A Fate Totally Worse Than Death

by Paul Fleischman

  “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.

  “Pack plenty of mace,” Danielle advised. She likewise passed over her own malady: In the course of chewing a bagel at breakfast, one of her molars had fallen out, causing a hurried trip to the dentist and much talk of bridges and crowns. She’d been thinking about Helga when it happened. She pictured her now, with Drew, and grasped the compass as if it were a knife.

  “So Miss Norway didn’t get the point?” Danielle pressed the tip of the compass against her thigh until it hurt.

  “Sorry,” said Tiffany, her voice guilty.

  Danielle returned her eyes to The Godfather. A man was running. “Forget it,” she snapped. “I’ll take care of it myself.” She hung up the phone. “Nitwit.”

  Danielle lurked after school the next day until she spied Helga walking home. She followed a block behind her, then turned left on a route of her own. Three hours earlier, at lunch, Danielle had entered the school office, empty save for the parent volunteer who typed and answered the phone. Casually remarking to the woman that she’d heard that her daughter had just received a knife wound, she’d been amazed at how quickly the woman had left and with what ease she’d found Helga’s address in the files. She now pulled the paper out of her shorts pocket and pondered the address: 244 Gardenia Court. She’d make sure Helga had time to get there first.

  Reaching 1st Street, she came to Frescobaldi’s Fish Shop and stepped inside. She cruised the long case, passing the ordered ranks of crab, sea bass, and red snapper. Then she halted abruptly. Before her lay four salmon. Danielle smiled. Before school, she’d made a rare stop in the library, had found the encyclopedias, and had learned, in the article on Norway, that fish was one of the country’s staple foods—especially salmon. The examples before her, cast up on their beach of ice, all lacked heads and tails. This suited her fine. She savored in memory the scene from The Godfather and caught the attention of the man behind the counter.

  ‘‘One salmon head, please,” she said.

  A smile shone through the man’s walrus mustache. “The head only? I bet you got cats.”

  Danielle forced herself to smile and nod her head. She hated cats.

  The fish seller turned and rummaged through a barrel.

  “A big one, if you’ve got it,” she added.

  The man’s forearm emerged, slick and flecked with scales. He held out a head. Its huge eye and Danielle’s regarded each other.

  “Do you have one with more blood? Around the throat?”

  The man’s mustache jerked. “More blood? You kidding?”

  “No,” she answered matter-of-factly. His look caused her to reconsider. “I mean yes.” She tittered in support of the “kidding” explanation. “You’re sure it’s a salmon?”

  “Sure I’m sure.”

  It looked like any other fish head to her. Fortunately, Helga was Norwegian. She’d recognize it the way an American would the Statue of Liberty. The man wrapped it and handed it to her.

  “No charge,” he said. “For cats.” He smiled.

  She pitied his poor business sense. “Thanks.”

  She left the shop and set off down 1st Street, following Clifftop Park across the street, high above the ocean. The day was warm, the sea breeze tousling the park’s long row of palm trees. She neared the bench where Charity Chase had been confronted by the Huns her last night. Staring at it from across the street, Danielle suddenly remembered driving past the park with her parents two days before and seeing none other than Helga sitting there. The coincidence was unsettling. She pried her eyes off the bench and looked elsewhere.

  Rose Street, Lily Street, Poppy, Poinsettia…. Danielle felt strangely short of breath. She checked Helga’s address once more, then pulled a note from her other pocket. She studied her words: “Stay away from the Hun boys or you’re dead meat.” On she marched, fueled by the picture of Helga hearing the doorbell ring, leaving her homework, opening the door, and finding the salmon head on her doorstep, the note clamped in its jaws.

  Panting now, Danielle sighted a bus stop ahead and staggered toward it as if it were the promised land. She collapsed on the bench, feeling like one of the relics at the nursing home. She needed energy. She pulled a candy bar from her p
ack and greedily bit into it, cursing her parents for not letting her drive to school like all the other Huns. If only she hadn’t had that fifth accident! And if only the man she’d hit would give her a break and come out of his stupid coma. She pictured herself riding in Drew’s BMW, kissing his ear while he shifted, passing the sorry rows of hand-me-down Fords and Toyotas in the school parking lot. She took another bite of candy, felt something strange, spit out a chunk of chocolate and caramel, and saw one of her teeth sticking out of it.

  “What is going on?” she yelled. The old woman who was about to sit beside her chose to stand at a safe distance instead. Danielle plucked out the tooth and was alarmed to see that it wasn’t a molar. Her tongue found the vacancy at once, in her upper jaw, just left of center. She opened her compact and peered in the mirror. She looked like a pirate or a street person. She shuddered and snapped the compact shut. Somehow she’d have to remember to keep her lips closed until the dentist fixed her up.

  She climbed to her feet and shuffled down the block, her tongue exploring the new gap with great interest. She tried to recenter her thoughts on her mission and came to Gardenia Court at last. She turned left and trudged a block and a half, puffing as if climbing Mt. Everest. The houses were small, well-kept bungalows. She passed numbers 238, 242, 246, then stopped. She pulled out Helga’s address and reread it: 244 Gardenia Court.

  She plodded to the end of the block, stared disgustedly at the street sign, then at Helga’s address once more. “I’m on Gardenia Court!” she burst out. She glanced across the street. All the numbers were odd, as she’d known they would be. Lungs wheezing, she backtracked, stopping between number 242, a pink stuccoed house, and its neighbor, number 246. Slowly the thought wormed through her weary brain: Helga’s house didn’t exist.

  CHAPTER 7

  ………Brooke’s eyes flickered open. Her dream of being passionately kissed by an unidentified boy melted away like a snowflake. Her mother was shaking her shoulder.

  “Time to get up, First Daughter.”

  The sky was just lightening. Brooke closed her eyes. For three mornings now she hadn’t heard her alarm. “Yes, Honored Mother,” she mumbled. Her mother left. With a mighty groan, Brooke raised herself out of bed. She groggily found her way into her robe, reached for the matchbox on her dresser, and sleep-walked through her daily dawn tour, placing sticks of incense in the house’s six holders and lighting them. She passed her fifteen-year-old sister, sweeping the house, eyes all but closed. From her brother’s room, lined with surfing posters, came his yawned “Yes, Master” and the voice of his tutor instructing him in Chinese verse patterns.

  She lit the living room’s incense stick and pulled her robe over her nose to avoid the scent she’d come to loathe. When, she wondered, would her parents grow out of this idiotic phase? Their family came from Scotland, not China. Had she and her siblings brought it on themselves? It was true that they’d often talked back to their mother, had ordered from catalogs with their father’s credit cards, and had refused to perform any household chores. Her parents had bought books on understanding teenagers. They’d tried written contracts and family counseling. Then they’d read the article on parents turning to Confucianism to keep their children in line. “Honored Father” and “Honored Mother,” obedience to parents, rigid etiquette, cheerful acceptance of one’s lot and duties—or a flogging with a bamboo rod. The movement was spreading coast to coast, hailed on TV by ecstatic parents. Brooke lit the last incense stick, vowing that she wouldn’t clean up after herself if the smell made her throw up.

  She shuffled into the kitchen and made breakfast for her parents and the tutor: omelettes with chives, fresh biscuits, peeled kiwis, and hand-squeezed orange juice. Vaguely, she wondered whether this was the traditional Confucian breakfast. While the adults ate in the formal dining room, she and her siblings hunched in the kitchenette and shared a pot of barley gruel, forbidden to speak but mentally recounting the Golden Age now past.

  Brooke returned to her room, washed and dressed, then stepped onto the scale. She’d lost another pound. Gruel and hard labor were good for something at least. Pledging herself to stop sneaking bowls of cereal to her room in the evening, she studied herself in the mirror a moment, then approached more closely. She viewed her left wrist. There was a brown spot of darker skin on it, about the size and shape of a penny, that had been hidden by her robe’s long sleeves. She’d never noticed it before.

  She sat down at her makeup table and surveyed the skyline of jars and dispensers. She reached for the tube of Jacques Pamplemousse Skin Salve and rubbed some on, without noticeable effect. She followed this with trial applications of pancake makeup, calamine lotion, Warts Away, Ajax cleanser, and lastly, Ponce de Leon-900 Tri-Alpha-Hydroxy Restorative Crême. She remembered it was Friday and rubbed it in harder. Though she hadn’t had a date in two years, she fantasized being asked out tonight, the boy noticing the spot on her wrist, and his spreading the word that she had AIDS, or leprosy. She glanced at the clock. It was nearly 7:30. The dark patch of skin was still visible. Though a heat wave had blown in the day before, she decided to peel off her tank top and put on a white, long-sleeved blouse instead, buttoning the cuffs to hide the spot. She then marched out and drove to school.

  She passed Drew, walking on the right, but didn’t stop to offer him a ride. She’d tried that on Thursday and had been turned down. She didn’t need more rejection. He’d actually claimed he preferred walking! She snorted. Was she truly that repulsive? The sight of him led her to review her roster of possible dates for that evening. Gavin. Too foul-breathed. Rhett. Too short. They were the only unattached Hun seniors. No wonder Danielle was determined to snare Drew. He was the plum of the Hun senior class, waiting to be picked. Dipping into the junior class, there was Logan. Majoring in substance abuse. Patrick. Too nerdy. Sean. Too much hardware hanging from his ears, a regular walking wind chime. She thought about Ray, the last date she’d had—a nice enough boy who’d been scared off either by her parents’ hour-long interrogation or by their Great Dane’s endless licking of his testicles. She checked her wrist. The spot was still there. She was mildly alarmed, until she realized there was no one left on her list of dates and that she’d be staying home anyway. Then she remembered Jonathan.

  Tiffany had broken up with him. Forever, she’d sworn to Brooke. Having heard the same line on eighty-seven previous occasions, Brooke had ignored it at the time. Now, desperate for a date, she chose to believe it. She parked the car and strode through the gate of the lot, her pace quickening. She entered the main building. At once she saw Jonathan, standing like a shopkeeper in front of his stationery supplies locker. She gave her cuffs a tug and approached.

  “Hi, Jonathan.”

  “Hi,” he said. With a practiced eye he sized her up, saw that she wasn’t opening her purse or giving other signs of buying something, and therefore turned his gaze elsewhere.

  “How ya doing?” Brooke remembered that her left side was her better one, and slid three steps to the right to offer him that vantage.

  “Just fine,” Jonathan replied. A girl came up, reached around Brooke, and swung open the locker to look over his wares. “Would you mind moving?” Jonathan addressed Brooke, and motioned her aside. She complied at once, then realized that her bad side was now facing him again. He sold two pencils, bringing each to a perfect point with an electric sharpener as a courtesy.

  “So how ya doing?” Brooke inquired.

  “You already asked me that.”

  “What?” She’d been having trouble hearing lately, especially when there was background noise.

  “I said, ‘You already asked me that.’”

  Brooke returned three steps to the right. “Oh,” she answered. She giggled, hoping to make him feel they’d shared a joke, but his eye was on an approaching customer, whom he moved Brooke aside to accommodate, making a sale of twelve sheets of notebook paper, with a thirteenth thrown in at no charge. The revelation reached Brooke that the way to his hea
rt lay through his wallet. She took out her own and studied his stock.

  “I need a pen, actually,” she lied. She reminded herself that he might be unattached only very briefly. Some of his breakups with Tiffany lasted no more than hours. She must seize her chance. “Make that a pack of twelve,” she said.

  Jonathan’s eyebrows arched. He seemed impressed. “At your service,” he said, and plucked the package off of one of the suction-cupped hooks he’d installed. She knew that she now had his attention, at the cost of $5.49.

  “Tiffany says you guys have broken up for good,” Brooke remarked, inspecting his box of special mark-downs.

  “You got it.”

  “Must be kind of lonely. You know. In the evenings.” She dared not look at him when she said it.

  “Not really,” Jonathan answered.

  He exchanged greetings with two passersby. Brooke feared she was losing his attention. She put a box of paper clips in his hand.

  “I’ve been reading a lot,” he volunteered.

  She read now and then. She wondered if she should propose that they read together tonight. It sounded weird. Then she remembered that he sold Playboy at another locker. Should she buy one and then suggest that they read the hilarious advice letters? This would get him pointed in the right direction, as well as adding $6.95 to his till. She debated furiously with herself.

  “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.