Tonya Hurley_Ghostgirl_03 (15 page)

“No problem,” Mary said eagerly, more than happy to help.
Mary, Sally, and Beth entered the office and closed the door behind them, leaving Pam, Prue, and Charlotte to finish their conversation.
“I have an idea,” Charlotte whispered.
“Uh-oh,” Pam teased.
She was worried Charlotte was about to turn from supernatural to super sleuth.
“In order to make things right,” Charlotte explained, “we need to get Darcy out of the picture.”
“But to do that…,” Pam prompted.
“Darcy must die,” Charlotte said.
Chapter 18 I Know You by Heart
How will you know if you found me at last
‘cause I’ll be the one with my heart in my lap.
—Neko Case
Love song.
Like a tune that you can’t get out of your head no matter how hard you try, love is something you can’t get out of your heart. You become trapped in an emotional cul de sac, going round and round and ending up exactly where you started. Breaking free, or not, is usually determined by whether you want to get somewhere slowly or nowhere fast.
Scarlet loved to hang out at Vinyl Frontier, a used-record store she frequented. It used to be called Permanent Records until it burned down and was rebuilt. It was a little hole-in-the-wall place, but it was a place where she could spend hours listening to any record she wanted without having to buy anything. The owner, Mr. Hood, was a cool guy who taught English lit at her school. He was a closet musician who played local clubs and considered teaching his day job. He used to sleep the last ten minutes of each class and say that if he got that time, he didn’t need to sleep at night.
Scarlet liked being at Vinyl Frontier for the same reason she liked scrounging through thrift stores and even visiting the cemetery. There was so much life to be found among forgotten things. In fact, if she wanted to, she could take her fingernail or the pin from her brooch and place it gently in the grooves and with a few careful spins, resurrect all the passion, energy, and magic that had created it. Try doing that on your touch screen, she thought.
Hood liked Scarlet. Whenever she paid a visit, word would get out, upping the store’s hip factor and, consequently, his sales. It was like a celebrity in-store appearance, so he didn’t mind giving her free run of the place after hours. It was a fair trade. That, and the fact that Scarlet wasn’t some stupid kid; she was a music historian, a true music lover. She knew her stuff—from the classics all the way to the most esoteric. They had many a late-night discussion about all the different genres of music, but mostly they didn’t talk, they just listened.
She shared with him not just a love of the sound of an analog recording playing back but a devotion to the actual platters and square cardboard album jackets themselves. Compared to the digital liner notes that were now offered for download, they seemed like museum-quality artwork.
The thing about records, Scarlet felt, was the physical relationship they created to the music. Unlike CDs or computer files, vinyl was fragile, easily damaged, and hard to replace. It needed to be cared for, respected, and protected from harm. She could relate.
Hood also explained a little to her about the business side of music, knowing she might have some aspirations in that regard. He told her how so few artists made money from records, even if they sold well. There was something called “breakage” deducted from an artist’s royalties that literally took into account that a certain percentage of vinyl albums were likely to be damaged in shipping to shops like his. She was fascinated by the concept, by the fact that “damage” was anticipated. Maybe that was the way people should enter relationships, she thought.
It was so common-sensible. Nothing lasts forever, she thought: albums, people, or even relationships, especially if they aren’t handled with care. The other side, of course, was that the scratches and chips that were cut into the grooves were proof that the disc had been played. It made them a record, not just of someone’s music, but of someone listening to it.
Lately, Scarlet found herself being drawn to songs about loneliness and heartbreak. It was obvious that she missed Damen, but she felt that their separation was for the best. Things take time. She knew that, and with time and some really good music, she would heal. She listened intently with the oversize headphones cementing her black hair to her ivory skin. The music began to fade and then out of nowhere, blasted in her ear.
“What the…?” she screeched angrily, pulling the headphones out a few inches.
Mr. Hood was sitting behind the register gathering his things, getting ready to close up.
Scarlet went back to listening, and no sooner did she get back into the song than it happened again. She looked around and past the displays into the back room where Mr. Hood and his band would practice. It was a raw, loftlike space packed with instruments and amps. She saw Eric standing there, laughing and looking totally at home. She didn’t want to alert Mr. Hood, for fear she would get Eric in trouble, so she excused herself to go use the restroom.
“Hey,” Mr. Hood said. “I’m going to head out.”
“Okay, I’ll lock up,” she said.
“I trust you,” he said as he shut the door and locked it behind him.
Scarlet felt a little uneasy but not enough to leave.
“What are you doing here?” she asked Eric curiously. “I’m not allowed to have friends here after hours.”
“I was walking past and I saw you in the window,” he said. “Just thought I’d drop by and say ‘hey.’ “
“You could use the front door,” she said.
“Too predictable.”
Scarlet started fiddling with one of the guitars, fingering the chords to one of her songs.
“What’s that?”
“Oh, nothing, just some stupid song I wrote,” she said.
“Sounds cool to me,” he said.
“Actually, it was entered into this radio contest, but it got disqualified ‘cause of a conflict of interest,” she said, not wanting to get too deep into the details. “My boyfriend entered it, but he works at the station, so…”
Eric got it. It clearly meant a lot to her to have her song in the contest, and she wanted it to be heard. He could appreciate her disappointment.
“There’s always a conflict,” he said vaguely.
“What do you mean?” Scarlet asked, thinking her situation was pretty unusual.
“Between guys and girls.”
She smiled, knowing exactly what he meant.
“I wrote this song for a girl I was really into, but we split up before I ever had a chance to play it for her,” he said as he strummed the first few chords.
“That’s beautiful.” Scarlet nodded along. “She must have meant a lot to you.”
“Still does,” Eric added, still playing.
“I hear you,” she said, simply swaying to the beat, feeling his music and his emotions too.
“My dream was to perform in front of a crowd,” Eric said to Scarlet, the disappointment in his voice contrasting with the joy in his music. “But right now, all I want to do is play this for her.”
“It’s never too late,” she replied. “I learned that from a very good friend of mine.”
As Eric continued to play, Scarlet began humming a melody line and a few words and phrases over it. Scarlet saw a softer side of Eric that she hadn’t seen before. She was staring at him but thinking of Damen as the verses for a new song came to her. If she didn’t know better, she might have thought Eric had planned it that way. As he ended the song, Eric made an enthusiastic pitch that he thought might be good for both of them.
“Maybe we can work on something together,” he suggested. “You know, collaborate.”
Scarlet wasn’t sure if asking to “collaborate” was his way of hitting on her. She hoped not, but it reminded her that they were virtual strangers all alone together in the back room of a locked-up record shop. She didn’t want to end up on the evening news, but at the same time, she felt close to him. Spiritually, more than anything else.
“I don’t think I’m ready,” she said, hoping to answer several questions, asked or not, with a single sound bite. “But if I was going to collaborate with somebody, it would be you.”
“I just thought that maybe they’d let you replace your old song in the competition.” Eric pulled back a little, thinking he might have come on a little strong. “I bet your boyfriend would like that.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” she said, escorting Eric out of the store, “anymore.”
Mary, Beth, and Sally stepped out of the intake office to be debriefed about Darcy.
“She has no idea where she is,” Mary began, “or why she’s there.”
“That’s not news,” Prue said, showing her usual impatience with underclassmen. “Nobody ever does.”
“Did she tell you the last thing she remembered doing?” Pam asked, more calmly.
“She said she was taking some glamour shots for the Gorey High yearbook,” Sally added, “but that’s all.”
It took her a second, but Charlotte figured it out. She’d been a pretty avid picture taker when she was alive, mostly of Damen, granted, but in her studies she’d come across a few cases of people who were prone to epileptic fits from a flashgun. That’s one of the reasons why she always adhered to the rock-star rule of no flash photography in the stage pit. That, and the fact that it was much more difficult to sneak a picture of someone across the room with a strobe popping.
“She must have had a seizure,” Charlotte surmised. “A really bad one.”
“How do you know?” Beth asked, a shiver of fear in her voice.
“Some people react that way to flashbulbs,” Prue jumped in. “Photosensitivity.”
“Not just the flickering light,” Charlotte expounded, “but the stress hormones from the pressure to look beautiful can push you right over the edge.”
“If it was bad enough to almost kill her,” Pam continued, “her soul might have disengaged from her body.”
“Like Petula when she went into her coma,” Charlotte agreed. “Except Darcy was probably revived much sooner.”
“But there would still be enough time for someone or something with bad intentions to get in there,” Pam said.
“Someone?” Mary asked, confused like the rest of her classmates. “Who would want to do that?”
Charlotte, Pam, and Prue just stared at each other and let the question go for the moment and got busy.
“We’re going to need everyone’s help,” Charlotte pressed on, “here at the office and at prom.”
“Prom?” Prue groused. “Is this your way of getting there?”
Charlotte was a little hurt.
“It’s not like you have the best track record,” Pam said out of the side of her mouth to Charlotte.
“No, it’s my way of getting Damen there,” Charlotte answered cryptically.
“See what I mean!” Prue cried, throwing up her hands. “Now that we’re back here, it’s ‘Eric who?’ “
“You mean Darcy, don’t you?” Pam corrected, shushing Prue.
“I mean both of them,” Charlotte responded. “Together.”
Pam and Prue weren’t quite sure where she was going, and the Dead Ed girls had no idea about Damen or prom, but Charlotte was persuasive enough that they were all willing to go along for the ride. Again.
Scarlet arrived home from the record store to an unusual sight: her mom sitting up in the kitchen nursing a cup of tea and looking worried. What should have been a fairly relaxing event seemed anything but to Scarlet, and she spoke up.
“Mom?” Scarlet queried. “Anything wrong?”
“Have you spoken to your sister lately?” Kiki answered in an atypically cryptic manner.
“Not if I can help it,” Scarlet said.
Despite the snarky attitude, Scarlet had been meaning to talk with Petula for a while now to show some solidarity in the face of The Wendys’ mutiny. But commiserating with Petula was something she’d never done before, and taking the first step had definitely proved to be challenging. Scarlet felt like a mosquito on a nude beach. She knew what to do but didn’t know where to begin.
“She’s got a lot going on,” Kiki said, “and I’m worried she’s not thinking clearly.”
“Status quo,” Scarlet said, shrugging.
“No attitude, please,” her mom insisted. “This is serious.”
“Serious how?” Scarlet asked with a bit more concern in her voice.
Maybe Petula had turned stripper—that would explain the late nights and rumors about her sister hanging out downtown. Keeping her off the pole had been a lifelong but so far unfounded worry of Kiki’s. Or, Scarlet considered, Petula might have become an identity thief, picking through Dumpsters for credit card receipts. Scarlet quickly dismissed that notion. Petula, she knew with absolute certainty, would never want to be anyone else.
“She wants to ask a homeless guy to prom,” Kiki announced.
Scarlet shuddered like she’d just been tasered by a policeman’s stun gun.
“She needs someone to talk to,” Kiki declared. “Do it for me.”
Kiki had always respected her daughters’ personality clash and never sought to force their relationship. So if she was asking Scarlet to reach out, it had to be really important to her.
Scarlet trudged up the stairs to Petula’s room, not knowing what to say or expect. As she peeked in the door, Scarlet could see Petula matching outfits, no longer hiding her causes. She was literally out of the closet now.
“What’s up?” Scarlet said, gingerly stepping across the threshold and into Petula’s sanctuary.
Scarlet looked around and could find few signs of Petula’s once vaunted meticulousness. The room was a mess, strewn with clothes and accessories, drawers and closets half-open, and rumpled bedding. Like Petula, the surroundings just seemed wilted.
Scarlet jumped right in.
“We’re all really proud of you for caring, but a homeless guy?” Scarlet asked, skeptically. “To prom?”
“I prefer to think of him as bohemian,” Petula interrupted. “Besides, who are you going with?”
That kind of slam would usually be the end of any serious conversation between them, but Scarlet gritted her teeth and let it go, pressing on for her mother’s sake.
“I’m just trying to understand what’s going on with you,” Scarlet prodded gently.
“He’s different,” Petula huffed. “And so am I. Just stay out of my business.”
“It sucks what The Wendys and that other clone Darcy did to you,” Scarlet offered sympathetically.
“I don’t need your pity,” Petula shot back, compulsively mixing and matching while she spoke. “I did what I did. No apologies.”
“Okay,” Scarlet said. “But what, exactly, did you do?”
The sisters stared at each other for a long while, Petula searching futilely for a plausible answer. Suddenly, Petula cracked. Not a huge earthquake-size fault, but a tiny fissure, enough to let off the emotional and psychological steam that had been building inside her.
“I’ve been hanging out with the homeless people downtown,” Petula wailed almost hysterically. “I’ve been giving them our old clothes.”
This outburst was so unlike Petula, Scarlet had no idea who was in the room talking to her—maybe, she thought, a changeling or something.