Authors: Randy Russell
MICHAEL DIDN'T FEEL IT.
He didn't feel a thing. Jana swung her hand repeatedly through the air and touched nothing. It was so horrible she couldn't breathe.
Then she was falling. Jana tumbled forward, passing through Michael into the people sitting behind him and her mother. She felt Mars reach for her from behind. He wrapped Jana in his arms and pulled her backwards.
Jana flushed with heat and despair. She slumped into his arms as if she had fainted.
“Stand up,” Mars said.
He tightened his arms around Jana like a safety belt and pulled her upright until her clunky school shoes planted themselves on the carpeted floor. With his face over her shoulder, Jana could feel his breath on her neck. Jana was wrapped in a combined fever of his heat and her own grief. She tasted strawberries in her mouth all over again.
“It's all right,” Mars whispered. “You're all right, Jana. It's just the way it is.”
Jana couldn't bear to look at Michael or her mother. She didn't want to see and remember Nathan sitting next to Michael. Or Sherry sitting at the end with her round face done up in rainbow eye shadow and lurid lipstick.
“Get me out of here,” Jana said weakly, choking on her own tears. “Please.”
Mars turned Jana sideways in his arms. He took one arm away, propping her up in the other one. He kept himself between Jana and the people in the chairs. She leaned on Mars. Inside the muscular arm he kept around her waist, Jana walked slowly away from Michael. Her legs barely functioned.
As they passed in front of Nathan, Mars reached out with his free hand and tapped the senior on the head.
“Hey,” Nathan said too loudly. He looked quickly left then right.
“Shhh,” Sherry said.
“What was that?” Nathan said much more quietly.
“I know what you did,” Mars said from the side of his mouth to Nathan.
Mars paused and looked him over. Nathan's face reddened like a light turned on. Sherry heard it too. Her mouth fell open and her head cocked sideways. She stared at the casket.
Jana gathered her strength as best she could. She wondered what it was that Nathan had done, then realized that Mars had spoken to someone on the Planet and they had heard him. She pulled away from Mars and turned to look at Michael.
“Michael!” Jana shouted. “Michael, it's me!”
No one heard a thing. Certainly not Michael. Certainly not her mother. Jana's eyes widened in confused anguish. Michael was there. She was there. Why couldn't he hear her? He was
right
there
.
Mars turned her away in his comforting arm.
“It's like I'm a ghost,” Jana said.
She leaned against Mars as they made their way toward the wide hallway full of flowers and people Jana barely knew.
“More like a spirit,” Mars said, using his Dead School voice that no one on the Planet could hear.
In the hall, someone's little sister noticed Mars. She reached out to touch him. Mars smiled at the girl. She was one of the sensitive ones. Some people could see him no matter what he did. But not many.
Her little hand passed through his arm.
Soon Jana and Mars were outside. The same people who were standing around before were standing around now. Off to the left, the cheerleader gabbed to her friend, gesturing with her hands, tossing her hair. It looked to Jana like the girl was making a salad.
The bus was parked in the street in front of the funeral home. People on the Planet could walk right through it and never know it was there. But it was real somehow, Jana knew. It carried her weight. She could feel the seats when she sat in them. It had to be real. And so did she.
She turned a button on her school blouse between her fingers. It was real. Everything was real. Her love and her pain, which seemed like the same thing now, were real.
“Tell me I'm real,” she said to Mars. “Tell me all this is really happening.”
Jana held her hand to her mouth and bit down on her own flesh just above the forefinger. It hurt. How could she not be real?
“Tell me I'm real,” she said again. When Jana breathed in, she swallowed tears. They burned like peppers.
Mars had tried not to look when she bit her hand, but he understood. It was like jumping. Jumping was a more extreme way of being real, but it was just like biting your hand to prove you were there. That you were real somehow.
“I'm not going back,” Jana told him. “I don't have to.”
Jana ran down the steps to the sidewalk.
She wasn't much of a runner. She had never been athletic that way. Jana couldn't catch a ball. She couldn't run in a straight line unless it was by accident. But she ran. As fast as her legs would let her, she ran. She ran past the idling bus, past the kids on the sidewalk, the kids standing under trees.
Her chest heaved. Her heart pounded. She ran like she could not stop. Like a little kid down a steep hill.
Jana turned at the end of the block on to a treelined side street of large houses set far back from the road. Her legs kept going, her arms pumping at her sides. She was surprised she was still running, still able to run. A bird flew in front of her, from one side of the street to the other. Like the bird, Jana was a thing of motion, her skirt flying.
She was also a thing of muscle and blood and urgent breath. Her body worked. Jana was real. Her chest ached. Sweat appeared on her forehead. Veins throbbed in her neck. A sharp pain stabbed her side.
Jana slowed. Her clothes felt heavy. She trotted two steps, then walked with her hand pressed against the probing pain in her side. Her heartbeat sounded like drums inside her head. Her face was red with heat, but at the same time she felt cold again. The cold was always there.
She stumbled into someone's yard and collapsed in the grass. Jana sprawled on her stomach and stretched out her arms. With her chest and belly and legs pressed against the earth, her breathing finally caught up. Jana hugged the earth, trying to hold on to it.
“Hey, are you okay?” Mars asked, catching his breath. He stood at her feet.
“Dunno,” she said without opening her eyes. Jana's head was spinning.
“I guess we have a few minutes to make sure. The bus won't leave till the service is over. Most people stay at their own funeral. They give you enough time to stay.”
“Did you stay at yours?”
Jana rolled over on her back. She drew up her knees. Her face was stained from being pressed against the grass.
Mars didn't answer. Jana studied him through half-closed eyes. Unlike the other students she'd met, he wouldn't talk about his own death.
“You can do things here that I can't,” she said. “I don't understand. We're both dead, but you're not as dead as I am.”
“Sliders have one foot still touching Earth,” he said in a serious tone. “We don't get to leave Earth entirely.”
“Not ever?”
“Pull your skirt down, Webster,” he said without looking at her. “I can see your underwear.”
“I don't care. I'm not really here.”
“Yes, you are. When you're with me you are.”
Jana tugged her skirt hem down over her legs. “Promise?”
“Cross my heart . . .” Mars said, then paused. They looked at each other. Their eyes locked. A hint of what Mars was about to say danced at the edges of the perfect blue gaze of his eyes looking into hers.
“And hope to die?” Jana finished for him.
His cheek dimpled, then his mouth broke into a wide smile. Soon he was laughing. And so was she. Mars laughed so hard he had to sit down to catch his breath. Jana laughed until she felt like crying. Her tears were always close by.
Jana sat up in the grass and smoothed the front of her blouse.
“It's like this,” Mars eventually told her. “Here on the Planet you're like a spirit and I'm more like a ghost. A spirit, you know? People can't see you, except in their dreams. A ghost, though, can interact and talk to people one on one while they're wide awake and walking around. Sometimes they can see me. If I want them to, they can see me.”
“Like you did with Nathan? He didn't see you, though.”
“No. But he felt me and he heard me when I talked to him.”
“How can you do that?” Jana asked. She wished she could.
“I work at it,” Mars confessed. He pushed his dark hair from his forehead. “It's what I do. The kids in school don't work at anything. They just do their classwork and think they are getting something done. They think that's it. They accept things the way they are. I don't know how to say it, really, but I have ambitions that have nothing to do with school.”
She understood perfectly.
“I want to do something out of the ordinary, Webster. Going to school on the Planet really is doing nothing. You just sit in the classes someone else tells you to sit in. You learn things you didn't choose to learn from people you didn't choose to teach you. Then one day they tell you it's over and you have to go out there and learn the world for real.
“And that's if you're lucky. That's if you don't die in school.”
Jana snickered. She was with him every word. She was working to be an actor. Besides taking speech and drama and being in a play now and then, she worked at it mostly on her own. She studied old movies, for one thing. She practiced acting all the time. When other people were just having conversations, Jana was working. She was watching reactions closely to see what clicked and what didn't.
“I've had real jobs since I was thirteen,” Mars told her. “I had to if I wanted anything. I worked when I was on the Planet and I work now that I'm in Dead School.”
“Why?” Jana asked. “We're dead. Work's over.”
“No, that's the thing. Dead School is different. You have to figure things out on your own. There are rules, but it's not the way Arva says it is. She wants it to be like regular school and so do most of the others. But in Dead School, you have to do it on your own. And you have to figure it out for yourself. Nothing's the way it was and there's nobody to explain it to you.”
“Figure what out?”
Mars grinned. “That's it exactly. You have to figure out what you have to figure out. It's going to be different for everybody.”
“What's going to be different?” As far as Jana was concerned, being dead was different enough.
“Our destinies. That's what happens when you graduate, Jana, or get expelled. You go to your destiny. I go to mine.”
“So why not just go now? Why Dead School at all?”
“That's the right question,” Mars said. He stared into her eyes as if looking for something there. “It's our chance to learn to change our destinies. We died while we were still in school, with almost none of our future determined. There are still things to learn in Dead School, Webster. There's still time.”
Jana let out a sigh. Despite his misstep with her mother at the funeral, Michael was Jana's destiny. She didn't need more time to learn that.
“Look,” Mars continued. He spread out his hands and studied them. “Every Slider in school could do what I've done so far. But it's work and most of them don't want to work at anything. We're bad kids to begin with, you know? And almost nobody wants to improve. They don't even realize they have the chance.”
“What about Risers?” Jana asked. “Can't we learn to do what you do?”
“You're not as close to Earth as we are. You're not Earthbound. For most Risers that's good enough. Your eternity is going to be . . .
better
than ours.”
Mars paused.
“What's your hometown, Webster?” he asked out of the blue.
“Asheville,” she said. Jana smiled to remember it so easily. Being on the Planet had its advantages and memory was one of them.
And when she smiled she was real again. Everything was real again. Dead School was real. Jana was real. Mars was real. But everything worked in a new way. She'd have to learn how it all worked to be with Michael again. He was real too.
“Michael thinks I'm dead and gone,” Jana said.
“Yes, he does.”
“But I'm not gone, am I?”
This time Mars smiled. “Maybe we should let him know that, Jana. Hand me your cell phone and I'll show you a few tricks.”
IT WAS TIME TO TALK TO MICHAEL.
Jana fished her cell phone from her skirt pocket and handed it to Mars. She tried to steady her excitement, but her grin turned into a beaming smile. The Planet smelled sweet. The yard they sat in had been mown the night before and it smelled like watermelon rind and clover.
Mars flipped her phone open and turned it on with one hand. “The kid sitting next to your boyfriend, you got his number?”
“It's in there somewhere,” she said. She took the cell from him. “His name's Nathan Mills. He and Michael are best friends, don't ask me why. The girl with the boobs is Nathan's new girlfriend. Sherry Simmons. But I want to talk to Michael.”
Jana pushed the menu. Her list of contacts didn't come on-screen.
“Hey, my phone won't work.”
“It's not the phone. It's your fingers when you're on the Planet.”
“I forgot. I can still feel my body.”
“There's a bit of you here,” Mars confessed. “Just not as much as there is when you've had more practice.”
“You mean, I can get to be like you?”
“No,” Mars said. “You're a Riser. You can do better, but . . . Here, let's try it this way.” He scooted closer, took the phone from her hand, and held it open in front of her. “Do the numbers. Start with Nathan.”
Jana pushed the code for her contact list and found Nathan. Her fingers worked the phone as long as Mars was holding it. She pushed Send. Mars lifted the phone to his ear while the number went through. It rang six times without an answer.
“Voice mail,” Mars said to Jana. He waited for the signal. “Hey, Nathan,” he said into the phone. “It's me. We met at the funeral today, remember? I'm your new best friend.”
Jana giggled.
“I know what you guys did and I think you should tell someone,” Mars went on. “I mean, if you don't get around to it pretty soon, I'll have to drop back by and talk to you about it in person. What's a good time for you?”
Mars winked at her while he talked into the phone. She thought he was making stuff up to get Nathan's attention.
He clicked the cell closed to end the call.
“Here, let me,” Jana said.
Mars flipped the phone open and held it again for her to push the buttons. She brought up Michael's number. His picture appeared on the screen. She had taken the picture of him at a rehearsal and he had a crazed expression on his face. It was supposed to be lust, she remembered. Michael was good- looking and all that, but Jana was a much better actor.
Michael's voice mail was short. “Not here,” he had recorded, followed by, “Message. Now.”
Jana didn't know what to say. And she waited too long. A service voice said, “We didn't get your message, either because you were not speaking or because of a bad connection. To disconnect, press one. To record your message, press two.”
Jana pressed two. It beeped.
“Michael? It's me,” Jana said. Her voice quivered with excitement. “I'm still here and you can find me. Call me back and . . .”
Jana was interrupted by the recorded service voice. “Unfortunately the system cannot process your entry. Please try again later. Good-bye.” There was no beep. The phone was silent.
“Your voice isn't registering,” Mars said. He was close enough to hear the recording.
“You mean, it can't hear me? Michael can't hear me?”
“Take my hand,” Mars said.
He leaned in. Jana huddled closer and placed her hand in his. Her left hand, the one with Michael's ring on the third finger. She blushed as his heat moved through her like a tide.
“Squeeze,” he said.
Jana closed her fingers tightly around his hand and felt so much warmth move through her she wanted to shut her eyes.
“Now try it.” Mars made a face like he was working on a math problem. A long black car drove by, followed by another one.
“Michael,” Jana said after she got the signal. “It's me.” She paused, then quickly added, “I'm still here. I'm always here. Call me.” Her hand that held on to Mars tingled. Michael's ring felt large and heavy and out of place on her finger. Jana pressed harder. Even her toes were warm.
Mars watched the other Jana, being driven in her casket, roll by.
“I love you,” she said into the phone. Jana's neck and chest were flushed with heat. She'd felt this way before when she and Michael were kissing, when they lay on the couch together and kissed.
She let go of Mars's hand.
Mars snapped the phone shut. Jana dropped her hands into her lap and watched an ant crawling on her wrist.
When she did talk to Michael, she knew what he would say. He would say he loved her and that he needed to be with her as much as she needed to be with him. Jana tried to flick the ant away from her wrist and realized she was crying again.
There were more cars on the street. They moved slowly, their lights turned on. A dog barked in someone's backyard.
She flipped her finger across her skin again. The ant was still there.
“All I do is cry,” Jana said to Mars. “I'm not like this in real life.”
Mars flicked away the ant for her. She looked at him through her tears. Jana's mouth trembled. Her tongue drew back in her throat. She tightened her lips as much as possible and tried to breathe without gasping. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Fart, fudge, and popcorn, Mars. I just want to be normal!”
Mars nodded as she spoke. He was listening without judging her. Mars understood.
Jana made herself stop crying. As an actor, it was never difficult to stop crying once you started. You just said your next line. When crying happened to you for real, it was difficult to turn it off.
“You are normal,” Mars said. “You're more than normal, Webster. Not less.”
A Virgin appeared.
She stood in front of Jana, seeming to float. A piece of pretty paper with eyes and lips. The dog stopped barking. The Virgin sang one word.
“Time.”
“The original singing telegram,” Mars said, standing up. The Virgin was gone as quickly as she had appeared.
A lock of dark hair had fallen onto his forehead.
“We gotta go now,” Mars said. He held out his hand to her, offering Jana his strength, his warmth.
The grass under her legs felt cold.
“What if I don't? What if I just stay?”
“Can't,” Mars said. “You're a Riser. In a few minutes you'll be sitting on the bus. We may as well walk. When you learn to leave campus on your own, you can stay on the Planet longer.”
What if she wasn't a Riser? Jana wondered. Her hands felt like ashes as she dusted her palms across each other. Her knees, she noticed, were grass stained. The inside of her elbow was streaked with dirt where a trickle of sweat had dried.
Jana took his hand and pulled herself to her feet. She and Mars were standing too close. Embarrassed by proximity, but not wanting to step away, Jana straightened her blouse and brushed off her clothes.
“If there are bugs in my hair,” she said, shaking her head, “I'll just die.”
Mars tried not to laugh. But he couldn't help it.
As they walked together on the sidewalk, Mars opened her cell. He turned it off and handed it back to her. Jana wanted to try to call Michael again, but slipped the phone into her skirt pocket. She didn't need the frustration of not being able to push the numbers on her own. He'd get her message. That was enough for now.
“Remember,” Mars said, “on the bus or on campus or in the dorm, don't even turn it on. You'll kill the battery.”
“Might as well be dead like the rest of us,” Jana said.
When Michael listened to her message, he would remember how much he loved her. When he heard her voice, Michael would need her again. The real her. The Jana who still existed. The Jana who was his whole world.
The side of her body walking next to Mars was warm. Her other side felt chilled. It was like walking in two different weather patterns at the same time. Jana imagined a TV forecaster offering the day's predicted high and low temperatures with the words “
depends on who you're with.
”
“We might be dead, Webster. But that doesn't mean there aren't things we can do with ourselves.”
“So what do you want to do with yourself, Dreamcote?” Jana tried out his last name for the first time. It seemed right since he chose to call her Webster most of the time. “Cure cancer?”
“Something like that,” Mars confessed.
“Really?” Jana stopped walking.
“Well, sort of,” he said. “If finding a cure for cancer is saving lives, then that's what I want to do.”
“Save lives?” Jana was surprised. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know Mars wanted to save lives?
“Okay then, one life. I want to save one life.”
“Anyone in particular?”
“I'm looking,” Mars confessed.
“You're looking for someone to save?” This didn't make any sense to her.
They were walking again.
“Okay, tell me quick, what do you want to remember?” Mars asked. “Say it out loud. You'll forget little things once we're back in school.”
“I don't know . . . I . . .” Jana was confused. There was nothing she could think of she would want to remember because, really, she remembered everything.
“Your hometown,” Mars suggested. “Say it again.”
“Asheville.”
“Address?”
“Thirty-eight Biltmore Forest Road.”
“Best friend?”
“Wait,” Jana complained. “This is like trying to memorize lines I already know by heart. It doesn't . . .”
“Best friend?” Mars repeated, cutting her off.
Jana was embarrassed. All she could think to say for the longest time was
Michael.
She didn't have any best friends. By not being there all those years, her mother had taught Jana to be her own best friend.
“Sherry Simmons,” Jana lied. Sherry's name had simply come to mind. Michael was Jana's best friend. There was no doubt. Jana knew better than to say it to Mars. He wouldn't understand.
“What's your favoriteâ”
Jana cut him off. “Stop it, Mars. I don't want to do this anymore.”
“Last one, I promise. Who were you with the night you died?”
“Michael Haynes, Nathan Mills, Sherry Simmons,” she recited. “Okay, that's it.”
“What does her dad do for a living?”
“Locksmith. Hey, you said âlast one' already.”
The bus waited. Mars and Jana approached from behind.
An open jeep full of jerky-looking boys was parked across the street from the bus. Mars's gait stiffened when he saw them. He hurried his step, reaching for Jana's hand as he stepped off the curb. The bus door opened to the street. She gave him her hand and stepped along quickly to keep up. Jana tasted strawberries with every breath.
There were four of them in the jeep. And one sitting on the hood. Losers, Jana thought.
In her old school, they were called streeters. They were the kids who hung out on the street and in parking lots day and night, graduating from skateboards to cars without changing clothes. Streeters looked like they smelled of gasoline. Their graffiti were black tire marks left in streaks in the middle of the street.
The one who sat on the hood of the open-top vehicle wore a jean jacket with the sleeves ripped off. He held an aluminum softball bat in one hand. As Mars and Jana stepped into the street, he slid from the hood. The others hopped out of the jeep. The one from the driver's seat stepped quickly in front of the others.
“Get on the bus,” Mars said.
“Who are they? What do they want?”
“Rogues,” Mars told her. “I'll tell you later. Get on the bus.”
With a rapid inward curling of his outstretched arm, he pulled Jana to him, then urged her on, letting go of her hand and stepping away from her.
“Now!”
Mars said loudly over his shoulder to Jana.
Without hesitation, Mars strode into the middle of the pavement to cut off the group of advancing streeters from Jana and the bus. The driver of the jeep was carrying the bat now. He wore a light blue policeman's uniform shirt with a yellow-and-black shoulder patch. The shirt was without buttons, open entirely from top to bottom.
Jana did as she was told. She caught a glimpse of the streeter with the bat as she rushed to the bus. He had a tattoo of a skull and crossbones on his chest.
The bus door was open. Jana clambered up the three steps. Her school shoes clattered down the aisle as she flew to a window near the back. Jana fidgeted with the latches and managed to pull the top glass down six inches.
“Kiss the ground,” she heard the one in front shout at Mars. “You know the drill, you Slider piece of puke. Kiss the ground!”
Mars kept standing. His arms lifted out slightly from his sides. He bent forward at the waist. Jana could see his shoulders rise and fall with his breathing.
“I ain't going nowhere,” Mars said calmly, loudly. The actor in Jana instantly recognized the change in his voice. He was being street tough in a stage voice. Mars was acting. And he was good. But he should have been running away, she thought. There were five of them.
There was motion off to the side. Jana looked to her right in time to see that one of the gang had drifted down the street and was flanking Mars. The others closed ranks to Mars's left. Mars had turned toward them. He was blind to the rushing movement from the right. The kid was running hard, straight at Mars.
Jana screamed.
It was too late. The running streeter slammed into Mars in a headfirst dive. The two of them fell sideways onto the pavement. She heard their bodies hit the street.
Jana screamed again.