Free Tonya Hurley_Ghostgirl_02 by Homecoming Page B

made sense. People might have been dying to get in, she joked to herself, but no one was too interested in what was on the outside.
    Release was becoming a more and more important concept for Charlotte. Her existence had become so burdensome lately that she was actually thinking back fondly on her life — a life that had been marked mostly by insecurity and isolation. Ever since missing that call, in fact, she’d been thinking more and more about Scarlet, Petula, and Damen and what might have been and about her family and what never was. Most of all she was thinking about what would never be.
    Maddy said it. They were seventeen forever. That might be an appealing thought for the reality show trophy moms who were always Botoxing, liposuctioning, implanting, and detoxifying to secretly compete for their daughters’ boyfriends, but it was increasingly depressing for Charlotte. She’d done everything she was ever going to do, and despite the mark she’d hoped to leave, within a few years’ time, her senior picture that was enshrined in the hallway at Hawthorne would inevitably begin to yellow and fade, as would the memory of her. She harbored no illusions about that.
    She recalled walking through the cemetery as a kid, looking at the born and died dates on all the tombstones and thinking about the people buried there. She would do the math and calculate how long each person had lived, what they’d seen, and what they’d missed. Electricity, space flight, civil rights, cable TV, the Internet, Starbucks. Some husbands died years before their wives, or children years before their parents. But when you’ve been dead for a hundred years, let’s say, what would it matter if your wife died two years before you? To the passerby, you’d both have been dead a long, long time —indistinguishable in death.
    Charlotte decided it did matter, though. Those two years might mean nothing in the sweep of history, but they were important to the people who had lived them. It was all they had. Whether the time was filled with joy or sadness was irrelevant. They’d lived to experience it.
    In the end, everyone, except for a very few, are forgotten, and Charlotte was starting way behind the eight ball. Seventeen years wasn’t very much time to cement a legacy, especially if you’d lived her life. As this bleak calculus continued circling her brain, she looked down at her sleeve and realized the most horrible thing of all about being eternally young: she would be wearing the same clothes forever.
    The superficiality of the thought reminded her of the Wendys, and her desire to be alive unnerved her like an e-mail from an ex-friend.
    Charlotte kicked off her shoes as soon as she got into the apartment, trying to shake the not-wanting-to-be-dead-anymore feeling. Being home, however, didn’t have the relaxing effect she had hoped it would. It was more than just her old life that was plaguing her now. After all she had done for the Dead Ed kids, all the personal changes she’d made, she wondered, why she still felt so excluded. So alone.
    Maddy had it right, Charlotte surmised, even though she never came right out and said it. She was back to being second or even third fiddle. Now that they were through the looking glass or whatever, they didn’t need her anymore. All she got from them now was busy signals. She knew they were tied up being reunited and all, and that the other girls especially did not approve of her friendship with Maddy, but who else did she have? Besides, Prue didn’t like Scarlet either at first, as Charlotte recalled, and Pam thought nothing of shunning her over the whole Miss Wacksel episode. Maybe they were all just showing their true colors now that they didn’t need her anymore.
    Charlotte crawled into her top bunk and continued feeling sorry for herself. Just then, Maddy walked in and looked as if she’d been rushing.
    “Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?” she asked nervously. “We always walk home