A Fate Totally Worse Than Death

by Paul Fleischman

  A FATE

  TOTALLY WORSE

  THAN DEATH

  Paul Flesichman

  FOR AMY AND KATE

  Paul Fleischman grew up in Santa Monica, California, the son of children's book author Sid Fleischman. Drawing on history, music, art, and theater, his books have often experimented with multiple viewpoints and performance. He received the Newbery Medal in 1989 for JOYFUL NOISE: POEMS FOR TWO VOICES, a Newbery Honor Award for GRAVEN IMAGES, the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction for BULL RUN, and was a National Book Award finalist for BREAKOUT. He lives on the central coast of California.

  Also by Paul Fleischman:

  Rear-View Mirrors

  A wicked parody of teen horror novels, pitting Cliffside High's ruthless clique, the Huns, against an otherwordly exchange student, leading them to endure the grisliest fate that a teen could imagine!

  Children's Choices Award (IRA)

  Booklist Editors' Choice

  A FATE TOTALLY WORSE THAN DEATH

  Copyright © 1995 by Paul Fleischman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  First ebook edition © 2012 by AudioGO. All Rights Reserved.

  Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-390-7

  Library ISBN 978-0-7927-9444-8

  Cover illustration © gokcen yener/iStock.com

  A FATE

  TOTALLY WORSE

  THAN DEATH

  CHAPTER 1

  ………. Danielle despised waiting in lines. Mixing body mechanics and brazen gall, she edged past a bent-backed, blind woman and her dog, then two tottering veterans of San Juan Hill, then a mother with triplets, and squeezed onto the bus. She saw the sign above the seat reserving it for senior citizens. She also saw that it was the last seat left. She grabbed it, pretending not to notice the parade of the old and infirm shuffling past. Last to board, the blind woman halted directly before her and groped for a handhold. Just my luck, thought Danielle. Helen Keller has to stop next to me. She felt poison-tipped glances thrust at her by her neighbors. The Whistler’s Mother look-alike to her left cleared her throat in a meaningful fashion. Danielle rolled her eyes, unzipped her pack, pulled out Prom Night Massacre, and opened it in front of her face. Cross-eyed, she flipped through the pages to her place.

  Her father. What a loser, thought Tanya. A sculptor! Not that he ever managed to sell any of his weird creations. She shuddered to recall their pathetic Ford Pinto and the single black-and-white TV they’d been able to afford. Who could blame her mother for dumping him? Or for marrying the knockout, Benz-driving owner of Belvedere Realty? She’d taught Tanya a lot. Get what you want out of life. Get it now. And don’t worry about stepping on toes. Or hearts.

  Danielle smirked. She’d come across characters like this, in books like this, plenty of times. Ambitious. Unrepentently selfish. Materialistic. Like me, she mused, but with a difference: They usually paid for their sins by being stalked, sliced, or sautéed in the end. She lowered the book and looked around with relief. This, thank God, was the real world, where the sharp and unscrupulous got a seat on the bus. Through this world, she knew well, she would waltz unscathed.

  She rang for her stop, gathered her things, and ran the gauntlet of stares toward the rear. “Ought to be ashamed,” spoke an eggshell-frail dowager. The bus’s sudden stop gave Danielle a pretext for lurching in her direction and stepping on her foot before exiting. The woman’s agonized howl faded as Danielle innocently crossed the street.

  The September sun warmed her shoulders while the breeze off the Pacific played with her sundress. Passing the Cliffside, California, Public Library, she inventoried her image in its windows. Legs: terrific. Bust: classic beach bunny. Hair: blond, straight, faultless. Face: Pepsi-ad quality. She threw herself a smile. This would be the year she’d hook Drew. She felt sure of it. They were both seniors now, both tall, blond, beautiful, and rich—fabulously rich in his case. He’d had all summer to forget about Charity Chase. He needed someone in the passenger seat of the new BMW his parents had just bought him. Together, they’d be shoe-ins for Prom King and Queen. They’d be the envy of all the Huns—the name proudly worn by those students living in exclusive Hundred Palms Estates. Though the Huns ruled Cliffside High’s social life and student government, Danielle dreamed of more: ruling the Huns. The triumphant merger of her looks and Drew’s loot would put her on the throne. They’d be Ferdinand and Isabella, minus eighty pounds of flab. She grinned. School was only two weeks old. No hurry, she thought. He’d notice her. She’d make certain of that.

  Absently, she turned down Jade Street. She was jerked out of her reverie by the sharp scent of disinfectant, then remembered why her feet had led her there: Community Service. She released a long sigh of martyrdom. An hour a week of unpaid labor, which the school district claimed would provide much-needed aid, increase student sensitivity, and build bridges between youth and community, a program instituted over the objections of the horrified, Hun-packed student council. Gritting her teeth, Danielle entered Driftwood Manor Convalescent Home, wove her way around obstacles human, inanimate, and indeterminate, and found her way for the second time to the room of Mrs. Edwina Witt.

  “Surf’s up, Winnie. What do you say?”

  Propped up in bed, Mrs. Witt slowly rotated her white-haired head toward her visitor.

  Danielle dropped her pack on the floor and noticed that the room’s other bed was empty. “What happened to Mrs. What’s-her-name?”

  Mrs. Witt’s lips moved diligently, producing miniscule smacks but no words.

  Danielle saw that the roommate’s table was bare and her family photos missing from the wall. “Well, like they say, death happens. Especially to you Model Ts in here.” Collapsing into a chair, she pried off her sandals with her toes and extended her feet onto Mrs. Witt’s bed. “Hope you don’t mind. Long day today. I’m totally beat.”

  Mrs. Witt’s lips wriggled.

  “Well, that’s two of us,” Danielle spoke for her. She tilted her head up toward the wall-mounted television and gazed blankly at Mrs. Witt’s news program. Bending forward with a groan, she snatched the remote control from the bed, flicked ahead thirteen channels—Mrs. Witt’s eyes expanding with each change—and found the music video station. Bleeding Ulcer, her favorite group, was on. She leaned back, tossed the remote on the bed, then spotted Mrs. Wìtt’s hand crawling toward it.

  “Now, now.” Danielle nudged it out of reach with her foot, then wondered if the raucous music might draw a nurse to the room. Groaning again, she got to her feet, closed the door to the hall, then locked it. Returning, she spied on a shelf the box of chocolates she recalled from the week before and brought it with her to her chair.

  “It’s only polite to offer your guests something to eat,” she said. Mrs. Witt’s lips moved speechlessly while Danielle fished among the candies. She’d already eaten all the cherry truffles during her first visit. She now plucked out a coconut-covered morsel, examined it critically, took a nibble, grimaced, and spit it out.

  “What flavor was that? Turpentine?” She cemented the piece she’d spit out back in place, returned the chocolate to its compartment, then jumped at the sound of two raps on the door.

  She shot to her feet and scrambled to find Mrs. Witt’s program on the TV. “Just a minute,” Danielle crooned. She shoved the candy back on its shelf, tugged her sandals onto her feet, straightened her hair, then opened the door. On the other side stood her friend, Brooke.

  “Man,” hissed Danielle, relaxing
. “You scared me.” She admitted Brooke and relocked the door. “What are you doing here?”

  “My little old lady’s on autopilot—asleep, as usual. And her TV’s broken.” Brooke plopped down on the foot of Mrs. Witt’s bed, grabbed the remote, and flicked forward to the music videos. Bleeding Ulcer’s video was over. The two watched ads with scholarly attention, but muted the sound when the next song came on, a pleading ballad by the Rainforest Collective.

  “Have you seen the new exchange student?” asked Brooke.

  Danielle eyed her friend’s stringy red hair and twenty pounds of excess weight. She felt a flicker of pity, then her accustomed pleasure at outshining her. She offered Brooke the box of chocolates, hoping she might gain another pound. “What exchange student?”

  “Helga something. From Norway or someplace.” She scanned the candies. “Any cherry truffles?”

  “All gone. They’re my favorites, too.”

  Brooke loudly devoured a peanut cluster. “She’s a senior I think. She’s hot,” she added, spitting meteors of peanut and chocolate. “Thin and blond. Cute face. With this little accent when she talks.” She licked her fingers. “I passed her in the hall. The guys were practically glued to her. Gavin. Rhett. Jonathan. Drew.”

  “Drew?” Danielle strained forward at the name.

  “Yeah, he was there. Hangin’ on her with the rest. Probably praying she’d faint from lack of air so he could give her mouth-to-mouth.” Brooke snickered sourly and picked out another peanut cluster. “I hear she lives downtown somewhere. Definitely not in Hundred Palms. Probably no one explained to her that the Hun guys all belong to us.”

  Danielle’s face turned stony.

  “Kinda like Charity Chase,” added Brooke.

  Grimly, Danielle exhaled. “Maybe we’ll have to give her the same treatment.”

  Alarm in her face, Brooke gestured toward Mrs. Witt.

  “Don’t worry about her,” said Danielle. “She can’t talk. Or write either. Look at her hands shake.” She glanced at the woman, whose owl-wide eyes stared fixedly back at her. “And what have we got to hide anyway? Charity fell off the cliff.”

  “After we chased her. Straight toward the edge.”

  “We didn’t make her trip on that stupid rock.”

  “But we did write a phony suicide note. Or have you forgotten?”

  Danielle sighed. “I’m working on it.” She looked out the window. “Does Tiffany know about this Helga?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Better give her a call. Put a watch on Miss Norway. We’ll meet here next week and decide if we need to have a talk with her.” Danielle stood up. “For her own sake.”

  CHAPTER 2

  ………Tiffany simmered with anticipation. Squinting through the video camera’s eyepiece, she pressed the PLAY button and beheld what she’d recorded. “It worked!” she crowed to the empty house. In silent awe, she studied the film. Tripod too high, she noted. Not bad-looking. A little bigger than I’d thought. Ought to try it in a skirt.

  She pushed the STOP button, adjusted the tripod, then flew to her room and traded jeans for a skirt. Dashing back to her parents’ vast bedroom, she composed herself, pressed RECORD, and despite the fact that she had no speaking role, cleared her throat. Look natural, she reminded herself. She took a deep breath, exhaled, then commenced her walk down the length of the room, the camera trained upon her rear end. “Know thyself,” her English teacher had commanded the class that day, quoting some ancient Greek writer. Obedient, Tiffany was placing the final piece in the puzzle of her identity and would at last know the unknowable: how her bottom looked to others.

  She reached the end of the room. She whirled around, as she’d seen fashion models do, causing her long, brown hair to wrap itself around her face like seaweed. Clawing it away, she smiled seductively at the camera, then pouted, then laughed. She doubled back and repeated her route, this time stopping and bending over, pretending to pick something up off the floor.

  She played back the film, grading her posterior for curve, firmness, breadth, and bounce. It didn’t measure up to Danielle’s, but then neither did Tiffany’s unremarkable face, flattish chest, and oily skin. Danielle was a natural beauty; Tiffany needed help, which she received in the eleven beauty magazines she subscribed to. She rewound the film and played it again. She was far better-looking than Brooke, she concluded, who was beyond the help of any magazine except Journal of Plastic Surgery. Tiffany admired her own lustrous, mahogany hair—her body’s greatest attraction. Then she pulled back her head and lowered the tripod slightly. As photographer for the high-school yearbook, she was skilled at handling cameras. Fired with scientific inquiry, she recorded herself in lycra shorts, her underwear, a mini-skirt, her robe, three different bathing suits, then decided to follow her teacher’s advice to the end and film herself naked.

  She glanced at the clock. It was just 8:05. Her parents had gone to a seven-o’clock movie. She had plenty of time. Then again, they sometimes left movies in the middle, if the teenagers sitting around them belched a lot, or talked, or vomited. She checked the curtains, removed the last of her clothes, pressed RECORD, cleared her throat, then jumped at the sound of the phone. It was the one in her room. The call was for her. Throwing on her robe, she shut off the camera, ran down the long hall, and grabbed the receiver.

  “Hi, Jonathan,” Tiffany purred. “Guess what?” She gave him a moment. “I’m naked.”

  “Try again,” spoke a female voice. “It’s Brooke.”

  Tiffany shut her eyes. “Damn!” She’d been waiting for eons to use that line. She flopped onto her bed. “What do you want?”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “I’m sorry, okay?”

  “And please don’t tell me you’re back together with Jonathan—again.”

  “This time it’s forever,” stated Tiffany. She heard a slurping sound from Brooke’s end.

  “Just like the other eighty-nine times.”

  “Eighty-seven times. But remember, that’s spread out over four years and three months.”

  “Why don’t you two go to the United Nations and have them work on it?”

  “The war is over?” she stated, ending her declarative sentence with an interrogative rise. “We made up this morning? Before second period? Then we had this quiet, romantic lunch? In the cafeteria? Which was totally empty because there’s no pizza on Tuesdays? We decided we’re going to get married the day after graduation? We’re naming our first child Kent if it’s a boy? And Courtney Marie if it’s a girl?” Tiffany heard Brooke chewing noisily. “Are you eating or something?”

  “Just a bowl of cereal.”

  Tiffany reached for the latest issue of Nymphette and began flipping through it backwards. “The sound is gross, if you’re interested.”

  “Not really,” spluttered Brooke.

  “Plus, you’ll, like, get electrocuted if you drop the receiver into the bowl.”

  “I’m talking on the speaker phone.”

  “My luck,” Tiffany sighed.

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “I’m sorry, okay?” Tiffany fell silent, reading an article on oil-free, hydrating, matte makeups. “So why did you call, besides to pour Niagara Falls into my ear?”

  “To let you know that your fiancé has been falling all over the new exchange student. If you’re interested.”

  Tiffany stiffened. She heard an avalanche of cereal falling into Brooke’s bowl.

  “She’s from Norway,” Brooke went on. “Tall, thin—”

  “I’ve seen her,” snapped Tiffany. “Hair blonder than blond. And her skin’s so pale you can practically see through it. And her eyes. They’re too blue. They give me the creeps. She looked at me in the hall today and I swear I got the chills.”

  A fresh round of crunching came from Brooke’s end. “Danielle said to put a watch on her. She seems to be going after the Hun guys. I saw Jonathan hand her a candy bar today, flashing his number-one smile.”

  Tiffany tightened
her grip on the phone’s receiver in place of Jonathan’s throat. “The jerk.”

  “Is that any way to talk about the father of little Courtney Marie?”

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m sorry, okay?” mocked Brooke.

  Tiffany hung up. She made up her mind to confront Jonathan tomorrow at lunch. Emerging from her dreams of vengeance, she heard voices, listened, then realized that while she’d been talking her parents had returned and quietly climbed the stairs to their bedroom.

  She prayed they’d forgotten how to use the video camera.

  CHAPTER 3

  ………“No trouble at all,” Jonathan insisted. “It would be a pleasure. Believe me.” He guided Helga down the hall, which was nearly empty at lunchtime. “Why should you put up with a locker that doesn’t open half the time? And an old, beat-up one at that, way down on the bottom row, where you have to squat down or break your back.” He cast a trained eye at her long, slender legs, as if measuring her for a better fit. “Especially when I know of a vacancy.” He plucked an index card from his pocket, studied it, then smiled. “In a much better neighborhood.” He recognized how much he sounded like his real-estate mother. “Close to the bathrooms. And convenient to both the old and new wings.”

  “You’re quite kind to do this for me,” said Helga.

  Her accent tantalized him as much as the lithe body moving beneath her airy, white dress. He looked at her face, framed by blond braids, and realized that she wore no makeup. This honesty in body and spirit, so rare among the other girls, drew him as much as her striking looks. She was a tall glass of cold spring water after years of Tiffany and Diet Coke. Gazing at her silver-blue eyes, he felt he’d do anything for her. Making a start, he pulled up at locker 422 and deftly unlocked it.

  “I don’t know if you had any dessert with your lunch.” With a flourish, he opened the door, releasing a bakery’s rich fragrance. The plastic shelves he’d installed within held seven slices of chocolate cake.