Tonya Hurley_Ghostgirl_02 (16 page)

“That’s Damen,” Charlotte said to Maddy like a lovesick schoolgirl.

The truth was, Charlotte was wiser, more mature, but she would never get older, and her deep, heart-on-her-sleeve emotions would always be with her. Seeing Damen took her back to a place where she had her whole life in front of her. Where anything was possible. B.G. — Before Gummy. She longed for that time again, a time of innocence and hope, a time before she was trapped in eternal teendom.

Maddy’s gaze shifted from Charlotte to Damen and back, taking the measure of each. Charlotte’s distress was plain to see.

“Don’t be so surprised,” Maddy mumbled under her breath, but loud enough for Charlotte to hear. “Guys are only as faithful as their options.”

“He’s not like that!”

“I wonder what Scarlet would think?” Maddy asked rhetorically. “It’s a good thing we got here first.”

“Yeah,” Charlotte said absentmindedly. “Good thing …”

Maddy was talking about Scarlet, but Charlotte couldn’t stop thinking about herself. She was fixated on the romantic scene before her, unable to resist inserting herself again, much as she had once before.

“Was it really worth giving him up for Scarlet?” Maddy prodded. “Just so that he could go back to Petula?”

“I don’t know. I thought so at the time.”

“No good deed goes unpunished. That’s what I always say.”

Charlotte knew a lot about unintended consequences. She’d been a victim of them since choking on that damn piece of candy. All she ever really wanted was to be popular, like Petula, and be noticed by Damen. Not dead, like she wound up. Not waiting for some supernatural phone to ring or some whining, coddled teenager to call in with a pathetic little problem.

Damen stood up and looked warmly at Petula. Charlotte did too. She looked good. Tanned, toned, same as always. Helpless, though, that was a new one.

“She isn’t much use to him like this,” Maddy commented. “Is she?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t you see?” Maddy paused for effect and gestured at Petula like a game show prize. “You could have everything you ever wanted.”

As Damen moved away from Petula, Charlotte moved within arms’ distance of her. She studied her, watched her chest rise and fall faintly with each labored breath. Maybe it would be the decent thing to do, Charlotte thought, bringing Petula back to life. She was sure to die if they couldn’t find her soul, but there was no guarantee that was going to happen.

“Who would ever know?” Maddy pushed, feeling Charlotte teeter. “It would be the greatest comeback ever.”

“I could never do that to Scarlet,” Charlotte said, trying to shake some sort of sense back into her own head.

Charlotte looked and felt like she was stuck in a corner of a boxing ring, being pelted.

“Look, we don’t even know if Scarlet is going to come back at all,” Maddy said. “Think of her mother — at least one of her daughters could be spared. You’d be doing a good thing, a selfless thing.”

Charlotte felt somber at the idea that Scarlet may never come back, but she was beginning to catch Maddy’s drift, and it scared her. She’d tried to possess Petula once before, and as she recalled, it didn’t go very well. Still, the possibility of a do-over remained intriguing.

Come to think of it, things had only really gone wrong for her when she’d failed to possess Petula and had to possess Scarlet instead. If not for that, Scarlet and Damen might never have gotten to know each other, let alone hook up. It wasn’t so much that they were meant to be, Charlotte rationalized, as the fact that she’d thrown them together, like two characters in a war-time romance brought together by fate, but destined ultimately to be apart.

“What about Scarlet,” Charlotte asked halfheartedly, running her hands just inches over Petula’s body.

“What about her? If for some reason she does come back, which I’m not sure she will, she’ll get what she wants … mostly.”

“Petula,” Charlotte replied, “but maybe not Damen.”

“She’ll have to face the truth sooner or later anyway,” Maddy touted. “It’s obvious he doesn’t really love her.”

It was hard for Charlotte to argue with Maddy’s logic. Perhaps all that angst Scarlet told her she was feeling was not imaginary. Maybe they’d just grown apart and Damen was feeling a little buyer’s remorse but was too decent to admit it. At least if she possessed Petula, reanimated her, she might be doing not just Scarlet or Damen but the whole world a favor. Just imagine, she thought, if Petula could use all those genetic gifts for good instead of for planning to be someone’s future ex-wife with a huge divorce settlement and one of those pretentious little dogs for a “child.” Maybe possessing her now would be a mission of mercy for all mankind. She looked over at Damen sitting there staring at Petula and felt empowered.

Charlotte reached for Petula’s chest and placed her hand over her heart, in preparation to recite the incantation, when suddenly the floor nurse pulled away the curtain that had been hiding Scarlet’s body. The sound broke Charlotte’s concentration, and when she looked over, the sight of Scarlet, lying there so pale and vulnerable, brought her back to her senses.

“I can’t do this,” she said to Maddy, wiping at her eyes as if she’d just woken from a deep sleep.

Scarlet, Pam, and Prue were finally making some progress. The tangle of branches, dead leaves, and heavy mist gave way to a forest of short stumps and light fog.

“Charlotte and Maddy were headed for the hospital, right?” Pam asked Scarlet.

“I think so. That was the only info I had to give them.”

“Maybe that’s a good thing,” Prue responded.

“What do you mean?”

“They’ll probably go to her hospital room, where her body is,” Pam conjectured, “But her spirit won’t be there.”

Scarlet thought about it for a second and realized her own body was there, too. It creeped her out to think that Maddy might be staring at her, judging her.

“Where will it be, then?” Scarlet asked, totally confused.

“In the hospital intake office,” Prue said. “Wherever that is.”

“Everyone has to pass through an intake office,” Pam explained, “on their way over.”

“I didn’t. I went straight to Dead Ed.”

“That’s because you aren’t deceased, Scarlet,” Prue quipped, the disapproval in her voice showing.

“How do we find the office?” Scarlet said.

“Good question,” Pam answered. “Only kids who have passed through it know where it is and can get back there.”

“But chances are good that one of the kids in that class came through the hospital,” Prue continued, picking up Pam’s thread. “Do you know where it is?”

“I do,” Scarlet puffed.

Chapter 17

Tomorrow Never Knows

Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.

—Gilda Radner

We only fear what we don’t know.

Yet fear is what makes us feel most alive. Familiarity breeds comfort, the Unknown breeds doubt. Will this be your last sunset? Will you ever eat ice cream again? Will you ever feel again the way he makes you feel right now? The uncertainty keeps us on the rim, sharp, living in suspense, at the edge of possibility. Charlotte knew that she had something inside of her that she wanted back, but what exactly that was, she did not know.

Wendy Anderson and Wendy Thomas showed up at the nurses’ station, dressed to kill in fitted couture suits.

“Do you know how long it will be?” Wendy Thomas asked the charge nurse, as if they were waiting for a table to open up at an exclusive club.

“There’s no wait,” the nurse replied helpfully. “You can go right in.”

“No,” Wendy Anderson clarified, “we mean, how much longer will it be?”

“There is no change in their status,” she said tersely after reviewing their charts and the girls’ outfits. “Names, please.”

The Wendys handed over their IDs, but the nurse, like everyone else who ever proofed them, was barely able to tell their pictures apart.

She looked the girls over and quickly wrote the first initials of their last names on their visitors’ tags: “T” & “A.” She handed them over to the girls with a slight smirk on her face.

“Who says nurses aren’t smart enough to be doctors?” Wendy Anderson jabbed.

The two glamazons wiped the artificial concern off their professionally made-up faces and galumphed uncertainly on their new heels to the Kensington girls’ room. Their focus was shifting away from Petula’s condition to more selfish matters, namely the official line of Homecoming succession. They’d been functioning as vice presidents in Petula’s cabinet for a long time, and given the unfortunate circumstances, one of them would be the logical choice to fulfill her Homecoming duties.

They felt entitled after their successful lobbying effort at the local Chevy dealer for a brand-new Corvette for the Homecoming queen to take her victory lap around the track. All they had to do was trade a little skin, appearing at the local car show in bikinis for some cheesecake pictures with random geeks and pervs — something they would have done for nothing if they’d been asked anyway. Either Petula was going to make it or not, and by “make it,” the Wendys meant, “to Homecoming,” not necessarily back to consciousness.

Charlotte looked away from Scarlet’s bed as the Wendys traipsed into the room. She was mesmerized by them as she had been in life. Maddy, too, was momentarily distracted by the duo. She sized them up instantly to gauge their level of sophistication and concluded that she did not feel threatened.

The Wendys definitely did not have anything like resurrection, or resuscitation, for that matter, on their agenda as their clacking heels announced their arrival and roused Damen from his stupor.

Damen lifted his head and rubbed his eyes to focus, and was instantly disgusted by the Wendys’ appearance. It was obvious to him that one or both of them were more than ready to accept the honor of Homecoming queen on Petula’s behalf.

“You couldn’t even wait until the body was cold, could you?” Damen said in disdain.

“You’re the one playing musical sisters,” Wendy Anderson snapped. “This is what Petula would have wanted.”

“Yeah, we’re doing it for her,” Wendy Thomas echoed, reaching for the hanger holding Petula’s dress and stretching it across her body for effect. “It would just kill her if someone else got the crown.”

“How considerate of them,” Maddy whispered to Charlotte.

“Yes,” Charlotte acknowledged, missing her sarcasm entirely once again.

Leave it to those two to find the silver lining in someone else’s misfortune, Damen thought. He stared intensely over at the Wendys for an uncomfortably long while. And then it occurred to him. The most outlandish, ridiculous thing he’d ever thought, but just possibly the answer to his prayers.

“You know what, you’re right,” Damen said with a crazed look in his eyes. “The crown shouldn’t go to anyone else.”

Everyone was confused, even Charlotte. Maddy stiffened up to listen more intently.

“If anything will bring her back, it’s Homecoming,” Damen said, reasoning it out more for his own benefit than the Wendys’. “And if she comes back, Scarlet comes back.”

“Is there a loony bin in this place?” Wendy Anderson asked indelicately. “I hear psych wards are the new rehab.”

Charlotte suddenly found herself wondering if a visit to the funny farm might not be such a bad idea for her either, considering the way she’d been thinking about possessing Petula and having Damen all to herself. The truth was, she wasn’t really thinking and really hadn’t been since crossing over. She was just allowing herself to be carried along and carried away, by Maddy mostly, who continued to make the case for full body takeover relentlessly.

“Charlotte, this is your time!” Maddy yelled in her face, trying to shake her into action. “If he takes her out of here, she’ll die.”

Charlotte, rather, seemed to be sloughing off Maddy’s argument instead. At least for the moment. She stopped listening to Maddy and started watching Damen closely. She was beginning to get it.

Damen grabbed the portable monitor that they used to take Petula for tests and started to put it around her wrist.

No, I can’t put it here, someone will see it, he thought to himself.

“What are you doing?” Wendy Thomas asked.

“I got it! I’ll just put it around her ankle and it will look like an alcohol monitor,” Damen said. “I’m sure she won’t be the only girl in the Homecoming court to have one of those.”

Both Wendys stared at each other, devising an exit strategy, telepathically, to stop this madness. Sharing a brain came in handy in situations like these. Suddenly, they both bolted for the door. Damen, too, as he tried to stop them. The door slammed shut before any of them could get to it, thanks to Charlotte. Damen slammed his foot against it and turned to face the Wendys, not entirely sure what had just happened, but very glad it did.

“Nice work,” Maddy said, hoping Charlotte had been persuaded to keep them all in place for a big Petula revival.

Charlotte, caught up in the scene playing out in front of them, didn’t acknowledge her.

“Nobody leaves this room until I say so,” Damen barked commandingly while shooting his eyes around the room searching for the invisible doorman.

“How are you going to get her out of here? You can’t just drag her lifeless body out and slap her in a Corvette,” Wendy Thomas said, realizing that what she just said was pretty much an oxymoron.

“You’ll get arrested,” Wendy Anderson said, much more to the point.

Damen wasn’t listening anymore, if he ever had been in the first place. He propped Petula up, grabbed some “Facial Freeze” cream out of Wendy’s bag, applied a generous amount to Petula’s orbital area, and held open her eyes for a second while the cream set.

“Hey, wait, that stuff is expensive! It’s liquid gold. Botox in a bottle!”