“Time to execute,” Charlotte said, pun barely intended.
“Next!” the greasy ponytailed headbanger in the threadbare powder-blue tux said as he snapped each couple’s picture. For them this was the most important part of the evening, the part they would carry in their wallets, frame for their parents, hide from their future wives or husbands in years to come, but to him it was routine business.
Charlotte looked around to see where everyone was, but there was no sign of Petula. Not seeing Petula at the prom was unsettling. Charlotte needed that comfort for what was about to go down. For her, it was like having a celebrity on your flight. It made her feel as though the plane, or in this case, the plan, wouldn’t go down in flames.
“Places, everybody!” Charlotte ordered, barking stage directions since she didn’t really know gangster lingo.
The line moved quickly, and Damen and Darcy were next. Prue, Pam, and Charlotte took their positions—Pam behind Damen, Prue behind Darcy, and Charlotte behind the photographer.
“Hello,” Darcy cooed, working the photographer so that they could get a few extra shots.
The photographer recited the standard rules and disclaimer as he did for each couple as Damen and Darcy positioned themselves to be memorialized.
“Your photo will be sent to you in an obituary format, so you’re going to need to fill out the forms over there for the mock article on you both as a couple, and today you’ll get a receipt that’s a ‘pray we make it’ couple mass card with your picture on it. You will need that to claim your obit once they’re in.”
“Together forever,” Darcy said.
Just then, Scarlet walked in, completely covered in a vintage long, blond faux fur coat, with Eric by her side, unseen of course by everyone but Pam, Prue, and Charlotte. She stopped to take in the surreal scene playing out in front of her, so intently focused on Damen that she didn’t even react to Charlotte at the tripod.
Damen looked extremely uneasy and red-faced. The whole memorial theme was really getting to him. This was not the way he hoped to be remembered, posing like a cardboard cutout next to a self-absorbed girl who meant nothing to him. If that was his life plan, he would have just stayed with Petula. He stared back at Scarlet blankly while Darcy flashed a victorious smirk.
“Don’t get distracted,” Eric nudged, trying to comfort Scarlet and keep her focused as he gently ushered her toward the gym.
Charlotte, meanwhile, looked as if she’d seen a ghost, which, of course, she had.
Scarlet entered, but Eric hung back, looking over at Charlotte.
“Don’t get distracted,” Prue repeated to Charlotte, who was distressed not just about Eric, but also over the pain she was clearly causing Scarlet. “First things first.”
The photographer played with the focus and locked them in his viewfinder for what seemed like an eternity to the angelic assassins. Finally, the moment arrived.
“Push it good,” Prue sang evilly as Darcy and Damen posed in front of the backdrop. “Push it real good.”
“Okay, now, on the count of three…,” he said.
As he counted, Prue, Pam, and Charlotte counted right along with him.
“Say cheese,” Prue smirked, reassuringly offering a “we can do this” nod to her friends.
“One. Two. Three!”
On three, Pam pushed Damen off the platform so he wouldn’t be suspected of anything criminal. Prue held Darcy right in the camera shot while Charlotte forced the photog’s finger down on the shutter, creating an almost continuous flash. The light was blinding.
Suddenly, Darcy dropped to the floor, shaking uncontrollably, but Charlotte kept the photog’s finger from lifting off the camera trigger, continuing the blinding onslaught so that no one could see what was happening.
A flurry of activity began in the room, students and adult chaperones rushing the photo station to see what was going on and how they could help. Memories of Petula collapsing in his car set off alarm bells in Josh’s head, and he decided to ditch Wendy. He panicked and backed away from the scene slowly, fearful of being blamed for yet another Hawthorne High hottie biting it.
“She’s down!” Pam yelled.
“Down… ”—Charlotte paused in anticipation for the result she’d been expecting—“and out.”
A figure emerged in the flashes and Charlotte released the button, along with a sulfurous stink that could have been from the burnt-out bulb or the sudden arrival. Either way, it gave new meaning to “party pooper.”
“Maddy,” Charlotte muttered.
They all knew she would likely be the one to show up, but seeing her again, right there in front of them, was a bit shocking, to say the least. There she was, standing over Darcy’s body with a slap-worthy smirk on her face. She hadn’t changed a bit. Her hair was frizzy and she was still sporting bohemian chic—a long, flowery, floor-length spaghetti-strap dress, bangles, and long, dangling earrings.
“The party can start now!” Maddy announced, but her arrogance was short-lived as she felt herself being pulled away. “What the…”
“I’ll be seeing you,” Charlotte said, throwing Maddy’s words from their last meeting back in her face.
“So far, so good,” Pam smiled as she and Prue grabbed Maddy tightly.
The three of them vanished an instant later.
“Get the defibrillator!” Damen shouted into the gathering crowd as he hovered above Darcy.
“What defibrillator?” Marianne, the ever-earnest student council president yelled back. “We used the funds for that for new tubas! The new fund-raiser isn’t scheduled for another year!”
Without any other alternative, Damen began chest compressions. He didn’t like Darcy, but he wasn’t going to let her die either. Scarlet watched from the side as he tried to save her rival, pulling for him proudly, but also watching where exactly he put his hands. She couldn’t help it.
“This is taking too long,” Charlotte said desperately. “She’s got to be brought back now.”
“If she is going to die,” Wendy Anderson whispered to Wendy Thomas, as they scoped out the decor, “she’s in the right place for it.”
Charlotte didn’t know what to do, and almost reflexively called out her boyfriend’s name.
“Eric,” Charlotte screamed. “Please help!”
Immediately responding to Charlotte’s plea, Eric placed his right hand, the one he strummed with, on Darcy’s chest, and then through her rib cage into her heart.
A bright light, mistaken by the crowd for an errant camera flash, exploded and crackled over the scene, and Damen was thrown back a little by a jolt he felt through his entire body. Judging from the sudden heaving of Darcy’s chest, she felt it too.
“They don’t call me Electric Eric for nothing,” Eric said to Charlotte with pride.
“I always said you had great hands,” Charlotte said gratefully.
Everyone’s eyes were on Darcy as she came to. Well, everyone except The Wendys. They were totally annoyed that Darcy had drawn so much attention to herself and away from them. The prom photographer had turned news photographer all of the sudden, documenting Darcy’s near-fatal collapse. With the flash popping again, The Wendys did a quick cost-benefit analysis and bent down to her side with faux sincerity, hoping to glom a little publicity from this washout of an evening.
“Where am I?” Darcy asked, still foggy.
“You are at the Hawthorne High prom,” Wendy Anderson said, more gently than anyone had ever heard her speak in public.
“With us,” Wendy Thomas stressed, her eyes peeled for local news crews, as she grabbed one of Darcy’s arms, carefully lifting her to a sitting position for a good group shot.
“Who are you?” the girl asked.
The crowd gasped with surprise and both Wendys, mortified, let her go. Damen shoved them both out of the way and helped Darcy, whose head hit the floor from the drop, back up. He could tell there was suddenly something different about her.
“Are you okay?” Damen asked.
br />
“Yeah, I just don’t remember much,” Darcy said, completely coming to and unable to see any of the dead.
“It was so strange,” she said. “I was just talking to some people, and now they’re gone?”
“It is,” Damen said, looking around for someone he knew he couldn’t see, “very strange.”
“I love that song,” Darcy said out of nowhere.
“Thanks; it’s from my mix tape,” Damen said, realizing Darcy was maybe a little more like Scarlet than he’d thought at first. “You should stick around. It gets better.”
“I’m not really much of a prom person,” Darcy admitted, “but thanks.”
Damen just smiled at Darcy and realized his instincts were right. She and Scarlet might even be friends under different circumstances. Probably best that she left anyway though. It seemed like she had a lot of questions that needed answering.
He waited a few minutes longer for the EMT to arrive, helped her into the ambulance, and headed back to the DJ booth as the crowd dispersed.
“I have to go,” Eric said to Charlotte. “There’s something I have to do.”
Reality hit Charlotte like a ton of bricks. He was there with Scarlet, not her.
“Yeah, I have something I have to do too,” she said glumly.
As Charlotte arrived at the intake office, a ghostly intervention was already well under way.
“Let go of me,” Maddy, pinned to the floor by Mary, Beth, and Sally, hissed. “Where am I?”
“It’s not so important where you are,” Prue spit, cryptically, “as where you’re going.”
“You can’t keep me here,” Maddy insisted, continuing to struggle.
“Yes, we can,” Pam said. “You don’t have a choice.”
Charlotte walked in and straight to Maddy, getting in her face.
“Darcy died in school just now,” Charlotte explained. “With you inside her.”
“So what is that supposed to mean?” Maddy challenged.
“It means,” Charlotte said flatly, “Dead Ed.”
Maddy had skipped it the first time, but the prospect definitely intrigued her. Whether it was the opportunity to clean up her act or corrupt a whole new group of people, even she wasn’t sure.
“Rules are rules,” Pam chuckled, the tiniest tinge of vengefulness in her tone.
“Time for a little rehab for the soul, sister,” Prue added with a sinister laugh.
Maddy relented and the girls let her up.
She then left the office with Beth, Mary, and Sally to begin her journey and pursue her higher afterlife education.
“You realize she’s not salvageable,” Prue commented to Charlotte and Pam.
“Look who’s talking,” Charlotte said. “Either way, at least we got her out of our world for a while.”
“You can’t change the world all at once,” Pam proclaimed.
“But maybe, little by little,” Charlotte said to her friends. “Now, if there is nothing else, I’d like to go… to prom.”
Chapter
23
Some Great Reward
Tell me, who am I without you, by my side.
—George Harrison
Making up is hard to do.
Like a Call Waiting signal buzzing in your brain, the prospect of getting back together with an ex often means putting your anger, disappointment, and sometimes even your better judgment on hold to answer your heart’s call. Whether it’s the right party or a wrong number is hard to know unless you pick up.
As they made their way back through the corridor to the gymnasium, Charlotte thought about the lesson she was taking away from all this. Maybe the whole point of the trip was to convince her that things were no longer about her, and that she was around for the purpose of truly serving others. She had to let go of her earthly friendships and more importantly, let go of love.
Charlotte was trapped in her own reverie and looking for an escape hatch when she heard a familiar voice booming down the hall.
“Did I miss something?” Petula asked as she grabbed her ticket from the counter girl and eyed the last throes of the commotion that had preceded her.
The girl, not realizing that for Petula it was a rhetorical question, began to breathlessly relate the events of the past hour or so about Darcy collapsing, the ambulance, all of it.
“No?” Petula interrupted, heading heedlessly on her way into prom. “Good.”
She was surrounded by a crowd, but not the high schoolers that typically attended her. Those days were long gone, though her haughtiness clearly was not. Whether this was just an act of self-preservation given how she’d been treated or an actual personality backslide, the confidence that she’d been doling out to others had definitely made a comeback in her own life.
As she approached the gym doors, the ushers eyed the mob behind her suspiciously, but Petula just played them off as if she was entering a hot club where she knew all the bouncers. The difference, she always knew, between A-Listers and everyone else was not fame or fortune, but attitude.
“They’re with me,” she advised, giving them a “you know who I am” face and turning to wave the mini-horde, now including Pam, Prue, and Charlotte, in behind her.
Just as she was about to enter, the lights went down. Petula took this as a gesture of respect for her appearance at her last-ever high school dance.
“Hello,” the announcer said. “Is everyone having a good time?”
As the lights came up everyone noticed a group of people come in all at once by the stage door. Damen brought the music down along with the lights and kept the volume low as he tried to figure out what was happening at the door.
“Oh, we have some latecomers,” the announcer said. “Just in time for the main attraction!”
“I am the main attraction,” Petula said as she entered, looking perfect in her gorgeous vintage Chanel gown.
Petula walked through the crowd to stunned silence, not so much because of her arrival but because she looked absolutely breathtaking. Everyone whispered about how great she looked, which ate The Wendys alive. Despite their efforts, Petula’s popularity had metastasized and spread.
They whispered also about the group dragging behind her. They were her clients, as she sometimes called them, the homeless people that she had been styling for months. They were all dressed fabulously in black, mostly pieces from Scarlet’s old wardrobe, which fit in perfectly with the fantasy funeral theme. And, since it was in honor of Charlotte Usher, a girl who was also invisible, they really felt as if they belonged.
“Please, Petula,” Wendy Anderson jokingly begged, pretending to hold out an empty bowl, “may I have some more.”
“She doesn’t have a date,” Wendy Thomas howled, breaking down in hysterics. “She has a bread line.”
“Yes, she does,” a guy they didn’t recognize said to them.
He was dressed in an expensive Armani suit. He was tan and his hair was full and coiffed. He was every girl’s dream, a little disheveled, and bad-boy, but very charming. The Wendys swooned over him as he walked by them. He looked like a Hollywood actor, much too good for their little pond.
The mystery man walked over to the MC and asked for his microphone. He took it and made his way to the center of the room and motioned for Petula to join him. Damen smiled and pulled up the gain on his mic so everyone could hear.
“Who is…,” Wendy Thomas stammered, “that?”
As she got closer to him, Petula found it hard to believe what she was seeing.
“Tate?” Petula sighed.
“You did invite me to your prom, didn’t you?” he asked, even the cadence of his words now revealing a breeding they hadn’t before.
“Yeah, but I didn’t think you were going to show,” she said, still confused. “And I certainly didn’t think you would show like this.”
“That’s what I like about you,” he said. “You liked me because of me, not because I’m an oil heir.”
This was the first time Petula had ever
been publicly accused of sincerity. She was happy to plead guilty.
“He’s a bum?” Wendy Anderson asked, perplexed.
“He’s a billionaire!” Wendy Thomas repeated, punching Wendy Anderson in the arm to quiet her.
“Why were you on the street?” she asked.
“All I seemed to attract were fame seekers, and I was sick of it,” Tate explained. “I started to believe that those were the only kind of girls I would ever meet.”
“What other kind are there?” Wendy Anderson asked Wendy Thomas, who just shook her head in wonder.
“I figured the only way to change that was to change everything,” Tate continued. “I gave up the lifestyle, the money, and the comforts, all of it.”
“Then why are you here?” Petula quizzed, cataloging his outfit loudly in an effort to make The Wendys even more jealous. “In a gorgeous, Italian designer, fine wool, single-breasted, two-button suit?”
“I was looking for something that I found when I met you,” Tate said sweetly. “Now I can be me again.”
Petula was once again the envy of the school and The Wendys, only this time she’d truly earned what she had. Tate handed back the mic and leaned in for a long kiss.
“Too bad CoCo isn’t here for this,” Pam said to Prue and Charlotte. “She did a great job.”
The crowd applauded, especially the ones who’d made fun of her and brought her down. There was a certain comfort they felt having Petula as their leader, even if they envied and hated her. She never failed to deliver on giving them something to talk about.
“Now that the young lady has gotten her surprise,” the announcer said, “I have one for the rest of you.”