Dead Rules (7 page)

Chapter Nine

JANA SHIVERED.

Her skirt was a puddle of plaid encircling her feet.

Sometime during the conversation, she had let go of her unbuttoned school skirt and it had dropped to her ankles. Jana had been talking to the hunkiest Slider in school while standing in her school blouse, underwear, and socks. And nothing else. Without even noticing.

This balcony scene wasn't anything like Romeo and Juliet's.

Jana jerked her skirt back into place, clamped the waist closed in her fist, and rushed inside the dorm. Mars hadn't said a thing when her skirt fell. Whenever
that
was. Jana couldn't decide if Mars was the nicest guy she'd ever met. Or truly evil.

She knew, for one thing, that Wyatt's cutting himself wasn't just a trick. It was real blood that pumped from his sliced-open flesh. It looked like blood and smelled like blood.

“This is from Mars,” Wyatt had said.

There was more to being a Slider than she understood just yet. And there was more to Mars than just being a Slider. He was warmer than the others. She was sure of it.

Beatrice and Christie were in her dorm room when Jana returned.

They sat on Arva's bed. Both girls wore loose cotton pajamas with small stenciled designs in light red and light blue colors. Arva stood by her desk in her cut-down prom dress.

“So?” Beatrice finally said.

She stared at Jana who looked back, puzzled.

“What happened?” Christie asked. “Did he kiss you? Did you kiss him?”

“No,” Jana said. “It wasn't a date or anything.”

“Close enough,” Beatrice said.

“Too close,” Arva chimed in, disapproving as always. She brought Jana a bottled water from an open case tucked under the computer table.

“Well, he did hold my hand,” Jana confessed, accepting the water from Arva. “And it was very, very warm.”

“Then what?” Christie wanted to know every last detail.

“Then my skirt fell off.”

“It's too early to tell her anything,” Mars said. “She's in love with this guy. She wouldn't believe a thing we said about him.”

“You make everything too complicated,” Wyatt said. “You think too much.”

“I'm looking for clarity, Wyatt.”

“Clarity?”
Wyatt laughed. “Life's a mess. Why should death be any different? We could have shown her everything tonight. We have to do the things we have to do. And not think about it so much.”

“There's a path here, Wyatt. A road. It's step by step. You just can't skip into the middle of everything or you'll get lost.”

The Sliders sat on the floor of their room, their backs against the wall. Sliders almost never went to sleep. Their rooms were smaller than the four-person suites on the second floor.

“Screw the metaphors,” Wyatt said. “Let's jump. For real.”

“Hey, I'll still jump,” Mars protested. “When it's time, you know I'll jump. But sometimes it makes sense to look before you leap. She's smart, Wyatt. She's strong.”

“Well, she can handle it, then.”

“We're not sure Risers can go off campus on their own.”

“Sure they can,” Wyatt said. “And so can we. But we aren't going to if you're going to sit here all night. It's time to get out there if we're going to jump.”

“Give me a minute, will you? I've got things to think about. You cutting your arm open didn't help matters any. What if she had flipped out and screamed for help? The library Grays would have caught you. And you'd have, what, two hours before the school had you in front of the Regents Council? The Virgins had already been sent to the room to warn you once.”

“Those old farts like me, Mars. I got the regents beat.”

“You have them beat until you don't. You come out on the bottom one time, Wyatt, and it's for good. It's instant.”

“Instant toast,” Wyatt said. “I kind of like that.”

“No reason to get expelled. If you're going to be a vacancy, you may as well walk out. At least you'll have a few days that way.”

“All right, already. Got it.”

“Well, get this too. You can't tell any of the Risers too much their first day. And you can't show them either. They freak, then they put on their Goody Two-shoes the school gives them and never look up again. You can lose them the first day.”

“She wasn't going to scream,” Wyatt argued. “Besides, you said she was sent here for you or something like that. I was just getting her introduced, you know?”

“I didn't expect her to be in love with that guy. Not
that
in love. It was in her eyes when she said his name. It's deep. It complicates everything. And you were trying to scare her pants off for the hell of it. You weren't doing me any favors, that's for sure.”

“I'm sorry, all right?”

Mars brushed away the apology as soon as it was offered. “I saw her die,” he said quietly, almost to himself. “You saw her too. On the Planet.”

“Okay, I saw her.”

“She walked right through me, Wyatt.”

“And then she died. So what?”

Jana had walked through Mars when she picked up her shoes at the counter. He was loitering as a ghost and he should have been more careful. But it wasn't just that she had walked through him. People on the Planet did that all the time. This girl had walked through him and softly said, “Oh.” She had felt him. In some manner or another, they had touched.

“That means something,” Mars said.

“It means she was going bowling, man. That's all. And
you
were the one who wanted to flip that place.”

“Exactly,” Mars agreed. “Don't you see? I was supposed to be there. I was supposed to save her life.”

“No, you were supposed to be here tucked in bed with your teddy bear.”

“I watched her die. I felt her die, Wyatt. And I was watching her when she fell. She had a wild, surprised look in her eyes.”

“Watching her?” Wyatt asked. “Hell, you were on top of her the second she fell.”

“I was trying to help,” Mars said. “That's the ticket, Wyatt. You've got to help somebody.”

It had felt like she was seeing him, Mars remembered, as she fell over backward with the stupid bowling ball in full swing over her head. She must not remember it, but he was absolutely certain she had seen him at a time when he was invisible to everyone on the Planet.

Then she was dead. By the time he materialized his body, she was dead. He couldn't do a thing about it. But he had tried.

“Ticket to nowhere, man,” Wyatt said. “We're here until we aren't. Come on, it's dark. Let's go.”

Mars stood up and offered his hand to Wyatt and, with a minimal tug, pulled his roommate to his feet.

“About time,” Wyatt said.

“Man, what's rubbed you the wrong way?”

“A quarter mile of highway pavement,” Wyatt growled.

Mars didn't laugh. Wyatt had died sliding a motorcycle on its side along a downhill run of Interstate 40. Wyatt left a lot of his skin, one side of his mouth, and one eye, along with his mortality, on the pavement behind him.

Clutching the lower metal railing with both hands, Mars and Wyatt dangled from the second-story fire-escape balcony. When they dropped to the ground, Wyatt fell over sideways in the grass. Landing on two feet when one knee bent and the other didn't made for a clumsy getaway. But it was a getaway nonetheless and that was all that mattered.

They strode through darkness toward the hole in the chain-link fence that surrounded the closed motel. The whole world waited.

“So where are we going to jump tonight?” Mars asked, helping Wyatt through the fence.

“You tell me. You're the badass of this place. I'm the simple guy, remember? I don't plan ahead.”

“I'll have to teach you how to do that, then,” Mars said. “There are consequences to be afraid of here, Wyatt. It's no good not to be afraid of anything.”

“
No Good
is my middle name. Always has been.”

Jana had to tell it three times.

Each time she ended her performance with realizing her skirt had fallen down to her ankles. And each time Arva said, “It did not.”

The last time, Jana showed her. She stood up, let go of her skirt's waistband, and let the material drop to the floor.

“Where was he standing? How close?” Christie asked.

“Too close,” Arva said. “You shouldn't have been alone with that boy, Jana.”

“Hey, can I borrow your lip gloss?” Beatrice asked.

“Sure,” Jana said. She stepped out of the puddle of her school skirt on the floor, found the tube of lip gloss next to her cell phone on the bed, and walked it to Beatrice. “Cute pajamas, by the way,” Jana said. “Did you get those here?”

“Oh, I make them. Sometimes the Grays slip up and leave a stray bedsheet or a pillowcase in the linen room when they collect the laundry.”

“What are the stencils?”

“I made those too. Mine are bluebirds and Christie's are butterflies. I found some stamp-pad ink in the school office. It's permanent ink and all, but I only have red and blue.” Beatrice did her upside-down little smile. Jana noticed she wasn't wearing makeup. She saved it for school.

“After a few washings, the red looks pink, though,” Beatrice added.

“They're very pretty,” Jana said.

“Thank you,” Beatrice said.

Christie did a quick shoulder spasm and said, “Ouch.”

“Okay, I have to ask,” Jana said. “Why do you do that, Christie? Do you have the hiccups? Do they hurt?”

“Love tugs,” Beatrice answered for her. “Her parents won't let go. They keep trying to pull her back.”

Christie made a face and shook her head slightly to let Jana know it was a subject she didn't want to talk about now.

“That's all nonsense,” Arva said. “It's just the way she died. She hiccupped or something.”

Jana believed Beatrice. She walked back to her bed and plopped down next to the clothes she'd been wearing when she died.

“Don't lie down,” Arva barked, her croaky, whispered voice as loud as Jana had ever heard it. “You'll go right to sleep. Ten seconds, tops.”

Beatrice nodded in agreement. Her yard dart bobbed along.

“I wish someone would hold my hand,” Christie pouted, unable to let go of the topic of Jana and Mars on the balcony. “The trouble is when you hold hands with another Riser, it just reminds you how cold we are.”

“The right way to look at it,” Arva said, “is Sliders are too warm. Risers are just right. Once you get used to it, Jana, you'll see that we're normal. We're what you're supposed to be when you die.”

Jana wanted to be more than normal. Jana and Michael were better than normal. They would sparkle beyond death just as brightly as they did in life. Once he got here. They wouldn't really be dead if they were together.

She smiled warmly at the thought of holding hands with Michael.

Arva kept talking. Croakity, croakity, croak. “Sliders are just a bunch of dirty pigs in sweaty clothes. They're still touching Earth. They have one foot on Earth and the other here. Risers don't cling to Earth like Sliders do. So, yes, Jana, they're warmer than us.”

“Some more than others,” Beatrice added, applying a layer of Jana's peach lip gloss. She couldn't help herself. It was there and so were her lips.

Wyatt watched everything Mars did in the real world.

Because he worked at it, Mars possessed a more highly developed skill in dealing with the physical elements of the Planet. He could naturalize at will. Few Sliders could. He was able to pick up things and move objects without having to think about it. Wyatt was still learning.

The grass and weeds alongside the pavement were wet. Mars and Wyatt walked down the middle of the road in silence, looking for a car to borrow. It couldn't be too new. Those cars had alarms. They kept their eyes out for something with rust.

“You think I'm not afraid of anything? I'll tell you what I'm afraid of,” Wyatt said as they walked. “Good girls. They give me the creeps.”

“Nothing to be afraid of,” Mars said. “Here's all you need to know. Good girls, girls like Webster, think they're bad. And bad girls think they're good. Bad girls think nobody understands them. Good girls are afraid that people do.”

“Maybe that's why they give me the creeps,” Wyatt said. “They're always hiding something.”

A blue Toyota pickup truck turned on to the road and came toward them, its radio blasting. Wyatt stiffened and shifted his head to the side against the noise and bright headlights of the oncoming vehicle. Mars never faltered. He walked in stride as the truck drove through the two of them. He pushed his fallen hair from his forehead once the vehicle was behind them.

“You could do real girls if you wanted to,” Wyatt said, extending his limping stride to catch up to Mars. “Have you ever thought of that?”

“Have you ever thought of anything else?” Mars asked.

“Not really,” Wyatt said.

Chapter Ten

PAULINE WAS BESIDE HERSELF.

It was the first thing Jana noticed about her roommate. Jana had come out of the bathroom to find Pauline sitting in two pieces on the bed. Her bottom half, that ended at the top of her skirt, kept its feet on the floor. Her upper half perched on the bed nearby, one hand planted on the pillow to keep from toppling.

Pauline's hair stuck out to one side. That was the second thing Jana noticed. The senior's hair was permanently swept straight out from the side of her head as if starched and lacquered into place.

“Her first day and she already had a date,” Christie was saying.

“Okay, tell all,” Pauline said, turning her hair toward Jana.

The yellow fins of the lawn dart in Beatrice's head leaned forward in anticipation of hearing Jana's skirt story one more time.

“Her skirt did
not
fall off,” Arva insisted in her hoarse, raspy voice. “She's teasing us.”

“It was Mars Dreamcote!” Beatrice, no longer able to contain herself, blurted out to Pauline.

The senior's expression turned stern. “Be careful, Jana. That boy's dangerous.”

“That's what I've been trying to tell her,” Arva croaked triumphantly.

“There are Sliders,” Pauline continued, “and then there's Mars. They say he's going to walk off campus one day and live on the Planet. Just walk off. He won't last a week. If you leave campus and stay overnight, that's the same as a vacancy. You can't come back. I'm telling you, it's dangerous just to know him.”

“I warned her,” Arva said.

“Now, tell all,” Pauline insisted.

Jana ran through the sequence of her balcony scene with Mars.

“At least your bottom didn't fall off,” Pauline said. Her legs and waist got up from the bed and walked to the bathroom, hips boldly swaying just to make a point. The hem of her plaid skirt flounced. “That's how you flash a little leg. You don't just let your skirt fall off.”

Jana was supposed to say something. She was thinking about tomorrow instead.

“I guess you're wondering how,” Pauline said to Jana.

Jana stopped watching Pauline's legs and tried to focus on her roommate's top half. With an absentminded motion of her hand, Jana brushed one side of her hair behind her ear.

“How
what
?” she asked.

“How I died, for instance,” Pauline said with a sniff.

The wind shook the pecan trees at the far side of the polo field.

A man standing next to Pauline reached into his shirt pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He put one in his mouth, replaced the pack, and held a blue plastic lighter under the tip of the cigarette. It wouldn't strike. Pauline had the odd sense that he had just done the whole thing twice, but the second time was happening at the same instant as the first.

Few people noticed the leading front of the wind shake the trees until the horses that were lined up and saddled for the match broke free. Black clouds with low, dark green edges had formed a line in the sky. The wind came through the trees and the horses whinnied, stood on their hind legs, and shook free of their tethers.

A gust of wind took Pauline's hat off her head. It was her wide-rimmed straw hat that was perfect for watching polo matches.

Pauline chased her hat.

The newborn storm surprised everyone. Pauline's father leaped from his thoroughbred as it reared wildly in the middle of the polo field. Other players tried to rein their mounts, then gave up. The horses went wild. There were forty or more of them. The horses turned sharply as the wind changed. Soon they were circling the field. Their hooves pounding the turf sounded like thunder.

Pauline almost had her hat once, then twice. But each time she reached for it, the hat flipped and rolled in the wind. She wasn't giving up. The hat was important to her. She'd worn it to the Kentucky Derby in May, when she had picked her own horse for her father to bet on and it had won.

The mounts in polo were called ponies. They weren't. Most of the mounts were thoroughbreds, large muscular horses full of run. Thoroughbreds were high-strung and spooked easily. Instinctively gathering into a close-knit herd, the horses charged in a mad all-out dash for safety.

But no place was safe. A funnel cloud formed overhead and dropped the pecans it had picked up from the trees. The hard-shelled nuts pelted the horses.

Crazed by the assault, the horses circled Pauline, who found herself in the middle of the polo field. She stopped chasing her hat. Stinging raindrops blew sideways against her legs, as if it were raining from the ground up.

The panic of the thoroughbreds frightened Pauline. She stood still in the rain, in the wind. It would be over soon. The charging mounts whinnied and screamed. Their eyes were wild with confusion and fear. The circle of horses, she believed, was protecting her. All she had to do was stand still. In a tornado.

The churning funnel of wind lifted and lowered in the dark sky, tipping from one side to the other. Pauline heard the roar above her. It sounded like a train. She heard tree limbs break. The funnel lowered. Pauline closed her eyes. Her feet, she thought, were lifting from the ground.

A sheet of tin from the stables roof passed through her body like a scalpel, slicing her in half. Her heart fluttered. There was no more to it than that. Pauline closed and opened her eyes.

There was nothing to see. It was the same with her eyes opened or closed. There was nothing to see and nothing left for Pauline to fear.

“A piece of tin roof blew right through me,” Pauline said.

Christie said, “Ouch.”

The wind explained the senior's unique hairdo, Jana thought.

“Pauline can put her ass on backwards, if she wants,” Beatrice said. “You should see her at dances.”

The four juniors laughed. Including Arva. It sounded like she was choking to death. Then from out of nowhere, Arva croaked and rasped, “Yeah, she's a real ass sandwich.”

This was so unlike Arva, the laughter in the room became hysterical. Even Pauline couldn't help but join in.

It was the first time since she had died that Jana was having any fun at all. Before she died, Jana would never have guessed that dead people told jokes. Or held hands. Or cared what clothes they wore. She wished Michael was there somehow to see all this.

A small black feather drifted to the floor.

The moon was out.

Mars and Wyatt rode to the cemetery in a 1997 Pontiac with a bad muffler. Mars drove. He concentrated on making his hands move the steering wheel. Materializing and interacting physically with the world required intense focus. Most of the Sliders couldn't manage it at all when they were first on the Planet. Others learned how to touch and move things, but only for short periods. Mars could go all night.

He turned the car onto a dirt road overhung with trees along one side. Mars parked in front of the cemetery entrance. The two Sliders got out of the car without opening the doors. They walked though the closed gate.

“That damn cat is around here somewhere,” Wyatt said. He turned his head from shoulder to shoulder, looking for it.

“It lives here. What do you care?”

“It always follows me,” Wyatt complained. “When I'm on the Planet, things are always sneaking up on me. Especially that cat.”

“Cats and dogs are like that,” Mars said. “They know we're here when people don't.”

The things they came for sat on Mars's grave in two cardboard boxes. Mars ignored the headstone. He was tired of reading it. The big white cat was with the Sliders now and it wouldn't leave.

“Shoo,” Wyatt said. “Scat!”

Mars was stronger at his gravesite than anywhere else. He could will his body back without any real effort at all. Wyatt had to work at it to pick up the lighter of the two boxes, but he got it done. Halfway back to the car, he had to set down his box. The cat was distracting him.

The cat waited for Wyatt to regain his physical strength. Materializing required practice. The more time you spent on the Planet, the better you became at interacting physically with the world. Mars and Wyatt practiced every night. Sliders had to naturalize on the Planet before they could jump. That alone made Planet practice worthwhile.

Wyatt had heard that when a Slider spends the entire night on the Planet and doesn't return in time for class the next morning, his body naturalizes at will. Of course, you couldn't get back into Dead School. He wondered how long a Dead School dropout had before being whisked away to his chosen destiny beyond the Planet. A few days of being more real than dead might be worth it.

The cat stopped at the graveyard gate. Mars and Wyatt put the boxes Nora Headley had left for them in the backseat and drove to the house where the psychic was waiting with her clients.

“I don't think that cat's real,” Wyatt said. “I think it's a ghost.”

“Takes one to know one,” Mars said. “And don't forget, Nora's sensitive. She can see and hear us when others can't. You can't make fun of her clothes out loud.”

“Remind me to whisper,” Wyatt said.

Jana lay in bed, clutching her cell phone.

Pauline had said whatever she held in her hands would be there when she was on the bus in the morning. Beatrice had suggested makeup or a hairbrush.

Jana dropped her head to her pillow and instantly fell asleep. Sleep for the dead was like falling backwards into a hole as black as midnight. You never hit bottom. And you never dreamed.

Arva undressed for bed. She checked on Darcee. Nothing had changed. Even kids in comas had to miss home, Arva thought. She kissed Darcee lightly on the forehead and whispered as softly as a feather, “Good night, dear one.” It seemed normal to do that. It was the one thing Arva could remember about her own mother.

Jana had dropped off on top of the covers. Arva took the blanket from her own bed and draped it over her new roommate. She didn't want Jana to be cold her first night in the dorm.

Arva silently counted to one hundred before resting her head on her pillow. She didn't want the day to be over. They were only in school for a certain amount of time and Arva never wanted any of their days to end. She wanted school to last forever.

Mars and Wyatt walked through Nora's kitchen.

She was set up in another room, waiting for Mars to come in and blow out one of the candles and answer questions in ghost voice.

Mars opened the fridge door and found his bottle of soda pop cradled in a bowl of ice on the top shelf. Drinking soda pop was an addiction for Mars, one of the things that made him feel normal when he was on the Planet.

“Is someone there?” Nora called from the outer room.

She spoke in her high, trilling séance voice. Nora's clients for the evening sat around her dining table. A candle burned in a silver holder in front of each of them.

It was Wyatt's turn. He walked into the room, leaned over the table on his good leg, and blew out the candle in front of a large curly-haired woman. He touched her shoulder lightly, then stepped back. The woman gasped and shuddered.

Wyatt was improving. When Mars had first brought him to the séances, he couldn't do anything but watch. Now he could earn his share of the barter items the local fortune-teller placed on Mars's grave as payment for a few scheduled words from the other side.

“Hey, Nora,” Mars said from the doorway. “What's up?”