Homecoming

by Tonya Hurley

  Seeing himself always triggered a pause on the tape and a story of how he had the Q-tip in his pocket, but the woman in front of him couldn’t make a deal because she didn’t have one. He then would get swept away by the way Monty Hall tilted his head to acknowledge him when he walked up the steps toward the woman. He thought, as everyone else surely did in the auditorium, that Monty was headed directly to him. For those few seconds, he thought he would be … chosen.

  Scarlet tried to pay attention, even taking in the whole Let’s Make a Deal as Metaphor-For-Life, but she was worlds away. She and her boyfriend, Damen, had been on the phone all night talking endlessly about independent movies, new music downloads they wanted to check out, and concerts that they wanted to go to. She was a different person when she talked to him. Open and chatty, her sentences would unspool breathlessly. The adrenaline rush was so strong it would take her hours to fall asleep after they hung up, if she slept at all.

  She was exhausted because, sadly, she wasn’t used to late nights like that anymore. With Damen away at college, and Scarlet working and finishing high school, it was getting really hard to find time for each other. Or, in her mind at least, it was getting harder for him to find time for her. Visits home and even phone calls had become more and more infrequent. They were in different places now, in more ways than one, and Scarlet was feeling that the distance between them was about more than miles.

  Besides, she really missed him. They’d shared things together that she couldn’t, wouldn’t, have shared with anyone else in their little deadbeat town. Damen always made sure to share every single detail of bands he’d seen at The Itch and movies that played off campus, saving promotional mementos like posters and ticket stubs and snagging her some T-shirts from the groups that were playing in his cool college town, a world away from Hawthorne. At least he did for a while, she thought.

  Scarlet was not naïve. She knew the dangers of not being together, not making new memories. It was death to a relationship. And if the end of last night’s conversation was any indication, she decided, the patient was sick.

  “Well, I better let you go,” she recalled Damen saying. “You have to get up early for school… .”

  He wasn’t exactly rushing her off the phone, but the passive construction of his goodbye, and seemingly generous tone — wrapping his signoff in a condescending little verbal pat-on-the-head — she thought analytically, might be hiding a deeper truth. He didn’t say, “I have to go.” He said, “I’ll let you go… .” In other words, putting the burden of ending the call on her, leading her to believe it was her decision when it wasn’t. She wasn’t done with the call, but apparently, he was.

  Hang-ups were always awkward between them anyway, but why couldn’t he just say what he meant? This led her to the most worrying issue of all.

  They had never said “I love you.” Not on the phone, not in person. They’d gotten close, but had never actually spoken the words. This troubled Scarlet because they’d been together for some time and surely each knew how the other felt, but neither could muster up the courage to say it first. Well, that was her take on it anyway.

  Could it be he didn’t say it because he didn’t feel it? So much had changed in their lives over the past year. It would certainly be understandable for his feelings to have changed. Or maybe they had passed the point of saying it, which would be even worse. That would mean their relationship was just moving along on auto-pilot or … on fumes.

  Her sister, Petula, who was prone to giving Scarlet little hurtful jabs in the guise of sisterly advice, had implied that maybe Scarlet’s relationship was just a fauxmance and that Damen had moved on while Scarlet was just a stupid, little school girl chasing after him. Scarlet knew exactly what Petula was trying to do. She was still carrying the torch for Damen, not to mention nursing the huge blow to her ego from when he dumped her for her little sister. That much was obvious, but her digs definitely let a little more doubt creep in.

  When the loudest voice in your head is Petula, Scarlet thought, you know it is time to stop thinking. All this emotional excavation was very out of character for a head as cool as Scarlet’s, so before she posed any further threat to her own sanity, she took a deep breath and recalled what Damen had actually said, and not what she heard.

  “I … love … you know … talking to you” were his exact words last night.

  “That wasn’t soooo bad, was it?” Scarlet reprimanded herself, embarrassed at the ride she’d just taken on the crazy train.

  “Well, I’m glad you aren’t just in it for my fame, body, and money,” Scarlet recalled joking, trying to take some of the tension off the wrap-up. Damen laughed for a second, then she heard a click in her ear, and the line went silent.

  Scarlet’s big sister suffered from no such internal conflicts. Petula’s only debate that day was whether to sign in to school and then skip out for a pedicure at the Korean day spa or to just cut totally and give in fully to her need to primp. She was leaning toward the second option, not just out of irresponsibility but out of pure indifference. School had never meant much to her, except as a place to validate her superiority, and it meant even less now that she had been left back. The Fall Ball incident had mostly faded from Hawthorne High’s collective memory, but Petula was still being made to pay for her crime via an involuntary senior year do-over. Typically, however, she found the silver lining in this humiliating cloud and exploited it to her advantage.

  In fact, getting left back turned out to be a blessing in disguise for her. She much preferred being a big fish in a little pond, and the prospect of starting her social climb all over again at some junior college was unappealing. She had few skills and fewer ambitions. She didn’t really mean anything outside of high school and she knew it. Her best friends, the Wendys, soaring to new heights of superficiality, held themselves back too, in sort of an homage to Petula. So, despite the setback, not much had changed for Petula.

  Today’s pedicure was an urgent matter. She was beautifying for her big date with a younger man, Josh Valence — a senior from Gorey High — Hawthorne High’s biggest rival. Josh was the captain of their football team and quite a catch, so she wanted to be super perfect from head to toe. Snagging a jock was only half her motivation, however, the other half was revenge. She hoped that word would get back to Damen. He’d lost the big game last year to Gorey in a squeaker, and even though Damen never gave it a second thought, Petula, in her infinite pettiness, imagined that dating Josh would really eat him alive.

  By the time she’d completed the parts of her beauty regimen she could manage on her own, she was already running behind schedule. She arrived a few minutes late to the day spa and was livid to find that despite the emergency appointment she’d made the night before, she still had to wait. She watched the seconds tumble away, drops of sweat popping through her cleansed pores and beading on her plucked brows.

  She still had to go to the tanning salon, get back home, eat a few carrot sticks, shower, set her hair, and steam her new bratank, not to mention pick up Scarlet from school since she had borrowed her car, all while texting the Wendys her every move. She was stressing big-time, although the “picking up Scarlet” item in her daybook was very low priority.

  She’d been waiting three whole minutes before she took her place on the pedicure throne and her nail tech began to scrub, scrape, pumice, massage, and clip. Ordinarily Petula would have required executive treatment and would never have bothered to speak to the help. But today she was growing more and more impatient and rushing the whole process.

  “What are you doing?” she snapped. “I don’t want my cuticles pushed back.”

  The nail tech looked up at her with a smile and resumed her work. Petula thought that she wasn’t getting it.

  “Don’t you talky American? Me No Likey!” she railed ignorantly while pushing back the cuticles on her fingers as a kind of sign language. The tech nodded again, blankly this time, and Petula exploded.

  “Chop, chop,” Petula bulli
ed, again urging the tech to pick up the pace, her agitated feet splashing dirty water, flakes of dried skin, calluses, and toe jam all over the girl.

  When her need for speed was still unacknowledged, Petula went totally Rocky 1 on her.

  “Cut me!” she finally roared, pointing to her toenails.

  The girl was moving as quickly as possible, trying her best to meet all of Petula’s demands, but with her hands nervous and shaking, she accidentally nicked Petula’s big toe.

  Petula continued screaming at the girl and broadcasting her incompetence to the whole spa, so much so that people and clinicians were peeking their heads out of waxing rooms to see what all the commotion was about.

  “Here, let me put some alcohol on it,” the girl said apologetically in perfect English, which made Petula even madder.

  “I think you’ve done enough,” Petula barked. “This better NOT scar!”

  Petula grabbed her things, hobbled outside still wearing her paper flip-flops and foam toe separators, and jumped in the car.

  She was already pissed enough, but having to drive home in Scarlet’s dented and scratched jalopy, plastered with band and radio station bumper stickers and a hubcap-less spare tire, was almost unbearable. And the car was black, her least favorite color.

  Petula usually wore a scarf on her head, oversized glasses, and, on occasion, a wig to disguise herself whenever she had to drive it. More than anything, the car reminded Petula of Scarlet, providing plenty of reason for her to hate it.

  She pulled up to the school and rolled down the passenger window just as Scarlet emerged. Scarlet was mortified to hear the new Fergie CD blasting over her mint soundsystem and prepared for battle.

  “Get in, Little Miss Misery,” Petula ordered as she saw Scarlet emerge from school.

  The first thing Scarlet noticed was Petula’s paper flip-flops.

  “I see you’ve had a productive day,” Scarlet said sarcastically. “You can’t drive with those things on. They don’t constitute as shoes.”

  “Aw, does somebody have a case of ‘the sads’?” Petula asked, dripping with phony sympathy. “You are making me late for a very important date.”

  Scarlet ran through a million comebacks in her mind, like how Petula was an irritating polyp on the butt of society, but uncharacteristically let it slide instead. She bit her lip and kept silent. The ride home felt like ages to Scarlet, but Petula actually made it home in record time. The car had barely stopped when Scarlet threw open the door like a kidnapping victim and literally jumped out. It wasn’t a “tuck and roll” situation, but nearly.

  “I’ve gotta get ready for work,” she yelled as she raced for the front door and up the stairs to her room.

  Petula walked in behind her and realized she was almost out of time. She pulled the separators from between her toes and jammed her foot into a pair of the hottest pointy-toed cougar heels she could find in her closet, then sat down on the carved bench in her foyer to wait for Josh.

  Before long, a car pulled up and Petula, feeling tired from rushing and verbally abusing nail technicians, kept Josh waiting just long enough to be irritating, as was her trademark. Scarlet emerged from her room wearing her trademark red lipstick, a fitted Slits tee with some black skinny jeans accessorized with a thick, vintage aborigine belt and leopard print flats.

  “Oh, look, your hookup is here,” Scarlet said as she grabbed her keys and headed out.

  Petula waited a few seconds and then strutted catlike down the sidewalk and got in Josh’s car. She gave him a long, intimate kiss, said hello, and they sped off. They ended up at a Gorey High house party, a place where Petula was either unknown or loathed. The only person she knew there was Josh, and he was too busy basking in the glow of his super popularity, air-guitaring riffs, and downing Purple Monsters to spend much time with her.

  Petula’s sourpuss was making it totally clear to Josh that she was unhappy being put in a corner with the other “dates.” She wasn’t even trying to socialize with any Gorey girls. Josh walked over to give her some face time.

  “Hey, so sorry, Petunia,” Josh slurred with oily insincerity.

  Even as he was chatting to her, Josh was shoulder surfing, his eyes wandering around the crowd to see if he was making any of the other girls jealous or if there was anyone better out there to hook up with. That kind of shopping around really rankled Petula, even more than getting her name wrong.

  “Done getting your, ah, ego stroked by your Bromeos?” Petula cracked.

  “I’d rather you stroke it,” Josh said, putting his hands around her waist.

  Petula saw his lips moving but could barely hear him through the crowd noise. She really wasn’t feeling well all of a sudden. All that self-absorbed small talk from Josh was starting to make her nauseated.

  Before Josh could get another uncaring word out, Petula lost her balance and leaned into him. She was looking sick, but Josh misunderstood and thought he was about to score with Hawthorne’s most in-demand babe.

  “That’s more like it,” he said cheesily.

  “I don’t feel good,” Petula moaned weakly, leaning harder into Josh for support.

  “Oh, yes, you do.” Josh whispered as he reached down and squeezed her ass. “You feel great. Wanna get out of here?”

  Petula was barely able to shake her head “yes” let alone break his grip on her backside. They split immediately, Josh flashing a thumbs-up to his drooling teammates and dragging Petula along after him. He was planning to take her to The Hut, which was really just his Dad’s ice fishing cabin about five miles away. There were actually beds lined up to accommodate as many couples as possible, like a Third World clinic without the mosquito netting. Unfortunately for Josh, they never made it.

  About halfway there, Petula, who had been slumped in the passenger seat practically unconscious, sat upright and puked all over the dashboard, Josh, and herself.

  “Holy shit,” Josh ranted unsympathetically, dripping vomit. “No wonder Damen left you for your sister.”

  Petula couldn’t hear him. She was nearly passed out completely. Josh swerved into a U-turn and raced back to Petula’s house. He screeched to a halt in front, ran around the passenger side, opened the door, and pulled Petula out. He dragged her a few feet and dumped her like a smelly pile of trash on her driveway, then sped off. Petula felt the cold blacktop and little pebbles and gravel pushing into the side of her perfect profile.

  Meanwhile, Scarlet, tired from a busy night at the coffeehouse and still a little depressed, drove home immediately after work, anxious to see if Damen had e-mailed. She parked her car on the street and walked over the lawn to the front door. By chance, she looked over at the driveway and thought she saw a sack of garbage.

  “Damn raccoons,” she muttered, feeling obliged to stomp over and pick it up.

  At closer inspection, she saw it was Petula lying there passed out, her arms and legs splayed. On any other night, she would have just stepped over her, letting her sleep it off in the driveway to teach her a lesson. This time was different for some reason. Even at her worst, Scarlet thought, Petula would never let anyone see her in this condition.

  “Party too hard again?” Scarlet asked, nudging her sister gently.

  There was no response.

  “Petula, wake up,” she said, this time louder but not as angrily.

  Just then Petula’s phone began to ring, only she didn’t answer it. Knowing that Petula was a complete nomophobic — in constant fear of being out of mobile phone contact —Scarlet knew then that something was wrong.

  She flicked her Bic and knelt down to get a closer look. Scarlet was shocked. Petula’s eyes were slightly open and dilated, her breathing shallow. She was drenched in sweat and smelled of vomit. When Scarlet reached to touch her face, it felt like a furnace. She grabbed her sister by the shoulders and turned her over so that they were face to face.

  “Petula!” she screamed, over and over, now officially in panic mode. Still no response.

  Scarlet r
ested Petula’s back on her lap as she cradled her head, then reached in the pocket of her vintage black, mink-collared coat and called 911.

  Chapter

  4

  Epitaph for the Heart

  We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

  —Anaïs Nin

  You can only get outside yourself by looking inside.

  Some people are in constant fear that their heart might cease between beats, feeling each pulse as a countdown to the end rather than a vital sign of life. Others are barely aware that they even have a heart beating inside them, moving through the day unencumbered by the complexity of their inner workings. Worry may not change the outcome, but it definitely affects your outlook. Better to care too much than too little?

  Petula was still lying on the gurney that the EMTs had brought her in on, naked underneath one of those backless white one-size-fits-all surgical gowns. Scarlet rode in the ambulance with her, warding off the PMS — potential murder suspect — looks she was getting and nervously watching as the techs checked her vitals and tried to stabilize her. She’d been wheeled through the Emergency entrance of the hospital and into an isolated triage room, away from the rest of the patients being treated in the urgent care rooms.

  “What’s wrong with her, doctor?” Scarlet pleaded, leaning over Petula’s helpless body.

  “Right now, I have no idea,” Dr. Patrick answered. “All we know for sure is that she is fevered and unresponsive. Comatose, clinically.”

  Scarlet turned away, petrified at that word, and was relieved to see her mom rush into the room. She was less pleased to see the Wendys burst in close behind. The look on the Wendys’ two faces at the sight of Petula might have been perceived as shock or grief or even sympathy by someone who didn’t know them so well, but Scarlet knew better. She knew it was the look of pure jealousy. Though she prided herself on her inability to guess what they were thinking at any given moment, Scarlet rightly assumed the source of their envy was Petula’s perfect immobility. They had been auditioning to be body sushi models at the new Japanese restaurant in town, and stillness was a required skill they had yet to master.