A Fate Totally Worse Than Death (5 page)

“Whatcha been reading?” she asked, stalling for time in which to make her decision.

“Plays, mainly.”

“No kidding. Sounds heavy.” She noticed that he was an inch taller than she was—the ideal height difference, according to
Glamour
. Had he been the one kissing her in her dream?

“Yeah,” he said. “Pretty heavy all right. I'm on
The Wild Duck
right now.”

“What?” Pretending to brush back her red hair, Brooke stealthily cleaned her left ear with a finger, hoping this might improve her hearing.

“The Wild Duck,”
he repeated loudly. “By Ibsen.”

She added a pair of erasers to her account, knowing full well she owned dozens already. “Who's he?”

“A playwright,” he said. “From Norway.”

Brooke felt her face fall.

“I've got his collected works. He's probably the most famous writer from there.”

Brooke's plans fled her mind. Her hopes collapsed. Rage crackled into flame inside her.

“And what brought this on?” Her voice was unsteady. She strained to seem ignorant of the answer, praying that perhaps she was wrong.

“You know Helga? She turned me on to him,” Jonathan casually replied. She saw that his eyes brightened at the name. “I heard her mention him in class. Thought he might be worth checking out.”

Brooke's fury blazed. Though she'd joined the war against Helga half-heartedly and only so as not to be left out, she now boiled with visions of vengeance and yearned to utterly destroy her.

“She said she'd help me with this latest one after school today,” Jonathan added. Pleasant expectation flickered on his face.

Brooke's patience snapped. Tears gathered in her eyes. He was just like all the rest—a slave to anything thin and blond.

“And after your stupid plays,” wailed Brooke, “you read the letters in
Playboy
out
loud I bet!” She knew she was shouting but didn't care.

Jonathan stood before her, dumbstruck.

“Then you'll look at the pictures,
of course!”

He cocked his head in puzzlement. “What?”

“You can keep your pens and erasers!” screamed Brooke. She snatched the box of paper clips she'd meant to buy, raised it high, and opened it, letting them rain out onto the floor. She presented him with a vengeful smile. Then she looked up and saw that the deed had caused her sleeve to slip down toward her elbow. On the back of her hand, in plain view to all, were three new dark spots, one of which was shaped exactly like a skull. Brooke let out a shriek and fled.

CHAPTER
8

… … …. “Turn left!” Tiffany ordered.

“What did you say?” asked Brooke.

“Left!”

Brooke swerved into the left lane and turned sharply, following the red Corvette and throwing Danielle against the door. It was Sunday morning. They were on the way to the beach, but had decided to first follow cars driven by handsome males. “Born to Hate” by Wehrmacht was blaring from the radio, the
ENGINE
light flashing on and off in time with the beat.

“Tinted windows!” shouted Danielle above the music. “He must be rich.”

Brooke sped to keep up with the car. “Or maybe just albino.” She'd been trailing it for miles when suddenly the driver pulled over and parked. Brooke slammed on her brakes and parked behind him, staring like the other girls. The Corvette's door swung open. From inside came a short, vast-buttocked, cigarillo-smoking woman, who extricated herself in stages and was followed, like a mother bear leaving her den, by her waddling, diaper-wearing cub.

There was stunned silence in Brooke's car, apart from “Full Dumpster of Love for Ya” by Trash on the radio.

“Damn,” summed up Tiffany.

“Beauty's only skin deep,” said Danielle.

“I think you mean ‘You can't judge a book by its cover,'” Brooke spoke up.

“Just shut up and drive,” snapped Tiffany.

“You're welcome!”
Brooke shouted.

“Sorry!”
mocked Tiffany.

The episode was in character with the previous week's events. Nothing had been going right in the effort to separate Helga from the Hun boys. The beach outing was less a tanning session than an emergency meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were determined now to destroy their enemy.

Brooke backtracked nearly five miles, headed up the coast highway, and turned off into the Sycamore Beach Club, which all three girls' parents belonged to. They got out and made their way down the boardwalk. Danielle subtly kept their pace slow, so as
not
to start wheezing from shortness of breath in front of the whole beach crowd. This suited Tiffany, who wished to hide the gimpy gait caused by her ever more painful hip joints. Though it was nearly ninety, Brooke was wearing a shirt of her father's over her swimsuit. It was long enough to reach her fingertips, and both cuffs were buttoned tightly to hide the half dozen spots she sported on each hand. She prayed that no one would ask her the reason.

They stepped onto the sand and chose a site with a view of the volleyball court. In silence, they slathered on their sunblock, reluctant to tackle the matter at hand. Danielle put on her Walkman's headphones and listened to
Serenity Cove
, a tape of beach sounds that her parents, hard-driving stockbrokers, played to wind themselves down in the evenings. Tiffany flipped backward through an issue of
Psst!
, pausing at an article on tinted moisturizers. Brooke discreetly opened her compact and arranged her red hair over the small dark spot she'd found on her forehead that morning.

“Shall we get it over with?” Danielle suggested an hour later.

Tiffany had at last reached her magazine's table of contents. She raised her head. “So what happened with
your
plan?”

Danielle's face soured at the memory. “I was going to leave this fish head on her doorstep. I found her address, but when I got there, there was no stupid house with that number.” She omitted the added insult that liquid from the fish had leaked into her pack.

“No house?” mused Tiffany. “Pretty weird.”

“Leaving a fish head is even weirder,” said Brooke. “No wonder your backpack smells like a bait shop.”

Danielle sniffed it. She wondered if the smell explained Drew's retreat when she'd tried to entice him into walking home with her on Friday. Or had her temporary false tooth, installed by her dentist, been askew? She felt it with her tongue. It was simply wedged in place between its neighbors and tended to swing out like a dog door if she bit into anything hard.

“You got any better ideas?” she challenged.

Tiffany propped herself up on her elbows. “Why not ask the other Hun girls to help out?”

“Nicole Cappellini said she'd help,” replied Danielle. “If she's not too busy with student council, cheerleading, French Club, Nostalgia Club, and the twenty-nine other groups she belongs to. The others all said they weren't interested.”

The three ruminated in silence. Tiffany got up to go to the bathroom, walking slowly both to spare her joints and to advertise her existence to all boys within view. Her luscious brown hair swung alluringly back and forth, halfway down her back.

“I
was driving by the park?” Tiffany remarked when she returned. “On Thursday? Going home from Community Service? I, like, looked over? And there was Helga? Sitting on the bench?”

The others knew what bench she meant. In unison, all three girls looked down the coast to where the beach disappeared. The waves there threw themselves into the massive rocks below Clifftop Park, the same rocks onto which Charity Chase had fallen to her death.

“Why does she have to pick
that
one?” asked Danielle.

No one offered a reply.

“She was here at the beach yesterday,” said Brooke. “By the lifeguard station. She was reading. Plays.” She thought acidly of Jonathan. “She said ‘Hi' when I passed. She'd been there all day. What's strange is that she never gets sunburned, even with her fair skin.” Brooke stated this last fact with disgust. She, by contrast, turned red and peeled if she stood in front of a forty-watt bulb. She seethed at Helga's good luck in this and every other category.

Four boys started playing volleyball, freezing the girls' conversation. One was a Cliffside graduate, famed for his many DWI arrests, whose talents had been foretold when he'd been found drunk behind the wheel of his car simulator in Driver's Education. He was well-built and looked over at Tiffany. Following the advice of an article in
Psst!
, she pretended not to notice him and quickly reopened the magazine, feigning reading an article on codpieces, plague, pilgrimages, and other fads that, after a long sleep, were fashionable again.

“C'mon!” barked Danielle. “We're here to think. Get your nose out of your magazine.”

“As soon as you take off your headphones,” said Tiffany.

“You sound like my parents!” snarled Danielle. She ripped off the headphones and snapped off her Walkman.

“Now who has an idea for taking care of Helga
for good?”
she demanded. She was annoyed by Tiffany's lack of focus as well as by the fact that the boy had chosen to cast his gaze at Tiffany rather than at her.

“What did you say?” Brooke inquired.

“Christ almighty! Are you deaf or something? And what are you doing with your shirt on? It's boiling!”

Brooke ransacked her brain for an excuse. “I get freckles!” she blurted out truthfully. “Even with sunscreen. I'm not like Helga.”

“I'll say,” said Tiffany.

“Thanks
a
lot!”

“I'm
sorry.”
Tiffany became aware of her urgent need to pee again, a need she'd felt much more often lately. Too embarrassed to make yet another trip to the bathroom, afraid of what Danielle might say, she hooked her ankles and pressed her legs together. Just then an ice-cream seller approached. Grabbing her wallet, Tiffany found her finger joints so swollen and painful that she couldn't manage to open the clasp. Enviously, she watched as Brooke bought an ice-cream sandwich. Danielle eyed Brooke hungrily as well, dying to buy one, too, but afraid that her false tooth might come out and get lost in the sand.

“So who the hell's got an idea?”
cried Danielle.

The others avoided her angry eyes. Brooke aimed hers at the two girls who'd joined the volleyball game. Both seemed cut from Tiffany's magazine: tall, slender, perfectly tanned. One was a brunette who seemed to enjoy maintaining suspense in her audience as to when, in the course of her leaping and diving, her bikini's top would lose its load. The other had long, dazzling blond hair, straight as a waterfall running down her back. Brooke stared at it, hating it and everything it stood for. It was nearly as long and as light as Helga's. Suddenly she had an idea. “Why don't we cut off her hair?” she proposed.

CHAPTER
9

… … … When Monday's last bell rang, Nicole Cappellini was the first one out of her business class. She was in a merry mood as she hurried down the hall, having just racked up a profit of $10,000 in the classroom's mock stock market. By the time she reached Helga's classroom, she'd mentally spent the bulk of it. She positioned herself outside the door, just as Danielle had instructed her. The class was a few minutes late getting out. She spent some more of her profits, acquiring a French château and a new hair dryer.

Abruptly, the door swung open and the first students began pouring out. Nicole noticed a clattering sound. She turned and discovered Gavin beside her, breath mints loudly orbiting his mouth. She knew he often waited for Helga. She wondered if he'd throw off the plan.

“Mint?” he offered. His breath held the natural foulness and chemical freshness found in veterinarians' waiting rooms.

Nicole shook her head, then spotted Helga approaching the door, talking to Drew. What if he walked home with her? Nicole's pulse quickened at the thought.

“That's just what Thoreau was saying,” said Drew. He and Helga emerged from the room. “Cut your
expenses
so you won't have to waste your life working to pay your bills!”

Nicole was shocked by such heresy. No wonder Thoreau had been hung with the witches. Or was that Benedict Arnold? She approached Helga and put in place the same oversized, phony smile that her mother often wore. She opened her mouth to speak, at which moment Gavin stepped forward, eclipsing her.

“Wondered if you might want to see a movie with me this afternoon,” he asked Helga.
“Grievous Bodily Harm Eleven
is playing at the Cliffside Twelve-Screen.”

He sent the mints on a quick circuit. “A real taste of America.”

Helga walked down the crowded hall, surrounded as if by a ring of reporters.

“By not
having
to work, Thoreau could study nature and write,” Drew went on.

Nicole grimaced, wondering how someone as rich and handsome as Drew could have gone so far astray.

“Thank you,” said Helga to Gavin. “It sounds quite interesting. But today I must
study.”

“It's nothing at all like
Grievous Bodily Harm Ten,”
Gavin persisted. “Maybe that came to Osaka.”

“Oslo,” Helga politely corrected.

Nicole trailed along, perspiring, aware that the scene was beyond her control. Fortunately, the procession was following the route that Danielle had predicted. As they all headed outside toward the gym, there was a half second of silence in the conversation. Nicole pounced.

“As a member of the Cliffside High World Friendship Club—” she spoke up.

“A total farce,” Drew informed Helga, as if he were translating. He knew that the club was no more than a group of Hun bigwigs on the student council, who voted themselves a budget each year and spent it dining at restaurants specializing in foreign cuisines.