Dead Rules (3 page)

Chapter Three

JANA WAS UP.

She stood and straightened the legs of her capri pants. They were light blue with vertical cream stripes. They made her legs look longer.

Jana picked up her marmalade-colored house ball and her foot slipped out from under her on the polished-wood floor. Bowling was slipperier than she remembered. She caught herself on the carousel with her free hand and righted herself. Then she slipped again. Her right shoe slid out from under her like it had wheels or she was trying to stand on ice.

She lifted her foot high to keep from falling.

Jana's left shoe caught sideways and she did a goofy dance. She leaned too far forward, then propelled herself upright as hard as she could. She raised her marmalade bowling ball over her head to try to keep her balance.

It was no use. Her right foot slid away from her on its own.

Jana heard Nathan's laugh start up as she fell backward, the weight of the ball pulling her arm back over her shoulder.

She held on to the eight-pound bowling ball like it was a life preserver. The ball hit the floor first. Her fingers were locked inside it. Jana's head landed on the bowling ball when she finally fell. Her elbow stuck up in the air.

Michael was nearby, but she didn't see him when she fell. Her skull was cracked just a little, with her skin barely broken over it. The pain was instantly unbearable. Just as quickly, it went away.

Air rushed inside Jana's brain. Her dreams rushed out.

She was three years old, sitting naked in a two-ring plastic swimming pool in her backyard in the middle of summer. Her mother wasn't there.

Then she was seven. There was a pony at her birthday party. Her mother wasn't there. The pony had long white hair that fell over the front of its face.

In the third grade, a boy called Jana a bastard child. She chased him until he tripped and fell. Then she kicked him because she didn't know what else to do and the other kids at school were watching.

Jana bought belted cargo shorts and flip-flops for her Ken doll.

A picture of her mother stared at Jana from the cover of
Vogue
. It didn't look like anyone Jana knew.

Jana danced at her junior high prom. The boy she danced with took large steps to the side. Jana could smell the corsage of white carnations on her wrist.

In the school parking lot, she choked on a cigarette and thought she was going to die.

“Ye wouldn't never leave me, would ye?” Jana asked Michael in the funny accent she had learned in order to play Abbie for a competition cutting from Eugene O'Neill's
Desire Under the Elms.
Michael was Eben. They'd had a baby together in that play.

Jana's mother sat on the edge of her bed and wept. Her mother was beautiful even when she cried.

In the back row of the movie theater, Jana removed her bra without taking off her sweater so Michael could feel her breasts. She had practiced for weeks.

The memories were gone in a flash. Was someone kissing her? Air came in and her life ran out, sweeping away her question. Every sensation she ever felt evaporated. Except for the lasting taste of strawberries in her mouth.

Fart, fudge, and popcorn. She was already dead.

The girl at the desk in front of Arva said, “Ouch.”

She had very pretty hair. It formed a lustrous fan across her shoulders and seemed to lift slightly as if held on a summer breeze.

“Ouch.” Then in a minute, again. “Ouch, ouch.” Each time she said it, the girl's hair and shoulders bounced.

Mr. Fitzgerald continued writing on the board. Jana turned her attention to the boy in front of her. He had three inches of thick black hair that stuck straight out. It made his head look like a dark dandelion puff. When he held his head to the side, she could almost see his eyes. His cheekbones were prominent.

He had looked at her when she first sat down and she noticed then that his dark brown eyes were round and wide, as if he had just been surprised. He had a smooth, round face to match.

“Ouch,” the girl in front of Arva said.

Jana shut her eyes and fought to concentrate. Mr. Fitzgerald sat at his desk. He opened a book to read. Their assignment was on the board.

“
That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger
,” he had written in barely readable cursive.
What about that which does? Answer in 250 words by the end of this period: Leave your notebooks on your desks. Have a good day.

Jana recognized the initial quote. It was from the writings of Nietzsche, the German philosopher.

“That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger.” What about that which does?

She was thinking it over when the round-faced boy in front of her turned in his seat and placed a note on her desk. He grinned at her in a shy way and turned back around. Jana opened the folded piece of paper. It read
Hi. I'm Henry Sixkiller. Come here often?

Jana couldn't help it, she laughed. She put her hand to her mouth. Her fingers felt cold on her lips. She ducked her head over her open notebook, hoping no one had noticed the chortling sound she'd made.

“Ouch,” the girl sitting across from Henry said quietly, with her peculiar little shoulder jerk.

Jana worked on her essay.

Love
, she wrote,
defeats death
. She and Michael were as in love with each other as they had ever been. And one of them, it was now apparent, was dead.

She hadn't seen Michael when she fell. But he was there. He was so near. Still, she had died alone. That's what troubled her now.

Once she'd met Michael, once they'd kissed and she'd felt a magical, warm-blooded life move back and forth between them, Jana knew she would never live alone again. Like she had with her mother.

It wasn't fair that Jana would die alone. It just wasn't.

Romeo and Juliet died together. Old grandmas and grandpas in nursing homes died within days of each other. The plane went down and killed everyone on board, Jana and Michael locked in each other's arms.

Jana returned to her essay, adding a few paragraphs, and concluding,
That which kills you doesn't kill love. The philosopher who said suffering short of death makes you stronger is critically flawed in his thinking because death doesn't end how strong you are
.

I am still here. And I am still strong. I am strong because I am in love. What Nietzsche should have said is that love makes you strongest of all.

Jana liked her essay. You didn't get straight As through your junior year if you couldn't write a couple hundred words that made sense. Jana only wished she could have read her work out loud. She was a whiz at dramatic interpretation.

Sometimes she even made herself cry.

Jana looked at the clock. The hands of the clock hadn't moved since she first sat down at her desk. She rubbed her arms for warmth. The room was cold. She thought to check her cell phone for the time, then remembered she didn't have it. Jana hoped it was in the dorm.

She opened Henry's note. At least he'd found a way to say hi. That was nice of him. Jana wrote a reply. She leaned over the top of her desk and tapped Henry on the shoulder with her pencil. She liked the way his hair stuck out all over and wondered how he got it that way. When he turned around, she handed him the note.

Once in a lifetime
, she'd written. Then she had signed her name and added
of Webster and Haynes.

•  •  •

Time sat still. But Jana couldn't.

If she was really dead, Jana decided, then this wasn't going to hurt. She jabbed her arm with her pencil.

“Ow!”

It hurt like crazy. Jana felt stupid. There was a spot of blood on her arm. She glanced at the back of the room to see if Mars was watching her.

He was.

Arva caught her eye as Jana turned from looking at Mars. Her roommate shook her head and silently mouthed the word no. Arva drew her index finger across her throat.

The door banged closed and everyone in class looked up. Three Virgins had come into homeroom. They stood shoulder to shoulder at the front of the class. They wore their translucent white gowns over their nearly see-through skin. They glowed.

The Virgin in the middle was a boy. He wore the same gown as the girls did. The three Virgins sang three notes in turn. It sounded like bells. Everyone in class closed their notebooks. The door opened and the Virgins walked into the hall. Mr. Fitzgerald was already gone.

Jana glanced at the clock, surprised to see that the hour hand had finally moved. It was an hour later now than when she'd sat down. There were no minutes in Dead School, she thought. Only hours. It was the first time Jana had thought the words
Dead School
.

But that was it. She was dead. And she was in school. They should put the name over the door so you didn't have to guess when you first got here.

Chapter Four

SECOND PERIOD.

It was just like first. There were the same students sitting in the same places. This time there was a textbook along with a new notebook on her desk. The teacher was named Skinner. He wore glasses and was busy drawing boxes on the chalkboard, muttering to himself.

Beatrice still wore the yard dart in her head. Henry said hi and then turned around in his desk in front of Jana. The girl who sat in front of Arva had quit jerking her shoulders and saying “ouch” for a while. Mars stared at Jana from his desk at the back of the room.

Jana opened her notebook. She caught her breath when she saw the note on the first page. This one read:
It was murder
. The words were in pencil, in the same precisely printed letters as the message in her first-hour notebook.

She turned quickly around and glared at Mars. Their eyes locked. Jana's eyes were daggers. Mars tilted his head to one side, as if he didn't know what daggers meant.

Arva reached across the space between their desks and touched Jana's arm. Jana jerked her arm away and stared angrily at Arva.

“I will if I want!” she said to Arva. “I don't need a mother.” If Jana wanted, she would march to the back of the room and tell Mars to stop writing in her notebooks.

She had spoken too loudly. Mr. Skinner stopped talking and turned from drawing boxes on the chalkboard to look over the class through his thick glasses. Students at the front of the class turned in their seats and stared at Jana.

Jana ducked her head over her open notebook and doodled. She traced her hand on a blank sheet at the back of her notebook. She drew in the lines of her palm and wrote
J. W. + M. H
. on the line that represented her heart. Then she cried. Jana couldn't help it. When she read her palm, her future didn't look so good. Her life line was blank.

She was very quiet about crying, letting the tears fill her eyes, forcing herself to breathe evenly. Her fingers trembled. She placed her hands in her lap. She kept her head down with her hair covering her face from both sides. She hoped no one would notice.

Jana cried because she was alone. Not because she was dead. She could get along with being dead if only she weren't so alone. Without Michael, she would always be alone.

He had left her in this awful place.

He was half of her and he was gone. Just like that.

Teardrops made wet circles on the pencil outline of her hand. Jana put an end to it by biting her lower lip as hard as she could stand. It was her first day of school and so far all she had to show for it was a sore dot on her arm where she'd jabbed herself with a pencil, an empty heart, and trembling fingers. And she still couldn't get the taste of strawberries out of her mouth.

Jana blinked rapidly, trying to bat her eyelashes dry, when the Virgins came in and sang their three-bell song that signaled the end of class. She'd cried in class. Other students must have seen her. She might as well have thrown up on herself.

The Sliders from her class walked down the hall between second and third period in a group.

Arva and Jana stood still as they passed. Some of their faces were a mess. One of them limped severely. His left leg barely seemed to work at all. There were two girls with them. They were Sliders too. Jana absentmindedly smoothed the front of her plaid skirt with her free hand as they walked by.

Jana held her second-period notebook in her other hand, wanting to show Arva what was written on the first page. Maybe Arva could tell her who was doing it.

“You have to believe me,” Arva said urgently. “You can't talk to them.” When Arva was excited, she sounded like a duck, quacking out one word after another. “Don't even look at them. If they see you looking, they'll try to talk to you. And you can't do that.”

A thin boy wearing a wrinkled school shirt showed up from nowhere and stood in front of Jana with his hand out. He kept his eyes on his shoes. The boy looked gray to Jana. His shirt was grayish instead of white. His black school tie was faded and knotted wrong.

He didn't say anything. Just stood in front of Jana with his hand out.

“Oh,” Arva said. “Your notebook. You can't take them out of class. You have to give it to him. He's a hall monitor.”

“But I wanted to show you . . .” Jana began. She fumbled the notebook open, to show the first page to Arva, to show her how precisely the letters had been written. As Jana moved the open notebook toward Arva, the boy reached out to stop her.

“Leave the girl alone,” a male voice said. “It's her first day,”

Arva froze, her mouth open to speak. Nothing came out.

Jana looked up to see Mars Dreamcote standing behind the boy, his hand on the hall monitor's shoulder. Mars had on an old pair of jeans without a belt. The collar of his white shirt was unbuttoned. The knot in his tie was two or three inches lower than his collar.

Mars studied Jana's face. His blue eyes sparked like matches being struck. A lock of dark hair had fallen across his forehead. The side of his mouth dimpled one cheek when he smiled.

Jana was embarrassed. She hated her clothes. She tried to think of her school uniform as a stage costume. It didn't work. She looked stupid and she knew it.

Mars wore a small teasing smile that Jana had thought of as a snicker when she saw him on the bus and in class. This time the smile felt different. He was trying to be nice to her. He must have seen her crying.

She closed the notebook. Jana gave him a little smile back and leaned her head to one side. His eyes followed the movement.

Mars reached around the boy and slipped the notebook from her hands. She barely noticed he was doing it. He gave her notebook to the hall monitor and turned the smaller boy around with both hands on his shoulders and gave him a push to get him started.

Mars glanced at Arva, daring her to speak. Arva's mouth closed. He turned and walked away.

Arva let out a long breath. It sounded like a sigh being squeezed out of a balloon. “Oh no,” she said in her usual foggy rasp. “He likes you.”

Arva had said on the bus that Mars had a smile that would melt the buttons off your blouse. Jana realized that she had felt warmer while he was standing there, when he looked at her. When he reached his hand toward her to take away the notebook, heat from his hand moved across the top of her fingers. Jana checked her buttons. They felt hard and smooth between her fingers. Maybe Mars wasn't so dangerous after all. Or maybe he had used only his little smile and not his big button-melting one.

Jana and Arva stood in the cafeteria line.

Hospital gurneys lined the walls. Occasionally one of the students on the wheeled stretchers would raise a hand and wave at someone coming into the cafeteria. Many of the tables in the room were already occupied. The room was filled with voices.

“First, second, and third period,” Jana was saying, “they all have the same students in the same seats and the one vacancy.”

“That's our class,” Arva told her. “There are four junior classes. Mornings are the same courses for all of us. Afternoons, the Sliders aren't there. Fourth hour is your elective. Fifth and sixth periods you're back with your homeroom class again.”

“I get an elective?”

When Arva talked rapidly, Jana had to listen closely. Some of her words were barely whispered, while others were sharp little croaks.

“You know, art, music, journalism, gymnastics . . . whatever you want. Today you go to the library for fourth period and choose your elective.”

Drama would be Jana's elective, of course. Drama or speech. They had to have one or the other.

The two girls picked up trays as they reached the service counter.

“What's your elective?” Jana asked.

“Journalism,” Arva said. “I'm on the newspaper and yearbook staffs.” She coughed, then added in a hoarse whisper, “It's easier for me to write than talk.”

“Does it hurt to talk like that?”

“Not at all,” Arva croaked. “I just can't get enough air out and my vocal chords are jammed. Anything that happened to your body before you got here doesn't hurt now.”

“But you're stuck like that? For all time?”

“Pretty much,” Arva said. “And I guess you figured out what you do to your body once you're here can hurt like crazy.”

Jana nodded. Arva must have seen Jana jab her arm with a pencil.

Two of the grayish-looking students stood behind the service counter in the cafeteria. The first food bay was filled with bottles of water. The girl behind the counter set three bottles of water on the countertop without looking at Jana. The girl had dark circles under her eyes. She wore the same school uniform blouse that Jana did, only instead of the blouse being clean and white, it was gray and wrinkled.

“You have to take three,” Arva told her, urging Jana along. “You don't have to drink them all right now, but they want you to take three.”

The next station at the counter had decks of cards and stacks of board games instead of food. Arva picked up a deck of cards and placed it on her tray, then stepped away from the line and started walking toward a table. Jana quickly caught up.

“Why are those students gray?” Jana asked.

“Suicides,” Arva said. “They're depressed. We call them Grays.”

Beatrice and the girl who said “ouch” were already seated. Arva and Jana joined them. Jana tried not to stare at the yard dart sticking out of Beatrice's head.

“This is Jana Webster,” Arva said, introducing Jana to the ouch girl.

“Hi. I'm Christie. Wow, you're pretty.”

“Me?” Whoever this girl was, she had been dead too long. Or maybe, Jana thought, you looked better when you first got here.

“What color are your eyes?” Beatrice asked. “They're just gorgeous. The right shade of eye shadow and I bet they'd look turquoise.”

“Hazel,” Jana said.

“Not quite hazel,” Christie said.

“Smoky green,” Beatrice offered.

Olive drab
, Jana thought.

Arva unscrewed the cap from one of her bottles of water and held it carefully to her lips. Tipping the bottle just so, she let a trickle of water run into her mouth.

“Jade!” Christie concluded. “Your eyes are jade. Absolutely, perfectly jade. Now that that's settled, I hear you have a boyfriend.”

“I do,” Jana said. “Michael Haynes. Everyone calls us Webster and Haynes. He's a senior. We're in drama together and he's district student council president.”

“Sounds like he's going places,” Christie said. “I mean, he's not here, is he? You didn't die together in an accident or anything like that?”

Christie wore a delicate silver chain around her neck and a narrow dark pink ribbon tied across her forehead. The reddish ribbon was at a slant, high on one side and nearly touching her eyebrow on the other.

“No, he's not here.”

“Oh, that's good,” Christie continued. “I was worried he might be one of the Stretchers. Or you know . . .” Christie let her words trail off as she watched the Sliders come into the cafeteria. Beatrice and Jana followed her gaze.

Arva made disturbing noises in her throat and the three girls turned their attention back to their own table.

“Did you have your purse with you when you died?” Beatrice asked Jana.

“No,” Jana said. “I left it in the car.”

“Too bad,” Beatrice said.

“She just wants your makeup,” Arva told Jana. “You can use what you have with you when you die but when it's gone, it's gone. You're not supposed to loan it to anyone else or give it away. Makeup here is contraband.”

“It is not,” Beatrice said. “You're just making that up because you don't have any.”

“You can get demerits for contraband,” Arva insisted. “It's a rule.”

“It's an Arva rule,” Beatrice said. “Not a real rule.”

It took Jana a moment to realize the girls were fighting. Thankfully Christie was quick to change the subject. “Were you wearing cute underwear when you died?” she asked Jana.

Jana shook her head no, puzzled by the question. She realized the pink-red line across Christie's forehead wasn't a ribbon, after all. It was a scar.

“Too bad,” Christie said. “You get to keep the clothes you died in.”

“Have you looked at your school underwear yet?” Beatrice asked.

“Granny panties,” Christie said.

“Maximums,” Beatrice countered. “You can sleep a family of four in these things. And I think they put starch in them. It's like wearing armor.”

Christie giggled, which only encouraged Beatrice to continue. “I swear, the boys in this school don't want to get in your panties. They just want to pull them off you. As a community service.”

Everyone laughed. Arva even squeaked a little.

“My mom's a beautician,” Christie said. “Her shop was in the house. I think I can do something with the back of your hair, if you want me to try.”

Jana raised a hand to her hair. “Thank you,” she said, wondering if it looked that bad. That's when Jana noticed that she wasn't hungry.

She'd been hungry since the seventh grade, when she first realized that all famous actresses were thin. She hadn't eaten anything but a piece of celery with peanut butter on it before going bowling. And now she wasn't hungry even a little. If it wasn't for the taste of strawberries in her mouth, Jana wouldn't have thought of food all day.

“Okay,” she said to the three juniors sitting with her, “tell me this. Why is there no food in the cafeteria?”

“Dead people don't eat,” Christie said.

“But you have to have water or else you dehydrate,” Arva said. “Better drink yours now. You can take only one bottle with you when you leave. Sliders drink out of the fountains, so it's best to consider those one hundred percent contaminated. You don't want to get what they've got.”