A Fate Totally Worse Than Death (3 page)

Her friends' faces were transformed into grotesque masks of agony.

“No
TV? Talk about unfair working conditions.”

“God's ways are beyond human understanding.”

“My little old lady's is broken, too.”

“This Community Service is child labor.”

“We should be getting overtime for having to smell these old folks.”

“And what about hearing their false teeth clicking?”

“Get a load of the wrinkles on this one.”

“I think her subscription to
Glamour
ran out.”

“Yeah. About sixty years ago.”

“Ten Avon ladies with pliers couldn't stretch
that
skin smooth again.”

“And what a pair of knockers.”

“If you can find 'em.”

“If mine ever get like that, shoot me.”

“Gladly.”

“Thanks a
lot.”

“I'm
sorry.”

“Let the meeting come to order!” boomed Danielle. “We're supposed to be talking about Helga, not the living dead around here.” She declined the depopulated box of chocolates held out by Brooke. “Anything to report?”

“Gavin was definitely coming on to her?” stated Tiffany. “On Thursday? I saw him waiting outside her last class? Crunching approximately twenty breath mints?”

“Not
enough, in his case,” said Danielle.

“I saw Jonathan hand her two pens and a ruler from his supply locker,” Brooke testified. She polished off the last of the chocolates. “I did
not
see
her
pay him a cent.”

Tiffany, playing violently with a strand of her brown hair, strove to show no reaction to this.

“I also saw her,” Brooke continued, “riding in Drew's BMW.”

Danielle's mouth dropped. “Tell me you're kidding.”

Having no boyfriend, Brooke found pleasure in gloating over her attached friends' troubles. “Sorry,” she chirped. “It was Friday, after school. It looked like they were headed toward the beach.”

Danielle sat stunned. A silence descended, broken only by Mrs. Witt's faint breathing.

“So do we all agree that we need to take action?” proposed Danielle.

Tiffany nodded.

“What if the guys are coming on to her instead of the other way around?” asked Brooke.

“She's encouraging them!” burst out Danielle. It had always seemed easier, and more satisfying, to discipline a rival female than a straying male Hun. “They're Huns and they belong to us. If she doesn't understand that, we have to make her understand.”

“Has anyone
told
her the rules?” Brooke asked.

“I did, on Friday,” snapped Tiffany. “All she said was something about how
interesting
the customs here were. And that afternoon, she goes driving with Drew.”

Danielle clenched her teeth. “She's been warned. Now it's time to do something. Actions speak louder than words, like they say.”

“Just ask Charity Chase,” said Brooke.

“I'm not saying we use nuclear weapons. Just show her we're serious. Any ideas?”

A second silence descended. Brooke burped.

“Break into her gym locker and rub poison oak on her clothes?” offered Tiffany.

Danielle smiled briefly. “Whoever did it would probably get poison oak, too.”

The air was heavy with cogitation.

“Tiffany's good with cameras,” said Brooke. “She could film her in the showers or something and threaten to show it to all the guys.”

The words disquieted Tiffany, bringing to mind her recent escapade with the video camera. She'd been lucky to snatch the tape the next morning, and for safety had recorded over it with Billy Graham's Las Vegas crusade.

“Good
thinking,” mocked Danielle. “We show it to the guys and then the
entire male student body
goes crazy over her.”

“I'm just
trying
to help,” Brooke pouted.

Tiffany suddenly stood. “You just did.”

The two others turned to face her. “What have you got?” asked Danielle.

“An idea that'll get the job done, I think.” Tiffany smiled mysteriously. “All I'll need is her photograph.”

CHAPTER
5

………Drew finished the test and glanced discreetly at Helga, one desk away. She was still on the essay, her hand producing her distinctive, filigreed penmanship. He found it, and its maker, bewitching. She flipped her page over and continued writing, leading Drew to wonder whether he'd written enough himself. He was the only Hun male in this honors history class; Hun womanhood was wholly unrepresented. He recalled with a smile the science fair exhibit, devised by some brainy, non-Hun boy, that correlated wealth and blond hair with low I.Q. among the female student body. Though blond, Helga was anything but dumb. Drew identified with her. He too was blond, as well as ridiculously rich, traits beyond his control and which he'd refused to be ruled by.

Though his parents' allowance of $200 a week could have bought him the choicest name-brand clothes, he proudly wore the same pair of patched, threadbare jeans every day—a streak that had now reached seven months and which had inspired several bets on campus. This savings he diverted to the Siena Club and other environmental groups that his parents railed against regularly. He was tall and square-jawed, with a quarterback's build but no interest in the job. He preferred reading Thoreau to football diagrams. Similarly, he'd resisted his parents' and peers' nudges down the well-worn path of student council, golf, a career in business, and marriage to a dimwit blonde. He eyed Helga's fascinating handwriting and sensed a different path before him.

The bell rang, ending the day's last class. Drew passed his paper up to the front and hurried to catch Helga. Waiting just outside the door, breath mints clattering around in his mouth like balls on a roulette wheel, Gavin got to her first.

“Wondered if you might want to watch football practice today. A real slice of America.” He modestly omitted his role as star halfback. “I could give you a ride home after.” He herded the mints into a cheek, then smiled.

“That's extremely kind of you,” said Helga. “I'm afraid that today I have too much homework. And, actually, I prefer walking home, in order to get my exercise.”

Drew caught her words. “I'm walking today, too.” He halted at Helga's other side. “If you don't mind company.”

“Not at all,” she said.

The
racket from Gavin's breath mints grew faint as he retreated down the hall. Drew grinned. He'd played his cards right. He'd recalled that she'd accepted his ride a few days before with some reluctance. She liked exercise. So did he. A good pair of walking shoes probably impressed her more than a BMW. He'd left his in the garage today, and now firmly made up his mind never to drive it to school again. Purchased out of the mountainous profits from his father's exporting firm—selling pesticides outlawed in the U.S. to unsuspecting, impoverished countries—the car had filled Drew with guilt. Walking to school through the fresh-minted morning, he'd felt clean, as if bathed in a Norwegian fjord. Now he and Helga were walking together.

“That's the Hall of Fame,” said Drew, serving as her self-appointed guide. They stopped before a case filled with photos. “Cliffside High's most illustrious graduates.”

She pointed to a bare spot. “Who used to be there?”

“Franklin Critch. One of Cliffside High's
most
illustrious graduates. Until he was prosecuted for larceny, perjury, and mail fraud.”

They both laughed and stepped outside. “And that?” Helga indicated a large, bronze plaque set into the ground.

“The student seal,” Drew replied. “Which seniors like us can order freshmen to polish, on their knees.”

“That sounds rather cruel.”

“Exactly. A bizarre encouragement to the strong to find pleasure in dominating the weak.” He noticed how well his words flowed in Helga's presence, just as they had with Charity.

“You're a much more interesting guide than the one I was given my first week.” Helga smiled at him. “Though, according to Tiffany Boyce, I should not associate with you.”

Drew rolled his eyes in disgust. “The old world's rigid class system lives.”

They descended a lengthy flight of steps, Drew's mind on Charity Chase. She too had complained about the Hun girls. Drew hadn't taken it too seriously. Her suicide, however, was undeniable, and had tormented him all spring and summer. Only Helga's appearance had caused his foglike grief to begin to lift. For the first time in months, he could see blue sky and feel the sun. He liked the sensation.

They crossed the quad among the other students. Tiffany had no trouble spotting them: Drew in his tie-dyed shirt and patched jeans, paperbacks sprouting from both back pockets, and Helga tall and pale, like a candle borne in a procession. She rose from her bench and headed their way, carrying the Pentax camera she'd checked out from the yearbook office. Although her assignment was to capture student life, recording the full
panorama
of the campus, the photos she took were conceived, composed, and cropped to put only Huns on display. Like the long line of Hun photographers before her, she'd dutifully submit one or two blurry pictures of the Hispanic Student Association's fall dance, which the Hun editor would squint at and reject.

Today, however, she was not after Huns. She followed Helga and Drew with her eyes. Then she saw Rhett Jones, realized their paths would cross, suddenly remembered she'd broken up with Jonathan, and went through the detailed checklist described in the last issue of
Pulchritude:
back straight, shoulders high, stomach in, breasts out, fingers relaxed, never clenched, mouth nonchalant, teeth almost touching, gait confident but not pushy. She'd been having trouble with the finger and gait elements all day. Getting out of bed, she'd felt strangely stiff, the ache in her joints progressing to the point that she'd hobbled around the track in P.E. and had toiled to bend back the pop top on her can of Diet Coke at lunch. The pain increased suddenly now, causing her to slow to a stop and miss intersecting with Rhett.

“Damn!” she hissed. She massaged her right hip socket, a maneuver not on her checklist. Afraid she'd lose Helga, she pushed on again. The photograph she planned to take would never find its way into the yearbook.
No
picture of Helga would get in, she'd sworn. The photograph would, however, be seen. Tiffany had already made a copy of the flier posted outside the nurse's office. She would very soon make many more and put them up all over school, after substituting Helga's picture for the sketch of the weeping teenage girl, whose face appeared under the bold-lettered confession: “I Didn't Know
I
Was Carrying a Sexually Transmitted Disease.” This, she figured, would serve notice both to Helga and the guys swooning over her.

Helga and Drew turned left around the library, leaving her view. Tiffany panicked. She was losing them!

She forced herself on, wincing all the while, and was relieved to find they'd stopped by the statue of the cougar, Cliffside High's mascot. Here was her chance—perhaps her last.

“It goes back to primitive man,” Drew was saying. “Adopting a totem animal that embodies and protects the tribe.”

Tiffany panted wearily toward them, struggling to remove the camera from the case that hung from her neck.

“Straight out of the Stone Age,” Drew continued.

Cursing her fingers, Tiffany grimaced, finally got the lens cap off, and crept behind Helga. “Smile!” she said.

Startled, Helga turned. Her pale blue eyes bore into Tiffany's own through the
viewfinder.
At the same instant, the pain in Tiffany's finger joints flared past endurance. She could no longer grip the camera. She tried to snap the picture, missed the shutter button with her finger, then felt the camera slip from her hands. Mr. Yancy, the yearbook advisor, was passing nearby when it smashed into pieces.

CHAPTER
6

………Danielle lay stomach-down on her bed, her eyes shuttling between her geometry book and the television screen.
The Godfather
, her favorite movie, was on. She glanced down and read, for the thirteenth time, the textbook's definition of “bisect.” Then she looked up and viewed the scene in which a man woke to find his favorite horse's bloody head in his bed. “Gross,” she spoke aloud. But effective, she added privately. The Mafia knew how to make a point. She studied angle DEF in her textbook. She looked up and watched an ad for the Army, in which a gun crew scored a direct hit on an enemy health clinic and then celebrated with high fives. She read the definition of “bisect” again. The movie returned to the screen. She opened her compass, using its pointed tip to clean under her fingernails. She sighed. Two men were talking in the movie. She reread the definition of “bisect.” Then the telephone on her night table rang. She shot her hand toward it as if for a lifeline.

“Hello.”

“It's Tiffany. You busy?”

“Doing homework. But that's okay. I'm ready for a break.” Danielle turned over onto her back, watching the movie upside-down. “What's up with Helga? Did your plan come off?”

Tiffany paused. “Not exactly.”

Danielle didn't like the tone of her voice. “What happened?” she barked, editing out “nitwit” with great effort

“Well, she was, like, with Drew?” stated Tiffany. “They were standing by the cougar? And I was about to take her picture? But then my hands sort of
slipped?
And I dropped the camera? On the cement?”

Danielle noisily exhaled her disappointment.

“Mr. Yancy was there?” continued Tiffany. “He was practically swearing at me? I thought that I was like dead for sure? Thank God he's such an incredible lecher? I pretended to cry? Then I bent down to pick up the pieces and gave him a good look down my blouse? He stopped yelling? Then he put his hand on my shoulder? He said we could
discuss
it in his classroom, tomorrow before school?” Tiffany made no mention of her mysterious pains.