Homecoming

by Tonya Hurley

  “That dress would look even more beautiful on you,” Maddy said. “You’re the one who deserves to go, and I bet he’d much rather be with you.”

  Charlotte couldn’t help but agree but the Wendys’ shrill voices shocked her back in the moment as they made one last ditch effort to reason with Damen.

  “You have to get her past the nurses’ station and security, not to mention everyone in the hall,” Wendy Thomas said, desperately, trying to protect her shot at the crown. “There’s no way.”

  “Want to bet?” Charlotte said.

  Chapter

  18

  Alone Again Or

  Solitude sails in a wave of

  forgiveness on angels’ wings.

  —Siouxsie Sioux

  It’s not you, it’s me.

  These are the most dreaded words spoken in any relationship. If you hear them, or if you find yourself wanting to say them, you can be pretty sure it’s over. A soft landing is being prepared, but the end result is not in question. Whoever offers this duplicitous explanation on the way out may not be sure of what they want exactly, but they are sure of what they don’t want—you.

  I’m afraid,” Virginia blurted out as Petula finished putting little ringlets in her long, flowing hair by spitting a little on her finger, twisting the strands tightly like she would a phone cord, and then releasing the bouncy curls.

  “I am too.”

  These were the words both girls had been too proud to speak before but were too smart not to speak now.

  Petula grabbed Virginia’s hand and held it tightly on her lap. She had never experienced such a bonding moment with anyone in her life before, especially a fellow female. Girls were always competition for Petula, people whom she had to outdo and outshine.

  Virginia was alarmed at first. She thought she wanted to be told that everything was all in her head, but instead, she found Petula’s honesty comforting. There was no point being in denial. They were alone in a room wearing hospital gowns, waiting for someone they didn’t even know to arrive eventually, if ever.

  “Don’t worry,” Petula said, pulling Virginia close. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  “Promise?”

  This was also probably the first time Petula ever felt truly needed, as opposed to wanted, and she took the responsibility seriously. Feeling protective toward anyone was foreign to her, but she was surprised at how naturally it came to her under the circumstances.

  “I promise,” Petula swore.

  The Wendys were killing time, reading through Petula’s chart, texting each other across the room, and hoping not to get busted. Wendy Anderson kept peeling the backs of her sweaty thighs off the vinyl mattress, checking them for signs of cellulite. They’d promised Damen they’d stay in Petula’s room and cover for him until he got back, but the real reason they stayed was to check out Dr. Kaufman. A shot at a hot young doctor was the only thing more appealing than Homecoming to them, and Damen worked it like a pro. They were still a little pissed about getting left behind, their dreams of filling Petula’s shoes now dashed for good.

  “Petula Kensington and Damen Dylan,” Wendy Anderson trumpeted snidely. “Together again!”

  “Not exactly,” Wendy Thomas laughed. “More like ‘Damen and the Real Girl.’ ”

  “Could you imagine if skullface over there knew what was going on?” Wendy Anderson said, pointing to Scarlet.

  “Can anyone say hostage situation?”

  Before the girls could finish laughing at their own jokes, they heard someone approaching. It was Dr. Kaufman, making his afternoon rounds.

  “Get in bed,” Wendy Thomas shrieked urgently. “Someone’s coming… .”

  Wendy Thomas paused and pondered what she’d just said. “Bet you’ve heard that before!”

  Wendy Anderson wrapped her head in a towel to cover her rich, brunette locks, hopped onto the plastic mattress, and crept her middle finger out of the sheet toward Wendy Thomas, afterward proceeding to lie perfectly still. Wendy Thomas headed for the doorway and leaned in it, her taut arms and legs stretched across the entrance like bicycle spokes inside a wheel.

  “Hello,” she said invitingly to the young doctor as he approached. “Can I help you?”

  Damen wasn’t kidding about Kaufman, he was definitely worth a cubic zirconium-encrusted tiara or two, and then some. If Wendy Anderson wasn’t so afraid to move her hand to pat herself on the back for deciding to stay, she would have.

  “I’m here to examine the Kensington girls.”

  “Why bother?” Wendy asked dismissively. “Aren’t they both veggies?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I mean, it’s really all over except for the funeral, right?” Wendy whispered knowingly to him. “Time for us to move on.”

  “Where there’s life, there’s hope, miss. Now if you will excuse me …”

  Dr. Kaufman began to push his way through the Wendy blockade in the doorway, prying her manicured fingers from the door jamb when his pager went off. He reached for it to check the caller when he got a second urgent page over the hospital intercom.

  “Dr. Kaufman, please attend to room three-one-one. Code Blue.”

  Kaufman bolted without a word, and the trundle of resuscitation equipment and footsteps that followed could be heard from every corridor.

  “That was close,” Wendy Thomas exhaled, totally indifferent to the suffering going on just down the hall. “A little closer would have been nice, though.”

  “Can you believe how he just took off like that, without even saying goodbye?” Wendy Anderson said, sitting up slowly and cracking her neck. “I’m gonna die if I have to lie in this bed any longer.”

  “Yeah, let’s get out of here.”

  Dead Ed was in session when Prue, Pam, and Scarlet arrived. Scarlet knocked gently, and Ms. Pierce invited the visitors in. Scarlet stretched her neck around the doorway and waved, meekly.

  “Nice to see you again,” Ms. Pierce greeted her sincerely, the relief in her voice in sharp contrast to the concern she’d shown when last they met.

  The very fact that Scarlet had come back was potentially a good sign, not just for Scarlet but for the whole class.

  “Hi, everybody,” Scarlet said, then turned to the teacher and asked, “Can my friends come in too?”

  “Of course.”

  With that, Pam and Prue followed Scarlet through the doorway and into the classroom. A wave of nostalgia hit them instantly as they looked the place up and down and from side to side, checking out the new kids, the teacher, the wall hangings, their old desks. Nothing had changed, except the faces and the fact that the room felt smaller than they’d remembered.

  “What are you doing back here?” Paramour Polly sniped, decidedly less happy to see Scarlet and company than her instructor and feeling a little threatened by the older girls with her. The rest of the kids were suspicious and grumbling as well.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not here to cause any more trouble, but …”

  “We need to find our friend Charlotte … ,” Prue said, cutting to the chase.

  “Not again,” Lipo Lisa interrupted. “Why don’t you just Google this chick or put out an Amber Alert or something?”

  “Shut up and listen, ‘Rexy,’ ” Prue barked, falling easily back into her Dead Ed leadership role and getting everyone’s attention. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “Do any of you remember if you came here from the hospital?” Pam asked calmly.

  This whole topic was generally taboo for Dead Ed because of all the raw feelings it tended to bring to the surface. Pam looked over at Ms. Pierce, who nodded her approval for Pam to continue. The teacher understood the gravity of the situation and admired the risks they all had taken for their friend.

  “I’m sorry,” Pam offered the class, “but it’s really important.”

  “Okay,” Scarlet said, “who wants to go first?”

  The kids looked around at one another, none willing to put a toe in first. As th
e seconds ticked by, the expressions on their faces went blank as each of them revisited their ending, a subject that they’d always been encouraged to carefully avoid.

  “I came from Hot Bed,” Tanning Tilly said, missing the irony, as a look of sadness swept across her face.

  “I came from my best friend’s boyfriend’s house,” Paramour Polly said, half prideful and half ashamed, as if she were confessing her sin to a priest.

  Scarlet hated bringing them back to the place in time when they’d lost their lives, but Ms. Pierce motioned for her to keep going. This was painful, but it was something they needed to face in order for them to graduate. Ms. Pierce was just hoping that it wasn’t all a little premature, seeing that there was still a seat left.

  “I ended up at Hawthorne Hospital,” Blogging Bianca said.

  “You did?” the three girls shouted excitedly in unison.

  “Well, I ended up there,” Bianca said. “They tried to administer anti-clotting agents intravenously, but I’d been on the computer so long that by the time I got to the hospital, I was DOA.”

  “So you didn’t die in the hospital?” Scarlet asked dejectedly.

  “No, I’m afraid not,” Bianca replied apologetically.

  “I died at the hospital,” Green Gary spoke up unexpectedly from the back of the room.

  “Can you take us there?” Prue asked.

  Gary looked at Ms. Pierce for permission.

  “You can take them, but you will need a pass,” the teacher said, removing a big wooden paddle engraved with the Latin motto dum spiro, spero from her desk drawer.

  “How many trees did it take to make this paddle?” Gary asked, ever true to his greenager roots.

  “Not as many as it takes to make a coffin, hummus head,” Prue jibed as they hightailed it out of the room.

  Chapter

  19

  The Supernatural and the Superficial

  Everybody has a heart.

  Except some people.

  —Bette Davis

  Looks are everything.

  There are a few ways of looking at someone. You can look up to them, you can look down on them or you can look through them, but after some serious life lessons, you can learn to look right at them. Petula was always looking down and Charlotte was tired of looking up, but all they really had to do was look inside themselves and see each other for who they were.

  Charlotte and Maddy hitched a ride on a freight elevator with Damen and a custodial cart carrying Petula’s nearly lifeless body like a sarcophagus down to the ground floor. Besides Petula, the cart was loaded with various cleaning solutions, mops, brooms, rags, paper towels, toilet paper, and garbage bags. Not a very glamorous treasure chest, Charlotte thought, a person of such nobility.

  Damen wheeled the cart out of the lift and toward the swinging rear doors of the employee entrance. The cart wasn’t designed to carry that much weight, and he could feel the wheels turning in, making it difficult to steer. Nobody thought much about it as they saw the young man in janitor’s garb struggling with the heavy load. The hospital was a pretty faceless place for entry level cleaning help, and Damen’s struggle hardly attracted any notice at all, except, he imagined, from his passenger, unconscious in the canvas bag he was wheeling around.

  “Sorry, Petula.” He winced each time he slammed the wall or bounced over a crack in the basement floor.

  “Brutal,” Maddy giggled with each jostle of Petula’s bobblehead, as she pulled Charlotte along, making sure to keep pace with Damen as he scrambled, like the quarterback he was, into the parking lot.

  Damen pushed the cart through the large doors and parked it next to a smelly gray Dumpster while he hastily discarded his janitor’s smock and tossed it in the garbage bin. He was relieved to be rid of the disguise, even after such a short while. It wasn’t exactly the kind of hero’s costume he imagined donning as a boy, but the mission he was undertaking might have proven too much even for a superman. He steered the cart over to his car, looked around, opened the passenger door, gently lifted Petula in, and positioned her in as natural a way as possible.

  Maddy and Charlotte hopped in the backseat behind him. Charlotte stared at Petula and remembered being in that passenger seat, playing “he loves me, he loves me not” as she pretended to slide under his arm. She laughed to herself about Petula being just as invisible to him now as she had been then, and if Charlotte hadn’t already choked to death on a gummy bear, she’d definitely be choking on irony now.

  The slamming of the passenger-side door startled her, and she turned her attention to Damen once again as he jumped into the driver’s seat. He fiddled with the rearview mirror for a second, and Charlotte imagined he was looking right at her. She stared back at him, into those warm, caring eyes she’d never quite gotten over, even after all this time.

  Gary led Pam, Prue, and Scarlet from Dead Ed back to the hospital in no time at all.

  “Hey,” Gary called as the girls began to split off from him. “It’s this way.”

  “I just need to check on something first,” Scarlet said, walking slowly toward their room.

  As they got closer, Pam and Prue noticed Scarlet slowing down until she was practically stopped just a few feet before the doorway.

  “What’s up?” Pam asked gently.

  Scarlet didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure how to answer. There might be a big difference between what she was hoping to see and what she could reasonably expect.

  First off, there was the little matter of her own body lying there. She’d seen goofy pictures of herself asleep, but the thought of watching herself breathe her last breaths was a bit much. And then there was Damen. He might still be all caught up in doting on Petula. She didn’t know how she would react if she walked in there and caught him mid-dote, and she’d feel guilty for being jealous of her dying sister.

  “Now is not the time for cold feet,” Prue warned.

  Pam and Prue walked in first, breaking the ice for Scarlet, who followed close behind.

  No Damen. That was the first thing Scarlet noticed. She saw his things scattered around, but he was MIA. Home showering, maybe, she rationalized. Although she was a little hurt at having been abandoned, she was also a little relieved not to find him wringing his hands over Petula instead of her.

  “Ugh,” Scarlet sighed as she walked over to her own limp form.

  This was exactly what she was afraid of. She even looked pale to herself, more so than usual, and frail. The IV drip in her arm made her wince, and the heart monitor beeping irritated her like one of those “mosquito” dispersal sirens that supposedly only teens can hear. She could see the outline of her legs beneath the heavily starched white sheets, which clung to her knees and feet like some sort of poly/cotton shroud. It was odd and not much fun to have the experience of totally being able to see yourself as others see you.

  Pam, Prue, and Gary, not wanting to intrude on Scarlet’s privacy, snuck behind Petula’s curtained side of the room to check on things. Scarlet was shocked back into reality by an audible gasp from her three friends.

  “She’s gone!” Pam shouted from behind the curtain on the other side of the semi-private room.

  “No!” Scarlet shrieked, a flood of emotion nearly drowning her. “She can’t be … dead!”

  “No,” Prue clarified, grabbing Scarlet by the shoulders. “I mean she’s really gone.”

  “As in not here,” Gary confirmed, pulling away Petula’s privacy drapes and revealing the empty bed, stuffed with towels and pillows.

  “Where the hell can she be?” Prue spat.

  “That’s one possibility,” Gary butted in sarcastically.

  “This is bad news,” Pam advised. “Without her body, it doesn’t matter whether we find her soul or not.”

  “What if they, you know, took her body,” Scarlet asked nervously, fishing for an answer she really didn’t want to hear.

  “Who’s they?” Prue asked firmly, not wanting to say what was just then crossing all their minds. D
id Scarlet mean the medical examiner or did she think that Charlotte may have taken her sister’s body for a more permanent spin with Maddy’s help? It wasn’t entirely clear to any of them which might be worse.

  “Pam, you go down to the morgue and see if she’s there,” Prue ordered, choosing not to overdo the kidnapping scenario just yet.

  “I’m not going down there!” Pam said sheepishly.

  Just then Prue noticed a visible trace of Petula, her hospital gown lying crumpled on the floor. She started gathering clues. She noticed that Petula’s chart was still clipped to the bed. It hadn’t been closed out, which meant Petula hadn’t been discharged or died. Finally, she picked up her hair extensions on the night table. She showed Scarlet the evidence.

  “Wait, they wouldn’t have left this stuff behind if she was gone,” Prue asked. “Would they?”

  Scarlet walked over to Petula’s side of the room and inspected it. The area around her bed looked a lot like her bedroom after a series of pre-date quick changes. She noticed the faint imprint of an unfamiliar shade of foundation and eye shadow on her pillow and caught a whiff of the barest scent of a really wretched fragrance that could only belong to one person — or more like two.

  Then Scarlet noticed the most important clue of all. Petula’s Homecoming dress was missing too. Either Petula was already dead and buried in it, or …

  “The Wendys,” Scarlet said out loud. “They’ve got her.”

  “What for?” Pam asked, giving Scarlet a reality check. “She’s barely alive.”

  “Where would they take her anyway?” Prue added.

  “Homecoming,” she said assuredly, holding up remnants of a formal quick-change.