Ghost Flower

  She looked me up and down. “I never would have thought of pairing motorcycle boots and flowers. Sort of a ‘naughty grandma’ look. Not everyone could pull that off.”

  It took me a moment to realize that the flowers she was referring to were my—Aurora’s—panties. I found the black suede shorts that were supposed to go with the silver blouse and tugged them on.

  “I’m sorry I scared you,” she said, crossing one leg over the other. “I didn’t know how else we could meet in secret.”

  I didn’t like people seeing me in my underwear. I felt off-kilter and at a disadvantage, so I made my voice as unfriendly as possible when I asked, “And that was important?”

  But if she noticed, she wasn’t bothered by it. Coralee laughed for exactly two point five seconds. Then the laugh vanished, and she was all business. “We don’t have long, so I’ll get right to it.” She typed on her iPhone as she spoke.

  “If this is about last night—”

  “It is in fact. Do you know how many hits we got?” She sat up and held her iPhone to my face. The screen was open to YouTube, and whatever the video was it had been viewed 10,093 times. “At this rate, it will be past twenty thousand by tonight. That’s good. No, I won’t lie to you—that’s great. It’s not ‘Relapsed Celebrity Throwing Furniture into the Pool,’ sure, but we’re certainly building at a solid ‘Kitten vs. Kitten’ rate.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She stood up, put her arm through mine, and pulled me out of the dressing room toward the arch that led to the sales floor. She pointed across it. “See?” I followed the tip of her emerald green lacquered fingernail and saw two guys sitting on an upholstered bench. One of them had a retro-looking set of big puffy headphones on over his closely cropped black hair and was leaning back with his eyes closed and tapping his foot to the beat of whatever was playing on his iPod. The other had brown hair that could use a trim and tortoiseshell glasses and was hunched forward intently reading a hardcover book.

  “You’re being stalked by slackers?” I asked. “Should we call security?”

  “Slacker stalkers, L-O-Love it,” Coralee said, typing something into her iPhone. “No, that’s my camera crew. Today they’re using their discrete rig—the iPod is a mic and the book has a hidden camera—but they follow me everywhere, to get footage for the webisodes.”

  “Webisodes?”

  I went to peer out again, but she put an arm in front of me. “Don’t lean too far. They’re filming, and I don’t want them to catch you.”

  “Why are they filming if you’re not there?”

  “They’re rolling for when I come out. Or in case you and I have a fight in the middle of the store. That’s one of my core promises to my viewers, nothing is staged. One life, one take. Catchy right?”

  “No.”

  She smiled. “I love your energy. That’s why I’m here. Let’s talk.” She motioned me back into my dressing room, holding the curtain open as though it were her office.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said, preempting anything I could say. “‘We weren’t friends before; in fact we were pretty much enemies. So why would Coralee Gold suddenly embrace me now?’”

  Since I had only a faint idea what their past history was, I decided to limit my response to nodding and “mm-hmm.”

  “But if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. I want to be an investigative journalist,” she explained, moving toward the outfits Bridgette had selected and flipping through them. She shook a hanger in my direction. “Try this on. Anyway, investigative journalism isn’t that easy to break into these days; you need an edge.”

  What she gave me was a poncho-like sweater in yellow, knitted to look like a ruler. It made me look like I was going to a teacher’s rodeo.

  “No, not like that,” Coralee huffed, standing up and adjusting it so it hung off one shoulder. “Better. So, I’m going the Paris Hilton route—only instead of hotels, my family is big in housewares. A whole new direction for the Good as Gold line. Perfect, right? That’s what my publicist Blaze White says. Yes, that Blaze White, the legend. Let me tell you, he is so worth his rate plan. Before he agreed to take me on, I was doing that thing where you talk about yourself by your first name? Horror face! Blaze completely saved me from me.”

  I stopped halfway out of the yellow sweater to gape at her. “Did you just narrate an emoticon?”

  “I’m testing out catchphrases.” She thrust a purple sweater dress at me, and I got the message I was supposed to try it next, even though technically I still had six outfits to go in the day-wear section. “The thing is,” Coralee went on, “it’s not as easy as you think. It used to be one sex tape, and you were golden. But now you need to build, and TMZ won’t come to Tucson for hardly anything.”

  I was fumbling with the zipper on the dress—certain things are hard to do with only one good hand—when Coralee stepped toward me and took over, talking the whole time.

  “That’s why you are such a godsend. Blaze kept saying that I needed a feud, but all my girls are too nice. You’re perfect, though—former enemy and wild girl, now with a mysterious past. Smirk.” She stepped back and eyed the dress. “Very nice but it needs a necklace. You’ll do it right? Will you do it?”

  I tried to sort through all the different parts of what she’d just said while she bent over the console table holding one velvet tray of jewelry. “Your goal is to be a reality Internet star? Don’t you think that’s a little—” I hesitated. I didn’t want to be mean, but there was really only one word I could think of. “Pathetic?”

  She got still for a moment, and her head cocked to one side. Slowly she straightened up and faced me. “Not quite,” she said. Her eyes were looking slightly above me, and she was biting the inside of her cheek. “I mean it was okay, but you need to—how should I put this—own it. Don’t be so tentative. Say it like you mean it. Go on, try again.”

  “Try what again?”

  “Your line. Say it not like a question, but like you really want to hurt my feelings. That’s a little pathetic. The way you would have before you disappeared. You would have really lain into me. Now you seem—I don’t know, different.” She looked me up and down. “I can’t quite put my finger on it but—”

  That was something I couldn’t risk. If Coralee Gold figured out my secret, this would all be over. She’d webisode it in three point five seconds. I cut her off. “This is ridiculous.”

  “Yes!” Coralee declared, pumping her fist in the air like I’d just scored a point. “That’s exactly the right tone. I’ll set up your Twitter account and tweet for you. And you only have to fight with me in public. In private we can be friends. Phone.” She held out her hand, and I realized that was a command. When I hesitated, she made an impatient little come-hither gesture. “At some point, probably in a few months depending on how things go, we’ll have a public apology and be best friends and reveal that we’ve been pals all along. So it’s totally okay for you to e-mail me and text me and stuff. I just called myself from your phone, so now I have your number and you have mine.” She put the phone down and picked up a string of clear round stones ending in a mirrored pendant. “Here, put this on.”

  She stood back, studying me, then shook her head. “That’s not right. Hang on.” She went back to the accessories table. “Turn around.”

  I did, and she slipped a choker made of a tangle of silver chains and crystals around my neck. Her fingertips softly grazed my skin, and I felt the breath catch in my throat. She didn’t move when I turned back. We were facing each other, nearly nose-to-nose, only a hand’s width apart.

  I could smell her expensive conditioner and her lip gloss and the cinnamon gum she’d been chewing earlier. She looked at me, right at me with a directness most people avoided, and something about her being so close sent a tingling ripple through me that could have been expectation or fear or both. I’d never stood this close, this way, with a girl before. Her thick lashes tilted down as her glance moved to my
lips, then came back to my eyes.

  She reached out and touched my cheek with her fingertip. “I’m a very good kisser.”

  I gave her a smile and tried to seem nonchalant, not letting on how strange her proximity was making me feel. Or that I had no idea if I was a good kisser or not. “Is that a proposition?”

  “It’s a fact,” she said. “It would be great for ratings.” Her fingertip rested on the corner of my mouth. “And it would be fun. Maybe next week when we’ve built a fan base a bit.”

  I swallowed. “No.”

  She leaned closer and cocked her head slightly to whisper in my ear. “The old Aurora would have done it.”

  Her breath against my ear was soft and warm, and the tingling inside of me had turned to a fizzy, slightly demanding heat. I felt my pulse beating in my knees as she moved her hand to my upper arm, and the knit fabric of the dress suddenly felt electric against my skin. It had been a very long time since someone kissed me.

  I stepped back a little. “I wasn’t saying no to kissing you. I was saying no to all of it. The show, everything. Your idea is really—something—but I can’t be part of it. My grandmother wouldn’t let me, and I don’t want to do it without her approval.”

  “Oh, of course,” Coralee said, laughing like I’d made a hilarious joke.

  “I’m serious.”

  “Says the girl who once rode a horse wearing nothing but a thong and a pair of cowboy boots across the Ventana Country Club golf course on a dare. In the middle of her grandmother’s charity golf tournament. You live to disobey.”

  “That—I was a different person then,” I said truthfully. “I’ve turned over a new leaf.”

  Coralee brushed that aside. “You say that now, but wait until you have your own spin-off.”

  “Were you just listening to me?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I was My-Profile-Picture-Is-Grumpy-the-Grouch, but I’m single-minded. Blaze says that’s what is going to take me to the top. Well, that and God. You’ll change your mind.” She flicked across several screens on her iPhone, stopped, and held one up for me. “Look, you already have your own fan page.”

  “AURORA SILVERTON IS A HOTTIE. I’D PSANK HER ANYTIME,” I read. “Great. Someone wants to p-sank me.”

  “It’s a typo for spank.”

  “It’s a synonym for stupid.”

  “Retweet! I am so posting that from your account. You’re a natural!” She tapped me on the tip of my nose. “Oh, and I’d want an exclusive on your story.”

  “I’m not sure—”

  “Listen, everyone will be trying to go the interview route, but I was thinking what if instead… we did a reenactment of the night you disappeared?”

  “No,” I said emphatically, maybe a little too emphatically, because she frowned at me. My head swam at the idea. Even hiding behind the amnesia excuse, there were too many ways a reenactment could go wrong for me to risk it. But almost as bad would be arousing the suspicion of an aspiring investigative journalist with a large YouTube following. “That—that isn’t possible,” I stammered. “All interviews have to be run through Jordan North,” I said. “Besides I don’t remember what happened that night. I don’t remember anything. So that’s not—”

  She put up her hand to silence me. “O-M-Genius. Listen to this: We’ll do a séance. Madam Cruz wanted to see you again anyway; this will be ideal.”

  “Coralee that is—”

  “Don’t say anything. I’ll take care of it all. Good talk. Hugsbye.”

  With a whoosh she was through the curtain. But the wooden rings clattered again a moment later, and she poked her head back in. “My wardrobe tends to be Roy G, so it will look best on camera if you focus on Biv. Like what you have on is perfect.” The expression on my face must have told her I had no idea what she was talking about because without waiting she said, “The rainbow? Roy G. Biv? Blue, indigo, and violet for you.”

  And she was gone.

  I was confident that no part of Coralee’s plan went with Althea’s “roll out,” and that in any contest Althea would win, so I decided I didn’t need to worry about it.

  I turned to examine what I still had left to try. There were six more outfits in the day-wear section, but my eye was drawn to the dark blue silk gown with a long row of pearl buttons up the front. I decided to put it on next.

  It was a mermaid cut with a narrow skirt and a train, and the fabric felt cool and exotic against my skin. It’s not easy to do up buttons with only one good hand, and I was bent over concentrating on them when I had the feeling of being watched. It started slowly, just a pricking on the edge of my consciousness. But then the hair on my arms stood up, and the back of my neck felt warm.

  “Go away, Coralee,” I said. “It’s Biv, see?” But Coralee didn’t answer. I felt a shiver run through me.

  I knew I was being silly, but I glanced quickly at my reflection in the mirror in front of me just to check and looked back down at the buttons. Then I registered what I’d seen, and my eyes snapped to the mirror again.

  She’d been standing behind me, in the gap of the curtain Coralee had left open. A girl with long blond hair and a slight smile on her face. The girl in the photo from the police station. The dead girl.

  Only her eyes were open. And staring right at me.

  CHAPTER 22

  When I looked back up, there was no one there. She’d vanished like a ghost.

  There are no ghosts.

  I lunged out of the seat toward the curtains and tripped over the narrow bottom of the gown. Clawing the air, I managed to catch myself on the wall before I went down entirely and was moving forward when I plummeted into Bridgette.

  She helped me back up, horror-struck—a look that changed when she caught what I was wearing. “Oh, thank God you’re already on evening wear,” she said. “It’s taking—”

  “Did you see her?”

  “Who? Wait, where are you going?”

  I pushed past Bridgette, ducked under the curtain, and caught sight of the girl at the end of the dim hallway. “Wait,” I called. “Stop.”

  She stopped. I teetered toward her, my heart pounding. “Hello?”

  She turned around and gave me a bright smile. “Yes?”

  “You’re not—” I staggered back. It was Maisie, the salesgirl. “How did you get here?” I asked stupidly.

  “Through the door?” She was regarding me like she thought I might be more in the market for a straitjacket than a bomber jacket. “Did you need a size? That gown looks amazing on you, by the way.”

  “What happened to the girl who was just here?”

  “What girl?”

  I felt like someone was playing a trick on me. “Blonde? Hazel eyes?”

  Maisie shook her head. “You and Coralee Gold and your cousin are the only people who have been back here. The only ones all day.”

  “That’s impossible. I just saw—” My pulse was roaring in my ears. There had been a girl, hadn’t there? I steadied myself with my palms against the purple flocked wallpaper. I could tell from how Maisie was looking at me that I sounded crazy. I made myself laugh. “Sorry, I thought I saw a friend.” I rubbed my head. “Big night last night.”

  Maisie nodded enthusiastically. “I know. I saw the video on YouTube. That was nuts.”

  Apparently, Coralee wasn’t kidding about—

  The video! That was it. Saying “thank you” over my shoulder, I ran-tottered down the hallway and through the cream arch in pursuit of Coralee. I spotted her standing with the two guys she’d pointed out as her crew. The one with the headphones was looping a cord around his hand, and it looked like they were packing up to leave. I rushed over, nearly diving headfirst into them when I tripped over my train again.

  “Hang on,” I said. “Wait.”

  Coralee turned and frowned. “Not here, not now. We’re enemies, remember?”

  I ignored her and talked to the brown-haired guy with the tortoiseshell glasses who was bent over the book that was a camera. “Excuse me
, did you film—” I cut myself off as he looked up.

  “Grant?” I said hesitantly. I was nearly positive it was the same Grant Villa the police had shown me photos of, but I didn’t want to be wrong.

  He gave me a wry smile. “I was starting to think you’d forgotten all your old friends.”

  I stiffened slightly, then relaxed realizing that was a joke, not a test.

  Grant Villa, who had been at the party the night Aurora disappeared. Grant Villa, who had been Aurora’s longtime crush—but not the guy in the photos. How would she react to seeing him?

  “Well, I didn’t want you to think I was throwing myself at you.” I paused. “Right away.”

  He laughed, then reached out and wrapped me in a bear hug. He smelled really good, and I could see why Aurora had a crush on him.

  “It’s nice to see you back,” he said as he pulled away. The hug had been just friendly, but there was something in the way he was looking at me now that made me a little tongue-tied.

  Fortunately before I had to sort out lucid response, Coralee was standing between us. “What are you doing out here?” she hissed.

  My eyes went from her back to Grant. “Were you filming the dressing room the whole time?”

  He nodded. “Of course. Captain’s orders.” He tipped his head toward Coralee. “Unfortunately we just stopped, so we didn’t capture your brave attempt at setting the floor-to-face speed record. I’m sure there would have been bonus points for the formal wear.”

  “Could I see the video you were shooting?”

  Coralee, who had been trying not very successfully to interrupt, now came and stood between Grant and me. “If you want to watch the footage, you have to agree to be in the footage,” she said, as though reciting the rules of Fight Club. “That means you do my show.”