Note: This is a continuation of the previous post, which grew out of part of the post previous to that. I hope to continue working on this idea, though not on here for everyone’s sake.
Another side of town, another gathering of girls of 17—Danielle presiding with Katie and Vanessa—at the outdoor seating area of a Dairy Queen, and over a more resilient serving of cheese fries.
“That was the weirdest party I’d ever been to,” Vanessa muses, mindlessly churning her flurry with her spoon.
“Was that actually a party?” Danielle asks.
“There were streamers all over and I thought I saw at least one balloon.”
“Was it fun?” Katie, who was not there, inquires.
Danielle nods in an approximation of sagacity. “You’re right. The streamers. They were school colors.”
“They were, yeah.” Vanessa pauses and looks down at the fries as if to seek validation that her next sentence is the right one. “They made having fun difficult.”
“I’ve never been to Kelly’s house. What’s it like?”
“It’s cozy,” Danielle says, “like a sweater you find at Goodwill.”
“Who has a party on a Wednesday afternoon?”
“Kelly was worried no one would come maybe. She’s reliving some kind of trauma.”
Katie’s face shifts to a more sympathetic gaze. “Did no one come to her birthday party or something?”
“She hit the wall early, and hard,” Danielle says.
“The wall?”
“At some point, birthday party attendance is no longer mandatory. Kids, or really our parents, fragment into smaller packs and can say ‘no’ to certain other kids and parents. People started saying ‘no’ to Kelly Coolidge way ahead of other kids. In both directions too. No one wanted to come to her house, no one wanted her to come to theirs.”
“I’ve had her over a few times. But maybe not since eighth grade.”
“Saint Katie,” Danielle snickers, “Our Lady of Sorrows.”
Katie looks self-pityingly down the straw of her strawberry shake. “So why did you go to this one?”
“I heard her talking about it, she was talking about Patty Mansfield. I thought I should know about it.”
“What does she know about Patty Mansfield?”
“I don’t entirely know. I think she was speaking in a kind of code and we were all trying to decode it as we went along.”
“She at least had refreshments,” Vanessa says.
“Stale chips and warm coconut water test the bounds of ‘refreshing.’”
“And she had a clipboard.” Vanessa takes a fry and eats it sumptuously before turning to Katie with light switch-shift to unease. “There’s something wrong with Patty. Kelly was telling us what, I’m guessing, Angela Peterson told her.”
“Why didn’t Angela tell you herself?”
“Angela couldn’t be bothered,” Danielle says with the pointedness of a rock in a slingshot.
“So what was Kelly actually doing?”
“Simply doing the service that a good slave does. This idea that Angela Peterson has ‘friends’ is wild to me. ‘Friendship’ is an SAT word for her. Angela collects strays that she domesticates into shopping at Anthropologie. But her taking an interest in Patty Mansfield is a thousand times worse.”
“Why’s that?” Katie asks.
“Vanessa, remember when we were going to Armor for Sleep in Asbury Park and you made that wrong turn off the Parkway?”
“I … think? It was in the clearing around all that scorched forest?”
“Yeah, it looked like a bomb was dropped. All this old machinery. A rusted ferris wheel, tea cup rides, loose go-karts …”
“A dunk tank.”
“Yeah, and all these booths. It was a fairground long left for dead.”
“What does that have to do with Patty Mansfield?”
“Not Patty; Angela. Angela was definitely there, in a past life. She has an aura of carny around her—in her soul, maybe even her blood. Not just a carny, but a freak-keeper. The kind who would show people around to the bearded lady, animals with extra legs, siamese twins, babies in mason jars.”
“Gross, Danielle,” Katie says, and takes another fry as a balm.
“I’m speaking Angela’s truth. She’s not of this time. So how to people born out of time cope? By trying to bring her time to ours. And subjecting it onto normal people like Patty.”
“Danielle,” Katie interjects, milling through the fries, selecting the most suitable one, and holding it before her face like a piece of chalk, “last week you said that Patty would benefit from medium-range anorexia.”
“I was engaging in a hypothetical panegyric and Patty was a placeholder. She is the kind of girl who’s a platonic placeholder.”
Vanessa’s mind rolled a flat “okay” out of her mouth. Katie tried to shoot hers into a brief frozen-drink oblivion, but her shake had melted into lukewarm strawberry chowder.
“The point is, Angela is so disconnected from reality that she cannot have anyone’s best interest at heart. She only wants to remake the world in her image. Vanessa, you saw it as clear as I did.”
“Maybe?”
“Do you want that world?”
“Not in that specific form, no.”
“Well, if Angela gets her way, she’ll make Patty into some bearded lady, show her around the halls to be gawked at. A spectacle. Worse than a pet. Worse than the girl who cleans up after.”
“What do you suggest should be done otherwise?”
“So that Angela does not get her way, we need to take Patty under our wing.” Danielle pulls out a fry, letting it hang from her lips like a cigarette and seems lost in thought.
“How?” Vanessa blurts impatiently.
“I’m thinking about it!” She flips her fry into her mouth. “Like,” she says mid-chew, “a benefit of some kind.”
“What if we tie it to the Rose Ball this year?” Vanessa asks.
Danielle’s still-chewing face halts all motion into a grave expression as if turned to stone by an object of myth. “That’s a month away. Seems too short notice.”
“Well,” Katie interjects, “Vanessa and I are on the Rose Ball committee; we can make adjustments.”
“We can add her as a candidate for Rose Queen.”
“Yeah, next to you and Angela. Like, you’re clearly a shoo-in for Red Queen, so it shouldn’t be a problem.”
Danielle swallows her solitary fry like she’s damning it for eternity and glares deep into Katie’s and Vanessa’s indistinguishable souls. They shrink across the table with that familiar dread of the moment before being sliced any which way by cutter wires.
“And what?” Danielle says breaking the silence but not the tension. “Have two Red Queens and one White charity case?”
“No,” Vanessa says meekly, “no you’re right. That doesn’t make sense.”
“Well,” Katie adds with an intently childlike inflection, “we can include her in some special way. An honorary Queen.”
“How do you mean?” Danielle asks curiously.
“I mean, there are other color roses. We can designate a new, but by no means equal to you or Angela, Rose Queen.”
“I don’t know if that’s doable, but it is more pleasing. I get how people like things to be, you know, fair. But I’m personally not comfortable ushering in a new egalitarian paradox.” She takes out her phone as if receiving a notification, though no one hears a sound. “I’m needed at home.” She gets up to leave, taking the fries in-hand. “You two let me know what you come up with. It’s a matter of life and death.”
“Is it?” Katie asks.
“It helps to think of it that way.”
After Danielle leaves, Katie follows Vanessa to her Escalade.
“If Kelly Coolidge is a slave,” she asks, “what the hell does that make us?”
Vanessa puts in her seatbelt and thinks for a moment. With a shrug she says, “Gladiators?”
“I wonder if she’s used a word correctly ever.”
“She gets ‘and’ and ‘the’ most of the time,” Vanessa says as she sifts through her phone. “Credit where due.”
The orchestral harmony of their nervous laughter is dissolved in waves of Mitski.