Perdita, p.1
Perdita, page 1
Perdita
Faith Gardner
Mirror House Press
Copyright © 2022 by Faith Gardner
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover designed by MiblArt.
ISBN:
Created with Vellum
Contents
1. Is This Sleep?
2. I Would Have Written It Down
3. Moonless World with No Stars
4. A Knocking That Won’t Go Away
5. Girl Made of Glass
6. To See the Morning
7. Between Sleep and Wakefulness
8. This World Behind
9. Ocean Floor Deeper
10. I Had A Time Machine
11. Prove It To Them
12. The Other Direction
13. Arielle’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
14. Darkening, Darkling, Darkening, Dark
15. I Survived
16. The Deepest Breath
17. Before and After
18. And A Wish
About the Author
More by Faith Gardner
The Second Life of Ava Rivers
1
2
1
Is This Sleep?
It’s two weeks before junior year starts and I don’t know yet that I can see the dead.
Right now I’m not a ghost-seer. In fact, if you saw me, you’d probably guess I’m professional slob because I’m wearing a tank that’s got a ketchup stain on the tit and some saggy yoga pants my sister doesn’t want anymore. You’d watch me sitting here in my bedroom like some kind of bad-postured TV-zombie with my best friend Chloe (who, even in leggings and an ’80s T-shirt with a faded surfboard on it, looks as if she could be a model for a skin or hair commercial) and you’d look back at me and think to yourself, “That girl? She doesn’t seem special at all.”
That’s what I imagine people say when they see me, anyway. Highlights of the moment would be the multiple empty bags of organic cheese puffs at my Freud-slippered feet (they’re called “Freudian slippers,” a gift from Mom) and the fact that this is the sixth consecutive episode of a reality show about dead pets who come back to haunt people that Chloe and I have sat through without even moving to even adjust a bra strap.
I should be appreciating the moment. Take some mental snapshots, bask in my ordinary existence. Do those “mindfulness” exercises my mom does when she gets pissed at door-to-door solicitors or patients who won’t stop calling. But change gives no heads-up when it comes, earthquake-styles, bumping and breaking loved but taken-for-granted things. So I spend the last few hours of normalcy watching a two-star reality TV show about the haunting of Smitty the cockatoo and a poltergeist that once was a cat named Mister Fluffers.
I’ve been laughing so hard I possibly ruptured an ab muscle. Or five.
“Mister Fluffers,” Chloe says again in her fake British accent. “’E was a fat old mangy beast of a cat, ’e was.”
That’s seriously how the gap-toothed British woman on TV talked about the poltergeist of her dead cat.
“She’s out of her mind,” I say, and then when I taste my own words, I stop to wonder. “I mean, right? Everyone on this show is.”
“They can’t all be.” Chloe pops a cheese puff in her mouth and chews it, thinking hard. “I mean, some of them. The Mister Fluffers lady is off her gourd, obviously. But … ghosts have to exist in some form.” She swallows. “Don’t you think?”
I nod. Watching cheeseball shows about them is one thing. And I like that I can talk logically about them with Chloe, no big deal. But I’d never dare bring it up with my family. In this house, the concept hits a little too near and a lot too sad. I believe in ghosts in secret. And—not that I’d ever tell anyone—I still sleep with the lights on some nights, even though I’m old enough to have my driver’s license.
“Cheer up,” Chloe says, snapping her fingers in my face and squawking in her fake British accent again. “Don’t let the thought of Old Mister Fluffers get ya down.”
“Stop.” I swat a cheese puff out of her hand.
The cheese puff flies across my room and disappears somewhere in the landfill of shoes and food packaging and now-meaningless school papers. We bust into tear-jerking laughter and curl up on the bed in fetal positions, unable to speak.
We did not sleep last night. Not a wink. So we’re delirious. At a glance, you’d assume we’re high out of our minds. But in my house? Fat chance.
No, Chloe and I are just good, old-fashioned sleep-deprived.
Which is why, when my stick-up-a-butt sister Casey walks by my room with Perdita—who is like 100 times cooler than Casey and it’s still a mystery to me why she’d want to hang out with someone who’s got a stick up her butt—Casey stops for a moment in the doorway to do what she does best: blab her unasked-for opinion.
“Wow,” she says, eyeing both of us in our doubled-over positions on my bed. Also eyeing the mess on my floor. Casey’s room looks clean and minimal as a museum. She organizes her socks by color. She uses a ruler to part her hair in the mornings. “You two still haven’t gotten dressed?”
I sit up, correcting my posture. Chloe does too.
“Hey, we’ve got to live it up before the misery of school begins,” I tell her.
“Don’t be a such a hater,” Casey says.
“Arielle’s right,” Perdita says behind her. She moves her platinum bangs out of her perfectly kohled-up eyes. “School sucks.” Perdita is a hundred times cooler than Casey, and it’s still a mystery to me why she’d want to hang out with someone who’s got a stick up her butt.
“You’re just as bad,” Casey says, turning to glare at her friend.
“Sorry we’re not bluestockings bound for Haaaarvard,” Perdita jokes. “We’re just good old working-class stiffs, right, girls?” She raises her eyebrows at me and Chloe.
Casey huffs and leaves my doorway. Her ponytail follows her like a champagne-blond whip. Her hair is endless and she’s kind of obsessed with it; her sprays and de-frizzers take up 80% of the cabinet space in the bathroom. But if I dare borrow a spritz of anything of hers she says I’m a “little klepto.” For a spritz!
There is no sister in the world more annoying than my sister and, rude as it may sound, I am so glad she’s going to a fancy famous school in a week. Not because it’s famous or fancy—but because it’s on the other side of the country.
Perdita’s still standing in the doorway, smiling at us with hot pink lips, arms folded.
“What are you watching?” she asks.
“Show about dead pets who haunt people,” I say.
“Oh my God, are you talking about Phantom Animals: True Confessions? I’ve seen every episode.”
See? Why can’t I have a sister like that?
“I haven’t seen you lately,” I say. “I thought you went away to school. Didn’t Casey say you were going to San Francisco or something?”
“I was,” Perdita answers, shrugging. “But … not anymore. Hey, did you know Tex is going to Velero High this year?”
Tex is Perdita’s little brother, who went to Laguna Verde, a private school in downtown Santa Caterina. I’ve kind of known him since we were in grade school together, plus the fact he lives a block away and our sisters were best friends for years. But I haven’t seen him in forever.
I raise my eyebrows. “Huh.”
“Yeah, he was kicked out for straight Cs. Apparently he’s not gifted and talented enough for the gifted and talented scholarship anymore.” She laughs. “So now you get to deal with him. Make sure you give him shit for me.”
“Okay,” I say, even though, let’s be honest: I’m not the type to give anyone shit.
“Later, ladies,” she says.
She leaves, turning her back to us and showing off the patch sewn to the back of her leather jacket of a fat red human heart—bloody and fist-shaped and crawling with arteries. I hear my sister’s door shut at the same time the doorbell rings downstairs. Soon footsteps thump up the stairs. My sister’s friend Emily, who Chloe and I secretly joke is part Hulk (seriously, she’s like six feet tall and all big-shouldered from swim team), walks by my room on her way to Casey’s without even saying hi. That’s how Emily is—if you’re not eighteen-plus and on your way to an Ivy League, you don’t exist. Way more my sister’s type than Perdita, if you ask me. I guess that’s why they’re going off to Harvard together next week, and Perdita’s staying behind. Casey and Perdita have been friends for almost as long as I can remember existing. Emily’s more of a newer edition, my sister’s new best friend as of a year or two ago.
“Perdita’s such a badass,” Chloe says, like she’s telepathic, because best friends practically are.
“I know.”
“I don’t even know why she’d want to hang out with Casey and Emily.”
“Perdita hasn’t been hanging out as much.”
“Shame, because she was the coolest thing about your sister.”
“Agreed.”
“I wish I could pull off a leather jacket like that,” Chloe says. “Even pleather looks wrong on me.”
“Shut up. You could wear a garbage bag and people would gawk at you.”
“Right, because I’d be wearing a garbage bag.”
“You know what I mean.”
“It’s called being a gir l with big tits. Being curvy is its own curse.”
I get tired of telling my best friend—the one who strangers often ask, “do you model?”—how hot she is. Especially because I look like me. Not that I’m a dog or anything. It’s just that I look like a teenage girl of sub-average height who gets pimples in her T-zone, must steal her sister’s de-frizzers on occasion, and would need to hide balled-up socks in her bra in order to get a fraction of the eye-lust Chloe gets.
“You are very lucky,” is all I can manage through my teeth at the moment.
“Right. Do you know how many awesome dresses I find at Trinkets that I can’t even squeeze over my chest? It’s heartbreaking.”
Chloe works in downtown Velero at an antique store called Trinkets and Treasures, which aids her fabulous ’60s-mod fashion sense.
“Yeah, my heart’s just breaking for you and your huge tits,” I say.
She’s about to protest, I’m sure, just as her phone buzzes. She glances at it. “Mom’s here. Gotta run.”
She stands and shoves her sparkly flats, yesterday’s yellow dress, her paddle hairbrush and Anna Karenina into her tote. Because on top of being drop-dead gorgeous, she’s also an effortless genius. If she weren’t my best friend in the whole wide world, I’d totally hate her.
“Bye,” I say.
We squeeze a quick hug.
“Let me know the denouement of Mister Fluffers!” she exclaims in her British accent as she heads out my door.
I peek out my window, down at the front of our house, where her mom Trixie sits in her VW bug. Trixie is like an older, tanner version of Chloe, and seriously the most laid-back mom you could ask for. She buys Chloe condoms and lets her drink wine with dinner. Chloe runs out to the car and jumps into the passenger seat. As the VW bug makes a fast U-turn and chugs away, Chloe looks up at my window and sticks her tongue out at me.
All my delirium catches up with me in a hot second. It’s only late afternoon, but I could pass out. I mute the TV and lie on my bed for a minute. When I close my eyes, remnants of that terrible show float into my brain-vision. I hear Chloe echoing “Mister Fluffers!” And, outside my wild mind, my sister’s voice floats through the wall, mixing and overlapping with other voices, which is kind of extraordinary considering there’s a bathroom separating us. I can only hear Casey when she’s raising her voice. Which, apparently, she’s doing right now.
I’m not proud of this, but I press my ear to the wall. It’s an old trick. Little sisters are expert eavesdroppers. And anyway, if she doesn’t want to be overheard, she shouldn’t be yelling. But I’m too late. I hear Casey’s door open so I spring forward, away from the wall. Don’t want to look suspicious. A white-blond flash whizzes by my doorway and heavy boots thud the stairs, and then the slam of the front door. I mean slam, a domestic sonic boom. I feel it in the floors. Which is maybe something Chloe would do, but Perdita? Cool as gelato.
I hang in my doorway, peek down the hall at Casey’s room. Casey’s sniffing. As in, possibly even tears and weepy noises. Now I know something’s wrong, because Casey is a desert. Even when we watched that Holocaust movie last year, which made me bawl and nightmare for weeks, Casey just sat there dry-eyed and sighing. Now she’s a faucet.
“Hey, everything okay?” I say, tiptoeing toward her door.
Emily just gets up and pushes the door closed and I hear the snick of the lock.
Alrighty then. Message received.
I’m so giddy-exhausted that the only comparison is that time last year the dentist had me huff nitrous oxide before a filling. All I can really manage right now is walking downstairs and eating cold leftovers while slouching at the kitchen table. Which is what I do.
I sit there, staring at the vase of marbles that’s the centerpiece of the dining room table. I’m tasting barely anything, almost forgetting what I’m eating … oh yeah. Tuesday’s cold spaghetti. Bleh. I rinse my bowl and space out as I stand in the dining room for a moment. That’s when I see something gleaming on the carpet at the foot of the stairs. I swipe it and hold it up in the light. It’s a necklace with a silver human heart on it. A veiny human heart you see in bio textbooks—or the heart on the back of Perdita’s jacket. The clasp is broken. It’s unique and familiar. I’m sure I’ve seen it on Perdita before. She must have dropped it on her way out. Just for fun, I hold it up to my neck and catch a glimpse of myself in the small mirror that hangs next to our stairs in the entrance. I imagine what it would be like to be Perdita, to be that cool, fashionable and bad in the best way.
Then it happens. The feeling.
I can’t explain it.
Everything shifts and becomes weirder than words.
Time warps for a second or maybe goes away entirely and then this … presence rolls in, kind of above me, also kind of behind me—wraps around me—an invisible body that fills the room. It’s a wordless scream YOU ARE NOT ALONE. It’s someone standing right in back of me. And panic explodes, paralyzing me, like something really terrible is going to happen, or it’s already happened and I’m reliving it. Devastating déjà vu.
And then I zero in on my eyes in the mirror. I can see it’s just me. I can hear the tick of the clock behind me and see the table and the vase with the marbles in it again. I’m a little dizzy but the feeling lifts. The room empties and the moment is new again, and …
I must be really tired.
Or it could have been a ghost, a whisper in me says, and I have to swallow hard and hold my breath to stop the shivers from rolling in. I turn and squint behind me, at the sliding glass door, at the darkening night, to make sure I don’t see anyone.
“No ghosts,” I whisper with a tight throat. “He’s not here.”
That’s when I notice that Emily’s standing at the top of the stairs with a weird expression in her eyes behind her tortoiseshell glasses.
“Are you … talking to yourself?” she asks.
“No,” I say. Which probably makes me look even worse.
Emily just shakes her head and walks past me toward the door. As she leaves the house, I notice she has a fuzzy backpack shaped like a turtle, which elevates her to the status of Ultimate Dork.
Clearly, I need sleep. I wash my dish in the sink, wipe the counters, clean the microwave so Mom won’t get mad about it later. Before heading upstairs I go to the front door and pull on it to make sure it’s locked and it opens. I startle when I see a figure crouching on the front porch. Then I realize it’s Perdita. She’s rooting around for something on the ground.
“Hey,” she says, standing up. “Um, you haven’t seen a necklace with a silver heart on it, have you?”
“You scared me,” I say, hand on my chest.
“Sorry,” she says. “I didn’t want to bug Casey about it. But I had it on when I was over earlier, I’m pretty sure. I just traced my steps back here and haven’t found it.”
“It’s inside,” I say. “Want to come in?”
“That’s okay. Can you just get it for me?”
“Sure, hold on.” I turn around and grab it from the dining room table and hand it to her. “Yeah, it was at the foot of our stairs.”
She breathes a sigh of relief. “Thank you. I thought I’d lost it. I haven’t taken this necklace off since I got it three years ago.” She holds it up in the porch light. “Fuck, it broke.”
“Want a safety pin?” I ask.
“Yeah, that’d be awesome.”
I go fetch her a safety pin from the kitchen drawer—I choose the hot-pink one because it seems to fit her—and come back to the front porch. She takes the safety pin and creates a makeshift clasp, hanging it back around her neck and fastening it. She squeezes the silver heart with relief.
“Thank you so much,” she says again. “I would have been so sad. It was custom-made, so it’s not like I can buy another one. I felt naked without it.”
“No problem,” I say.
“Have a good night,” she says with a big hot-pink smile, still fondling her silver heart like she wants to make sure it’ll never leave. “See you around.”
