“Don’t worry,” Petula reassured Virginia in the only way she knew how, “I’ll be at Homecoming if it kills me.”
“Scarlet,” Damen pleaded, flashing the narrow beam of light from the laser pen Dr. Patrick had left behind in her eyes. “Please come back.”
He held her lids open gently and studied her pupils closely for any reaction. All he could think about was how happy she always was to see him. How he could always get her eyes to light up just by saying her name, but now they were just dark holes.
He tossed the penlight on the floor with frustration and grabbed the desk lamp clipped to Scarlet’s headboard. He brought it right up to her face and shined it in her eyes until the inside of her nostrils glowed orange from the wattage.
“Please, Scarlet,” he begged, his voice cracking. “Come back.
“Come back to me.”
Trapped in the middle of nowhere, literally, without a friend in sight and feeling closer to death by the minute, Scarlet was trying hard to channel her old self. Not that she was ever particularly cheery or upbeat, but she’d always prided herself on her determination, defiance, and independent streak. All those qualities were in short supply right about now with little hope of restocking before the final closeout sale. Nevertheless, she still had enough pride left to beat back the tears she felt swelling in her eyes, attempt to regroup, and do whatever she could to find her way back to the hospital.
She tossed her hair away from her face, raised her head from its hiding place between her arms, and, looking off in the distance through the tangle of leafless branches, she saw a light. She couldn’t quite tell what it was, but she knew it was not the moon or a twinkling star — it was too steady for that. Whatever it was, she felt compelled to walk toward it, and after a few yards the stream of light became a blinding flash. It lit everything around her, most importantly a detour she must have overlooked the first time.
She walked down the new pathway and felt just as lost as before until she began to hear the sound of twigs and branches cracking.
“Charlotte?” she called out reticently, hoping her friend had indeed come to her rescue.
“Charlotte?” the voice called back faintly.
Scarlet froze. It wasn’t Charlotte, but it wasn’t an echo either. It wasn’t her voice at all, in fact. The whole black forest thing was weird enough, but now it was getting downright terrifying. Scarlet heard loud footsteps running toward her, and she panicked. That shining light must have been a trick, and she’d fallen for it, like a rookie.
She did her best not to fall down, screaming helplessly like one of those high-heeled victims in slasher films — she did not want to go out like that — but it didn’t matter. She felt something take hold of one of her ankles and pull her to the ground like a rodeo calf. There was something oddly familiar about the grip.
“Oh, no,” the voice above her moaned. “Not again” was all Scarlet could hear as her face hit dirt and her body flipped over onto her back, eyes closed tightly, waiting for the ax to fall.
Scarlet was frozen; her limbs went dead as if she were just zapped by a Taser.
“Prue?” Scarlet asked, peeking through squinted eyelids.
Prue released her from the leg tackle she’d just employed and stood over her in disbelief.
“Pam?” Scarlet asked a little more hopefully, looking to Prue’s side.
Both girls nodded, the look of disbelief on their faces noticeable.
“What are you doing here?” the girls asked each other, laughing and then hugging before any bothered to answer.
The rest of Charlotte and Maddy’s walk had been easy, like a stroll around the manicured grounds of some well-kept historic estate, but Charlotte’s mind was restless.
“Maddy, do you think she’ll be okay?”
“Hard to say,” Maddy said ambivalently. “It’s too bad you guys had to fight after not seeing each other for so long.”
“I know. She came all this way to find me, and now she’s lost.”
“She was always kind of difficult though, right?” Maddy asked rhetorically. “Kind of selfish?”
“I guess.”
“She grew up the same as Petula,” Maddy said. “Nice house, nice family, every advantage.”
“Yes, what’s your point?”
“My point is that all the drama and sourpussing around is an act,” Maddy answered. “To get what she wants.”
Maddy had really gotten to an issue that Charlotte had wondered about since she first met Scarlet. She’d always assumed that Scarlet’s personality and attitude were just a reaction to Petula’s. But maybe it was really just Scarlet’s way of getting attention.
“I mean, think about it,” Maddy went on. “She stole her sister’s boyfriend and used you to get him.”
“She didn’t steal him,” Charlotte said weakly. “Not exactly.”
“Is that right?”
“I helped her get him, even though I …”
“Wanted him?” Maddy concluded. “Now she comes here to use you again, only this time for you to save her sister, who treated you like dirt.”
“Scarlet’s not like that. She’s impulsive. She gets carried away sometimes, that’s all.”
“Stop making excuses for her,” Maddy interjected. “You deserve better than the way she’s treated you.”
Charlotte really didn’t appreciate the way Maddy was talking about Scarlet, but then, she couldn’t really rebut anything she was saying. Scarlet did have it really easy. Much easier than Charlotte had. Scarlet might not have been popular like Petula, but that was her choice. She could have been. She preferred to rebel, be different, and it still got her noticed, didn’t it?
They strolled a short while longer and then spied a town in the distance.
“That’s Hawthorne,” Charlotte said with awe, as if she’d just spotted The Emerald City.
It was home. Her home. Maybe not sweet, but bittersweet at least. The place where she dreamed her dreams, made her plans but never got to live them. The place that she had left behind, the people too. People she would never, ever forget, but how long before they’d forget her, she continued to wonder.
“I told you this was the best way.”
“You were right,” Charlotte acknowledged, “about everything.”
Chapter 16
Bizarre Love Triangle
This wasn’t supposed to happen.
I’ve been hit with your charm.
How could you do this to me?
I’m in love again.
—The Sugarcubes
Don’t tempt me.
We all want what we can’t have. In fact, most of the time we only want things because they are unavailable or forbidden. To justify the purchase, we convince ourselves that what we want so desperately is also what we need. The trouble is, impulse purchases can often lead to an expensive case of buyer’s remorse.
Scarlet was waving her hands wildly in the dank air as she explained everything to Prue and Pam. She told them about Petula and her botched pedicure, how desperate the situation was, and why she had come. Once they were all on the same page and had gotten over the initial shock of seeing each other again, the conversation quickly turned to Charlotte.
“When she called in sick … ,” Pam said, “we got really suspicious.”
“So we went to her apartment to drag her in to work,” Prue explained.
Scarlet sensed there was more they weren’t telling her, but she let it go for now.
“What’s weird is we were looking for Charlotte,” Prue said, “and we found you.”
The girls stood looking at each other for a second, chewing over the circumstances that had thrown them together once again.
“We’ve been feeling pretty bad about not having a lot of time for her,” Prue lamented. “But things are different now than they were in Dead Ed.”
“That’s only part of the problem, anyway,” Pam let slip.
“What’s the other part?” Scarlet asked. “Or maybe I should say who.”
Pam and Prue knew exactly what Scarlet meant. Everyone was suspicious of Maddy, even Scarlet, who barely knew her.
“She’s a nightmare,” Scarlet railed.
“Tell us about it,” Prue concurred. “Maybe worse.”
“She’s been feeding all of Charlotte’s insecurities about not being reunited,” Pam said. “And keeping her away from her old friends.”
“I’m sure when you showed up,” Prue said, “Maddy freaked out.”
“Yeah, she got a little passive-aggressive, but then she offered to help us find Petula.”
“Really?” Pam asked, shooting Prue a knowing look. “Where were you headed?”
“To the hospital.”
“Let’s go,” Prue ordered. “Now.”
“There it is,” Charlotte said, pointing excitedly to the tall building in the distance.
“C’mon,” Maddy smiled giddily, grabbing Charlotte’s hand and hurrying her along.
They meandered through the small town, Charlotte turning her head from side to side, accessing memories, some good, most bad, at nearly every street corner and shop. Down Main Street, they passed by the nail salon and saw the makeshift pre-morial for Petula.
“Wow,” Maddy said, getting Charlotte’s attention, “she must be really popular!”
“You have no idea,” Charlotte replied quietly, taking in the burning candles, notes, and mound of colorful get well bouquets spilling from the salon doorway onto the sidewalk. Charlotte was good at erecting mental memorials, but seeing an actual, real-life one for Petula was a little too much to take.
“You must have been cool too, right?” Maddy’s comment hit Charlotte like the sight of a magazine page that has you and another girl wearing the same outfit and 88 percent of the readers voted that she wore it better.
Charlotte remembered her own memorial. It wasn’t even the bargain bin version of Petula’s.
“Yeah. They had buses for the service and everything.”
She conveniently left out the fact that the buses didn’t exactly make it to the service, but whatever. She was the reason for a half day, and that practically meant her death was recognized as a holiday. This made her feel a little bit better anyway, but the lack of enthusiasm was noticeable to Maddy, who didn’t feel the need to press it any further.
They walked, unseen, into the busy Emergency entrance of the hospital and behind the nurses’ station desk, looking for Petula’s room.
“Third floor,” Maddy said, fingering the patient roster. “Room three-three-three.”
Damen was slumped in his chair, situated between Petula and Scarlet, half asleep, when the floor nurse brushed by and woke him. She was there to sponge-bathe the girls, Scarlet first, so Damen moved to a chair closer to the door. The nurse pulled the curtain between the beds closed to give Scarlet some privacy, which Damen appreciated. All the poking and prodding of his girlfriend by strangers, even though they were medical professionals, was really starting to get to him. It was all so undignified.
The drawn curtain gave him very little to look at except Petula, which was something he had not done much of since his vigil began. Staring over her immobile form, he couldn’t help but notice how good she still looked. So much of Petula was about the surface that it wasn’t really shocking to him that her looks would be the last thing to break down.
She’d been at death’s door since he arrived, but for the first time, he could actually envision her being dead. He pictured her in a coffin, the frilly lining studiously color-coordinated with her outfit, her spiked high heels thrusting defiantly upward at the bottom, and her class ring gleaming from her folded fingers, as a line of mourners waited eagerly to view her corpse. He was glad not to be able to see Scarlet right now with his mind wandering like this. Even in a coma, she might know what he was thinking.
He looked away from Petula and around her bed, where only a single bouquet of flowers from her mother sat. Now that was odd. He’d heard about the memorial sprouting up around the nail salon, and all the chatter around town, but nobody had come to see Petula except the Wendys, and that barely counted, their motivation being so suspect. Public grieving, like the memorial, was not really a good barometer of affection because it was always more about the spectacle than the deceased anyway.
That was always the problem with being Petula, Damen thought. She was popular, but not liked, if such a thing was possible. Other people wanted Petula to like them, notice them, not the other way around. Now that she couldn’t provide that positive reenforcement to others by inviting them to her parties, hanging out with them, or actually remembering their names, she was kind of like a passé child star grown out of her cutesy roles. All she could do for them now was die, the quicker the better, to make her fans feel better about themselves for caring and provide a last little bit of entertainment for everyone while she was still hot. Talk about undignified, he thought.
Damen walked over to Petula, not out of remorse per se, but out of guilt. He’d made the right decision being with Scarlet, that was for sure, but he’d probably handled it the wrong way. No matter how arrogant Petula acted at the time, she was a human being and she had been humiliated. Some might even say she suffered, not that her pride would ever let it show.
He took Petula’s French-manicured hand uncomfortably in his for the first time in ages and leaned over her, saying the words he probably should have said a long time ago.
“I’m sorry,” Damen whispered.
Just then, Maddy and Charlotte entered in the room. The sight of Damen cooing in Petula’s ear was a shocker.
“Look at that,” Maddy said, as if cheering on a TV soap romance. “He still loves her.”
Charlotte was speechless as all the old feelings came flooding back and seeing him again made her heart melt like a Dreamsicle stuck to a dashboard on a hot summer day. He was still golden and gorgeous, and now so gentle and vulnerable. It was as if he literally hotwired her heart. Not even death could hold back those familiar feelings. They didn’t have anything to do with her body or her head; they were imprinted in her soul.