Dead Rules (17 page)

“And it did wonders for your hair,” Beatrice said.

“I know,” Christie said happily. “It really did. Plenty of bounce.”

Jana saw how Christie's death fit in with Arva's view of things. Christie's uncle had been drinking. If Arva had been there when the uncle showed up, Jana was certain she would have said, “Better not.” And Arva would have been right, Jana had to admit. Still, you weren't going to get anywhere if you never did anything.

“Speaking of bounce,” Beatrice said, “you're lucky one of these didn't fall on you at the dance today.” She pointed to the yellow yard dart fins at the top of her head.

“Or two!” Christie added quickly. Both girls burst out laughing and Jana had to smile.

“Maybe if I'd been dancing with Brad, one would have,” Jana said.

Beatrice stopped laughing. Her face softened and she smiled warmly at Jana, her little upside-down smile stretching into a real one.

“Thank you,” she said. “I'd almost forgotten his name, and I never want to forget that. What we did may not be a lot for some people, but it was special to me. It was the first time I'd ever felt like an adult. You know what I mean? When he touched my breast, when he closed his hand over it, I felt like a woman instead of a girl.”

•  •  •

Jana didn't even consider going to drama class.

Students she didn't know said hi to her in the halls, especially the boys. Jana was popular now. Neither Wyatt nor Mars had been in the cafeteria for lunch. She feared she might be unpopular with both of them for the time being. No, she thought, Wyatt would have gotten a kick out of her performance. It was Mars she worried about.

She found her way to the basement swimming pool on her own. This time the overhead lights were on. Two Risers stood near the diving board. Jana walked to the edge of the pool. The surface of the water looked like light blue satin.

Jana pulled off her shoes and socks. Mars sat on the bottom of the pool. She felt cold and didn't want to be. She took off her skirt, practically bruising her fingertips on the ridiculously tight buttons that held the waist closed. She left her skirt where it fell. She carefully removed Michael's ring and placed it inside one of her shoes. Leaving on her blouse and school uniform granny panties, Jana jumped into the pool feet first.

Chapter Twenty-Five

JANA JUMPED IN AND WENT UNDER.

Water covered her in warmth. She came back up and quickly took a breath of air. She swam to the middle, where Mars was waiting below. Jana pointed her toes straight down and, with a push of her arms upward, dropped beneath the surface.

She released air in a series of rising bubbles and swam toward Mars. He was watching her. He waved one arm, then the other, rising into a crouch, his knees folded under him. He brought his hands to his sides, and in one powerful push he shot straight up toward the surface, passing Jana in her slower descent.

Jana rowed her arms through the water, bringing her legs under her. Her feet touched bottom. She pushed gently away, upward, and rose to the surface.

Water ran from their hair and faces. Mars gasped for air.

“Are you trying to set some kind of record?” Jana asked. She wondered how long he could stay down there before he was forced to surface.

Dark eyelashes batted away droplets of water from Mars's blue eyes.

“I thought you were the one trying to set a record, Webster.” Mars tried to look like he was angry with her, but one corner of his smile wouldn't quite disappear. “Most demerits per minute in the history of the world.”

Jana grinned. Mars understood. She didn't have to explain anything. She didn't even care if her ears stuck out of her wet hair.

“I think you should know,” he continued, “demeriting is not an Olympic event.”

“Not yet,” Jana said. The warmth from his body broadcast through the water in a widening circle that included Jana. It was like swimming in heated milk.

“You're trying to think of a movie, aren't you?”

“No,” she said. It surprised her that she wasn't, in fact, doing just that. She was thinking, instead, of an electric blow-dryer dropped into Michael's bathtub. “They haven't made this one yet.”

Nathan decided not to go back to school after lunch. Anyone who knew Jana at all had an excuse.

“We have to get this behind us,” Michael said. “It was a joke, a stupid joke. And now it's over.”

Nathan didn't want to say the wrong thing. He recognized a bad mood when Michael was having one. They were parked in Nathan's driveway. He couldn't get out of the car until Michael was through talking.

“You know, she thought it was all about her,” Michael went on. “When I talked about my plans, she thought I was talking about us, the two of us. Every waking hour, I swear, she was right there next to me. It was humiliating the way she stuck to me like that. She was into this
Romeo and Juliet
thing to the core. There was no end to it. It's like her hands were superglued to my belt. She was really holding me back.”

“I can see that,” Nathan said.

“So it was a little joke. That's all. Listen, there were words I wanted to say that would have hurt her more than falling down at a bowling alley.”

“You were going to have to break up with her sometime,” Nathan said. Michael had told him that a hundred times or more, so it was safe to say.

“Exactly. You know, it's probably better this way. She died happy. She didn't know about Sherry and me doing it behind her back. And I swear, it was going to break her into pieces when we split up. Her dying spared her that.”

“You didn't do it on purpose. It just happened.”

Michael stared bullets at Nathan. “
We
didn't do it on purpose,” he said slowly, firing each word from between his teeth.

The Risers were waiting to dive. Mars and Jana climbed out of the pool. Mars turned on the pumps while Jana retrieved her skirt. She needed to get out of her wet blouse and dry off.

“Come with me,” she said. “I want to talk.”

Mars followed her into the girls' locker room. They both grabbed towels. While he rubbed his chest and legs with his towel, Jana turned her back and slipped off her blouse. She wrapped herself in her towel.

“I thought of one,” she said.

“One what?” Mars stopped rubbing his hair with his towel. It looked terrific half wet and tousled like that, Jana thought.

“Movie,” Jana said. “Wring this for me.” She handed Mars the soaking, dripping lump of cloth and buttons that previously had been her blouse. Jana took another towel for her hair. She'd have to comb it with her hands.

She watched Mars twist her blouse into a snake, water pouring out of it. He folded it over and twisted it tighter. His stomach tightened as he worked, his biceps flexed. She put on her skirt, keeping the towel draped over her shoulders.

Jana spread a fresh towel on the locker room bench. She sat on one end of the towel. Mars unwound her blouse, shook it loose, and draped it over a towel bar by the sinks.

“Come here and sit down,” Jana said. “I'm cold with my hair wet.”

Mars sat next to her.

“So, what's the movie?”

“It's silly,” she said. “I bet you saw it when you were a little kid. Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan.”

“Got it, Webster.
Tarzan of the Apes
.”

“Close. The first one was
Tarzan the Ape Man
. This was the second one, Tarzan
and
Jane. It's
Tarzan and His Mate
.”

“Me Tarzan. You Jana?” Mars asked. “Is it the way I talk or something?”

“No, you doof. They go swimming. Jane skinny-dips. They show it underwater. They cut the scene out of the movie for years and years. Then they put it back.”

They listened to a diver hit the water from the high board. He messed up, Mars thought. It was too big of a splash.

“So, what do you want to talk about, Webster?”

“I don't. I want you to talk. I don't know how to be nice about this, but I want to know how you died and why you want to save a life. I also want to know why you chose me. My first day here, you chose me, Mars, like you pick out something at the store to wear. Why me?”

“It wasn't your first day here,” Mars said. “It was before that.”

Like most guys, he looked straight ahead while he talked. Jana watched his face, the way his eyes moved when he was remembering things. He told her everything, beginning with when she walked through him at the bowling alley shoe counter and ending with when he frantically blew air into her throat by sealing his lips over hers.

“I almost had you back,” he said. “Your eyelids fluttered. I almost made you breathe again.”

Jana moved the tip of her tongue between her lips and swallowed. Strawberries.

“And you'd been drinking strawberry pop,” she said. “I can still taste it. I guess I brought it with me when I died.” Mars had been trying to breathe air into her mouth, she realized. But it was the same as if he'd been kissing her.

“Listen to me,” Jana continued. “You couldn't have saved me. It was the little crack at the back of my head. That's what killed me.”

“But I saw it happen, start to finish. You don't know how it feels to fail at that. To have someone dying and no matter what you do, they just keep dying . . . until they're gone. It tore me up.”

Jana touched his leg as a gesture of understanding. The heat from Mars's body leaped through her hand, up her arm, across her shoulders. It moved down inside her like she was drinking it. Her neck and face reddened. She took her hand away.

“You tried to give me my life back, Mars. Thank you.”

He didn't say anything. Jana listened to him breathe. She had said enough. He would answer her other request if he wanted to.

“You know, it's funny,” he finally said. “On the Planet, you meet people and they tell you the story of their life. Here, we tell each other how we died.”

Mars combed his fingers through his wet hair.

“I was drunk,” he said. “Wasted. In the middle of the day. I was drunk and I was angry. I wanted to get away from something and there was nowhere to go, really. So I just drove. I got on the interstate. I drove past three exits, got off at the fourth, and turned around and drove back.”

“Get away from what?” she asked.

“My father,” he said quietly. “He was a drunk. He hated himself and he saw himself in me, I think. And maybe he should have. I was becoming just like him. I hated him and I was becoming just like him. Stupid, huh?”

Jana didn't answer.

She thought about her mother's addictions. Alcohol, cocaine, heroin, pharmaceuticals. Mostly her mother was addicted to her own beauty, addicted to being adored. Her mother became dependent on drinking and drugs because not enough people loved and admired her. Her mother was the only star in her own sky, and no matter how strikingly beautiful she was, she could never shine brightly enough. Jana might have loved and admired her too. If her mother had ever been there.

“What happened?” Jana asked.

Mars and his car were just alike. Motors roaring, nowhere to go.

The speed of it all, the scream of engine and tires, was under his right foot. His car fishtailed on the interstate ramp. The sound in his head was louder than the engine.

He raced past a semi in the slow lane by driving ninety on the shoulder.

Windows down, the wind rushed through. The sound of the truck was deafening. But not loud enough.

It had to be louder. And faster.

Mars raced through traffic and sunlight, drove past three exits, hit the exit ramp at the fourth. He hit the brakes to hold the curve. He spun the steering wheel to the left, running the stop sign at the end of the ramp.

His hands were meaningless. The car knew where he wanted to go. Motion and direction were thoughts in the pulse of his blood. The car zipped under the highway, cut off traffic as it turned left again, and slid up the reverse direction on the ramp like a bullet in the barrel of a gun.

If he drove fast enough, long enough . . . loud enough, the rage inside would lessen, would become a heartbeat again, would eventually go away.

But not yet.

There was no comfort now in anything but speed. The trees along the highway slammed by. They challenged him to go faster. Speed could make them disappear. And Mars could disappear along with them.

He changed lanes constantly, passing cars, passing trucks, weaving, letting available space among the traffic reveal itself once he was upon it.

It was easy until he topped a long incline, right foot to the floor. His mouth open, dry, his eyes mere slits, Mars was behind traffic just like that. He was moments from plowing into somebody. In that instant before he could touch the brakes, there was nothing to do but swerve.

The swerve, his last chance to avoid an accident, cost him control. Mars was pushed against the inside of the driver's door. He stomped the brakes. It was too late. His world jolted, turned, lurched, and the brakes merely barked once as the car left the pavement.

The car flew. It was an airplane, with four wheels and no wings. There was no gear for landing. Mars tried to think of a prayer. He didn't have one. His car flew over the ditch alongside the interstate, nose down into the base of a tree.

It might have saved him if he had a car with air bags. At least Mars was belted in. His harness held. That might have saved him too. But it didn't. Hitting the tree was like hitting the wall at the Indy 500 straight on. Dead stop.

“That's what killed me, Webster.”

Mars closed his eyes.

“Coming to a stop killed me. My brain threw itself forward inside my skull. Like you throw a fist against the wall.”

His voice was thick with pain. Mars turned around and stood in front of her.

Jana watched the rise and fall of his flat belly as he breathed. She looked at his bare chest. She could almost see his heart beating. She wanted to place her hand lightly there, to keep it from hurting him so much.

“Look at me, Webster.” Mars tapped a finger against his cheekbone.

His blue eyes glistened with tears. “Look at me,” he said again. She hadn't stopped. His eyes held hers to the finish. “I wasn't the only person who died when I wrecked.”