A Fate Totally Worse Than Death (7 page)

Tiffany awoke the next morning wondering how she would get out of bed. Each joint in her body felt swollen twice its size. She glanced out the window. It was still drizzling. Vaguely, she recollected a commercial in which an old lady complained of wet weather worsening her arthritis. She winced as she slowly sat up in bed, vowed to move immediately to the Sahara, then staggered gingerly to the bathroom. She picked up a bottle of aspirin and squinted, hoping to see the word “arthritis.” For the past two days she'd found it increasingly hard to focus on nearby objects. She gave up reading the miniscule type, took two pills anyway, then stood under a scalding shower. Combing her hair afterwards, she noticed the comb felt heavy in her hand. She glanced at it. Then, in a frenzy, she wiped the condensation from the mirror. Ragged gaps showed in what had been her body's prize attraction: Her gorgeous brown hair was falling out.

“Damn that Helga!” she swore aloud. She blinked back tears while surveying the damage. She would have no choice but to wear her hair up. Then she set eyes on her ravaged bangs. She couldn't let them show either. After dressing and pinning up her hair, heaping curses on Helga all the while, she covered her scalp with a red bandana, as she'd seen her mother attired in photos taken back in the '60s. She hoped her peers would find the look cool. Then she searched her magazines for advice, flipped to page twenty in April's
Foxy
, and skimmed in disappointment the article titled “Your Balding Boyfriend: What To Do, What Not To (and Ten Remarks To Keep
Under
Your Hat!).” She looked at her clock. She had to be at school early. She dragged her body to the kitchen, washed down a croissant with a Diet Coke, trudged out to her car, lurched back to the house, distastefully put her diaper in place, then shuffled back out and drove to school.

Brooke pulled into the lot right behind her. The rain had stopped. They parked
and
got out.

“What's that?” asked Brooke, pointing at Tiffany's bandana.

“A bandana, idiot. What do you think?”

“Sorry,”
said Brooke. “I was just wondering why you came to school disguised as a Russian cabbage farmer.”

This was not precisely the response that Tiffany had hoped for. She lowered her voice to a deathbed whisper. “My hair is falling out.”

Brooke's eyes expanded. The pair set off, Brooke slowing her steps to match Tiffany's hobble. She scoured her brain for a change of topic. “So why are you here so early today?”

“Mr. Yancy,” answered Tiffany. “I have to help the old lecher twice a week to pay off the camera I broke. Today he'll be taking more pictures of me.”

“With or without clothes?”

“With
. Are you crazy?” Then she imagined him arranging her pose, carefully adjusting her buttocks with his hands—something that seemed to need doing often—and causing her diaper to audibly crinkle. She tried to evict the vision from her mind. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

“I thought I'd work out in the gym before school.”

Tiffany scented deception. “Yeah?”

“Maybe do some gymnastics.”

The word sent more pain into Tiffany's joints. “When did this start?”

Brooke didn't answer. Then Tiffany realized she was crying.

“This morning,” she sniffled.

Tiffany halted, alarmed. “Helga?”

Brooke nodded her head. “My clothes haven't been fitting lately. The way they used to.” She dabbed at her eyes. “This morning I measured myself. And I'm
shrinking!”
She gave herself up to unrestrained bawling.

Tiffany viewed her in terror. It was true. Brooke was shorter by an inch or two. “Jesus Christ,” she murmured.

“I thought maybe hanging from the bars might help,”
Brooke wailed miserably.

Tiffany patted her shoulder. “Of course it will.” Privately, she had her doubts.

Brooke mopped up her tears. They inched down a walkway, Tiffany fantasizing being pushed in a wheelchair. Then both of them halted. In the distance, Helga crossed between two buildings.

An eerie chill skittered up Brooke's spine. Both girls exhaled when she disappeared.

“How
am I supposed to pass her in the hall?” said Brooke. “Knowing what we know?”

“Not to mention what
she
knows,” said Tiffany.

They pushed on in silence.

“At least we haven't been called in to the dean's office for trying to cut her hair,” Brooke spoke up. “It probably would have happened by now.”

Tiffany sighed, “Great. So now we know for sure that she couldn't care less about that. She's after revenge for Charity.”

Brooke cleaned out her left ear. “For what?”

“For
Charity,”
Tiffany repeated.

“Clarity?”

“Charity!”

Brooke nodded. “I almost wish she'd get it over with. And put us out of our misery.”

Tiffany grabbed her arm for help in ascending a short flight of steps. She rested at the top, then put her mouth to Brooke's ear and shouted, “Me, too.”

CHAPTER
12

………1:30. 1:48. 2:17. 2:27.
Time
flies when you're having fun,
Danielle mocked herself. It
was Wednesday night and insomnia, not fun, was what she was having. It was the latest symptom of her advancing age. She hadn't minded the first two nights, when she'd been madly skimming her horror novels in search of help against Helga. Now, however, the bags under her eyes were as big as gunnysacks. She hungered for sleep. She'd tried warm milk. She'd counted sheep, Gucci purses, new BMWs. She now tried guided fantasy, strolling hand in hand with Drew along the beaches of Bermuda, listening to him marvel aloud at her physical and spiritual beauty. When this failed, she turned to truly desperate measures: her history textbook.

She opened Chapter Five of
Let Freedom Ring
and forced herself to read. Looking ahead, she held great hopes for the discussion of the Stamp Act crisis, and was astounded to discover herself still awake at the end of the chapter. Though Chapter Six, “The Tide of Independence,” promised to induce sleep, and possibly death, she couldn't bring herself to administer the dose. Instead, she scanned her paperbacks for any she'd missed, reached for
A Score to Settle
, and opened a page at random.

Rolf's lips met hers. Ashleigh closed her eyes and fell deeply into the kiss. Down and down, plunging blindly into the unknown, the voices in her head growing ever fainter. Her father yelling that he wished she'd died in the car wreck instead of her beautiful sister, that she was ugly, that no boy would ever kiss her. Margo saying that Rolf gave her the creeps. Megan saying he had the eyes of a killer. Old Mrs. Weiss remembering that a man by the same name had been executed fifty years ago—for murder
.

The plot came back to her. She closed the book. It wouldn't help with Helga. Though Rolf was a ghost, no one was able to stop him from killing the descendants of the jurors who'd falsely convicted him. Would she soon be as dead as his victims? Most people who tried to kill ghosts ended up getting killed themselves. Bullets were no good
against
them. Silver daggers through the heart only worked on vampires. Ghosts didn't
have
hearts. The trick was to coax them to return to the grave. But how? She'd gone to a bookstore and read the back covers of the entire forty-book Bloodstains series, feeling the need to shower after to remove the gore splashing up from the artwork. None of the cases matched Helga's exactly. What would she report to Brooke and Tiffany at their meeting in the afternoon?

2:45. 3:02. Eyelids at half-mast, she railed in X-rated fashion against her insomnia, then sighed and picked up
Let Freedom Ring
. She considered bringing it down on her head, not caring if it broke her neck, but was too weak to lift the granite slab of a book high enough. She propped it on her chest, felt her ribs give, and grimly turned to Chapter Six. “While Britain's colonial policies….” she began. A moment later, it seemed, it was morning, the sun slapping her in the face.

Groaning, she closed her eyes against the glare. She felt dead, for an instant hoped she was, then recognized her room with disappointment. She fingered a strand of her blond hair and endeavored to focus her eyes upon it. She'd found gray hairs lately, necessitating search-and-destroy missions each morning. Groping for the hand mirror on her table, she held it up, squinted, then gasped. Half her hair had gone gray in the night.

She sat up, fully awake, her mind racing. She couldn't pull all the gray hairs out, unless she wanted to look half bald. If she got a buzz haircut, the silver would still show. She rejected wigs and shaving her head. She'd have to dye her hair. Not that she had any dye or the time to apply it. She'd pick some up on the way home from school. In the meantime, she resolved to wear her hair up and hidden beneath her floppy beret.

She crept to her door and listened, judging if the coast was clear to the bathroom. If her spiteful younger sister, a sophomore, got a look at her hair and blabbed, Danielle would have no course but suicide. She cracked the door, stuck out her nose, then dashed down the hall, her robe over her head. She locked the bathroom door behind her, turned on the shower, and sighed with relief. Then she slipped off her robe and nightgown, glanced down—and felt the blood halt in her veins.

“No!” she moaned and blinked her eyes, praying they were playing tricks from fatigue. Pushing her grandmotherly gray hair aside, she peered more closely at her breasts. Withered, wrinkled, pathetically droopy, they looked like they'd been deflated during the night. They now hung empty, pointing at the floor. The term “pickle tits” rose up in her mind, an epithet she'd once applied loudly and in mixed company to a rival, leading to the girl's eventual withdrawal from school and move out of state. Danielle's breasts not only hung low, they looked ancient, as if she'd exchanged them with some toothless crone from
National Geographic
. Never again, she vowed, would she shower in
P.E.
She'd claim she had cramps and sit out the class. After a week of that, she'd excuse herself from showering on religious grounds. She'd forge a note from her minister, or some made-up Indian guru. She'd go to the Supreme Court if she must to keep her breasts from being seen!

She averted her eyes from them as she entered the shower and began to wash. She raged at Helga, begging God to smite her with acne, AIDS, cellulite. The list was cut short when she reached behind herself to wash her buttocks and found, in dismay, that they weren't where they used to be. She craned her neck, dropped her washcloth, and felt frantically with her hands. Aghast, she found them six inches lower than usual, sagging like a pair of flat tires. She wavered, disbelieving, oblivious of her surroundings. She thought back to her taut, faultless figure, recalling her lengthy sessions beneath the outdoor shower at the beach, ostensibly to remove the sand, knowing the guys were stripping her in their minds. She closed her eyes, revolted by her body. Sinking down slowly, she sat on the tiles and let the water strike her head. She'd read horror novels by the score, had met demons, werewolves, and demented killers with blood on their hands and murder in their hearts. None of that, she swore, could touch the gruesome, ghastly terror of aging. She rested her head on her knees and cried.

Forty minutes later, she set out for school. She'd lost two more teeth at breakfast, but had been fortunate that both were molars. She reminded herself not to open her mouth wide. Sunglasses hid the dark bags below her eyes. Each strand of her hair had been pulled up and pinned tight, safe from sight beneath her red beret. She'd scooped her breasts into her jogging bra. She'd raised her posterior in similar fashion, squeezing it into her tightest lycra shorts. She wondered if others could sense the strain of wearing this clown's trunk of disguises or whether she looked perfectly normal. She crossed Via Serena, looked up, and ardently hoped for the latter answer. Drew was marching down his walk just at the moment she passed it.

“Hi,” she said, delighted at her luck. She'd been trying to attract his attention for weeks, but could never find him without Helga at his side. “How ya doin?” She flashed a big smile, then feared she'd revealed her missing teeth and quickly snapped her mouth shut.

“I'm late, as a matter of fact.”

“Yeah?” She pushed the word out through her sealed lips. She glimpsed his BMW in the garage, between the Ferrari and the silver Rolls Royce. Laboring to match his long strides, she imagined riding with him in the Rolls, the envy of all the Huns. She wondered why he no longer drove, and why someone so rich would wear the same patched jeans and ratty shoes every day. Once they were a couple, she'd give his
wardrobe
a do-over.

“I usually leave at seven,” he said.

Danielle pretended fascination with his words while stealthily checking her beret's position.

“Helga and I usually meet before school. To talk about what we've been reading.”

Danielle strained to maintain her blithe expression. There'd been no trace of apology in his words, no remorse, no thought of her at all. For the first time, the fact struck her square between the eyes. He never
had
given her a thought. Though she saw him constantly in her mind, and saw herself as the love of his life and heir to his staggering fortune, he never noticed her at all unless, as today, she was blocking his path. Was he immune to good looks? Gay perhaps? Then why was he surgically attached to Helga? And before Helga there'd been Charity. Danielle's body outshone both of theirs, or had until that morning. She stared daggers at him from behind her dark glasses. Enraged at his rejection, clinging by her fingernails to her fantasies, she decided to lay her ace on the table.