Charlotte sat there, busted and all alone.
“I was sooo close,” she cried, feeling sorry for herself. “It’s over, and I’m dead,” she concluded, imagining what awaited her back at the Dead Dorm and Eternity.
In her bedroom, Scarlet put on a silk Chinese dragon robe, looked over her shoulder for any sign of Charlotte, and booted up her PC. She clicked on her Web browser and began searching for local obituaries.
“She’s got to be here somewhere,” Scarlet said, determined to find out as much about this so-called Prue as possible.
After trolling through pages of irrelevant links, she found one that looked promising and clicked on it. It was an archive of local crime stories from a newspaper that had folded ages ago, so long ago that Scarlet had seen only a page or two of it when she unwrapped her grandparents’ old Christmas ornaments one year. The Hawthorne Advance. The archive had a searchable database, and Scarlet entered the only info she had.
“P-R-U-E,” she said as she typed, and hit return.
Three articles were retrieved, none of them obits.
“Great,” Scarlet fumed, already frustrated.
She read through a couple of them but found nothing pertinent, just pieces about “Prue” the old maid who canned “the best damn vegetables in the county,” and even a turkey nicknamed Prue that had won a Thanksgiving reprieve from the mayor. Two strikes.
Just then, Charlotte slid in through the door. Scarlet switched off her computer.
“Who the hell was that crazy bitch Prue?” Scarlet asked.
“That was one of my Dead classmates…. She’s angry because I was spending time here and not at the house, where I was supposed to be. I’m so sorry,” Charlotte said, sincerely trying to assess if Scarlet really was okay or not.
“Sorry for what? A) For making the cheerleading squad? B) For trying to kiss my sister’s boyfriend? Or C) For almost having me killed by some evil demon seed?” Scarlet replied.
Charlotte shrank down in Scarlet’s pink-and-black skull chair.
“I happened to see your little screen saver when I was at the Dorm,” Scarlet said, suspicious of who the “guy” was on it, but not letting on to Charlotte that she wasn’t 100 percent sure.
Charlotte was cringing silently, imagining exactly what Scarlet had seen on her computer. There were folders and folders of Damen-head jpegs she had taken over the past two school years. Smiles, frowns, profiles, portraits—every mood and angle. But most damning of all was the crude screen-saver animation she had Photoshopped from scans of vintage magazine cutouts and pictures of their heads. When Scarlet hit the spacebar, did she see the composite of a couple—-Charlotte’s head pasted atop a beautiful dove gray Chanel dress and Damen’s pasted atop a gray Givenchy suit with a white silk pocket square—dancing close? If so, she was busted for real, and there was no point in trying to spin it. She decided it was best to come clean. About everything.
“Okay! Okay. I’m not really tutoring Damen so that he can pass Physics,” Charlotte said, realizing that she couldn’t lie to Scarlet any longer.
“I got that,” Scarlet snapped, realizing that the guy was, no doubt, Damen.
“I’m tutoring him so that he can go to the dance,” Charlotte admitted.
“Why would you care if he goes to the dance with my sister?” Scarlet asked.
“I don’t. I’m tutoring him so he can go to the dance with… me,” Charlotte said. “I don’t just want to go—I have to go.”
“That’s a good one,” Scarlet said sarcastically.
“Really. See, when we die unexpectedly, we carry unresolved issues with us. Issues that need to be resolved before we can… move on,” Charlotte explained.
“So let me get this right. You have to go to a stupid dance with a moron to reach a higher spiritual plane?” Scarlet said, not believing Charlotte’s audacity.
“It’s true. Look, you don’t know what it’s like. I am now and have always been invisible to everyone,” Charlotte replied.
“I will not let you use my body to go to a dance with my dumb sister’s boyfriend… or to do anything else for that matter,” Scarlet announced as she shooed Charlotte out of her room and slammed the door.
“But what about Damen? What about his test?” Charlotte yelled from the hallway, which prompted Scarlet to open the door, shoot her a look, and slam it again.
15
Do or Die
Kiss me and you will see how important I am.
—Sylvia Plath
Perception vs. reality.
In high school, they are pretty much the same thing. We put on makeup and football helmets, buy nose jobs and fast cars, all to reinforce perception and keep reality at bay. There might, in fact, be much more to someone than meets the eye, but in order to make such a discovery, you have to be willing to dig beneath the surface. Most people aren’t, because it would upset the social order; but a few, very few, are.
Charlotte peered through the glass of the Physics room door, the same door that she’d peered out of when she took her last breath, only this time she was literally on the other side. She saw that Damen was struggling with his Physics quiz under the watchful “eye” of Mr. Widget. Everyone in the room was on edge but not nearly as tense as Charlotte.
Damen was already stuck on the first “easy” question, unable to make up his mind between two answer options. Was it a trick question or was it really easy? He was so nervous that he began to overthink everything and second-guess what he knew.
Charlotte was beside herself as he agonized and finally decided to go in and help him. She walked through the door and back toward Damen’s desk. As she did, the mini solar system on the ceiling started to whirl around as she made her way toward Venus, the planet Damen was sitting under.
Charlotte stood behind Damen and tried to move his hand telepathically to the correct answer, but as usual, found it difficult to use her powers around him. Leaning over his shoulder in such an intimate position, staring at his paper nearly cheek to cheek, was thrilling for her but not so lucky for him. Charlotte unwittingly knocked the pencil from his hand, attracting totally unwanted attention from Mr. Widget, who was deep into the new issue of Physics Today. Widget caught Damen fishing around for it under Bertha the Brain’s desk.
“Eyes on your own paper, people,” he reminded the class without singling out Damen. He’d seen enough clever cheating techniques in his tenure to write a book, from plain old sneaking a peek to the more hi-tech tactics of the digital age—taking cell phone pictures of tests, texting answers, Googling from cell phone Web browsers…. Basically, he’d seen it all, and so he kept an eye—his good one, that is—trained suspiciously on Damen.
“Cramp,” Damen mouthed, pointing to his hand, as Widget shook his head and resumed reading his magazine.
Charlotte immediately tried again. She wrapped herself around Damen and got so excited that the hot pink electrical current that periodically sparked in a glass ball next to Damen brewed into an all-out electrical storm. She stepped away, not wanting to call any more attention to Damen, but this only caused the eraser on his pencil to jerk all the way up his nose. Damen was getting a little freaked and Widget, who continued to eye Damen, was on high alert.
Concerned that she might cost Damen not only just a ticket to the Fall Ball but also his place on the football team if this kept up, Charlotte made her best effort to focus on the task at hand. She ignored his broad shoulders, his strong arms, his beautiful head of thick hair, his gorgeous eyes, his sweet lips, and his perfect nose, and without any further distractions took his hand in hers and gently guided it to the right answers just as time ran out.
“Pencils down, people!” Mr. Widget said with the gumption of a cop trying to disarm a dangerous assassin. “Time’s up!”
The stragglers blindly filled in the last answers without even reading the questions as they passed up their papers.
Mr. Widget personally snapped Damen’s paper out of his hands with the last question still blank
. Charlotte desperately grabbed Damen’s hand, which caused him to dive out of his seat like a receiver catching a Hail Mary pass, and fill in the last answer.
Hoping for a more normal day (or as normal a day as was possible for someone like her), Scarlet was in the hall getting stuff out of her locker when there was a knock on the other side of the steel door.
“Go away,” Scarlet said, not even looking to see who it was. A few more knocks followed, irritating Scarlet enough to get her to pay attention. She closed her locker and saw Damen’s quiz, marked with a big red “A,” covering his face.
“Can you believe it?” Damen asked, shoving the paper into her face now.
“I can believe just about anything at this point,” Scarlet replied.
People started to stare at them, so Scarlet ducked down and tried to keep a low profile, but Damen didn’t seem to care who saw them. He was way too excited.
“It didn’t even feel like we really studied,” Damen said excitedly.
“Tell me about it,” Scarlet replied.
“I hope we do half as good on the big exam,” Damen added, walking backward away from her. “See you after school.”
“We?” Scarlet asked. “Wait, I’m busy….”
He was already out of earshot, leaving Scarlet no time to object but plenty of time to resent Charlotte.
Damen arrived at Scarlet’s, well, Petula’s house, parked in front, and entered as he usually did, without ringing the bell. He knew Petula was at cheerleading practice and wouldn’t be home for a little while. He walked down the hall of the second floor but made a left turn to Scarlet’s room rather than the right turn he usually made to Petula’s. It felt a little weird to him.
He approached Scarlet’s room, ignored the authentic keep out sign posted on the partially closed door, and walked in. The lights were dimmed and there were what seemed to be hundreds of ornate candles flickering around the room. It was beautiful. Damen looked around for Scarlet but couldn’t find her until he noticed her silhouette on the ceiling, projected by the candlelight. On his way over to her, he noticed a pom-pom pinned to the wall with a steak knife. He walked toward Scarlet, on the floor next to her bed, her iPod cranked as she rocked out mindlessly.
“I guess this means you won’t be attending any more pep rallies?” Damen said as he pulled the knife out of the wall, freeing the pom-pom above her.
Scarlet was lost in the music and didn’t hear him. He tapped her on the shoulder while holding the steak knife in his other hand, which was the first thing she saw. She yanked her ear buds out and jumped up on her bed to get away as the morbid strains of the new Arcade Fire spilled out into the room.
“Oh, sorry,” Damen said, realizing that he looked like an attacker.
As he put the knife down on her nightstand, he noticed the tag line on a poster for the cult indie film Delicatessen, which read, “A modern tale about love, greed, and cannibalism.”
“Hey, isn’t that the one where the guy has a deli in the apartment building and grinds up tenants and sells them for meat?” he asked.
Scarlet was blown over by the fact that he knew the movie, but she didn’t want him to know that, so she just brushed it off as best she could. “I’m thinking about doing my own version at Hawthorne where a disgruntled student gets a job as a waitress at the local country club and grinds up popular kids into pâté and then feeds them to their unsuspecting parents,” she said, trying her best to intimidate him.
“I just got here a little early, but I thought, if you were free now, we could study for a few minutes?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this whole tutoring thing…,” she replied.
Damen noticed her guitar—a pale purple Gretsch hollow body—sitting on a stand and picked it up, interrupting her.
“I didn’t know you played,” he said as he placed the black leather guitar strap over his head.
“Why would you?” she asked, somewhat sarcastically.
Damen plopped down on Scarlet’s bed and started fiddling around.
“Oh, sorry, do you mind?” he asked.
“No, no, not at all…,” she replied, using it to stall him, “… go right ahead.”
Damen looked at the guitar, closed his eyes, and felt his way through “I Will Follow You into the Dark,” by Death Cab for Cutie.
“I didn’t know…,” Scarlet uttered, unable to believe not only that he could play, but that he knew one of her favorite songs, “… that you played.”
“Yes, you did. Remember? I told you,” he said.
“Right. I guess I forgot,” she replied, figuring that it must have been when Charlotte possessed her.
Damen was intrigued, since in all his experience with girls, they hung on his every word, remembering every little thing he said.
“I never thought I’d be playing this song for a ‘cheerleader,’ ” he said, laughing as he strummed.
“Ex-cheerleader,” she snapped, cracking a little smile. Scarlet smiled throughout, impressed by his song choice.
“You know, I have tickets to see Death Cab Saturday night…,” he said as he played the last few notes of the song.
“Oh yeah?” she said in her deadpan tone, not wanting to let him know that she would kill a small cuddly animal or even a close family member for a ticket.
“Petula’s really not into them and she’s making other plans,” he said tentatively. “Would you… I don’t know, be willing to cramp your style and maybe go with me…?” he asked.
The question hung in the fragrant air as the most awkward silence ever followed.
Lost in their moment, neither of them heard a car pull up to the house or the front door open or Petula cursing about practice being unexpectedly canceled and what a waste of her precious time that was.
“I mean, you know, as a thank-you for all your help and all?” he added.
“Umm… yeah… I guess, sure,” she agreed, trying to keep her cool, but on the inside she was ecstatic. Her reaction surprised her.
“Damen?” Petula yelled, calling through the house for her boyfriend.
Scarlet and Damen both blushed, as if they were just caught making out in the fiery grips of passion.
“I better go,” Damen said, setting her guitar down and straightening his shirt and pants.
“Yep…,” she replied, trying to act like she couldn’t care less.
“So, okay then, Saturday, we’ll just meet outside the theater,” he said as he left the room. “Hey, you were going to say something about tutoring?”
“Oh right, it was nothing…,” she said.
Damen ducked into the bathroom that adjoined the sisters’ bedrooms and flushed the toilet, creating a little audio alibi for himself as he opened the door and walked hurriedly down the stairs.
“Coming!” he yelled down to Petula. “Just draining the dragon.”
16
Princess and the Poseurs
You’d kill yourself for recognition, kill yourself to never, ever stop You broke another mirror, you’re turning into something you are not.
—Radiohead
We all want to be stars.
The idea of being revered and envied must be encoded somewhere deep in our DNA. So must the desire to revere and envy others we imagine to be better, more accepted, and more popular than we are. The only problem is that the most necessary qualities required to be a celebrity—self-absorption, egomania, shamelessness—are the least attractive in a friend.
Maybe it was another possession side-effect?” Scarlet ruminated as she walked down the hall to her locker. Could she actually be starting to like Damen Dylan as, dare she say… a person? A guy? In a desperate attempt to drown out the unpleasant thoughts plaguing her, she sought the solace of the iPod volume control yet again, spinning the toggle wheel to ear-bleeding levels, so loud that the people halfway down the hall could ID her playlist.
As she headed to her locker, wearing a washed-out vintage Suicide tee, she looked around for Charl
otte, who had been noticeably absent of late, but saw only Damen standing in the hallway, leaned up against an adjacent locker.
“Hey,” he said as she came into view.
Damen reached into his backpack and pulled out a bootleg Green Day CD from under his coat.
“I burned this for you last night. Thought you might dig it,” he said as he handed it to her.
“Thanks,” she muttered, not really trying to hide her ambivalence.
Scarlet’s tepid response suggested to Damen that he was off the mark.
She reached into her locker, scoured the customized CD rack that she kept at the bottom, and picked one for him.
“Dead Kennedys?” Damen asked.
“Truer now than ever,” Scarlet replied.
“ ‘Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables,’ ” Damen read the title out loud. “How thoughtful.”
While they were caught up in their music discussion, a few football players noticed their exchange, and then some girls noticed the football players noticing Scarlet.
“People are looking at me funny,” Scarlet said to Damen as the girls stared her up and down.
“Is that a new thing?” he asked, impressing her with a surprisingly quick-witted comment.
“Hey, just because I’m paranoid…,” she began.
“… doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get me,” Damen said, completing her thought with a nod.
They weren’t exactly soul mates, but there was no denying they were becoming increasingly comfortable around one another. Scarlet decided to surf this wave a little further, or at least until it crashed. She shrugged off her anxiety for the time being and agreed to meet Damen later for a tutoring session. Her only problem: she didn’t know a thing about Physics.
Charlotte sat at her desk in Dead Ed, thumbing robotically through the pages of her Deadiquette text. She had been feeling inexplicably uneasy ever since Damen’s test and thought she might lose herself in her studies. It had always worked for her before, but unfortunately, not this time.