Dead Rules (11 page)

Chapter Seventeen

JANA WAS EARLY.

Her drama elective was taught onstage in the auditorium. A semicircle of student desks was arranged at the back of the stage. Only a few of the acting students were already in their places, standing near their desks. Jana recognized Henry Sixkiller instantly. Nobody but Henry had hair like that. His head was three inches of black brush that stuck straight up and straight out from neck to crown.

Jana smiled at him. He smiled back, his Cherokee cheeks tightening into shiny apples, and walked over.

“Hey,” he said. “I'm Henry.” He thrust out his hand to Jana. Actors can have courage onstage even when they're not acting. It was interesting to see that the shy, note-passing kid in homeroom found his charm on the stage.

“Hi,” she said. “Jana Webster.”

She shook his hand. There was no heat in the touch. A ragged scar inside his grip pressed against her palm.

“I know, I know,” he said. “Of Webster and Haynes. I sit in front of you in homeroom.”

“Second and third hour too.”

“Hey, you went to your funeral today,” Henry said. “Are you doing okay?”

“I'm fine.”

“No one can believe you took a Slider.” Henry made an actor's face, opening his eyes wide and tossing his pupils from side to side. He feigned shock by dropping his mouth open and bringing up one hand to cover it.

Jana grinned. She loved being around other actors.

“I thought it was cool,” he said.

“Not stupid?”

“Not stupid,” Henry said. “It was brave.”

“Thank you,” Jana said.

“It's Mars Dreamcote, then? Second day in school and you're already hooked up. Guess I wasn't fast enough.”

“You never know,” Jana said. “The next new student may be the one. I love your hair, by the way. How do you get it like that?”

“Toaster,” Henry replied.

Jana lifted her eyebrows.

“I stuck a fork in one.”

Mars stood in front of her desk.

“Let's go, Webster,” he said. He handed a slip of paper to Henry, who sat in the desk next to Jana's. “Give that to the teacher for me, Sixkiller, when she gets here. I'll owe you one.”

Henry nodded.

Jana stood from her desk, once again enveloped in the warmth of being close to Mars. She hated to miss her first drama class, but Mars was going to help her find her way to Michael. And that was more important than school. Any school.

Mars walked Jana to the basement swimming pool. They were alone now. The Risers who dove from the high board only used the pool two days a week.

Small lights over the locker-room doors barely lit one end of the room. The remainder was dark. Jana stood alone in the edge of the dim light and waited. She felt cold surrounded by the darkness. She ducked her head slightly and let her hair fall forward in an effort to keep her face warmer.

Except for two feet at one end of the pool that caught and reflected the dim light on its surface, the water was black.

Mars came out of the boys' locker room in red swimming trunks. He turned on the underwater lights. He left the overhead lights turned off. Lit up from underneath, the water was deep and pretty. Jana stared at it. The pool looked like a three-dimensional movie screen, waiting for her to move across it, inside it.

He stood next to her. Standing near his body was like standing in sunlight for Jana. She wanted to run her hand along his bare shoulder, down his muscled arm, until their hands met. Jana shook her head. If she touched Mars that way, it would only make her want Michael more. If she kissed him to swallow his warmth, it would only make her desperate to kiss Michael again.

“Aren't you getting in?” she asked.

Mars nodded. “We need to talk,” he said. “This is our only chance at school.”

“Okay. It's kind of spooky here.”

“Do you swim?”

“I'm clumsy at it,” Jana admitted. “But I float real well. I'm buoyant.”

“You're not afraid, are you?”

Jana waited. “Yes,” she finally said. “I'm afraid all the time.”

Mars let it soak in.

“What are you afraid of, Webster? Me?”

“No, not you. It's everything.” Jana bit her lip. “I'm afraid of everything. Aren't you scared to be here?”

“Maybe,” Mars said. “Sometimes.”

“I guess I'm afraid of being alone.”

“Being dead is like that.”

“That's it,” she said. “Exactly that. I'm afraid of being dead.”

Jana turned to look at him. She'd said too much and wondered if he noticed. When Mars looked back at her, his blue eyes sparkled in the reflected light of the pool. Like lenses that magnified existing light and color, his eyes were small blue mirrors. Jana saw her face in his eyes. There was one of her in each blue eye.

They were both afraid, she realized.

Mars looked away and Jana felt a chill.

“Jameson told me you want to be a Slider,” Mars said. “That's not the way to go, Webster. You don't want to go in that direction.”

“Don't tell me what I want,” she warned him.

“I know what you want,” Mars told her. “You want Michael.”

“I'm in love with him. He's in love with me. Michael wants to be with me, Mars. And I need him here. Does that bother you?”

“Some of it does,” he admitted. “I don't think you should kill him.”

“Why not?” she asked. “You're the one who is all about
murder
, aren't you?”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I wrote those messages in your notebooks. I wanted you to know . . . to remember. You didn't just fall, Webster. I was there. I saw everything.”

“Yes, I did just fall,” Jana insisted. Her words echoed off the tiled walls.

“I'll show you later.”

“What were you doing there, anyway?”

“Just walking through,” Mars said, “remembering what it was like to go bowling.”

“It hurts. That's what it's like to go bowling,” Jana said.

“You saw me, Webster. You don't remember, but you saw me. As you were falling, you looked right at me. Your eyes looked like green traffic lights. It was like you were asking for help.”

“No,” Jana said quietly.

“I watched you die.”

Mars turned away. He dove into the pool.

Her eyes were greenish at best, not as bright green as traffic lights like Mars had said. The color was plain. Not like her mother's eyes. Her mother's eyes were rich with pure, photographic color. Jana's were dull in comparison.

His legs scissor-kicked just under the surface of the underlit water. Waves of eerie light and shadows, reflected through the movement and color of the water, moved around the walls of the room. It looked like she was dreaming.

Jana was dreaming of Michael being with her again. As soon as she was a Slider, she'd find a way to save Michael from his empty life without her. Jana would find a way that didn't hurt him. Or if it did, it would be fast, like pulling a tooth.

Sitting down beside the pool, Jana tested the water with her fingers. The water wasn't as cold as she feared. She tugged her skirt under her bottom and, sitting sideways, took off her school shoes and kneesocks.

Jana wanted to be in the water. She wanted the weight of the water wrapped around her like a blanket. She put her feet in and wiggled her toes.

Soon Mars was next to her, his elbows over the edge of the pool. His dark hair was soaked through, and water ran down his face in tiny rivers.

“I wanted you to know this is here,” Mars said. “That it's an option. Aren't you coming in?”

“Don't know.” Jana pushed her feet out into the water until her toes appeared above the surface. “Looks wet.”

“There are swimsuits in the girls' locker room.”

“I don't think so. The last time I wore someone else's clothes . . . well, shoes, anyway . . . I mean, I might drown.”

“I'll save you if you do.”

“Are there towels in the locker room?”

“Yes,” Mars said.

“Are they plaid and pleated?”

“Normal, regular dead people towels,” Mars assured her. “Swim in your underwear, Webster. I won't watch, I promise. I'll wait at the bottom of the pool.”

“But you have to come up for air,” she said.

“Turn the lights off, then. The pool's the best thing they've got in this place.”

The water was warmer now than when she'd first put her feet in. It was Mars, she decided. His body temperature had warmed the pool while he swam, while he loitered next to her, kicking aimlessly behind him to keep the weight off his elbows on the pool's edge. The water was definitely warmer. And it was deep. Jana wanted it that way. She wanted to be covered up entirely in water.

“I guess I'd better hurry,” Jana said.

Chapter Eighteen

MICHAEL SHUDDERED.

A chill climbed up his spine every time he listened to the voice mail. It was Jana's voice. There was no mistaking it. And the call was from her cell phone.

“Michael. It's me.”

Marilyn Webster was his concern now and that gave him the creeps, as well. She smelled strongly of stale wine and had breathed with her mouth open through the entire funeral. She'd practically ruined his best dress shirt with makeup and tears.

“I can't be alone,” Jana's mother said. She had one elbow stuck in the air with her hand bent behind her neck, trying to start the zipper on the back of her black dress.

“Turn around,” he said.

She nearly fell onto the bed when she did. Michael unzipped her dress. Somehow she managed to pull her dress over her head without falling down. The material lifted her hair and it didn't quite fall back into place.

Jana's mother sat on the edge of the bed and kicked away her shoes.

“Stay with me, Michael.”

No. She would be asleep in two seconds. She'd taken a handful of pills on their way to the bedroom. Michael had seen it all before. Jana's mother reached for pills as often as a smoker reached for cigarettes. She was a walking pharmacy, when she could walk at all. And that was on top of the wine.

“Be a good girl,” Michael said. “Go to bed.”

“Good girl,” Marilyn said, mimicking him.

“That's right, go to sleep now.”

She lay back on the bed, her eyes closed. Michael opened the drawer of her bedside stand, took something from the back that Jana had never known was there, and slipped it into the side pocket of his suit jacket.

He looked at Marilyn carefully before leaving the room. She had been a model when she was young. A supermodel. At sixteen, she'd made the covers of magazines. She'd dated NFL football players and movie stars. She did TV commercials for shampoo. Michael didn't see it when he looked at her. She just looked thin.

Jana was twice as pretty as her mother. Everyone knew that but Jana. She'd been the perfect girl for him to be seen with.

“I'm still here. I'm always here.”

But, he thought, pretty didn't matter anymore.

Standing on the porch, holding up his hand for Nathan and Sherry to wait to say anything, Michael called the lady next door. She took care of Jana's mother when Jana wasn't there.

“Fine,” he said when she asked how he was. “But Marilyn isn't. Can you come over after a while and check on things? Spend the night if you want to. There's plenty of food in the fridge. And the money is where it usually is if you need to buy anything.”

“Call me.”

Did he dare?

•  •  •

Jana considered her options. She didn't have all day.

She left her shoes and socks on the wooden bench in the girls' locker room and looked through the swimsuits that were stacked in rows on an open shelf. They were bright red one-piece suits with wide shoulder straps. She held one up. The bottom half was huge compared to the top. When the whole thing got wet, the bottom would bag to her knees.

Jana struggled to work the buttons on her skirt through the double-sewn buttonholes. She took off her skirt and blouse.

She couldn't wear her bra into the pool. It wouldn't be dry in time for fifth period. Same thing if she put her blouse on without her bra and got into the pool. And she couldn't wear the school's famous granny panties into the pool either. They'd weigh five pounds wet and be around her ankles in no time.

Jana ran out of options.

She took off everything, bra and panties too. She placed Michael's class ring inside her shoe on the bench. Jana wrapped herself in one of the towels from the rack by the door and slipped out of the locker room. She'd seen where Mars had turned on the pool lights. She walked quickly to the switches and flipped them, one after the other, until the lights inside the pool went out.

Jana heard a motor whir. She'd accidentally turned on the pumps that sucked water from the drain at the bottom of the pool and sent it through jet sprays to agitate the surface of the water for the high dives. Jana wasn't sure what it was, but she could hear the water moving. It sounded something like a whirlpool.

The spill of light from the locker rooms was enough to get into the pool by. Three or four feet from this end of the pool, she would be in darkness. She'd be safe.

Jana couldn't see Mars, but he was in there somewhere. She used the exit ladder to climb backwards into the pool, removing the towel as her knees submerged. She tossed the towel on the concrete, and with a quick push backwards, Jana was in the water altogether.

It was wonderful. The water was as warm as a bath. If they'd let her sleep here, she would.

Jana dog-paddled with her head above water to the edge of the light, then she dropped under the surface with her legs stretched tight, her feet together. Chlorine stung her eyes. Jana held her breath until her toes gently touched bottom, then she came back up to the surface by waving her hands like wings.

With her head above the water, she pushed her hands through her wet hair. Even her hair felt warm. She swam back to the edge of the pool. Jana made circles with her feet, lazily keeping her chin just above the surface of the pool.

“I thought you couldn't swim.” Mars's voice reached out to her from the darkness.

“I'm not as bad as I thought,” Jana said. “Where are you?”

She turned around. Jana placed one hand back over her shoulder to grip the edge of the pool. She kicked slowly to stay in place.

“Here,” he said, splashing her.

Mars appeared from the darkness. Moving toward her. He stopped where she could see the outline of his face. But his warmth didn't stop. It moved toward her and touched her. An underwater wave of heat bathed her body. It was impossible, she thought, that he was only one or two degrees warmer than she was.

Jana was surprised how comfortable she felt being naked in the water and so close to Mars. He wasn't the flirty, pushy type. Other than flipping Jana the bird her first day on the bus, he'd never misbehaved. Jana wasn't afraid of Mars. She was afraid of herself.

“I was sitting on the bottom,” he said. “I felt the water surge when you turned on the pumps. It causes a current toward the drain. You're not supposed to go near the drain when the pumps are on. If you put your hand on the drain, and you aren't strong enough, it can hold you there.”

“Oh, I never go to the bottom, except my toes,” Jana said. “Too buoyant to sink, remember? I think it's my ears. They're like water wings.”

“It's your lungs,” Mars said. “It's because you hold your breath. If you let all the air out of your lungs as you slip underwater, you'll drift down. It's like being suspended in air.”

He moved a little closer, then his shoulders lifted from the water. Mars raised his hand in front of his face and pointed downward.

“Come on,” he said. “Drop down. When your head is under, Webster, let all the air out of your chest.”

Air bubbles rose above her as Jana submerged into darkness. Mars was right. She sank.

It felt like she was floating in air, a fallen leaf caught on the breeze. With the slightest motion of her hands she could rise a little, or drop farther. It was pitch black. When her feet touched bottom, she let her knees bend. Soon her fingers touched the bottom of the pool.

Then she stretched out backwards and stayed still, an inch from the bottom, maybe two. Jana felt the current created by the pumps slide under her. The drain was in the dark end of the pool. When she needed to breathe, Jana folded her arms over her chest and leaned forward and up until her legs where under her again. She pushed her feet hard against the bottom and shot to the surface like a rocket.

Michael drove.

Sherry was in the passenger seat, her feet on the dashboard. In the backseat, Nathan played the mystery voice mail message over and over again.

Nathan couldn't shut up about it. “It's the guy from the bowling alley, the one who tried to save her life. We have to find him before he finds us. We have to protect ourselves.”

“Give it a rest,” Michael said. “It was an accident. Nobody killed her on purpose or anything.”

“I don't care,” Sherry said. “I don't care at all. You wanted to be rid of her, Michael, and you are. So what if she died? People do, you know. It's the same as breaking up with her. She just did it for you.”

“With a little help,” Nathan said. He punched the code to play the voice mail again.

Michael worried that it would keep him out of college if anyone found out. He didn't know whether or not what they had done was a crime. Technically it probably was, he thought. And he'd done it to her. If it was against the law, he was the one the cops would come for.

“You ever watch old movies?” Jana asked.

“Not really.”

“I watch them all the time. Some of them over and over again. However old you are in a movie is how old you'll be forever. For actors, that's how old you are when someone watches the movie—even if it's a hundred years from now.”

“Guess it's the same with characters in books,” Mars said. “Tom Sawyer is the same age every time you read it.”

They were in the water, near the edge of light, dog paddling.

“Here's one,” Jana said. “All these actors were just kids. Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms, Ellen Burstyn, Randy Quaid. They're all in high school and they go skinny-dipping in a swimming pool.”

Jana waited. It was one of her all-time favorites. “And Cybill Shepherd. It was her first movie. Got it?”

“Not yet.”

“
The Last Picture Show
,” Jana finally said. “I'm sure you've seen it.”

“I don't think so.”

Jana bobbed below the surface and came up with her mouth full of water. She spit it out like a fountain. It left the taste of strawberries in her mouth.

“Okay, how many demerits do I have to get to become a Slider?”

“Don't joke about that, Webster.”

“I'm not joking. How many? Ten, fifteen, twenty-five?”

“Probably a couple hundred. It's a major change of status here. And Risers are the good kids. You could do all sorts of stuff wrong and it wouldn't hurt you in the end. And since you're Risers to begin with, you don't do much rule breaking anyway.”

“Maybe it's time to start,” Jana said. “How many? No kidding. I need to know.”

“Well,” Mars said, “I think killing someone on the Planet would just about take care of it.”

“Now you're joking,” Jana said spitefully. “You know I can't do anything on the Planet without becoming a Slider first. I want to be like you. I want one foot on Earth, Mars. Is that so much to ask?”

“Give it a day, Webster. To think it through.”

“I want Michael to see me! Can't you understand that? Before it's too late. Before . . . you know, things change.”

“I understand,” Mars said softly. “You're in love with him.”

“Let's go back,” Jana urged. “If you hold my hand like you did before, he'll be able to hear me. Let's go back.”

“Maybe,” Mars said. “You'll definitely get a few demerits for going off campus.”

“Okay, then. That's settled. We'll do it tonight. What time?”

He didn't say anything. Jana felt alone despite the increasing warmth of the water when Mars was near.

“What's wrong?” she asked.

“I want to save a life, Webster. And you want to kill someone. You might say we have a conflict of interests.”

“I'll help you if you help me,” Jana said. “Conflict resolved.”

Mars didn't say anything again.

“Well,” Jana said loudly, “that's why you brought me here, isn't it? To ask me to do something.”

“Maybe,” Mars said.

“Listen.” Jana spoke more softly. “I'm not stupid, Mars. I know you want or need something and it's important to you. And I know it has something to do with me. With where I died or how I died or something. You've been staring at me since the minute I was on the bus the first day. So just tell me. What are you afraid of telling me?”

Jana waited.

“Have you done the mazes yet?” he eventually asked.

“What?”

“The mazes in second hour. I saw you copying them down. Mr. Skinner's sharp, Webster. Try those mazes, do them all in order, and then we'll talk.”

She might be on the plain side compared to her mother, but Jana's body was just what most boys wanted. She was naked. She was only two feet away from him. And he was telling her to do her homework. Unbelievable.

“Are you kidding me?”

“No,” Mars said pleasantly.

Jana wanted to call him a name. Mars was the most frustrating guy she'd ever met, the most frustrating guy on or off the Planet. Jana didn't have time for mazes. She wasn't Arva, afraid to do anything. And she wasn't her mother, who let everyone else do things for her, including raising Jana, because she was beautiful.

If there was something to do about the situation, Jana wanted to get it done. Now. Lights, camera,
action
!

“Look,” she finally said. “Whatever you want me to do, I'll do it. So, let's go save a life and let's go kill Michael.”