Pretty Dead (9 page)

I
drove around for a while, not knowing where to go, half wishing to smash into a wall or to go over an embankment. I was speeding on Sunset, tires screeching around the curves, when the vision hit me like a semi that had lost its brakes and swerved to the wrong side of the road.

In my mind I saw the club where I’d gone with Emily and then Jared. I saw the line of kids outside. I saw Jared standing with William and Emily. Jared
looked dazed, and Emily held him up. William was watching them with sneering eyes. He was wearing a long, dark trench coat.

He knew no one would stop him. No one would search him. He’d get inside the club. In fact, they’d let him in first, invite him to the front of the line because he and his party looked so good in their black clothes, with their pretty faces. They could have been models. No one questioned models. They could get away with murder. I know from experience.

Billy and Emily would read about the event in the newspapers tomorrow. They would shake their heads.
What a shame. All those young people. So much privilege and beauty, and their whole lives ahead of them…

Emily wouldn’t question him. It would take her years to put together the puzzle of all the chaos. There was so much in the world, anyway. This was the first time William had the bomb. Usually he just attracted disaster to himself. Now he was getting bored, getting bolder. He wanted to be in the very center of
the explosion, with his new love beside him, and walk away with her untouched. There would be so much light! So much sound! The bombings in London and Hiroshima both happened while he was there. They were all beautiful in their way. And the boy would be off their hands. He had no intention of sharing Emily with him….

A car horn blared and I startled, as if waking from a nightmare. But it wasn’t a dream. I had seen what was coming.

I called 911 and screamed at the operator. “There’s a bomb! Zanzibar. In Santa Monica. You have to help. You have to do something.”

I kept on like a race car driver in hell. All I could think about was Jared. And the nightmares of the ages. The Black Dahlia’s severed body. The kimono-flower scars of Hiroshima. The man dead under the tractor at Woodstock. Kurt Cobain with a bullet in his head.

I had seen the look of trust on Jared’s face, his blind eyes. He would have followed Billy and Emily anywhere that night. He would have walked straight down into Hades with them. What was Hades, anyway? It was the fires in the hills of Malibu. It was a bomb in a nightclub. It was everywhere.

By the time I got to the club, they were at the front of the line. I stopped the Porsche in the middle of the street and got out. Cars honked and tires shredded and sparked as I ran through traffic across the road. Jared glanced up. His eyes met mine, and for a moment he looked like he understood. He started to walk toward me, but William held up his hand and pushed him back.

I threw myself at William.

“Fuck you! Let him go.”

A smile passed over William’s face. “You think you can avert disaster? You, who are always there, at the scene of the crime?”

“It’s you! You’re the one. It’s all you!”

“You have less power over me now than ever, Charlotte Emerson.”

It wasn’t true. I finally had what he had taken away. What made me more powerful than before.

I was a human again.

The bouncer came over and grabbed my upper arm. “What’s the problem here?”

“There’s a bomb! He has a bomb!”

They all stepped back, and I dragged Jared across the street and pushed him behind a car as the police drove up to the club and, still smiling, William took Emily’s hand and walked inside.

I
live in a tiny room now. A claw-footed tub stands behind a screen. The walls are brick. The floor is scratched wood. I have hardly any furniture, hardly any decorative objects or clothes. I wear the same pair of jeans; one black dress and one pair of black boots for work. I sold my car. I do not miss all the beauty. I have had enough.

My life is peaceful, though. I go to work at a cosmetics counter every day. I put makeup on women’s
faces. I like to see how happy it makes them when I hold the mirror up. I tell them they are beautiful. And they buy the products I sell because they know I am not lying. I think they are all beautiful, just because they are human.

At night, on my way home from work, I walk to the grocery store on the corner and buy a loaf of bread, some cheese and chocolate, a bottle of red wine and, once a week, a bouquet of fresh flowers. No more rare meat or any animal flesh at all, although I think about it sometimes, especially sushi. I light candles and sit on a cushion on the floor and eat. After that I read or watch a DVD.

I like old silent films in black and white.
Nosferatu.
Why do they make him so hideous-looking? That is a lie.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. La Passion et la Mort de Jeanne d’Arc.
“Are you a good angel or a dark angel?” the mad monks ask Joan with her big eyes, her huge, real tears that catch the light. Once I was a dark angel, and now I am not an angel at all.

Sometimes I write. I am writing the story of who I was because there is no real story of who I am. I don’t have any friends, only acquaintances, because I am afraid that I may accidentally reveal my secret past if I let my guard down. The only person I share that past with is Jared. I email him the story of my life as I write it. He never responds, but I keep sending pages anyway. It is worth the risk to know that he may be reading them.

I think of Emily often. Of what I did to her. In my jealousy, my rage. Of what I was. I know that I will never be free of the guilt, not even when I die, but at least there will be that escape some day, that leaving, in itself a redemption.

What I do most is think of Jared.

One night I finish my dinner and curl up in bed with a book when there is a knock on my door. Usually you have to be buzzed in; someone has gotten upstairs without that. I creep to the door and peep out.

Jared Pierce stands in the hallway. My heart wants to jump into his arms like a puppy, like a child.

I open the door and let him in without thinking.
He could kill me. He could be like William now. Like Emily. I don’t care. I want to see him.

He looks thin and pale; his cheekbones are gaunt, his eyes red and swollen. He shivers in his black leather jacket. Southern California boys don’t know about real winter coats. At least he wears his biker boots and black knit gloves and hat. How I want to make him warm.

“Come in and curl up by the radiator,” I say.

“Charlotte…”

“Come in. I am always waiting for you.”

He walks in slowly, stomping his feet as if to bring life back into numb toes. I am relieved at his discomfort; it means he has not been changed, is not impervious to the chill or to human emotion. I try to sniff him, to detect his human scent, but it’s too cold.

We sit together on the floor. He eyes my bed warily, so I don’t invite him there. He takes off his cap and stretches it in his hands.

“I read everything you sent me. I didn’t know how to respond.”

“You don’t have to. I just wanted to send it to you. It’s for you.”

“Thank you.”

He looks into my eyes so deeply I feel it in my stomach.

“I’m so sorry, Jared. Please forgive me.”

“No, I’m sorry. For hitting you.”

“I deserved it. I was a monster.”

He takes my face gently in his hands and makes me look at him. “Did you really kill her?”

I start to cry and choke out the words. “I didn’t know I did it. I’ve gone over and over it in my head. It was as if William orchestrated it somehow. He admitted he was watching me. He saw me with Emily and wanted her, and wanted to let me go. Do you believe me?”

He is silent for a moment. “I believe you. I saw what William is like, And I know you, Charlotte.”

“I am a monster. Or I was.”

“You saved my life. And you’ve changed, haven’t
you? He was telling the truth?” His voice is anxious, almost pleading, praying it’s true.

“Yes. I’ve changed.”

I see the relief on his face.

“You are part of the reason I changed, though, not just him. He can’t control me anymore.”

Jared bends his head so his black hair falls into his eyes. He takes off his gloves and I see that his knuckles are red and raw. I want to hold his hands, feel the pulse of mortal blood in his veins.

“Why did you go to William at all?” I hadn’t meant to ask him this; it just came out. I sounded pathetic. “After our nights together.”

“Those nights were the reason. I wanted to be with you forever. I loved Emily when we were together, but in a different way than I love you, Charlotte. And she was gone then. I thought he’d help me, since you wouldn’t. I didn’t understand that you weren’t immortal anymore.”

“And now that you know I’m not and Emily is…?”

Jared puts his hand over my mouth. My lips against his fingers.

“After the explosion and you leaving, it was like I woke up. I saw what she had become and that you weren’t what I thought. I knew I didn’t want immortality. I only wanted you.”

“But don’t you wonder? Don’t you still…?”

“I love you, crazy,” Jared answers softly. “I want to be with you now here, for as long as we have.”

He takes my hands in his. I cannot smell his human scent or hear his blood or see color around his head. I no longer thirst for what runs through his veins or the clock in his chest with its limited beats. But now I can see. I close my eyes, and all I see inside his mind is a girl with shoulder-length dirty-blond hair, which splits at the ends when she does not trim it, and imperfect skin. It takes me a moment to recognize that she is me. She is about to turn eighteen.

And then Jared Dorian Pierce kisses Charlotte Emerson by the hissing radiator in the damaged city
far from the one he had left behind, and I know that she is me and that somehow love, like a lost twin, like mortality, like the hope that our planet will survive long after we are gone, has been returned to us.