"Did you write down in the log what your parasite ate last night?" Wendy Thomas asked Petula.
"No, because she didn't eat. She barely fits into the clothes I just bought her, so she's detoxing," Petula said casually. "I won't have a baby with a baby bump."
The Wendys were surprised that Petula, in her own way, cared so much about her baby, at least about how she looked anyway. It opened the door to a discussion they'd been having.
"Funny you should mention the whole baby fat thing," Wendy Anderson added.
"We were thinking that the next big trend could be baby lipo," Wendy Thomas continued. "We could collect the lard and then use it as a renewable biofuel for cars and buses."
"It addresses both our foreign oil dependency and epidemic childhood obesity," Wendy Anderson added. "It's eco-friendly too."
Petula was unfazed by The Wendys' industriousness; in fact, she was barely even listening to them. She was too distracted by the sight of a homeless woman lingering over a Dumpster behind the organic supermarket. Rather than speed away, Petula slowed down and eyed the vagrant as an archer does a bull's-eye. The Wendys readied to ridicule. If Petula was going
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to take the time to acknowledge her existence, both girls surmised, they'd better be prepared to mock.
"That's horrible," Petula said.
"It rots," Wendy Thomas said, using all of the protein-bar derived energy she could muster to stop her gagging reflex.
"At least she's trying to eat healthy," Wendy Anderson giggled cruelly.
"Shut it!" Petula commanded, pulling over even closer to the depressing scene. "You two couldn't walk an inch in her shoes."
"What shoes?" came the clueless query from Wendy Thomas, which was met by stony silence from Petula.
The Wendys locked eyes conspiratorially. The truth was, Petula had been acting very different since she "came back" from her near-death experience, and they were growing increasingly wary of her, even before this outburst. They expected some changes, but they were thinking more along the lines of a semi-dead accent or a more svelte figure thanks to the liquid-only IV diet that coma patients were lucky enough to require, not these wild mood swings, which weren't obvious to a layman, but to Petula-acolytes like them were huge.
Still, they mostly chalked it all up to something she picked up while she was away, odd conduct that was most likely a direct result of her pseudo-passing. Besides, Petula didn't talk about the whole experience much. They weren't sure if it was because she didn't remember anything or because it was part of a "what happens in the afterlife stays in the afterlife" pact.
Alternatively, it could just be P.P.D.--pre-prom delirium. The Wendys thought that was a more acceptable "diagnosis,"
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and they were confident that the few weeks they spent in and out of the hospital when Petula was a patient medically qualified them to come to such a conclusion.
Petula stopped the car, spritzed some sugary body spray on the bottom of her shirt, and pulled it up over her glossed lips like a surgical mask to defend against the smell of urine. She got out and approached the woman. The Wendys were amazed. They'd kept the windows rolled up tightly to keep the heat in and the stench out, so the brief chat was impossible to overhear. But the fact that Petula was talking to this person at all was really the issue. Evidence was mounting. Her condition was worsening.
"What is she doing?" Wendy Thomas asked.
"You know, when they diagnosed my grandmother with Alzheimer's, all her other medical stuff disappeared. The doctor said that sometimes people forget they're sick and so things resolve," Wendy Anderson said.
"What are you talking about?" Wendy Thomas asked, quickly losing her patience. "What do you know about anything?"
"I know lots of things... like, there is a stunningly high suicide rate tied to reality TV show contestants, oh, and, you can wallpaper an entire room with the tissue of just one lung...," Wendy Anderson spouted off proudly. "And, I know that my grandmother had diabetes, got Alzheimer's, and then forgot she had diabetes and so did her body. It might be the same here. Petula's near-death might have, you know, given her popularity amnesia."
"That's genius!" Wendy Thomas said sincerely. "I don't
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know why everyone is so shocked that you were accepted to online college for next year."
Petula got back in the car, fully aware of what The Wendys were thinking, and moved quickly to defuse the situation.
"What was that about?" Wendy Thomas asked accusingly.
"I asked her where she got that scarf she was wearing," Petula spouted, feigning indignance. "It looked just like one that might have fallen out of my car last week."
The Wendys accepted the explanation for the time being, but Petula was angry that she'd let herself get carried away like that. This kind of schizophrenic behavior was getting harder for her to keep under wraps. She could neither understand nor control it.
As soon as Petula pulled away from the curb, Wendy Anderson received a foreboding emergency text.
"Petula," she said, "you aren't going to like this."
"Out with it," Petula demanded.
"Someone spotted that transfer student, Darcy, wearing the same sweater that you have on now!" Wendy Anderson chirped, fishing for a reaction.
Petula made what she was wearing a status update on each of her social networking sites every day so that no one would wear the same thing that she had on. Everyone knew that, except, apparently, for the new girl. Or maybe, Petula was thinking, it was intentional.
"It's the same color too," Wendy Thomas added. "Reportedly."
Petula had nothing but hate for Darcy, even though she didn't really know her, and no one seemed to know much about the new girl, except that she'd recently come to Hawthorne
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from Gorey High. That on its own was enough to put her right at the top of Petula's Out list, but she'd had a bad feeling about Darcy since she'd arrived at Hawthorne. It was a gut feeling, much like her instinctive aversion to buying jewelry from the home shopping channels. The Wendys, on the other hand, may not have liked Darcy either, but they secretly liked that Petula was threatened by her.
Petula pulled over, stopped the car again, got out, and opened the trunk, which was filled with plastic bags packed with clothes of all sorts. One more thing to alphabetize in the "crazy file," The Wendys thought. It was becoming pretty clear that Petula was two garments short of a runway show.
"Was the dry cleaner's closed?" Wendy Anderson called out the rear window.
"My closets are bursting and I think Harlot is stealing my clothes," Petula offered. "I don't want to leave anything lying around."
The Wendys nodded in unison and waited patiently in the car. This seemed plausible. Scarlet had been looking better lately, they grudgingly admitted to themselves.
Petula rifled through the bags until she found a suitably fashionable and competitive change of clothes, pulled off her crewneck sweater, and right there on the street replaced it with a plum-colored cashmere cardigan. She was never worried about making a public display of her assets because Petula believed wholeheartedly that you should only be embarrassed if you had something to hide. She, on the other hand, was perfect and was always happy to flaunt it. The world was her dressing room. That much had not changed.
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Scarlet was working feverishly as she stepped around her cluttered bedroom; piles of her weathered, worn, and otherwise "artfully destroyed" one-of-a-kind pieces of clothing were strewn everywhere. She'd decided it was time to cast off her old self, and she was making fast work of it to reduce the pain.
At first Scarlet had picked through her closets and drawers carefully, like a miner sifting for diamonds, but before long, she was grabbing armfuls of outfits that had once been precious to her and tossing them indiscriminately to the ground, prepping them for a trip to Goodwill. She could just about hear Petula walking by her open bedroom door and cracking yet again: "Is that your closet or a t
ime machine?"
For a change, Scarlet felt, Petula might have a point.
"Sometimes vintage," Scarlet thought to herself, "is just old."
This was a realization that Scarlet had come by hard. She'd once crafted her outfits strictly for her own pleasure. The way she chose to dress had been a real act of pride, maybe even defiance. Not so much now, when everything she wore would turn up in knockoff versions on underclassmen a few days later, but not that long ago. She could remember being stared at, or worse, laughed at for her "look." Oddly, she missed that part of it. Much like having a personal assistant to prescreen potential friends, it had helped her to weed out the people she would never want to associate with. Besides, she felt that girls in velour tracksuits with chain store logos splashed across their asses had no right to say she looked bad.
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What those girls, especially the ones who could afford to dress well, would never understand is that there is a big difference between having a sense of fashion and a sense of style. One comes from magazines, from what you're told; the other from your own imagination, what you feel, she thought as she added to the mound below her.
Revisiting all her old issues and foraging through her old clothes were becoming more and more commonplace for Scarlet these days. She wasn't sure if it was an early spring-cleaning bug she'd come down with, her pathological fear of boredom, or something much deeper. With school nearly over and Damen away at college, she had much too much time to think. And one of the things she had been thinking about quite a bit was Damen. She would have much preferred to be cleaning up for his visit, but he had exams and couldn't make it home for Valentine's Day.
Scarlet understood that school was a priority for him, but she was still a little upset about being alone. Not that she would ever show him. She wouldn't have minded going to see a midnight viewing of a V-Day slasher flick in 3-D, which happened to be their tradition. She felt just the slightest bit taken for granted. Would Petula, she thought, have ever stood for such treatment, or more the question, would he have even considered treating Petula this way in the first place?
She returned to the business at hand. Tossing all these things was like a little death for her. You might even call it murder, judging from the condition of her closets and the castoffs on the floor. But what was she trying to kill off, she wondered? Her past or her future?
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As she stared down at the mounds of her once must-have apparel, she realized that in giving her stuff away, she was giving up her history, too--a history she'd shared, mentally, emotionally, and physically with Charlotte. Scarlet missed her terribly. Theirs was the most intimate relationship she'd ever had--at least so far. But even though she may have given herself over to Charlotte, she'd never given herself up, she thought, until now.
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Chapter 4 Heart-Shaped Box
And I'm not gonna live my life
On one side of an ampersand
And even if I went with you
I'm not the girl you think I am
--Amanda Palmer
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I against I.
We are often so distracted by the internal war between what we want to do and what we have to do that we overlook what we need to do. Not need in the sense of an obligation to others, but in the sense of a compulsion to preserve our own sanity. When doing what others think we should do comes into direct conflict with what our heads or hearts demand, it's time to choose whether our top priority is to please others or to please ourselves.
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Petula strained to see through the fogged-up windows of her brand-new BMW and down the darkened side street toward the glow emanating from the alley. As best she could determine, it was a garbage can spewing fire and smoke. The streetlamps were in disrepair and flickering, transforming the grimy scene from live-action into a stop-motion flip book.
After making sure the coast was clear, she hiked up the fur collar on her coal-black peacoat and stepped out of the car and onto the street, the loud clacking of her high heels against the cobblestones startling her for just a second.
"Shhhh," she hissed before realizing she was the only one there.
She reached back inside the car and grabbed the green plastic trash bag, which she'd been keeping in the trunk, from the passenger seat. Petula pulled down her sunglasses and stepped
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lightly and quickly past the shuttered and steel-gated storefronts, padlocked loading bays, broken pay phone, and grungy Dumpsters and tucked down an alleyway with the bale.
"Lock and load," Petula said, fixing her sights on the glowing target and the straggling crowd huddled around it.
Once she'd gotten close enough to catch a whiff of the unfortunates, she stopped and dug her heel tips into the crevice between cobblestones for stability. Petula then spun around a few times with the bag like a discus thrower, groaning out billows of cold breath into the night air, and let it fly. The sack landed and burst open like a watermelon dropped from a window ledge, spilling all kinds of high-end clothing, footwear, and accessories across the sidewalk. It looked like a fashion fireworks display gone awry.
Petula whirled back around on her heels and sprinted across the uneven surface for her car, her stealth mission accomplished. She pressed her automatic key to unlock the doors as she ran, and as the taillights blinked to acknowledge the command, they illuminated a car parked behind hers, sitting in total darkness. She couldn't make out a thing about it through her sunglasses, which being her disguise for the evening would be unthinkable to remove, and she was certain it wasn't there earlier.
It being the dead of night and all, Petula promptly freaked and sped toward the luxury sedan even faster. As she reached for the door handle, a loud, blaring voice called out, as if through a megaphone: "Stop right there."
Petula acted like she didn't hear--which was clearly impossible--and fumbled for the door handle, hoping whoever it was might take pity on her and just leave her alone.
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"Don't move," the authoritative voice demanded, followed by a blaze of light that shot from a lantern on his car roof.
She could just make out the silhouette of a cop exiting his squad car through the glare of the floodlight.
"Thank God for oversize," she mumbled to herself, adjusted her sunglasses again, and raised her arms limply in a gesture of surrender.
She was discovered. Doing what, even she wasn't quite sure.
"Don't you know who I am?" Petula shouted frantically, flashing her ID in hopes of intimidating him. "I want to call my representatives."
"Turn around and place your hands on your vehicle, miss," the young officer, unimpressed, ordered calmly but firmly.
Petula felt the blood rushing to her face in embarrassment. She was busted. Exposed. What would her mom say? And Scarlet? Petula didn't even want to go there. Now The Wendys would find out all the details of her late-night excursions, which would confirm their worst suspicions, and possibly even give them an opening to overthrow her. Et tu, Wendy!
On the bright side, Petula pondered, she'd definitely take the best mug shot ever. She thought as fast as she could under the circumstances, hoping to distract the cop.
"Are they arresting people for wearing fur trim now?" Petula carped, turning her collar up and her head back around to look at him. "Or do you just want to frisk me?"
The patrolman remained silent and gave her a chance to settle down, which was definitely taking a while. He knew who she was. He'd graduated from Hawthorne a few years ahead of
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her. But even without this background info, he wouldn't need to be a detective to see that a Hawthorne streetwalker couldn't afford the outfit she was wearing. He followed procedure nevertheless, pulled out his cuffs for effect, and asked her a few questions.
"What are you doing out here all alone at this time of night?" he asked. "This is a dangerous place for a young lady."
"I'm taking the Fifth," Petula rebuffed him, both unwilling and unable to e
xplain. "I know my rights."
The officer just shook his head and stared at her. He'd only been on the force for a short while, but he was experienced enough to know he'd get nowhere with her.
"Take me to your leader," Petula uttered, confusing sci-fi with CSI as she extended her arms straight out in front of her and put her wrists together, offering herself up for arrest.
"This is just a warning, Miss Kensington," the officer said. "You're not under arrest, but I don't want to see you around here again."
"Really?" Petula said, her tough demeanor melting in relief. "Thank you, Officer, ahhh..."
Petula strained through her shades to read the name from his badge. No need to be so formal any longer, she figured; besides, he was kind of cute.
"Officer Beaumont," he proffered with a little smile. "Charlie Beaumont."
"Thank you, Charlie," Petula said gratefully, hanging her head ever so slightly.
"Stick with your blondetourage next time," Beaumont said, sarcastically referencing The Wendys, to indicate he
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knew more about her than she would have thought. "There's strength in numbers."
"They're not blond," Petula corrected sheepishly, stroking her own locks. "They're just brunette with highlights."
Officer Beaumont walked away silently and returned to his vehicle to answer another call that was just coming across his police radio.
Petula got in her car and drove away slowly. Beaumont followed behind till she cleared downtown and then peeled off toward the next thruway exit. As she watched him turn away, she realized for the first time that night just how lucky she was that he was around.