Pretty Dead

by Francesca Lia Block

  Pretty Dead

  Francesca Lia Block

  For T.D. and J.B.

  in peace

  Contents

  Charlotte

  What William Saw

  The Loneliess of Beautiful Things

  Emily Floating

  Jared Dorian Pierce

  The Twin

  The Devil in Disguise

  Nightmare

  Pretty Dead

  Watch

  Dark Trick

  The Philosophical Egg

  The Fires

  Need

  Dark Soul

  The Questions

  Memories of the Great Cities—for Jared

  William Stone

  A V in Love

  The Artist Is a V Word

  The Girl in the Red Dress

  Psychography

  The Exchange

  Rage

  Meet the Monster

  Why Billy Came Back

  Happily, Not Ever, After

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Francesca Lia Block

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Charlotte

  Teenage girls are powerful creatures. I remember; I was once one of them. They are relentless and underutilized. They want what they want, and they will do what they must to get it. Love, possessions, beauty, food, sweets, friends. Unless they are crushed so hard as to give up. But then they are just as relentless, only seeking different things. Destruction, annihilation. Unless they can find a way to birth something beautiful out of themselves. In this way teenage girls and Night’s children are not that much different, are we?

  What William Saw

  It’s amazing how beautiful destruction can appear. If we don’t judge it, don’t put value on it, it’s just color and light and motion. You can think of it as a kind of art.

  The sky is red. Every sunset like a warning of disasters still to come.

  She sits by the pool, tiled like the ones we saw in Rome so long ago. She is wearing a big white hat and sunglasses, but I can see she is staring out at the red-tinged sea below the cliffs beyond her house. The movieland villa, the tiny palace bought by someone else, a man, now dead, the one she left me for. But she didn’t really leave me for him. She just needed to go. And all these years I’ve wandered the earth, looking for her. She left no easy trace.

  My Charlotte. Mine.

  I wonder what she is thinking. I remember how her body felt, the long, lean limbs, the sharp, curved hipbones, the swell of her breasts. I remember the plumpness of her lips and the way her eyelids trembled, her eyes shattered blue glass turned skyward when I pressed my lips to her swan neck.

  She doesn’t think I am capable of love; perhaps she is right. But what is dreaming of someone for a hundred years? Isn’t that a form of love? Isn’t love following her across the world and waiting, hidden in the dark, watching her, afraid to approach because of what you might lose? I took something from her once, so long ago. Seeing her now, I wonder why I have followed her all this way, looked for her for so long. She doesn’t want to come away with me. How weary she is of this world.

  The girl beside her reminds me of Charlotte when we first met. There is a kind of blankness about her, like a canvas. She is much smaller than Charlotte. Her hair is dark. She sits curled up in a towel, feet tucked under her. Her lips form a slight pout; she shows some discontent. Her wrists look so fragile, as if they could break with a snap. While Charlotte looks at the sunset, the girl looks at Charlotte. She is assessing the flawless skin, the full breasts, the long, long legs. She is thinking about the house filled with treasures—tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl, jade dragons, cloisonné vases, authentic Impressionist landscapes in carved frames. She is thinking about the closet filled with Balenciaga and Dior, the rows of bags and shoes. I know what women think—after all these years I should. She wants everything my Charlotte has. This in itself makes her appealing to me. I want to take her in my arms and comfort her. I can hear her voice now, soft and feathery across the garden.

  “On nights like this, when everything’s so beautiful, I want to live forever.”

  Charlotte says, “Don’t say that, Em.” Her voice is tense.

  The girl reminds me of someone else, too. Not just my young Charlotte. She reminds me of my maker, the one who took me in my madness and discontent and gave me the world and then abandoned me. Abandoned me, but with all the tools I needed to survive every destructive force that could befall the mortal earth.

  And then a thought crosses my mind. Maybe I do not really need Charlotte anymore. Maybe a substitute would suffice. And if I take someone Charlotte loves, in a way she will still be mine.

  Although it does not always work, although they do not know it, I might be able to give each of them what they most desire.

  The Loneliess of Beautiful Things

  I love beautiful old things. They create the illusion that they will last forever, that I will not be alone.

  I live in a house filled with them. The house is in the Palisades, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific is not unlike my eyes—sometimes sparkling blue and sometimes gray and sometimes dark. It is even older than the things and will last forever, or at least as long as anything else.

  The house is a villa with white walls and a coral-tiled roof. It stands behind banks of red roses. There is an entryway with a marble parquet floor, a Ming vase and a painted Chinese cabinet filled with carved opium pipes. On the walls are paintings by Monet and Picasso. Upstairs, in the round master bedroom, is a statue of Quan Yin, the Chinese goddess of compassion, that is almost as tall as I am and painted in faded jade and teal and rose. She lies on a green silk divan because she is broken and cannot sit up on her own. There is a Louis XIV chair of gold and tattered white damask in the powder room and an old Louis Vuitton steamer trunk filled with dress-up clothes. My perfume bottle collection covers the quartz countertops. Most of them are collector’s items. Ambergris, labdanum and old rose in crystal teardrops, silver filigreed rosettes. I must always use a lot of perfume to hide the fact that my body has no scent of its own.

  I tell everyone that my parents are away, living in Europe. People pity me, but mostly they feel envy. I have all the luxury and freedom a girl my age could want.

  They just don’t know that I have lived for almost a century.

  People want to be me. They think that the way I look and the things I have are enviable. My hair is naturally blond. I read online that the blond gene will soon become extinct. The last blonds will be in Norway or Denmark. Then there will be none left.

  I am five feet ten. At the time I was made, this was extremely tall for a girl. My parents worried that I would scare off suitors. Nowadays it is not so extreme.

  I am very thin. At the time I was made, this was not considered such a desirable trait. Now it is strived for in a frenzied fashion.

  I have broad, bony shoulders. My hips and large breasts have always served me well, except, unfortunately, for the main purpose for which they were designed. No child will ever come from this body, although sometimes I dream of a child, a little girl, to care for.

  My large, voluptuous lips are naturally very pink. My eyes are large, heavy-lidded and, as previously mentioned, the colors of the Pacific Ocean. I am often told I have the look of someone who has been awakened from a long, dream-filled sleep.

  I move jaggedly and without much grace, but no one seems to mind this at all. They are busy looking at my breasts and long legs, my lips and nostrils and eyes.

  I dress mostly in antique-lace blouses or silk gowns, tight blue designer jeans, high-heeled Spanish leather boots and ancient necklaces of giant Chinese amber beads or Egyptian tur
quoise and gold. I line my eyes with kohl and paint my pink lips red. I wear my naturally blond hair loose and long, or piled up on my head with stray tendrils, or in many little braids.

  People want to be me. But I am like that Quan Yin lying prone in my bedroom. No one understands the extent of my loneliness.

  Emily Floating

  Something terrible has happened to Emily Rosedale.

  Emily Rosedale did not have blond hair, blue eyes, big pink lips, big breasts, a lavish wardrobe (at home she liked to wear cutoff jean shorts, her brother’s Star Wars T-shirts and woolen socks) or a house of her own stuffed with beautiful antiques. This is what she had: sad brown eyes, brown ringlets, ballet lessons, a love of classic novels, delicacy, kindness, innocence—in spite of what had happened to her—a mother who loved her but who did not protect her when she needed it most and a boyfriend named Jared Dorian Pierce.

  Emily Rosedale was found in her bathtub with slit wrists. They say it was suicide.

  Like Jared Pierce, I, too, loved Emily Rosedale. I can say that I loved her as much as I have loved anyone, except one other, in these long years.

  We met in our English class, where I sat bored, daydreaming, examining my perfectly manicured vermilion nails and answering the teacher’s queries without having to think, as I have read the material numerous times. Emily was the only one who had anything interesting to say. She always seemed to have an innate understanding of the heroine’s fatal flaw.

  I noticed that her ringlets would fit perfectly around my fingers. I imagined gently tugging on them, feeling them straighten and then bounce back. She turned one day while I was admiring her curls, turned suddenly and for no apparent reason, and smiled at me over her small shoulder with a sweet, wry curve of her lips.

  That was when I sniffed the first whiff of the blood inside her. That is when I saw the true color of her, shining around her head. She was white, white light, but at the very edges a rim of darkness like the bloodred trimming a pale rose.

  One day I invited her over to study for a test. Instead of studying we had steak tartar in my kitchen of blue and yellow Venetian tile. The food made her squeamish, but she ate it anyway and drank the red wine I gave her. I drank my special red, the kind I get from my dealer; it resembles a dark Bordeaux. Then we swam naked in my long blue pool with the sea gods spouting jets. The water was warm; it was late spring and you could smell the imaginings of summer and see in the clear distance the ocean that is not unlike my eyes. Emily had undressed shyly, slipping quickly into the pool; her body was smaller and paler than I had thought. She splashed in the water like a child and stayed there until evening came from the east to sit in my rose garden. When Emily finally got out, her lips were blue and her fingers wrinkled with white whorls. I wrapped her in my thickest white bathrobe—stolen, during one of my many visits to New York, from the Plaza Hotel—and brought her inside.

  We drank more of our libations, dressed up in gowns from my trunk and danced to Portishead in my sunken living room. She had chosen a white satin ball gown with a tattered skirt, white elbow-length kid gloves with tiny pearl buttons and a diamond tiara. I wore a white velvet cape with a white fox collar over a tulle evening dress covered in beaded blossoms.

  She said, “What is it like to have everything?” Her voice was soft, but I heard the slightest edge to it.

  I took her hand in mine and twirled her around like a ballerina on a child’s jewelry box.

  “Tell me!” she insisted.

  “What makes you think I have everything?”

  “Oh, come on, you just want to hear me say it! You’re a genius, you look like a supermodel and you live in a palace!”

  She danced away from me, around the Tang horses on the inlaid table. In some ways she reminded me of myself so long ago. The freedom, the sweetness and the underlying restlessness and discontent. It was as if we had known each other forever.

  “I don’t have everything. Believe me. You may have everything yourself and just not know it yet.”

  Emily shook her head and stopped dancing. “I don’t,” she said. She sat down on the couch and I joined her. Her eyes were bright with agitation.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her. I wanted to stroke her hair to calm her. I noticed that the light-blue polish on her toenails was chipped. I wanted to repaint them for her.

  “Charlotte. I was going to tell you something. I don’t know you that well. It’s probably too much.” It was a statement, but I heard the question mark at the end. She hoped I would insist.

  “You can tell me,” I said. “I understand about secrets.” How I wanted then to let Emily know who I really was. I felt so close to her. So close. Maybe just because I hadn’t had a girl sit beside me in such a long time, but still. I could smell the soap she had used in my bathroom, and the more elusive scent of her skin beneath it.

  I poured us more wine, and she took a large gulp, grimaced as it went down.

  “I couldn’t tell my mom, even.”

  “I understand,” I said, remembering my mother’s wan face before I left her. She never knew my secret, either.

  Then Emily told me that her mother’s last boyfriend had raped her the night before he left her mom two years before.

  The only one Emily had ever told was Jared Pierce. She was afraid to admit that being with Jared did make her feel as if she had everything, in spite of what had been taken from her.

  “Meeting him felt like it saved my life,” she told me. “Before that I didn’t think anything mattered. I used to go to sleep wishing I wouldn’t wake up in the morning.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “Now I want to live forever. If I had one wish it would be to live forever with the one I love.”

  She said she had never known you could love anyone that much, for eternity or enough to die for, like the characters in her favorite novels. She had thought it was just a fiction.

  I told her, “No, that is real.”

  Believe me. I know. But even if I wanted to die for someone, it wouldn’t be that easy.

  They just keep dying for me.

  Emily, none of this is worth it. Not this endangered blond hair, not this house full of shining things, the velvets and pearls and shiny red-soled shoes of fortune, not even this beautiful curse of immortality. What you had, even with the pain—that was life. What I have, especially now, without you, without the other one I loved and lost, is just living. Dead.

  Jared Dorian Pierce

  He is tall, even hunched over like that. Long arms and legs, the bony wrists dangling from his shirtsleeves. Black hair—straight, combed back or falling in his face. Even unshaven, his chin is still defined. His eyes are dark green and slanted, feline, under his dark glasses. Emily had told me he was adopted, his heritage a mix that embarrassed him, although it was what made him so beautiful. Dressed carefully in white cotton T-shirts and torn Levi’s, sometimes a leather jacket, black biker boots. Not like all the surfer boys around here in their shorts and flip-flops, but he can surf, too. He walked with her everywhere, protective; sat sullenly outside her ballet studio every afternoon to give her a ride home on his motorcycle. All the girls wanted a boy like that. Someone so beautiful to wait for them.

  I tried to hide it from both of them, but I, too, wanted a Jared Pierce for myself, the way I had wanted William when we first met.

  Jared Pierce was an artist. A real one. What I had always wanted to be, and perhaps, once, could have been. He painted Emily’s portrait and wrote songs for her on his guitar. Sang them to her in her darkened room before he kissed her. She heard about herself in the songs, saw her face and body in the portraits and hardly recognized that angel, but it reminded her of how she appeared to him. He had even painted her as a little girl from an old photo. That was her favorite of the portraits. In it she looked very small except for her long white neck and looming, womanly eyes.

  I came to find him the day after the funeral. I knew where he would be, on the beach in front of his house. The police
had already questioned him and let him go. You’d have thought his family and friends would have him on suicide watch after what had happened, but he was alone. Not that he had any friends. Except for Emily, who was gone.

  And me?

  I wondered.

  The day was bright, but I felt a menacing gray gloom, turning raggedy black at the edges, veined with black. I stripped off my shoes and walked barefoot across the damp sand at the shore, feeling it squish between my toes. He sat hunched on the beach, wearing jeans, a thermal and a sweatshirt with the sleeves pulled down over his hands, protection against the cool wind. The light was flashing whiteness, and I never feel safe like that. Maybe it’s just psychological, based on all the mythology. The idea that we can’t be out in the day wasn’t even in the original lore (it came from the movies), but I still dress carefully in the sun—a big white hat and long-sleeved zip-up shirt in a thick white sunproof fabric. Layers of sunscreen. You just never know.

  I came up behind Jared and saw he was holding something white in his hands, holding it up to his face.

  I said his name.

  He jumped and turned to see me, crumpling the white thing in his large hand. “Fuck!”

  “I’m sorry if I startled you.”

  “Charlotte.” He looked at me in a way I had seen him look at me before, when Emily was alive, but I had denied it then. It was as if he could see beyond my surface to what lay beneath. As if he could see the layers of darkness and, way beneath that, the last flicker of light that might still be there.