The Little Black Dress

by Linda Palund

  Everybody heard me, and I was too embarrassed to come out of the girls’ room until Wendy finally managed to sneak me out through a side door during a fast dance when nobody was looking. But the damage was done. Bobby ran with the elite crowd, and I had just demonstrated in front of the entire junior high school student body what an immature little nerd I truly was. I was just lucky I had Wendy to keep the bullies off me afterward.

  Along with my interest in weird music, I finally began to develop a degree of individuality and style. Over the next year, Wendy did a bit of a makeover on me too. She lightened my hair with this easy-to-use rinse, so I became a strawberry blonde instead of a scary redhead. Then she taught me how to wear makeup and took me shopping to further hone my “style” so that I learned what looked good on me and enhanced my natural attributes without compromising my dark sensibilities and my desire to remain unconventional.

  So by the time Carmen came into my life, I was a five-foot-four strawberry blonde with a fine little face, good teeth, and green eyes. My outfit of choice was tight black jeans and a long, deep crimson or purple-colored top with lots of belts and scarves. I wore my hair long, with big hoop earrings that suited me best. Oh yes, Wendy was responsible for that too; she pierced my ears for me with a sewing needle.

  So even though I kept putting her down, she had always been a good friend to me, and with her dad being this big-shot Hollywood blockbuster director, she could walk among the top cliques at our school. Her friendship had always afforded me protection from the usual torments. And to her credit, she only grazed among that crowd without ever actually belonging to it. Her heart was totally devoted to dancing, and when she was not at school, she was working out with her personal choreographer. She didn’t have time for petty school politics because she was absolutely driven. I felt I was lucky she still wanted to be my friend after all the time I spent ignoring her.

  We passed the weekend after my return from Europe preparing ourselves for the new semester. I showed her my prospectus for Santa Cruz, and she showed me her acceptance letter from the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York, known as the AMDA.

  “That’s fantastic. I heard it was really impossible to get into that school unless you’re totally talented!” I exclaimed, giving her a big hug. “And you know you are.”

  “Yeah. They have these monster auditions, and you have to be recommended by your choreographers too,” she said, kind of dismissively. “But my dad is furious with me. He said it’s not a real university, and I should stay out of show business anyway. He really hates it.”

  “God, I was hoping he’d got over that by now.”

  “Nope, he’s just dead set against it, but he can’t stop me,” she said, “I love it too much, and I’m damned good at it. I’m a lot better dancer than I’ll ever be a student.”

  “Well, he will get over it,” I assured her. “He’s probably trying to protect you from an industry he knows is pretty corrupt and cruel.”

  Sunday afternoon, James called me to say his cab was coming to take him to the airport, and I ran over, and we said our tearful good-byes. I stayed late with Angela, and we made a batch of brownies to drown our sorrow in. Then I went home to take a look at my choice of outfits for the next day. Classes were beginning on Monday.

  Time was just going to keep right on going, and I had to get on with the rest of my life. The rest of my new life, that is, the one without Carmen.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE NEW BOY

  ASIDE FROM haunting my dreams, I didn’t know what Carmen’s ghost got up to over the summer. All I knew was that the rumors started up again as soon as the semester began.

  I still didn’t know if it was simple hysteria on the part of the male student body brought on by the rumors of Carmen’s ghost or what, but now all the new kids seemed to be experiencing these same hallucinations or visitations or whatever. I never could explain it adequately because I never experienced any of these visitations myself, but after a while, I simply took it upon myself to protect Carmen’s memory as well as the mental health of these new kids, and I began to look out for any new male arrivals.

  I wanted to get ahold of them before they were contaminated by the stories circulating throughout our campus. I took to patrolling the hallways, as unobtrusively as possible. Sometimes, I actually volunteered for hall patrol, which was a duty seniors could take on during their free periods but was usually the purview of the most craven Goody Two-shoes. It mainly meant you were supposed to bust kids who were skipping class or smoking on campus. I didn’t like pretending I gave a shit about school rules, but I wanted a chance to explain this phenomenon to any new kid I spotted and give him my spin on the ghost stories so that they made some sense.

  So when I saw this tall skinny kid leaning against the wall outside the door to the chem lab, his face drained of all color, staring down the hall with his mouth open, I could tell right away he was the new boy in school.

  He had obviously lost his way. No one else was around because class had already started, and he was alone in the corridor. I walked right up to him in a casual, nonthreatening way so as not to frighten him any further, and said, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  He stared down at me, eyeing me carefully to make certain I was real before answering, “I think I just did!”

  I leaned back against the wall beside him. “Yup, you probably did,” I agreed. “Tell me what you saw.”

  I looked him over while he answered. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy, but the poor thing had that geeky look boys his age get when they are late bloomers. Those are the kinds of boys who have their massive growth spurt late in their teens, around about seventeen, becoming suddenly and unexpectedly miles taller, and therefore, unused to their new height, they become terribly awkward and clumsy, bumping into things and knocking things over while their faces grow bonier and their bodies become leaner because they can’t keep enough food in themselves to compensate for all this new growth.

  “I was late to class,” he began. “I couldn’t find the chemistry lab, and all of a sudden, the bell rang, and I was the only one in the halls. I heard this sound, this tapping sound, like high-heeled shoes walking behind me, like they were following me, maybe teasing me. So I turned around, and there was no one there!” He looked at me to see if I believed him, and I just nodded and let him go on.

  “I decided to walk back down that hallway and see if somebody was playing a joke or something, but as soon as I started walking in the other direction, I began to hear those footsteps again, but behind me now, just tap, tap, tapping like a woman in high heels walking right behind me. I turned around real fast, but there was no one there again, except this time I thought I caught a glimpse of someone stepping around the next corner, a girl in a black dress. I don’t know, but I blinked my eyes for a second and she was gone.” And he shook his head in disbelief and looked hard at me. “You are real, aren’t you?”

  “Oh yes, I am certainly real,” I assured him. “But listen, I’m kind of your, um, unofficial guide, and I need to explain a little about what you just heard and maybe saw. You need to come with me now.”

  He was staring at me again like I might be crazy, but I just went on, “Look, I’m real, and I know some things that will help you, so just let’s get out of this hallway, okay?” He still looked doubtful, but I kept talking. “It’s your first day, right? You can skip this class. Everything is always chaotic on a kid’s first day. The administration won’t care, and your teachers won’t care either. Come with me; we need to talk.”

  Luckily, he was still so obviously awestruck that he let me lead him down the hall to the seniors’ lounge, where I had special privileges on account of my grade point average and my association with Carmen. The seniors’ lounge is very cool; it’s tucked away in the arts workshop part of the school, so the lower grades don’t come near it, and it provides a respite for those seniors with good grades. We can use it for study or for a place to hang out in during our free peri
ods. It’s equipped with sofas, study tables, and computers, as well as a coffee machine and a couple of vending machines with sandwiches and snacks.

  “Hey, this is cool. Are you sure we’re really allowed in here?”

  “This is the senior lounge. You are a senior, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said, putting his book bag down on one of the tables.

  “How about a coffee?”

  “We’re allowed coffee at school?”

  “You’re a senior, remember? This is one of the approved drugs for seniors. Milk and sugar?” I asked, and he nodded, as I expected he would, and I brewed two cups of slightly chemical-tasting coffee in the handy brewing machine, and we sat down at one of the tables.

  “I’m Lucy, by the way.”

  “I’m Seth Greenberg,” he offered with a toothy smile, revealing the appropriate amount of orthodontia necessary for life in LA.

  “Where did you transfer from?” I asked, always curious.

  “We’re from Austin, Texas.”

  “Wow!” I exclaimed, genuinely impressed. “How did you get here, of all places?” We didn’t get very many Texans in LA.

  “My dad’s a police detective, a captain, actually, homicide. He just got this offer from the LAPD and took it. He’s kind of a specialist in his field, one of the new-style ‘homicide criminologists’ with a PhD. They’ve got him working on the latest unsolved murders already, and we’ve only been in town for three days!”

  Oh my God! I thought. How perfect is this? He can help me. He has to have been sent here to help me find Carmen’s killers!

  I told Seth the whole gruesome story about Carmen’s murder and my association with her. I made sure he understood how truly awful it was those creeps were still at large and still out there somewhere. I wanted him to understand how important this was, and most of all, I wanted to make sure he talked to his father about it.

  “Christ! That’s awful,” he exclaimed, and he seemed honestly appalled by my story. “We’ve got to do something about this. That’s just horrible. I’ll help in whatever way I can.” Just like that. He sincerely wanted to help.

  We spent the next half hour talking about what he could do to get his father interested in the case or at least find out if his father was already working on it, and if so, how far he had gotten.

  I wasn’t looking for a new best friend right then; I was simply floating on the hope of finding Carmen’s killers at last. But then I asked Seth where he was living.

  “We’re living in Brentwood right now. Just renting.”

  “That’s pretty far from where I live,” I remarked.

  “I’ve got a car,” he answered.

  I didn’t know then that, from that point on, I would be seeing Seth nearly every day, and in the next few weeks, I would tell Seth everything there was to know about Carmen and me.

  CHAPTER 13

  HOPE

  SETH WAS waiting for me outside the front entrance after school that day. He was easy to spot, being so tall and skinny and dressed like a geek. He was probably the only boy in my school trying not to look cool. We walked together to the parking lot.

  “I have no idea what happened in any of my classes today,” he said. “All I could think about was your friend, Carmen. I can’t get her murder out of my mind.” He shuffled beside me through the throngs of normal LA high school kids, with their normal, angst-filled, privileged lives, hurrying to their flashy cars their folks had given them for their sixteenth birthdays. “I want to talk to my dad about it tonight.”

  “Gee,” I said, looking down at the sidewalk, which was covered in little round circlets of dried gum. I didn’t know what to say. I was too excited and hopeful. “Where’s your car?” I asked.

  “I didn’t know where to park, so it’s in the visitors’ lot, right here, actually,” and he pointed toward a little black Honda Civic, definitely not a prestigious car but reliable, parked close to the admin building.

  “You’re lucky you didn’t get a ticket,” I remarked.

  “I asked for a visitor’s permit,” he said. Of course he had. He was a policeman’s son. He’d do everything by the book, I thought. How wrong I was. “Where’s yours?” he asked, opening the back door of his car and throwing his book bag on the backseat. “Want me to give you a ride to it?”

  “Sure,” I said, climbing into the passenger seat. “I’ll show you where I park. It’s the best place, really.” He got in the car and put on his seat belt, and then we just looked at each other. I guess my face looked pretty grim, because he suddenly brightened up.

  “I know my dad’s going to help,” he said. Seth’s eyes were a gray-blue, like ice, but they were honest eyes, and I knew he meant what he said. “You’ll see. He’s going to find her killers. He can do it. He’s really good at his job.” He started the engine, and I directed him through the maze of parking lots to the student lot at the back of the theater arts building where I always parked. It had easy access to my homeroom, and there was always a space there because everyone else liked to park near the gym. I pointed out my little red car to Seth, and he pulled in beside it.

  “This is amazing, Seth,” I said, “I can’t believe that your dad’s a homicide detective. It’s fantastic. But how are you going to talk to him? Won’t your dad think you’re meddling in police business?”

  “I’ll just tell him how I met you and how we got talking—”

  “But you won’t tell him that you thought you saw Carmen’s ghost, right?” I interrupted.

  “No, of course not. I’ll definitely leave that part out. Maybe I’ll just say I met you in the senior lounge.”

  “Right, and we just got to talking. That’s normal, right?” I don’t know why I was suddenly obsessed with appearing normal. Seth certainly didn’t look normal. He was gangly and dressed like a geek. He was going to have a hard time fitting in as a senior here at Uni High. None of his clothes had designer labels on them, and he was wearing a short-sleeved plaid shirt, for God’s sake, so that his skinny arms stuck out like the “before” picture in a muscle-drink advertisement.

  “Look, don’t worry, Lucy,” he said, smiling a slightly crooked big-toothed smile. “I’ll know what to say. I’ll find out if my dad’s already working on the case or not, and if he’s not, I’ll tell him all about you and see if I can get him to check into it.”

  “But not too much about me,” I said.

  “Just enough so he realizes how important this is.”

  “Thanks, Seth. Here, you better take my number in case you need to ask me anything.” We exchanged texts so we had each other’s numbers in our phones’ contact list. Then I opened the door and leaned in to say good-bye.

  “It was great meeting you,” I said.

  “Yeah, me too,” he said. “I’m going to help, you’ll see. Meet me here before class tomorrow? I may need you to show me how to get to homeroom.” He smiled that crooked smile again. He didn’t look too bad when he smiled, I decided.

  “Sure, and maybe you can call me tonight if you have any news about Carmen?”

  “I will,” he said. I shut the door and waved a good-bye as he drove off to wherever he lived in Brentwood.

  I climbed into my little Mazda and drove out of the school lot and through the streets of West LA without seeing a thing, my head buzzing with new possibilities. I don’t even remember what route I took. All I know is when I got home, I surprised my brother by actually eating one of Constanza’s abundant after-school snacks. I had an appetite for the first time since the day Carmen disappeared.

  Seth telephoned me just after we finished our dinner, which, to my mother’s great pleasure, I ate most of. It was a good thing he called, because I was so agitated I couldn’t concentrate on anything at all.

  As soon as I saw his name come up on my phone, I said a quick “hi” and ran down the stairs to my bedroom. I didn’t want anyone listening in.

  “I talked to my dad,” Seth said.

  “How did it go?” I asked, trying not
to sound too hopeful.

  “I just told him how I met you and how we started talking and how you were connected to this girl named Carmen that had been murdered last year.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “My dad wasn’t surprised that I knew about Carmen’s murder. He already knew your name too.”

  “He did?”

  “Yes. He seemed to know all about you, that’s why he asked me how you were doing.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him the truth. That you were depressed and disappointed and that you didn’t think the police were looking hard enough to find her killers.”

  “What did your dad say?”

  “He told me that he already knew all about the case and that it was a top priority. I kind of got the feeling that he thought the LAPD hadn’t done such a good job on the investigation.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “Not in so many words. He plays things close to the vest. But he told me he was planning to reinterview you this very week. In fact, he’s going to reinterview everyone as soon as he can.”

  “That’s amazing,” I sighed, biting my own lip. I was afraid I was going to burst into tears at any moment.

  “He also told me, in no uncertain terms, that he had no intention of sharing any information about the case with me. Period,” Seth added.

  “Oh gosh,” I said, disappointed that I wouldn’t have an inside into any information after all. “That’s too bad.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” Seth said, chuckling. “I’m a computer geek. I’ve been hacking into my dad’s computer for years. If my dad isn’t willing to share his information, I’ll figure out another way of obtaining it.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Yes, I can,” he assured me. “We’ll keep tabs on the investigation, don’t worry. I better go now. I’ll see you before class tomorrow.”