Chapter 3
She's three months dead when there's a new fear.
(twelve weeks, three months, she doesn't care to count how many days or hours it's been)
It's the New Year, people have been drunkenly ringing in the hour and flipping calendars. Normally she'd join in, be at the centre of the party with a flock of people around her – boys flirting and girls envying, sneaking drinks when adults look away. This time she can't take the risk, in vino veritas, she remembers someone saying once, and so she stays soberly quiet in a café with a book. Here, she is a bookworm.
She reads a new book on a new day of a new year and weaves a tale about the symbolism in her journal.
Anyway, the café is still open at 3am, the trendy thirty-something behind the bar accommodating sober-up coffees and a place to sit out of the cold. Her vantage point is the best in the building, the better to scope out who is approaching.
"Ali!" rings out from the door, and she stiffens. It's like a blow to the chest,
(or the back of the head, she remembers, but she's too entranced to do anything. this is like watching a horror movie unfold, watching some bad thing happen to your favourite character and – she's tempted to get up and run, but that would give it away.)
The girl stumbles in, hair wild and makeup smudgy from drinking and dancing. She's a bit of a prep, a bit of a Spencer-type, and Ali watches stiffly. It feels like everyone can see through her heavy eyeliner to the blue eyes underneath, like the line of her wig is completely obvious, like everyone can see through the black fiber to the blonde underneath. Her face feels like it is bright red, spotlit somehow and every inch of her wants to get up and run.
Instead, Prep Girl makes her way over to a punk girl, one with blue hair and an eyebrow ring. She forces herself to sit civilly for another thirteen minutes, counting each one off on her cheap watch. Her toes wiggle in her boots, the only way she can fidget without it being seen, and she yawns twice in the process.
Eventually it's time to leave, so she drops a twenty under the coffee cup and winds her way through the tables. Learns that Blue Hair is actually called Ellie, short for Eleanor, and tries not to let her relief show. Sticks her hands in her coat pockets to hide the shaking.
She walks out of the café and down the street as though everything is perfectly normal, but she can't resist the temptation to run to the motel. The guy on the desk raises his eyebrows – the most he'd ever come to showing concern – and she brushes it off with a pretence that she's been drinking. She stumbles a bit on the way to the stairs, so it's convincing enough. He doesn't need to know it's from her latest adrenaline rush.
That night, she packs up and leaves with the dawn.
0o0o0o0
Another day, another city, another café. She watches the sun rise on a snow-dusted city, trampled celebratory ornaments being kicked aside as people shuffle through the city on missions to cure hangovers and catch up with others.
This is the problem, she decides: She has been Vivian Darkbloom too long. It's made her complacent.
It's time for an update, a change in identity – oh, but the problem is she doesn't know anyone. Has no contacts here who will forge her a new name, no-one who can change her face. Unseen, under the table, her nails dig into her knees through the thin fabric of her jeans. She feels useless, can't reconcile how long she's survived if she doesn't know something as basic as getting a fake ID.
In the motel room, she scowls at her reflection in the bathroom. The dark wig is hanging up to dry, it's the one thing she really takes care of because she still needs it, can't afford hair dye all the time.
"Call yourself a survivor," she mutters, and turns away.
Two nights pass like this, she goes hungry because that incident with punk Ellie has spooked her thoroughly, she doesn't dare venture out for food. It doesn't matter that she has placed miles between them and she's in a different damned state, because what if punk Ellie was an A-trap?
Not for the first time, she has this thought: she is in way over her head.
0o0o0o0
She gets lucky though.
She dresses for a night of clubbing and works her way through the crowds. Makes oblique references to fake ID's that no-one understands, though half the crowd is drunk anyway. It's a college town with students who have an excuse to party, still being on semester break.
(closest she might get to college now)
Her strategy is a good one: picks people to buy her drinks, admires their ID and hope they take the bait.
At some point she's in the bathroom, the stall sealing her off from everyone else, and two girls stumble in. They're talking in the slightly garbled tones of someone who is partially drunk, and trying to be sober. They are trying to be secretive about their conversation, and she swings her feet off the floor.
Fake ID piques her interest, and she smudges the address onto the inside of her arm with eyeliner.
0o0o0o0
The address turns out to be an office-type place, all apartment building of offices and there's a tiny hidden room. She's prepared for it to be a trap – always is – so when the guy calls her Holly and takes note of her new fake details, she counts it as another stroke of luck. He doesn't ask why she needs it, so she guesses he's seen it all before: pretty rich girl wants to defy her parents and the law.
Guesses he doesn't care enough to stop her.
(only why should he, he's the one getting paid, he's got just as much to lose as his clients)
A day later she's Claire, Claire Sharpe and she swings her bag on the crook of her arm. Claire is nineteen and born in December and hails from New York. It takes a bit more work to look nineteen every day
(not just the nineteen of a girl getting into a club where the bouncers turn a blind eye)
and she's resourceful as ever. Makes it work with heavy eyeliner and lashes tinted black, lips stained red and the odd twisted hairdo. Memorizes her new details, buries Vivian deep in her bag. Can't risk sentiment, but doesn't want to get rid of her just yet.
Whatever.
It's survival.
0o0o0o0
She stumbles through her cities, always marks them as hers in some small way. They're all the cities that took her in and kept her fairly safe. She leaves lipstick marks and perfume trailing behind her, people wondering after the girl who slips away.
They're her cities.
(so was rosewood, once)
0o0o0o0
It took fourteen weeks, but she is a ghost now.
No, no – not in that she's dead,
(though the world thinks she is)
but the kind where she no longer stands out from the crowd. She no longer has the ability to stand tall and challenge someone twice her age with her carefully-designed posse at her heels. People don't stop and stare anymore, they don't stop to admire her shoes or carry her books. There is no fear, no manipulation left. There's no need for her to steal secrets, because she takes them with her when she leaves their owners behind.
Her source of power is gone.
0o0o0o0
She trails around, lost.
Her food supply is dwindling and she's used her new ID to clean a house, babysit a few hours in the afternoons. It's not a good idea, she knows, because there's always the chance that someone will look too closely. She has money with her, hidden in an old ChapStick tube and in at least four different pockets of her bag, plus the lining of her coat, but she doesn't know where she is or what she's doing.
Her usual routine has become just that – routine – and she can't afford to risk people. It's too risky, forming attachments and meeting people. She doesn't like to be alone all the time, it's why she made her posse, but now she needs to be alone.
Routine is how they catch you out, after all.
0o0o0o0
So she slows her running.
She manages to amass enough money babysitting or cleaning, and sometimes supplementing the money when no-one is paying attention. It isn't her fault if everyone leaves their spare cash in the same place – they're practically inviting someone to take it, and she needs it.
Every little addition she takes builds up, until the designated tin can't close any further. She gets inventive, hollows out lipstick tubes and one rainy day making a hollow book. It's enough for her to remain in a place for two weeks if she's careful with what foods she buys.
(she once vowed to never stoop to petty crime, but this is desperate. anyway, she can't let herself see it as stealing, because she does need the money, and she promises herself it's not like she's spending it on shoes and bag)
In the usual grotty superette, she adds a bottle of vitamin supplements. They take a while to work and she's wondering if she wasted her money, but overall she does feel a bit healthier, does feel a bit better for the steady supply of vitamins in her bloodstream. They don't exactly balance out her eating habits, but they do help.
Anyway, the bottle is sturdy plastic. It makes for another place to store cash.
0o0o0o0
There's a boy.
His name is Jeremy, and he's kind and sweet. He is all the things she isn't, especially honest. She pretends to be Clara – Claire was a good name, sometimes she can change it slightly, call it a clerical error or nickname – and he tangles his fingers through hers in the dark of a theatre.
(she's a drama major, you see, and loves theatre)
In the dark she tilts her face away from his, lets her stinging eyes spill over a bit and tells him she found the play so moving. He makes her want to be good, to be the honest girl he thinks she is, but honesty hasn't got her far up until now. If he knew about her, about Alison, he'd be the one running and she wouldn't blame him.
She'd let him go, honestly.
They drive back to the hotel she's pretending to stay at and he watches her walk in, she watches him drive away and then leaves for the motel.
It goes like this for two weeks and she thinks on her fourth month of being dead. Jeremy kind of makes her feel alive, but he's the sort who would want to do dorky anniversaries like first date or first met and she can't afford it on any level. Instead, she tells him one lunchtime that there's a family emergency, she has to fly back home right away and her flight is tonight.
He writes down his information and she promises to call or write. Ten minutes later she's leaving the restaurant and by the end of the night his information is flushed down the toilet.
(he wouldn't have liked the real her anyway, she reminds herself, and swallows down the regret)
Another one bites the dust.
0o0o0o0
The ghost girl is back.
She drifts to another bus, another city that she doesn't know.
It turns out that she does know this city, because she's been here before. Not geographically; she's meticulous about recording every place she steps foot in, but figuratively. The buildings look the same, the same libraries and museums and galleries. She'd never really stopped to noticed this before, but all the cities are blurred.
(see one city, you've seen them all)
She doesn't remember one from another, doesn't remember where she got the green bracelet wrapped around her wrist or the blue earrings in her ears.
Well, maybe it doesn't matter. She's alive, isn't she?
0o0o0o0
The thing about crowds is that they envelop you, draw you in and tangle you into a clump of people who wouldn't know you from any other person. She makes a habit of pacing streets with long crowds of people, and this makes her feel alive.
She is here.
She wants to shout at people, because she's hiding in plain sight. Don't you see, she'd yell, I'm here, I'm me. I'm real. Wants to rip off the wig and let people see her there, alive as ever because even death wasn't enough to keep her down, to fade the black dye from her hair and watch shock and awe play out in a crowd of people, better than any story on stage.
Still, she is a ghost here, and she doesn't do that because people wouldn't know her anyway.
(one day she selected a milk carton, it had her own face on it and she stared at it in front of the mirror trying to find similarities between the girl and her own)
People are still searching for her then.
Does that make her real?
0o0o0o0
She resists all temptation to return to herself, and continues playing Claire. The trifecta of celebratory holidays has passed; that makes it easier to keep going, keep playing dead.
(every time she passes a department store she buys her favourite red lipstick. it's the one thing she always keeps money for, because when she wears it, it means she can't be a ghost)