Ghostgirl: Homecoming

  “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.

  He could stand in the pocket and face down a core of blitzing linebackers without a second thought, but he couldn’t face his own feelings. That’s what made Petula so easy for him to date. No depth required. He could tote her around like one of his sports trophies, more a prize for others to envy than for him to value. But being with Scarlet had changed him, or at least it had begun to.

  He began thinking about all the things he should have told Scarlet but didn’t have the courage to say. Not so much about stopping her from trying to cross over — she was too stubborn for that — but other things. Things like how much he cared for her, how much he missed her. How much he needed her. Things she needed to hear from him.

  Desperate, he reached out to her the only way he knew how, through music. They had exchanged songs and albums like love letters from their earliest days together, and even if she couldn’t hear him, she just might, he fantasized, be able to hear their music. He reached into his backpack and pulled out his iPod, loaded with bands she had turned him on to, most of them way cooler than anything he’d ever heard before. He gently pushed the speaker buds in each of her ears, and, recalling their first real date, scrolled to the track he was after — Artist>Death Cab For Cutie>Album>Plans>Song>I Will Follow You into the Dark — selected the song and hit play.

  As the tinny sound bled from the headphones into the hospital room, the “if onlys” started swirling in his mind like a flock of diseased pigeons. Maybe he had made too much of Petula’s illness, or maybe his expression or tone of voice revealed an unconscious flicker of dormant affection for Petula, despite his true feelings for Scarlet. Maybe that’s what really set Scarlet off. But he was only trying to help Petula for Scarlet’s sake. How could she not know that? Was bringing back Petula Scarlet’s way of saving her sister and their troubled relationship?

  Whatever Scarlet’s motivation, he needed her to return. And for Scarlet to come back, Petula needed to also. However out of sync they were before, Scarlet and Damen were now on the same page. They both wanted Petula back.

  Chapter

  9

  Bird on the Wire

  If I, if I have been unkind,

  I hope that you can just let it go by.

  If I, if I have been untrue,

  I hope you know it was never to you.

  —Leonard Cohen

  Live and learn, but really, Death is the best teacher.

  When you’re faced with death you are forced to dig deep within yourself to understand who you really are and what you really feel. It rubs you raw, like a harsh facial peel, scrubbing away the mask of denial, excuses, and other gunk built up over a lifetime. What’s left is not always so pretty to look at, at least not at first. Scarlet was hoping that her near-death experience wasn’t going to become a life sentence.

  Scarlet had no idea where she might find Charlotte, but felt herself drawn, almost like a homing pigeon, back to Hawthorne High. Back to Dead Ed. Why, she could not imagine. Everyone was gone as far as she knew. Graduated. What was the point of turning up in an empty classroom? She was compelled nonetheless and followed her gut back to school.

  For a second, she thought about Petula as she floated in the building and how odd it must have felt to come back to a familiar place, but with all the familiar faces gone. And of Charlotte too. How scary was it to be in a new place, to be the new kid?

  As she hovered down the long hallway, her worst fears were confirmed. The school appeared to be vacant, but before she could be completely discouraged, she heard voices in the distance. She zeroed in on the sounds and, sure enough, saw a light emitting from the last classroom. She approached it, stopping to eavesdrop just outside, and peered in the window.

  “This must be it,” Scarlet thought. “Dead Ed.”

  She looked through again, this time for a bit longer, hoping to spy Charlotte or anyone she recognized.

  “Come in, come in, whoever you are,” Ms. Pierce said playfully.

  Scarlet reached down tentatively for the polished brass doorknob and, with some effort, turned it until the latch released and she could pull the heavy door open.

  Ms. Pierce was a gentle woman of indeterminate age: pleasant-looking with a few wrinkles and a firm but caring voice. Her hair was tied up in a bun held there by a number two pencil, and she was wearing a smart silk long-sleeve blouse with a conservatively cut wool skirt. She seemed from an era when a person might as easily look fifty years old as thirty. A time, it occurred to Scarlet, now long passed. She felt badly about not having an apple to leave on Ms. Pierce’s desk.

  “Welcome. We’ve been expecting you, but … ,” Ms. Pierce stammered. “I’m afraid I don’t know your name, miss.”

  “Um, Scarlet, Scarlet Kensington, ma’am,” she replied in an uncharacteristically respectful tone. “But I don’t think you’ve been expecting me.”

  “Of course we have, Scarlet,” Ms. Pierce assured her, emphasizing Scarlet’s name so as to commit it to memory. “And there is your seat, the last open desk, at the back.”

  Scarlet had a feeling she knew where this was going, but before she could object, Ms. Pierce handed her a textbook, took her by the arm, and led her halfway to the seat. Scarlet looked from side to side along the way and realized that there was not a soul in the room whom she recognized. This was not good. Rather than pipe up, however, Scarlet was determined to have a little patience and wait until class was over to approach Ms. Pierce with her dilemma. No point, she thought, in making the real dead kids feel like she was slumming it or something.

  “Now class,” Ms. Pierce resumed, “as we are all here together at last, let’s review the orientation film one last time. You can follow along in your Deadiquette books.”

  The lights dimmed and Scarlet watched the film out of the corner of one eye and scanned her classmates with the other. She definitely did not recognize these kids. Then Scarlet was startled by a tap on her shoulder.

  “Hi, Scarlet,” a boy behind her said as she turned to look at him. “I’m Gary.”

  Gary, or Green Gary as he was known to his friends on the Other Side, was a nice, outdoorsy-looking kid dressed in baggy burlap clothes and hemp sneakers. He appeared totally normal except that his lower torso was misshapen and almost completely twisted around, like an old tree trunk.

  “Hi, Gary,” Scarlet whispered, trying hard to look him in the eye given his posture. “I’m looking for a girl named Charlotte Usher. Do you know her?”

  “No,” Gary answered quietly, “but I haven’t been here as long as some of the others.”

  “Hey, Lisa,” he whispered over to the next row. “Do you know some girl named Charlotte?”

  Lipo Lisa was a totally groomed, moisturized, waxed, and buff girl. Even in the darkened classroom, she seemed to shine and sparkle. The kind of girl who could give Petula and the Wendys a run for their money, Scarlet thought, except she wasn’t a
showhorse, she was a workhorse. Lisa was multitasking, watching the movie and doing book curls with her Deadiquette text, when Gary interrupted her workout.

  “Never heard of her,” Lisa grunted, barely breaking her rhythm.

  “Thanks anyway,” Scarlet said sarcastically. “Guess she’s too busy working her jelly to say much, huh?”

  “She can’t say much,” Gary said. “She died during a botched liposuction procedure on her neck and her facial muscles are pretty much paralyzed.”

  “She must have had her brain sucked out first,” Scarlet quipped.

  “Lisa considers herself the wave of the future, a beauty martyr,” Gary said sincerely.

  “Well, I hope she gets to meet the seventy-two plastic surgeons at some point, then,” Scarlet cracked.

  She began idly checking out whatever names on toe tags she could read in the dim glow of the projector. There was Polly, Tilly, Bianca, and Andy, to name a few. Scarlet was just starting to imagine how each of these kids died, but didn’t need to, thanks to an unexpected whisper in her ear from Gary.

  “There’s A.D.D. Andy, a skater who tried to five-oh it off a cement truck,” Gary informed her. “Only the cement churner turned on, and well, Andy was sidewalk.”

  “Jackass,” Scarlet said devilishly.

  “Yeah, he did get a lot of hits on YouTube though,” Gary said, trying to be positive.

  “And Tilly over there?” Scarlet asked.

  “If the lights were up you wouldn’t need to ask,” Gary said with a smile. “Tanning Tilly got fried in a tanning bed. A world-class UV addict. Too greedy with the bulbs.”

  “That’s hot,” Scarlet mocked, her cutting sense of humor returning for the first time in a while. “She got a killer tan.”