Dead Rules (18 page)

Chapter Twenty-Six

MARS CHANGED.

He came out of the boys' locker room looking like he'd never been wet. Except his hair was a little more tousled than usual.

Jana looked like she'd been in over her head. Her blouse was badly wrinkled and damp. Her hair was in semi-corded tangles. She looked like a Slider, she thought.

“You saw me the night you died,” Mars told her.

“I don't remember that.”

“That's the thing. You looked right at me as you fell. Wyatt and I were ghosting. No one could see me, but you did. Your eyes were wild and wide. When you looked at me, your eyes pleaded for help. That's when I materialized. I decided to be there for you.”

“There was a moment when things froze,” Jana recalled. “Everything slowed down. For less than a second, everything stopped. But I didn't see you.”

“When you were on the bus your first day here, I thought you would recognize me. I thought you knew.”

“I'm sorry, Mars. I didn't know you had been there. I didn't know you tried to save me.”

“You must have thought I was a total creep.” He grinned and combed his damp hair back from his forehead with his hand.

“I didn't have to think anything,” Jana said. “Arva told me you were as dangerous as poison.”

“Am I?”

It was Jana's turn to smile. “Yes, I think you are. But not for any of the reasons you would guess. You're poison because I'm in love with Michael. He's my destiny.”

Mars stopped walking. “I turn off here,” he said. “I don't do classroom work in the afternoons.”

“Vocational training?”

“Yes.”

“I just thought of something,” Jana said quickly. “You know, you don't have to go to the Planet to do good things for people here. You can save a life right here, Mars, without leaving campus.”

He waited, his perfectly arched eyebrows raised as he gazed at her.

“Beatrice,” Jana said. “Do something to get that dart out of her head. She has to feel like the elephant man every minute of every day. Believe me, you would be saving her life. You guys have metal shop or something, don't you? You can take pliers and yank it out of her head.”

“It would be there the next day, Webster.”

“There must be something you can do.”

“I'll think about it,” Mars said. “You better go now and pick up your demerits. The Virgins will be waiting for you.”

“Let me ask you something first? Real quick, I promise.”

He nodded.

“When I kissed you last night on the stairs and we were nose to nose like that, did you want to kiss me back?”

“Maybe,” Mars said, his eyes dancing with mischief.

Jana laughed. “Why didn't you?”

“You already said it, Webster. I'm not your destiny. He is.” Mars turned and walked away from her. If Jana had been Pauline, she could have left with Mars and stayed with Michael both. But Jana wasn't Pauline.

Jana did fairly well.

All told, her demerits now neared a hundred. Cutting a class must be a big no-no. Leaving her panties in the locker room at the pool and coming to fifth period commando seemed to have helped.

She was tired of the game for the day. If she acted up in class, she'd get detention again. And she had run out of things she could take off and still live with herself. The only thing to do, she thought, was to jump. If she jumped, they'd have to make her a Slider. Jameson had almost said as much.

When Dead School was over for the day, Jana walked to the back of the bus and rode to the dorm with the Sliders. It didn't seem to make anyone comfortable. Sliders didn't talk to Risers on the bus, Jana learned. Not even Wyatt. And he never kept his mouth shut.

Arva left her alone in the room with Darcee. Jana didn't blame her. Jana's recent behavior obviously alarmed and dismayed her roommate to no end.

Jana opened a bottle of water. “Is it insane to kill him?” she asked Darcee. “It's not madness if I know he will be here with me. I'll be saving both of us. For all time.” Darcee, as always, reserved her comments for later.

“A lifetime isn't enough time for love,” Jana said. “Not my lifetime, anyway.” She changed into the clothes she'd been wearing the night she died. “A lifetime isn't enough time, period.”

It was obvious from last night that Jana would have no chance to talk Michael into cooperating. He had gone crazy when he saw her sitting next to him on the bed. It almost broke her heart. Now she thought she understood it. A woman can talk to a ghost. They did it all the time in movies. A man can't handle it.

Jana considered a nail gun. There wouldn't be an exit wound and she could shoot Michael in the same spot where her own skull had a hole it in. They'd be just alike in Dead School, sort of. But a nail gun might be too heavy, she decided, and she didn't know how to work one. She'd have to rent one and take lessons or something. No go.

She returned to favoring electrocution. As a Slider, Jana could materialize long enough to pick up something plugged in and toss it into the bathtub with Michael. And then he'd have really cool spiky hair. Just like Henry's. Only it would look better on Michael.

When Arva came into the room, there were other students with her. Jana didn't know any of them, although she had seen them all in class.

“We want to talk to you,” Arva said. Everyone nodded solemnly. Arva held an open notebook in her hands.

“Yearbook staff?” Jana asked, smiling.

“Sit down and listen.” Arva stated it as strongly as her hoarse choking breaths would allow. Hoarse feathers, Jana thought.

“Publicity Committee?” she tried. “I won't mess up your dance again, I promise. That was a one-time thing and—”

“Intervention,” Arva announced. “You need help, Jana. To stop what you're doing. You're destroying yourself and damaging those around you, the people who care about you. We're here to help you help yourself.”

Suddenly Jana had somewhere else she had to be. Without saying another word, she helped herself out of her dorm room as quickly as possible.

The third floor was her only refuge.

Jana marched out of her room and walked past the lone Gray at the stairwell. As she climbed the steps, the noise grew louder. Upstairs, from one end to the other, the old motel rocked. At least three stereos played different music at the same time. The hall was filled with Sliders.

A metal door in the brick fire wall in the middle of the long hall was propped open with a table from the laundry room. Yellow stenciling on the door read
Girls Only.

If this half of the third floor was the girls' dorm, it was hard to tell. An almost equal number of boys and girls leaned against the walls and sat on the floor. They talked and rocked in place to the music. They didn't seem to notice her. The air was filled with cigarette smoke. Everyone smelled like beer.

Jana walked to the table holding the dividing door open. Candles were burning there. They'd been arranged on a paper plate.

“It's a birthday party,” a girl with a cigarette in her mouth said to Jana. “We ran out of cake.” The Slider's eyes were dark red where they should have been white. They must have filled with blood as she was dying.

“Whose birthday is it?” Jana asked.

“Who knows? It's one of the things you forget. So we have a birthday party once a week just in case.”

Jana searched her memory. Michael's birthday was missing. It seemed impossible that she didn't know when it was. He was a Leo, she thought. Or was she?

The Slider drew on her cigarette, watching Jana's face. “Someone can check your gravestone if it matters to you,” she said. A narrow white finger of smoke rose from the back of the girl's head. She must have gone bowling, Jana thought.

“Guess not,” Jana said. “Do you know where Mars Dreamcote's room is?”

“Sure. All the way to the end of the hall next to the fire escape.”

“Thank you,” Jana said. She stepped around the table and walked into the boys' half of the hall. Two Sliders tried to talk to her. She smiled but kept on walking. A neatly penciled sign on the door read
Knock
. Mars had said they'd leave after dark. It was after dark. Jana knocked.

Half an hour later, Jana sat on the bench out front with Barry. The Gray wasn't talking much. She was getting used to that. Grays were like potted plants. Something to look at, but lousy when it came to conversation.

Headlights blinked twice on the road out front. She hurried to the hole in the fence.

A police detective was on the phone.

“I need you to write out a statement and sign it,” he said.

“Yeah, whatever,” Michael said. “Do you always call people this late?”

“It's been a long day,” the detective apologized. “What can I tell you? This isn't our top priority. Routine paperwork is all. I don't get it done, I get in trouble. You understand that, don't you? It's like homework. It doesn't always matter, but you have to get it done.”

“The whole thing was an accident,” Michael said. “She fell and hit her head on her bowling ball. I don't know what else I can tell you.”

“Oh, that will do. You just write that out for me. I have to file your statement is all. You were a witness. It's entirely routine, Mr. Haynes. I have to do a chain-of-events type thing. You know, she picked up the ball. She walked over there. She fell down. Look, I can come by your school tomorrow and we can do it there.”

“No,” Michael said. That was the last thing he needed. “I'll drop by like you said. It's across from the courthouse?”

“Park in the municipal lot. I'll give you a voucher. What do we say, then? Ten o'clock?”

“Ten's okay.”

“We're all set, then. Hey, look, I know this must be an emotional time for you, Mr. Haynes. But the sooner we do this the better. You were going to get married, right?”

“No,” Michael said. “Nothing like that.”

“Oh, okay. I had that wrong, then. Say, she wasn't pregnant, was she?”

“Of course not.” Michael's hand started shaking. He moved his phone to the other one.

“Wait,” the detective said, seemingly distracted. “I've got it right here. Her blood report. Oh, of course, you're both good kids. I can see that. Let's see, you're going to college at the end of the year, is that right? Early entry in the summer. Leadership scholarship . . .” He sounded like he was reading a list. “Dartmouth, what do you know. Ten o'clock, then, tomorrow, and I can get this paperwork out of the way.”

The detective finally hung up. The investigator was lying, Michael decided. They'll say anything to get you to talk. It was more than paperwork he had on his mind. As for “chain of events,” Michael was the one who was chained to events. He didn't deserve this. He couldn't believe Jana had done this to him. She fell down the wrong way and now they were going to ruin his life over it.

Mars drove into the mountains south of Asheville. The automatic transmission of the car they'd borrowed geared down for every climb on the winding state road that brought them nearer to their jumping-off place.

“Lookaway Rock,” Wyatt said from the backseat. “Elevation somewhere around four thousand feet, but you don't fall that far.”

Occasionally they approached a dark rise of mountain that shone with the scattered lights of houses. You couldn't see the mountains at night and the lights looked like stars hung low in the sky.

“Give me your hand,” Jana told Wyatt. He did. She tried Michael's number on her cell one more time. He still wouldn't answer. She guessed she didn't blame him.

“Most jumpers do the waterfall,” Wyatt said. “You stand over to one side and just step off. It's easier.”

Lookaway Rock was a much longer drop. It was over three hundred feet of vertical granite left over from the movement of glaciers during the Ice Age. The cliff marked the steep end of a mountain gorge and was shaped like the inside of a horseshoe at the top. From the bottom it looked like a waterfall itself, but Lookaway was pure rock.

“You can jump off anywhere and not feel a thing until you hit bottom,” Wyatt said. “It's tricky, though, because the entire curve of rock slopes off at the top, toward the open sky. You get vertigo standing there and that's how it got its name. To keep your balance on the rock, you have to look away.”

It sounded scary to Jana. Truly, awfully, dreadfully scary. She hoped Michael appreciated what she was about to go through.

“Tell me why you do this again,” she said.

Jana had a goal. She was jumping so she could become a Slider. Mars and Wyatt were jumping just to jump.

Wyatt laughed.

“It's the ultimate extreme,” he said. “It's the absolute most, like standing in front of a freight train. Only your body parts don't get dragged all over the place when the slam comes. You don't understand adrenaline until you've jumped. You'll never feel more alive. It's beautiful.”

Jana doubted that jumping was beautiful.

“And the slam. It is so total, Webster. There's nothing like it you could ever do in real life. Well, not twice, anyway. You're crushing every bone in your body all in one rush. It's . . . it's total.”

“It's definitely suicidal,” Jana said. “Why isn't it suicide?”

“Because we're not doing it to quit. When you give up, when you kill yourself to quit, they don't repair you. That's suicide. We're just killing our bodies, because eventually when you're dead, you figure out you can. It's a loophole.”

“I don't get it,” Jana confessed.

“Okay, if I cut off my finger in Dead School either on purpose or by accident, it heals itself. We keep the body we died with, remember? So the rest of it, the suicide part, is intent. We're not killing ourselves to give up and quit the whole show. We're taking our bodies to the maximum for the thrill of it, Webster, because we know beforehand we'll get our bodies back.”