Ghost Flower (16 page)

There were four curtained alcoves off the hallway, and Maisie led me to the first one, nearest the arch. “She put you in No. 1,” she said, pulling aside a heavy velvet curtain as though she were unveiling a new home spa on a game show. “It’s our nicest changing suite.”

The “changing suite” was large—large enough for an overstuffed chaise lounge and small table near the entrance, a console table against one wall, and a kind of dais in the front where the three-way mirror stood. The corners were in shadow, but the part of the room with the mirror was well-lit. The console table held a velvet jewelry case with necklaces, earrings, and bracelets, and next to it stood six pairs of shoes and three purses. There were four sets of bars to hang clothes on, and they were all full. I’d never seen so many beautiful clothes in one place before.

“She has day wear on this side,” Maisie explained, pointing to what looked like ten outfits, arranged by color. “Going-out clothes over here.” Another ten outfits, also arranged by color from light to dark. “And the gowns are back here, although she said you might just have to have some made.”

That sounded like gowns plural. “Did she say where I would be wearing gown
s
?” I emphasized the last syllable.

“Many of our ladies have black tie affairs to go to, and there are the dances at the club. But I think she mentioned something about your eighteenth birthday party.”

“Oh. Of course,” I said. And for some reason that both delighted and relaxed me. After everything I was learning, it was reassuring to have some evidence that Bain and Bridgette intended to stick to at least some part of their original proposal.

“She said to start over here”—she pointed to her left—“and then go around, so you are moving clockwise.”

Bridgette couldn’t even let me try on clothes in my own order. I was increasingly glad that I’d decided to ignore her plan and come a week early. How incredibly annoying for her that must have been. “I’ll be sure to consider that,” I said.

“Oh, and she said to tell you that your phone is in that bag by the chair.” I glanced at the brand new iPhone and wondered why Bridgette had bothered. It wasn’t like I had anyone to call—or who would call me. “It’s your old number; she just got a new handset. If you need anything, I’ll be right nearby. Although”—she looked around with clear admiration—“I doubt you will.”

“Thanks,” I said, feeling a bit disoriented.

She pulled the heavy velvet curtain back into place with a discrete clicking of the large wooden rings it hung from. With it closed, the sound from outside was muffled, and it was like being in a little cocoon. I fingered an inky indigo silk dress with a row of pearl buttons that was in the middle of the “night” section and toyed with starting there. But since I was still a little afraid of how Bridgette would react to my show at Coralee’s party now that we were alone, I decided to follow her instructions.

I was on the second of the “day” outfits when I heard a phone ringing. It was coming from the bag on the chair. With a jolt, I realized it was mine.

Slowly, I walked to the chair, opened the bag, and pulled out the handset. “UNKNOWN NUMBER” blinked up at me from the screen. My heart beat faster.

Who would be calling me?
I thought again.
Bain? Althea?
Who else had this number or would know it had been reactivated?

“Hello?” I said, trying to keep the trembling out of my voice.

There was silence on the other end.

At first I thought I had been dialed by mistake from the bottom of a purse.

Then I heard, very faintly, the sound of breathing. Someone was there.

“Hello?” I repeated.

It was soft, faint breathing, as though coming from very far away. It reminded me of how my mother, my real mother, sounded when she’d call me from pay phones. The tinny, crackling sound of her voice making it seem surreal, inhuman.

“Who is this?” I demanded.

The breathing stopped. The line went dead.

Super,
I thought, setting the phone down.
I’m not even here for twenty-four hours, and I’m already getting prank calls.

I tried to laugh it off, but as I slid into a short-sleeved cashmere sweater, I had to admit there was something unnerving about the call. If the breathing had been heavy and perverted, that would have been one thing. But it wasn’t. It felt like the breathing of someone asleep on the other side of the world.

It took me ten minutes to work through the first three “day” outfits, and at that rate I figured I was going to be there until Aurora’s birthday. To speed things up, I decided to forgo fastenings, which is how I found myself trapped half in and half out of the silver grey blouse when I felt the air behind me move and something brush against my leg.

I couldn’t see, and I couldn’t move my arms. I started to say, “Who—”

A hand closed over my mouth, an arm locked around my chest, and a voice said, “Don’t scream.”

N
o one who has lived the life I’ve lived would follow that order.

I’d managed to keep my motorcycle boots on through all the trying, and now I kicked backward with one of them, making contact with a shin.

“Stop it,” a girl’s voice said. “Ouch.”

Scrambling my head out of the top of the blouse and plowing my arms into the sleeves, I turned around. I was face-to-face with Coralee Gold.

“You are so violent,” she complained, massaging her shin.

My heart was pounding, and my mind flipped from the fact that this was the girl whose graduation party I had ruined the night before, to what the police had said about her and Liza being enemies.

She pushed clothes I’d discarded on the chaise aside, sat down, planted her arms behind her, and leaned back. She was wearing tight jeans, a billowing yellow top with gold-wrapped tassels at the sleeves—which was sheer and open enough to make it obvious she wasn’t wearing a bra—and one long beaded earring.

My mind flashed to the picture of her parents—Gina “Domestic Diva” Gold, tall and Japanese; and the “adorable Bernie,” short and white—that showed up in every issue of
Tucson
magazine, and I realized Coralee’s looks were a perfect blend of the two. With her mother’s thick dark hair and features and her father’s piercing green eyes and cleft chin, she was more beautiful than pretty. I imagined that had been challenging when she was younger. Now she was a knockout, and the way she carried herself suggested she knew it. A little too much maybe, like she was making up for lost time. Or had an axe to grind.

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.