“What doesn’t kill you,” she philosophized, stomping her foot for emphasis, “makes you … Owwww!”
The pain shot up her leg before she could finish the motivational maxim. It dragged Petula from her imaginary photo session and coronation back to the decidedly less glam environment surrounding her. It was getting noticeably colder now too, and she began to fidget impatiently.
Just then, the front door of the office cracked open slowly.
“It’s about friggin’ time,” Petula bellowed, more relieved for company than she’d ever been before.
The door to the office opened completely, but Petula still couldn’t see who was walking in. Whoever it was, she thought, must be vertically impaired or something, because she couldn’t see a head through the clear glass window in the upper door.
“Just my luck,” Petula moaned, “getting out of here is gonna take forever.”
She saw a leg step in, tentatively. It definitely belonged to a little person. But it was a young girl. She poked her head through cautiously, looking at one side and then the other before entering, just as she must have been taught to cross a busy street.
“Where am I?” the girl asked, stepping all the way through the entrance and allowing the door to slowly shut behind her.
That was a very big question, Petula thought, from such a little person, and one she had not the slightest clue how to answer right at the moment.
“And you are?” Petula asked warily of the confused little girl.
“My name is Virginia Johnson,” the girl answered, just as skittishly. “What’s yours?”
Petula was dumbfounded for a second. It had been a long time since she had needed to introduce herself to anyone, but this was as good a time as any to make an exception.
“I am Petula Kensington,” she affirmed haughtily, in a tone that might have warranted a curtsy a century or two ago. “Pleased to meet me.”
This was Petula’s standard M.O. when she was nervous. Act in a superior and confident way, and the more weak-minded, the more insecure, will buckle. The fact that she would use this tactic on a child was simply an indication of how increasingly anxious she was feeling about everything.
“Let me guess,” Virginia said, looking Petula over, “you’re a cheerleader.”
“How could you tell?” Petula asked with pride.
“Big head to match …” Virginia cracked, cocking her neck just slightly to get a better side view of Petula’s open-back gown “… a big butt.”
Petula was not expecting this from such an innocent-looking kid. Her first reaction was to be offended and fire back, but she checked herself instead, sort of charmed by Virginia’s spunk. The young girl’s fresh mouth also reminded Petula of Scarlet, and all those long car rides they had shared together on summer vacations, before the divorce.
She hadn’t thought about those days in a very long time. They’d spent most of the time fighting, sure, but not all the time. They had fun too. Singing out loud until they were hoarse, playing “I Spy” until they were cross-eyed — each seeing things that the other would never notice — and swatting mosquitoes off each other as an excuse to smack one another without getting punished, a game that generally ended in a heated round of “Sudden Death.”
Of course it was always a competition between them, and Petula almost always won. If she got the most bites, she used to tell Scarlet it was because “even the bugs couldn’t resist” her. Petula was crafty and liked winning, but Scarlet was always the tougher of the two. She would never let Scarlet know, but Petula would marvel at how her sister could take the abuse, the defeats, and keep coming back for more.
Petula smiled at the little girl she saw in her mind as much as the little girl she saw in front of her.
“You think that’s funny?” Virginia chided.
“What?” Petula said distractedly before gathering herself, “Oh, ah … no, you just remind me of somebody, that’s all.”
After shopping, the Wendys arrived at Petula’s hospital room, keeping a vigil, some said, or more accurately, a deathwatch, and much to their surprise they saw Scarlet lying just as lifeless in the bed next to Petula. Dr. Patrick was in the room, on evening rounds. Evidence of the commotion was everywhere, with tubes, syringes, tape, gauze, and monitors of all kinds still strewn around from the cardiac team’s fight to stabilize Scarlet. Instead of sympathy, all the Wendys could muster for Scarlet was contempt.
“Did she finally see the light and try to kill herself ?” Wendy Anderson sniffed.
“Look at that,” Wendy Thomas said at the sight of Scarlet lying next to Petula in a hospital bed. “It’s booty and the beast.”
“What a follower,” Wendy Anderson snapped.
“Yeah,” Wendy Thomas agreed coldly, “it wasn’t enough that she stole her boyfriend. Now she had to go and steal Petula’s coma spotlight too?”
Both girls turned suddenly as Damen entered the room. He was rumpled, scruffy, and red-eyed, looking weary and worried. The Wendys, who’d never forgiven him for choosing Scarlet over Petula — or either of them for that matter —savored this opportunity to kick him while he was down. He ignored them both and took his seat between Petula’s and Scarlet’s beds.
“What the hell happened?” Wendy Thomas asked, more irate than concerned.
Damen didn’t bother to respond. He knew once he got sucked in, he would be caught up in the endless, mindless hamster wheel that was the Wendys’ thought process.
“It’s possible that Scarlet is in a self-induced coma, triggered by extreme stress,” Dr. Patrick said. “It could be psychosomatic.”
“You got the psycho part right,” Wendy Thomas snipped.
“It might be too much for her to see her sister whom she loves lying there,” Dr. Patrick said.
Wendy Anderson was unable to hold back the laughter, and the Red Bull she was drinking leaked out of her nose. The thought of Petula meaning that much to Scarlet was too much for them to handle. However, they managed to regain their composure after Mrs. K, who had been stroking Petula’s Homecoming dress absentmindedly, shot them a nasty look.
Just then Scarlet’s heart-lung monitor went off, and she appeared to be experiencing some type of acute distress.
“Everybody out,” Dr. Patrick ordered and pushed the call button for the crash team. “Now!”
Chapter 8
Back in Your Head
Did I dream you dreamed about me?
—Tim Buckley
Hope against hope.
Most hope is false if you think about it. It’s a belief that an outcome will be positive despite evidence to the contrary. But where would we be without it? It’s the mind’s compass and the heart’s buoy, which we cling to as we wait for help to arrive. Without hope, life is sink or swim, and Charlotte hoped she would find a way to swim.
Maddy and the others were stuck on their calls, so Charlotte decided to leave by herself. As she crossed from the office complex to the residential campus, she looked over at the fences that bordered the entire barracks. She hadn’t noticed them much before because she’d always been talking to Maddy along the way. They seemed in place more to mark a border than to discourage entry or exit, which made sense. People might have been dying to get in, she joked to herself, but no one was too interested in what was on the outside.
Release was becoming a more and more important concept for Charlotte. Her existence had become so burdensome lately that she was actually thinking back fondly on her life — a life that had been marked mostly by insecurity and isolation. Ever since missing that call, in fact, she’d been thinking more and more about Scarlet, Petula, and Damen and what might have been and about her family and what never was. Most of all she was thinking about what would never be.
Maddy said it. They were seventeen forever. That might be an appealing thought for the reality show trophy moms who were always Botoxing, liposuctioning, implanting, and detoxifying to secretly compete for their daughters’ boyfriends, but it was increasingly depressing for Charlotte. She’d done everything she was ever going to do, and despite the mark she’d hoped to leave, within a few years’ time, her senior picture that was enshrined in the hallway at Hawthorne would inevitably begin to yellow and fade, as would the memory of her. She harbored no illusions about that.
She recalled walking through the cemetery as a kid, looking at the born and died dates on all the tombstones and thinking about the people buried there. She would do the math and calculate how long each person had lived, what they’d seen, and what they’d missed. Electricity, space flight, civil rights, cable TV, the Internet, Starbucks. Some husbands died years before their wives, or children years before their parents. But when you’ve been dead for a hundred years, let’s say, what would it matter if your wife died two years before you? To the passerby, you’d both have been dead a long, long time —indistinguishable in death.
Charlotte decided it did matter, though. Those two years might mean nothing in the sweep of history, but they were important to the people who had lived them. It was all they had. Whether the time was filled with joy or sadness was irrelevant. They’d lived to experience it.
In the end, everyone, except for a very few, are forgotten, and Charlotte was starting way behind the eight ball. Seventeen years wasn’t very much time to cement a legacy, especially if you’d lived her life. As this bleak calculus continued circling her brain, she looked down at her sleeve and realized the most horrible thing of all about being eternally young: she would be wearing the same clothes forever.
The superficiality of the thought reminded her of the Wendys, and her desire to be alive unnerved her like an e-mail from an ex-friend.
Charlotte kicked off her shoes as soon as she got into the apartment, trying to shake the not-wanting-to-be-dead-anymore feeling. Being home, however, didn’t have the relaxing effect she had hoped it would. It was more than just her old life that was plaguing her now. After all she had done for the Dead Ed kids, all the personal changes she’d made, she wondered, why she still felt so excluded. So alone.
Maddy had it right, Charlotte surmised, even though she never came right out and said it. She was back to being second or even third fiddle. Now that they were through the looking glass or whatever, they didn’t need her anymore. All she got from them now was busy signals. She knew they were tied up being reunited and all, and that the other girls especially did not approve of her friendship with Maddy, but who else did she have? Besides, Prue didn’t like Scarlet either at first, as Charlotte recalled, and Pam thought nothing of shunning her over the whole Miss Wacksel episode. Maybe they were all just showing their true colors now that they didn’t need her anymore.
Charlotte crawled into her top bunk and continued feeling sorry for herself. Just then, Maddy walked in and looked as if she’d been rushing.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?” she asked nervously. “We always walk home together.”
“I didn’t want to bother you.”
“You’re never a bother, Char,” Maddy said endearingly. “Something on your mind?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“You can tell me,” Maddy urged.
Charlotte paused for a second and then decided she felt secure enough in their friendship to really open up.
“I miss … everything,” Charlotte confided. “I feel different all of a sudden. I thought I was over it, over all of them, and totally changed in really profound ways, but now I think that was all just one big rationalization.”
“How so?” Maddy asked, more like a therapist than a friend.
“I did what I was asked to do,” Charlotte went on. “I made the hard choices Brain wanted me to.”
“Brain?” Maddy asked.
“My Dead Ed teacher,” Charlotte babbled, totally on a roll now. “I made every sacrifice for my friends,” she blurted, “to get us all here.”
“And for what? What did all that do-gooding get you?”
“I just thought, hoped, that, well, that things would really be different for me here,” Charlotte said quietly. “But it isn’t. It’s like this world is a Mac and I’m a PC.”
“Heaven isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? Is that what you are trying to say?”
Charlotte hadn’t really thought about it, but Maddy had a good point, once again. Charlotte had never really entertained the notion that this was it. Heaven couldn’t be a phone bank, could it?
Charlotte spent another day staring at the phone on her desk and trying to tune out the chatter from the other interns’ calls. She couldn’t even sneak away with the damn video camera constantly trained on her and Mr. Markov constantly walking by in the same pattern every few minutes like some kind of supernatural jail warden. Kim’s calls were the most annoying and the most difficult to ignore.
Charlotte loved talking on the phone too: that wasn’t the issue. It’s just that Kim was so … sure of herself. So sure about what was right and what was wrong. Charlotte had felt that at the Fall Ball, right before they all crossed over. But she wasn’t so sure what was right anymore. How can you be expected help anyone else if your own gray matter was one big gray muddle?
Charlotte struggled with these big ideas and covered her ears. This whole experience, she thought, was like being a mouse caught in a maze, except there was no cheese at the end to guide her through. She’d lost her life, her friends, her future, and now maybe even her mind. She was trapped in a state of perpetual puberty and in the same outfit forever, and her payback for all this sacrifice? She got to help other people, or might get to, if her phone would ever, just once, ring!
She looked up at the lens of the camera and mouthed slowly:
“HELP ME.”
Damen’s legs were bouncing nervously as he sat silently in the still hospital room, positioned equidistant from Petula and Scarlet. For perhaps the first time in his life, he felt out of control, not just of the circumstances but of himself as well. He prided himself on being an athlete, after all, disciplined, determined, and optimistic. He was a winner in sports and in life and had the resume to prove it. He never considered losing, even when it was inevitable, such was his faith in himself and in the power of positive thinking. The dreary thoughts and increasing hopelessness of this situation, however, were new territory for him, mentally and emotionally. Mostly emotionally.