Scarlett Fever

by Maureen Johnson

  She flipped through them all again for a few seconds each. The few that she thought were worth a second look she set on the side of the counter. The majority of them she dropped in one big sloppy pile. Scarlett picked up her tea and sniffed it carefully. It smelled like cooked pencil shavings and just a tiny, tiny bit like burning plastic. She set it back down again.

  “God,” Mrs. Amberson said in disgust, “I’m just not getting the quality that I’m looking for. I’ve set my bar, and it’s high.”

  She pushed the photos to the floor in dismissal.

  “What’s wrong with those?” Scarlett asked, looking at the faces of actors around her feet. They looked sad and desperate now, smiling all around her shoes, asking to be picked up. They had done nothing wrong. They just wanted a chance.

  “No spark,” Mrs. Amberson said. “You can see it at once. You know when you see it.”

  “How can you see a spark in pictures? They all look the same.”

  “Exactly.” Mrs. Amberson gulped down some tea, even though vast clouds of steam were still coming off of it. “They all look the same. We need Chelsea. She’s the key. She’s our next step.”

  Scarlett picked the pictures up from the floor and piled them on one of the bar stools. She had to do that much for them.

  “That’s all for today,” Mrs. Amberson said. “Oh, but you have to deliver something very important. Do you see that large envelope over there on the bookcase? Take that with you. Your brother has an audition tomorrow for Crime and Punishment! He’s reading for the part of a young pervert! He’ll enjoy that!”

  “Crime and Punishment? You mean, like, to be on the show with Sonny Lavinski? The Crime and Punishment?”

  Scarlett liked Crime and Punishment. Everyone liked Crime and Punishment. Crime and Punishment had been on TV as long as she’d been alive. It had four spin-off shows and was on in reruns pretty much all the time on one network or another. And wisecracking lead detective, Sonny Lavinski, was pretty much her favorite character on any show. Everyone loved Sonny Lavinski.

  “I’ve been talking to the producers for a while,” Mrs. Amberson said, “since one of the directors came to see Hamlet. They have real interest in him. I’ve been working on this for weeks, but I didn’t want to say anything until it came through. Make sure he looks at the pages tonight. The audition tomorrow is at four. I have a very good feeling about this one.”

  BAD OMENS

  The moving van had come while Scarlett was out and the stage platform and lights were gone. Only the chairs remained, scattered around in a confused fashion. Hamlet was truly over, and the room was once again an underused, dingy dining area. Scarlett took a moment to stand alone in the empty room, listening to the echo of traffic outside, the creak of the floor. The feeling of loss was so profound that for a moment, she couldn’t breathe. Something wonderful had happened here—something confusing, but wonderful—and now it was gone, and it would never come back. The show was permanently over.

  She probably would have started crying, but she was startled by a noise behind her. Quick little steps in the lobby.

  “There you are,” Lola called. “I was worried you’d be late for dinner.”

  Lola had been cleaning. Unlike most people, Lola cleaned while wearing neat and formfitting black pants and shirt, with a little white pocket apron tied around her waist. She carried a little caddy of furniture spray and cloths. Her hair was pulled back in a loose, flattering knot.

  Lola was the second-oldest Martin, just three months out of high school. She had taken a “year off” to work at home at the hotel, instead of going to college like all of her friends. Of course, there was no money for college, but that was never mentioned. Lola always acted like her service was completely voluntary. She was unfailingly, sometimes infuriatingly gracious. She was also a strange throwback to some other generation of Martins—white-pale with a fragile build. If she had been a character in an old romance story, she would have been the lovely maiden at court, the one with the terrible wasting disease who had to be married off before she dropped elegantly dead.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about these chairs today,” Lola said, pushing one of the many scattered dining room chairs into a patch of sunlight. There were many styles of chair in the room, but the one Lola had was one of the old ones, part of the fancy original set from when the dining room was decorated in 1929 and all the furniture matched. They were made of deep cherry wood, with backs carved into stylized flowers. Some of them still had the threadbare original cushioned seats, covered in yellow silk with a pattern of silvery birds.

  “I’ve been trying to think of a way to get these chairs refinished and reupholstered,” she said, testing one of the legs. “It would probably only cost a few hundred dollars.”

  “A few hundred dollars?” Scarlett said, settling herself in one. They creaked, too.

  “Maybe a thousand. Or two. But I think it’s important. They’re really good chairs, and I feel like we need to make a good impression right here, on the doorstep. If people come in and see frayed fabric…well, people notice.”

  “We could put them in the basement if they look bad,” Scarlett said.

  “The solution for everything isn’t ‘put it in the basement,’” Lola said.

  This had been the solution for as long as Scarlett could remember, but she didn’t care enough to argue the point.

  “That’s true,” Scarlett said, picking at the threads. “It never works in horror movies. The thing always escapes and eats you. Or someone finds it and then you have to kill them. And then you have two secrets in the basement. Basements are bad.”

  “I’ve researched this,” Lola said. “After Mrs. Amberson told us about the man who designed this place, J. Allen Raumenberg. We could be sitting on a fortune, literally. He was a really famous designer. The pieces are just in such bad condition. If we could get them fixed…”

  “You’re probably right.” Scarlett held up her hands in surrender. “But we can’t afford to.”

  Lola sank down in the chair opposite Scarlett.

  “I know,” she said. “I just can’t help thinking about it. This place could be a showpiece. A good cleaning, a little fixing…it’s not even that much money in the grand scheme of things.”

  “Every amount of money is a lot of money when you have no money.”

  “It would be an investment, though.” Lola stared into a thready patch of fabric for a moment and worked her finger into the seat stuffing. “Did I mention I had an interview at Bubble Spa the other day? It went really well. Even though I was fired from Henri Bendel, my old manager still loves me, so I got a really good recommendation. I think I’ve got that one in the bag. I’m hoping they’ll give me twenty hours a week. I could make a ton on commission there. That stuff is easy to sell. Makeup, skin care…I can sell that stuff in my sleep.”

  This was true. When it came to selling beauty products, Lola had Jedi powers. She’d only been fired because she took off too many days to go places with her ex-boyfriend, Chip, who didn’t understand that when you had a job, you were supposed to go all of the days you were scheduled to work. But it wasn’t his fault. Lola had done the skipping.

  “That’s great,” Scarlett said.

  “It’s something. I mean, I like sales. Oh, and you heard we’re going to Lupe’s, right?”

  “Yeah,” Scarlett said. “With Marlene. Let the happy fun times begin.”

  “Scarlett…” Lola admonished.

  The Martins were, on the whole, a fairly open family, but Marlene was one subject no one was allowed to touch. She was the elephant in the room. They all knew that it was Marlene’s medical bills that had caused so many of their problems. Talking about this, ever, in any context, was not allowed. Scarlett even wondered if they were allowed to think about it. The other thing that you really weren’t supposed to mention was Marlene’s personality, which was not entirely composed of sunshine and rainbows. She responded a little differently to each member of her family, with Lola
at the top of the pack and Scarlett at the far, far bottom. Marlene’s normal greeting for Scarlett was a contemptuous glance, and (if she was very lucky) a little side-brush out of the way.

  “I’m going to go upstairs,” Scarlett said, getting up. “To put on my biggest smile! How’s this one?”

  She gave Lola a wide, alarming grin. Lola just shook her head and picked up her cleaning caddy.

  Scarlett had nothing to do upstairs. She sat on her bed in the Orchid Suite and watched dust motes float in the sun for a few minutes. She examined the crack in her windowpane that prevented it from being opened more than halfway. She watched her neighbor on her roof deck. The neighbor, who was about seventy, was often proudly naked, especially in the morning. Today she was setting some kind of art project, a big collage, out on a table and spraying it with some kind of substance in an aerosol can.

  Her sheets needed washing. She hadn’t stripped them and taken them downstairs in more than two weeks. Bad hotel daughter. That would be a good thing to do. Or any of her laundry, really.

  Or she could watch that commercial. Her laptop was right under her bed. One little view…Dakota would never know.

  She hit PLAY.

  The commercial was for a pizza chain, and Eric was playing a guy who accidentally set himself on fire while cooking dinner (which is why he had to order the pizza). Scarlett had seen the commercial many, many times before she met Eric. It was kind of funny, but it didn’t make much of an impression. Once she knew Eric, though, the commercial was her obsession. She knew every expression in every frame.

  The flames, Eric told her, were part real and part CGI. When the fire just started at the stove, that was real. His shirt had been treated with some chemical, and he wore protection underneath. They put him out after just a few seconds. When he fell to the floor and started rolling around, and when he tumbled through the window, those were all fake. At the end, he was seen bobbing up in his neighbor’s swimming pool, fully dressed, soaking wet, shirt clinging to his body. (Though he looked much smaller on television than he did in life, which was the opposite of what Scarlett had heard about what the camera did to you. The real-life muscles were welldeveloped, but you couldn’t see them on TV. Which was fine by Scarlett. This was a secret the world did not need to know.)

  The commercial took two days to shoot, and Eric earned enough from it to pay for four years of college in his home state, or one year of the extremely pricey NYU acting school. He auditioned. He got in. He opted to blow it all on NYU and take his chances. He’d moved to the city for the summer and scored a part in Hamlet as Spencer’s partner, and that was that. That was where their lives connected. A pizza commercial.

  Scarlett was about to add a few more forbidden viewings to the counter, when there was a knock at the door. She slammed the computer shut and shoved it off her lap.

  “It’s open,” she called.

  A very tan and freckly Marlene stood in the doorway with a duffel bag. To Scarlett’s amazement, Marlene came over and gave her a tight, businesslike hug. Then she sat on the edge of Scarlett’s bed. There was something about her expression that chilled Scarlett. It was a kind of peacefulness. An even-temperedness. No scowl or evil look or shifting eyes. She just sat there, all prim and vaguely saintlike.

  “I’m home,” she said.

  “I see that,” Scarlett replied.

  “I missed you.”

  Scarlett coughed in shock.

  “Camp was good,” Marlene went on. “I won the award for canoeing. Want to see?”

  She opened up her bag, shuffled around through the dirty shorts and shirts and still-damp bathing suits and produced a small plastic trophy with a picture of a canoe on it. Marlene had never bothered to share something like this with Scarlett before. Scarlett had learned from television that the appropriate big sister reaction to this sort of thing was praise, but it seemed like too big a leap. Maybe she should start out slower, by fact-finding.

  “How did you get this?” Scarlett asked. “What’s it for?”

  “Canoeing.”

  “Right, but, was it a race, or…”

  Marlene squinted a bit, probably sensing Scarlett’s weakness and confusion, but she kept playing the politeness game. There was maybe a little tension in the jaw area, though. A sign of strain.

  “It was just for canoeing,” she said.

  “It’s great,” Scarlett said, turning it over once in her hands and passing it back quickly.

  The trophy was stuffed back into the bag. Marlene idly twirled a lock of hair around her finger and looked around the Orchid Suite.

  “When did your hair turn curly?” she asked.

  “It…was always this way.”

  “Even when you were a baby?”

  “As long as I’ve had hair, it’s been like this.”

  Unlike Scarlett and Lola, who were pure, total blonde, Marlene’s hair was slowly going a burnished red-blonde. It was long now, too, not quite curly and not quite straight. For a long time, it had been so fried by the cancer treatments that it was patchy and thin and fell out in big clumps, clogging the bathroom drains. Now that she had some hair, Marlene played with it constantly, obviously proud of it.

  “I thought mine might grow in curly,” she said. “I like your hair. I wish mine was like it.”

  You can’t complain about how big and unruly your hair gets to someone who’s happy to have hair at all. Scarlett guessed that Marlene knew this and had cornered her, conversationally. This was a politeness death match, and Marlene was winning.

  “Have to go unpack,” she said, with an unnerving smile.

  When Marlene got to the door, she turned and gave Scarlett a knowing look—the kind of look one spy might give another spy when she realizes that they are both spies and no one else is aware of the fact.

  “Your outfit is pretty,” she said, and shut the door. “And it’s time to go. Lola’s waiting for us.”

  Scarlett sat there in shock for a moment, stirring only when she heard her phone buzz. There was a text message from Dakota that read simply: I saw you do that. Don’t do it again. I AM WATCHING!

  Lupe’s wasn’t far from the Hopewell, just a few blocks uptown, in the hustle of the Upper East Side. For the whole walk, Marlene swung her arms playfully like a little girl and chatted to Lola about camp. She even turned a few times to try to include Scarlett in the conversation. But Scarlett could now see something cold and steady in her eye. Some terrible plot was afoot. Everyone conspired against her. Her friends. Her boss. Her eleven-year-old sister. It sounded paranoid, but it was true. Hamlet was gone and Eric was gone and she was doomed.

  Spencer called and met them halfway, skidding up on his unsteady bicycle. He pulled it up on the sidewalk and rolled it along.

  “Audition go well?” Scarlett asked. She tried to make her voice sound normal and pleasant, but it cracked a bit. Luckily, someone hit a car horn and this was lost.

  “It was good,” he said, taking a deep breath after his ride and wiping some sweat from his hands onto his pants. “They kept me for a few hours. They laughed at the tie thing. They laughed even more at the oxygen mask thing. They had me read eight times. I’ll find out tonight whether or not I got it.”

  The bike snaked and banged into his side, and he had to keep lifting the front wheel to make it go straight again.

  “That doesn’t look good,” Lola said, noticing the bike. “I’m glad you always wear your helmet.”

  Marlene rushed ahead of them, which was a common behavior. But this time, she did it to get the door of the restaurant and hold it open for them. Spencer stayed behind a moment to lock his bike. Lola went through, and Scarlett fully expected Marlene to move aside and let the door shut in her face, but she stood there, waiting for both her and Spencer. No one else in the world could hold a door open with the bitter determination of Marlene.

  Once she had herded her three older siblings inside, she stepped in front of them and backed them into a very loud corner of the festive, red-tiled l
obby filled with piñatas and a decorative old-timey red gas pump.

  “Stay here,” she said to the three of them. “I want to show you guys something.”

  “Did you see that?” Scarlett whispered to Spencer. “She held the door. And when she got home? She hugged me. She showed me her canoeing trophy. She said I looked pretty. She said she missed me.”

  “That’s a little disturbing,” he admitted. “Maybe she just really liked camp?”

  “Camp does not do that,” Scarlett said. “Unless she went to camp at Lake Prozac.”

  “She could be on new pills.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with her,” Lola said, obviously having overheard. “She’s so proud of that canoeing trophy…”

  “You’re not listening,” Scarlett said. “The only time Marlene feels bad about missing me is when she’s thrown something at me.”

  Lola laughed one of her oh-Scarlett-what-a-wit-you-are-but-I-have-no-idea-what-you-are-talking-about laughs.

  Spencer was looking intently over both of his sisters, into the depths of the restaurant.

  “Lola…” he said.

  “You just need to give Marlene a chance,” Lola was rambling on.

  “Lola…” Spencer repeated, and this time, his voice was a warning.

  Scarlett immediately saw the cause of his concern. Someone was coming toward them. They had been led into a trap.

  DINNER IS ALSO FOR SUCKERS

  Coming at them through the melee of waiters and bright yellow chairs and blue tables and guacamole carts was Chip Sutcliffe, Lola’s ex-boyfriend.

  “I didn’t do this,” Lola said quickly. “I swear.”

  Scarlett believed her. Lola’s constant, unfailing composure completely fell away for a moment, and she backed up gracelessly into a dark corner by the host stand, bumping her head into a low-hanging piñata of a yellow cab.

  “So this is a coincidence?” Spencer asked. “We just stumbled on Chip while he was on a mad, lonely hunt for tacos?”