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and wanted to start the incantation before her own common sense got the better of her.
    “Can you, you know, wait outside?” Scarlet asked Damen apologetically.
    “Sure,” he agreed nervously. “I’ll be right outside.”
    Damen closed the door and the room was dark. Scarlet shut her eyes and started to hypnotize herself into believing she was with Charlotte. She thought about the first time they met, recalling every single detail — the beakers, the chalk dust, the way Charlotte looked, touching her fragile hands as she recited the incantation with shallow breaths. Soon, she was there. Right there in that moment. It scared her a little, but feeling Charlotte’s presence so vividly calmed her.
    “You and me, our soul makes three,” she said excitedly.
    She waited for just a moment — at least, that’s how fast she thought it was — and she heard a voice echoing faintly in the distance.
    “Me and you, our soul makes two,” it whispered in a familiar tone.
    “We are me,” Scarlet finished, her eyes opening as wide as her mouth.
    Damen heard her bumping into shelves, burst into the closet, and was able to catch her just before she hit the floor. Her eyes were blank, her breathing labored, and her skin clammy. It was as if somebody had just hit the “off” switch on her.
    Damen quickly pushed open the closet door and shouted for help as if Scarlet’s life depended on it. And in some ways, it did.
    Chapter 7
    Imitation of Life
    We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
    —Kurt Vonnegut
    Love and Death have a way of distorting things.
    When you fall in love, you see the world through rose-colored glasses. When you pass away, you are viewed through them. In love and death, all faults are ignored or forgiven. You are transfigured, cast as a character in everyone else’s biopic of your life.
    Petula awoke slowly. She thought she heard a voice, a male voice, calling to her, but when she opened her eyes, she was completely alone. Her head propped up on a pillow, she reached for her face, checking for any imprints on her cheek from the gravel. It was the last thing she remembered before going to sleep. God forbid she have to deal with pock marks before Homecoming, especially after all the money she’d spent on weekly dermabrasion treatments and collagen-based skin fillers. Still fuzzy, she blinked a few times to get the sleep dirt out of her eyes, looked down, and evaluated herself as she did each day, just to make sure she looked as hot as the day before.
    She didn’t recognize the sheer poly cotton smock she was wrapped in, but it did look good on her. It really played to her strengths, namely her ass, which was mostly visible. What most people didn’t realize, mainly because of her beautiful face and perfect chest, which drew their eyes upward, was that she had a short torso. This sweet little number she was wearing, however, covered up that minor anatomical hiccup and put the emphasis where it belonged: on her legs, which went on forever — all the way to her feet, in fact. Her feet. The source of all of yesterday’s drama that suddenly came flooding back.
    “Bitch,” she said, squinting for a second to focus on her toes and the unfinished pedicure.
    With that little curse-out of the nail tech, Petula was fully roused, or at least enough to recognize that she wasn’t in her own bed. Or even at home, for that matter. She sat up, looked around, and swung her legs over the side of the bed, which she could recognize now as a hospital bed from her past mandatory-volunteer work as a candy striper in the geriatric ward.
    “What or who did I do last night?” she wondered, more curious than afraid.
    She couldn’t recall much of the date with Josh, but what little she could was not worth the neurons it took to retrieve. Suddenly, she remembered she’d gotten really dizzy and puked. Totally freaked at such inappropriate public behavior, she convinced herself he must have slipped