A Fate Totally Worse Than Death

by Paul Fleischman

  Brooke cocked her head. “You mean you go to Norway when you die?”

  Danielle rolled her eyes. “Don’t you guys ever read?”

  “Like what?” asked Tiffany.

  “Like Death of a Nerd, A Demon Among Us, Bridge Over the River Styx. The ghosts of the murdered are always coming back to earth.”

  “In books!” yelled Tiffany.

  “And in real life, too! I’ve already seen two ghosts in my life before now. And let me tell you, they weren’t made up.” Danielle shivered at the thought “If you haven’t seen one, you just haven’t been in the right place at the right time. But you sure as hell are now.”

  The other two eyed her uncertainly.

  “It’s a classic case. I should have caught on sooner.” Danielle kicked a rock. “All the signs were right there.”

  “Like what?” asked Brooke.

  “Like open your eyes! The first day of the first school year without Charity Chase, a new girl shows up, out of the blue. From a faraway country, at the ends of the earth.”

  Brooke and Tiffany pondered these facts with sudden trepidation.

  “When I went to her house, it didn’t exist Naturally! She’s a spirit!”

  Shaken, Brooke leaned on the car for support.

  “And her favorite place to sit?” pressed Danielle.

  “On the bench in Clifftop Park,” Brooke and Tiffany answered in unison.

  “Talk about totally obvious,” Danielle scolded herself. “They always come back to the place where they died.”

  Tiffany swallowed. “If she’s a ghost, how come you can’t stick your hand right through her?”

  “They get bodies when they come back to earth,” said Danielle. “But not like ours. They’re just shells. Just look at her. Her hair’s beyond blond. And her skin’s too pale and bloodless for a mortal’s.”

  “And it never sunburned,” remembered Brooke.

  Tiffany stiffened. “My god,” she muttered. “That’s why she left biology class the day we all pricked our fingers to draw blood.”

  Brooke screamed. “I can’t believe this is happening!”

  “Why is she back?” Tiffany demanded.

  “For the same reason ghosts always come back to earth,” said Danielle. “To avenge her death!”

  “You’re sure she knows we did it?” asked Brooke.

  “Of course she does!” Danielle shot back. “You heard her yourself: ‘There will be justice.’”

  “‘That’s why I’ve come,’” Tiffany repeated, suddenly understanding the words.

  “You bet it’s why,” declared Danielle. “She really gave herself away with that line.”

  Brooke’s eyes were wild. “What’s she going to do to us?”

  “She’s already started,” said Danielle.

  The other two girls locked their eyes on hers, waiting to learn their fates.

  “I didn’t want to tell anybody. But I’ve been having trouble breathing lately.” Danielle looked away from the others. “It’s been getting worse for a week now. It’s like I’m turning into a little old lady.” She considered removing her six false teeth, but decided that her point was clear.

  “That’s weird,” said Brooke. She unbuttoned her right shirt cuff and pulled it back. Her audience grimaced. A dozen dark spots were spread out like islands over the back of her hand. One unmistakably resembled a skull.

  “Jesus,” whispered Danielle. “Liver spots.”

  “What?” asked Brooke.

  “Liver spots! Old people get ’em. My grandmother’s even got ’em on—”

  Brooke pulled back her hair, revealing four more high on her forehead.

  “On her head,” Danielle finished. She examined the skull-shaped spot and smirked. “Nice of her to make sure you got the message.”

  “And I think,” added Brooke, “that my hearing’s starting to go. A little.”

  “A lot,” said Tiffany. She noticed the other two looking at her.

  “Well?” asked Danielle.

  Tiffany was silent. Then tears began to overflow her eyes. “When I blew it that time? Taking Helga’s picture? It was all because of this!” She held out her hands for public inspection. Her knuckles were swollen, her fingers bent like claws. “Sometimes the pain’s so bad I want to scream.”

  “Sounds like arthritis,” Danielle diagnosed.

  “What’s happening to us?” wailed Tiffany.

  “Helga,” Danielle replied. “You said it yourself. She has magical powers. She could have killed us back in the bathroom. Or any other time she wanted. But instead, she picked out a punishment for us that’s worse than death—getting old!”

  The three peered at each other, their faces frozen by this revelation.

  Brooke’s eyes lost their focus, then seemed to turn inward, beholding the dawn of mortality. “Are we going to die? Soon, I mean?”

  “Beats me,” Danielle replied.

  Simultaneously, Brooke and Tiffany exploded into tears.

  “I knew we never should have met Charity at night!” blubbered Tiffany.

  “Especially at the edge of a cliff!” added Brooke.

  It had all been Danielle’s plan. She avoided their eyes.

  “I’m too young to die!” Tiffany informed the universe at the top of her lungs.

  “You’re getting older by the minute,” mused Danielle.

  Tiffany faced her accusingly. “You got us into this! Now get us out! Or my ghost will kill you deader than dead. If Helga doesn’t get you first.”

  “You think I don’t want to?” Danielle shouted back. “Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy. You can’t kill a ghost. I’m sure of that, from what I’ve read in books. But let me look back through some of them. Once in a while the spirits get beaten. At least we can maybe get some ideas.”

  “Hurry!” said Brooke. She opened the door of her car and urged Danielle inside. “I’m having my birthday party in two weeks!”

  CHAPTER 11

  ………Tiffany flicked her windshield wipers to MEDIUM. It was Tuesday night. Though normally she hated rain, in this case it suited her perfectly. It meant fewer people on the streets and fewer witnesses to her errand.

  She followed Fourth Street out of Cliffside and into neighboring Wilmington Heights. Children’s boutiques and outdoor cafés gave way to bars and self-storage lockers. She recalled where she was and locked the car doors. She turned onto Broadway, swerving around a drunk talking to himself in the street. The rain was now drumming deafeningly on the roof of the car. “Shut up!” she yelled back. She turned the wipers to HIGH and struggled to make out the numbers on the buildings. “Where the hell is 930?” she demanded. She drove five more blocks, glimpsed 924, crept past a bail-bond office, and parked. She sighed. She would be safe here, from prying eyes if not from rape. She got out and limped toward the drugstore. When your mission was buying adult diapers—for yourself—confidentiality won out over price, selection, and personal safety.

  She stepped inside. The store seemed empty. A hefty, grim-visaged female clerk, guarding the register like a dragon, took note of her entrance without greeting. Tiffany disappeared down an aisle. Another customer entered the store. Tiffany ducked down instinctively. She wondered if she really needed the diapers, then thought back with a shudder to her close calls in English and history, and suddenly sensed her bladder’s fullness. She scanned three aisles, then found what she was seeking at last and gave silent thanks. She debated between Second Childhood and Sphincter Sentry, picked up three packages of the former, then made her way to the front.

  “I’m buying these for my great-grandmother?” she announced, unbidden, to the clerk. “She just came to live with us? From Kansas? It’s the very brand she asked me to get? The same brand she used to use? Back in Kansas?”

  The clerk stared at her. “Where in Kansas?”

  Tiffany swallowed. “Dallas,” she answered out of the blue, praying it was located in that state. The woman eyed her. Waiting for judgment, Tiffany suddenly rea
lized that she was beginning to pee.

  “Nice town,” said the clerk, approving her answer. “I’ve been there two or three times.”

  Tiffany had trouble maintaining eye contact. A Nirvana-like bliss passed over her face, followed by deep worry.

  “That’ll be nineteen dollars and sixty-eight cents,” said the clerk.

  Tiffany paid, requested a brown bag, and furtively eyed her small puddle. Her jeans and left shoe held most of the urine. She took a trial step, getting used to the feel, then remembered the storm with relief.

  “Floor’s a little wet,” she remarked offhandedly. “From the rain.”

  The clerk bent over the counter to look.

  Tiffany peered in panic at her bright yellow urine. “They say this storm has a lot of acid rain in it,” she added and vanished out the door.

  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 Bloods
tains 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!