“I don’t know what happened that night,” Damen said, clearly having put much of that evening out of his head. “But whatever it was, it was a fluke. A once-in-a-lifetime thing.”
“What if her spirit is dwelling on the other side and it is just a matter of time before she dies and her soul completely separates from her body? Maybe even sending her to Hell for all we know!”
“Scarlet … ,” Damen said softly.
“Maybe she’s in a circling pattern? Waiting to get checked off of a friggin’ list or something, and we’re just sitting here while she turns into firewood!”
“Scarlet, you need to calm down,” Damen said more forcefully this time.
“How do you know what I need?” Scarlet snapped, surprised at what just escaped from her mouth.
Damen was worried. It was not like her to act so erratically, and he was starting to think she might be on the verge of a breakdown.
“I’m sorry,” Scarlet said earnestly. “I just want to help Petula. She could be damned for all we know.”
Scarlet was not just being dramatic, but she wasn’t being entirely honest, with Damen or herself, either. They both knew that Petula hadn’t exactly lived an exemplary life and that the odds of a good outcome for her in the Afterlife were slim at best. But Scarlet’s concerns were driven less by Petula’s spiritual deficiencies than her own guilty conscience.
In her mind, she’d taken Damen away. And on some level it felt good, winning for a change and serving Petula up some just desserts. But the thought of never being able to make it right between them, to apologize, even if she didn’t really regret it, before Petula headed straight to Hell in an oversized handbag, was unbearable.
“We don’t know that,” Damen uttered reassuringly.
“No, we don’t, but I know someone who probably does,” Scarlet said, half-hopeful and half-petrified.
“Let me guess,” Damen said, finally putting it together. “Charlotte?”
Scarlet was silent.
“How are you going to contact Charlotte?” Damen asked skeptically. “She’s … gone.”
“I’m going to go find her.”
“You’re not going to start speaking in tongues, are you?”
“I’m serious,” Scarlet said soberly. “I’m going over there, Damen.”
“I can’t let you do that! What if you don’t come back?”
“I’m going,” Scarlet said firmly.
“What if Petula wakes up?” Damen asked, still trying to convince her to wait it out. “She could at any second!”
“Whatif isn’t what is,” Scarlet said even more definitively.
Damen noticed a sudden calmness and resigned-ness in her expression, the kind of look you see on the faces of martyred saints on those supermarket devotional candles.
“If I can find Charlotte,” Scarlet reasoned, “maybe she can help me find Petula. And then we can save her.”
Damen held her tight and whispered in her ear.
“What about you? Who is going to save you?”
“Oh, Romeo,” Scarlet said, trying to lighten the mood. It comforted Damen a bit to know that her sense of humor, if not her sanity, was still intact.
“Scarlet, I’m serious,” Damen said sternly. “I know you think you know what you’re doing …”
“Damen, I’ve been over there before. If I can help Petula and I don’t, I won’t be able to live with myself.”
For all his levelheadedness, Damen knew she was right. He also knew there was no stopping her now. He’d seen that look before. Her mind was made up.
They looked into each other’s eyes as if it might be their last chance. In her eyes he saw resolve, in his she saw respect … and fear.
“She would do the same for me,” Scarlet said sarcastically, trying to get him to crack a smile.
They both laughed, bonding over Petula’s selfishness that they both oddly missed so much.
“There’s just two things,” Damen said. “How are you going to get there and what happens to your body when your spirit splits?”
“Details, details.” Scarlet poo-pooed.
Scarlet paused, lost in thought for a second as she realized she hadn’t thought this through very well. Without her soul, her body was very likely to wind up just like Petula, maybe worse.
“Yeah, well, they say that’s where the Devil is.”
“Have you just met me?” Scarlet asked. “I don’t care what people say.”
The closet was tiny, definitely not a walk-in, which is what Petula would have insisted on, had she been conscious. It was overflowing with folded towels, blankets, latex gloves, backless gowns, bedpans, Vaseline, triple antibiotic ointments, bandages, and surgical booties. Barely enough room for supplies, let alone Damen and Scarlet. But it was the only private room available.
He would have much preferred to have snuck into a closet with her for a quick make-out session, but romance was the last thing on his mind, well, one of the last. He was a guy after all.
“Don’t worry,” Scarlet said in a forceful whisper. “I know what I’m doing.”
“Really?” Damen whispered back sarcastically. “What are you going to do, click your Doc Martens three times or something? Scarlet, please don’t do this.” He was more fragile and open than he had ever been with her. “If anything goes wrong …”
“Yes?” Scarlet replied hopefully, breaking her concentration for just a moment, and giving him an opening to declare his undying love.
Damen wanted to say he loved her, that he couldn’t live without her, but he wouldn’t allow himself to get all Casablanca with her. It was too maudlin, too final.
“What will I tell your mom?” he asked instead, hugging her tightly.
“That I’ll be back,” Scarlet said, trying to convince herself of her answer at the same time.
“Promise?”
Those weren’t quite the words she was waiting for, but the point was made. Scarlet was getting jelly-legged now and wanted to start the incantation before her own common sense got the better of her.
“Can you, you know, wait outside?” Scarlet asked Damen apologetically.
“Sure,” he agreed nervously. “I’ll be right outside.”
Damen closed the door and the room was dark. Scarlet shut her eyes and started to hypnotize herself into believing she was with Charlotte. She thought about the first time they met, recalling every single detail — the beakers, the chalk dust, the way Charlotte looked, touching her fragile hands as she recited the incantation with shallow breaths. Soon, she was there. Right there in that moment. It scared her a little, but feeling Charlotte’s presence so vividly calmed her.
“You and me, our soul makes three,” she said excitedly.
She waited for just a moment — at least, that’s how fast she thought it was — and she heard a voice echoing faintly in the distance.
“Me and you, our soul makes two,” it whispered in a familiar tone.
“We are me,” Scarlet finished, her eyes opening as wide as her mouth.
Damen heard her bumping into shelves, burst into the closet, and was able to catch her just before she hit the floor. Her eyes were blank, her breathing labored, and her skin clammy. It was as if somebody had just hit the “off” switch on her.
Damen quickly pushed open the closet door and shouted for help as if Scarlet’s life depended on it. And in some ways, it did.
Chapter 7
Imitation of Life
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Love and Death have a way of distorting things.
When you fall in love, you see the world through rose-colored glasses. When you pass away, you are viewed through them. In love and death, all faults are ignored or forgiven. You are transfigured, cast as a character in everyone else’s biopic of your life.
Petula awoke slowly. She thought she heard a voice, a male voice, calling to her, but when she opened her eyes, she was completely alone. Her head propped up on a pillow, she reached for her face, checking for any imprints on her cheek from the gravel. It was the last thing she remembered before going to sleep. God forbid she have to deal with pock marks before Homecoming, especially after all the money she’d spent on weekly dermabrasion treatments and collagen-based skin fillers. Still fuzzy, she blinked a few times to get the sleep dirt out of her eyes, looked down, and evaluated herself as she did each day, just to make sure she looked as hot as the day before.
She didn’t recognize the sheer poly cotton smock she was wrapped in, but it did look good on her. It really played to her strengths, namely her ass, which was mostly visible. What most people didn’t realize, mainly because of her beautiful face and perfect chest, which drew their eyes upward, was that she had a short torso. This sweet little number she was wearing, however, covered up that minor anatomical hiccup and put the emphasis where it belonged: on her legs, which went on forever — all the way to her feet, in fact. Her feet. The source of all of yesterday’s drama that suddenly came flooding back.
“Bitch,” she said, squinting for a second to focus on her toes and the unfinished pedicure.
With that little curse-out of the nail tech, Petula was fully roused, or at least enough to recognize that she wasn’t in her own bed. Or even at home, for that matter. She sat up, looked around, and swung her legs over the side of the bed, which she could recognize now as a hospital bed from her past mandatory-volunteer work as a candy striper in the geriatric ward.
“What or who did I do last night?” she wondered, more curious than afraid.
She couldn’t recall much of the date with Josh, but what little she could was not worth the neurons it took to retrieve. Suddenly, she remembered she’d gotten really dizzy and puked. Totally freaked at such inappropriate public behavior, she convinced herself he must have slipped her some kind of date-rape drug.
“Pervert,” she thought.
She pushed herself off the bed until her feet reached the floor, and as they did, she felt a twinge. Not pain, exactly, but enough discomfort to notice. She limped gingerly through the empty room toward the door and out into the hallway.
“Hey?” Petula yelled, her voice echoing faintly down the corridor. “Yo Yo Yo?!”
Finally, she called “Holá?” snidely. No response.
She gimped to the nurses’ station, which was unmanned as well.
“We really do need health care reform in this country!” she snarled.
Farther down the hall, she could see a cool white light emanating from an office.
“Thank God,” Petula said, relieved, heading for the glow.
As she approached the door, she tried to look in, but the glare from the office light that spilled out into the dim hallway distorted her view. Annoyed, but undeterred, Petula pushed the door open and entered in her trademark huff.
“Hello?” Petula called out obnoxiously. “I’m here to be discharged?”
Her greeting bounced off the walls, ceiling, and floor. The office was as empty as the hallways and her hospital room. It wasn’t just that there was no one there: there was no thing there either. No magazines, no instructional pamphlets or paperwork of any kind. It was bare as her bottom, except for a desk with a bell, a chair in the back of the room, and a bench, which ran along the side wall under the windows. On the rear door there was an authorized personnel only sign.
“Hey!” she shouted again as she rang the little bell on the desk repeatedly. “I really don’t have time for this today.”
Petula was not used to waiting or being unattended to. She turned to the door to leave and noticed another sign hanging from the doorknob.
your time is important to us, it read. please notify the receptionist if you have not been attended to within __ minutes.
The number of minutes she was to wait was not specified on one of those little clock faces with the plastic hands. Nevertheless, Petula was encouraged that someone was attending the room and that she would not be kept from her daily schedule much longer.
“That’s a good sign,” Petula thought, not intending the pun.
She settled herself down and took a seat on the bench. As her skin hit the hardwood, she felt a little chill for the first time. She pulled her hospital gown down as low as it could go, covering her knees, which was almost unheard of for her, and crossed her arms in front of her to keep the cold away.
“So much for global warming,” she theorized.
Before long, however, the loneliness became more of an issue for her than the chill. Solitude, regardless of how brief, was not good for Petula, and she was self-aware enough to know it. She was not a very introspective sort in the best of times, and these were not the best of times.
Though she always displayed complete disdain for the general public, Petula needed people more than she would ever care to admit. No pressure to actually interact with individuals, to give anything of herself, was required. She needed their attention, their adoration, even their hatred and jealousy. Large, faceless crowds of worshippers were a particular favorite of hers. Just a perfunctory smile and wave was all it took to soothe the adoring throng.
Petula held her hand up to her face, out in front of her at arms length and examined her clear-coat manicure, which had been completed expertly, unlike her tragic pedicure. Noticing her own reflection in her fingernails, she decided to use this time constructively by practicing her pose down. She spread her digits wide to create as many angles as possible, a slightly different view of herself reflected in each. It wasn’t her fulllength bedroom mirror, but under the circumstances, it would have to do.
“Glamour shot,” she said, turning her profile sharply to her outstretched hand, her other arm turned elbow out and hand placed firmly on her hip.
“Reaction shot.” She brought one had to her cheek, rounded her lips and busted a surprised “who me?” expression.
She even practiced being humble and tearing up for what was sure to be her inevitable coronation as Homecoming Queen. After all the humiliation she’d had to suffer at Fall Ball last year, this crowning, in front of the whole school, would be sweet revenge. A return to form. Proof that all was well with the world. The Fall Ball was a big deal, sure, but this was Homecoming! That little “psychotic break” she’d had would be long forgotten once the tiara was placed upon her golden tresses, which was where it belonged, as far as she was concerned.