Dead Rules

by Randy Russell

  Beatrice kissed him hard this time. When they broke for air, he kissed her neck.

  “Wait,” she said. “My top is falling off.”

  “It’s okay by me,” Brad said.

  He hadn’t asked her out yet. He should any time now.

  Beatrice brought her fingers to her fallen strap. Instead of pulling it back into place, she pulled the strap down to her elbow, until her breast was exposed. Then she pressed herself against him again and kissed him the best kiss she had.

  His hand found her breast almost instantly. He pressed her pliant flesh with his palm and fingers. Beatrice had to stop. It was a church picnic, after all. She stepped away from Brad and pulled her swimsuit top into place. She blushed.

  “If you want to keep doing this,” Beatrice said, “you have to ask me out.”

  “Okay by me,” he said.

  Beatrice was pleased. She took his hand in hers again and they continued along the path from the river back to the park.

  “Friday?” she asked.

  “Okay.”

  Beatrice stopped walking. They were at the edge of the woods. “Wait,” she said. “Didn’t we already say that?”

  “Say what?” Brad was puzzled by the question.

  “What we just said,” Beatrice tried to explain. “Did we say that twice?” She had the feeling that the last half minute had happened twice in a row.

  “I don’t know what I said,” Brad replied.

  “Oh yes you do,” Beatrice said, smiling broadly. “You said you were taking me out Friday night.”

  They were at the edge of the park, just coming out of the woods, when a large steel dart with three bright yellow fins fell from forty feet above them. Miraculously missing the trees, the dart gained speed as it raced through sky toward earth, seeking impact. Beatrice stood in the way. She wasn’t going to go steady with anyone this summer either.

  • • •

  Jana gulped down the last of her second bottle of water.

  “It was just like in those slasher movies,” Beatrice said. “I let a boy see my breast and the next thing you know I’m dead. When a girl in one of those movies takes her top off, you know she’s going to be the next one killed.”

  Beatrice showed Jana her upside-down smile.

  “Does it get heavy?” Jana asked. “I mean, do you feel it there when you walk and sit down and stuff?”

  “I’m used to it,” Beatrice said. “It’s the way things are. You just live with your body the way it is when you get here.”

  “And you still have to take showers or you’ll stink.” Christie wrinkled her nose at Jana.

  “I’ll bet that Brad guy thinks twice before going around and grabbing a boob at a church picnic,” Arva said in her harsh, throaty whisper.

  She screwed a cap back on one of her bottles of water. A small black feather was in the corner of her mouth again. Wet from her drinking water, the feather looked like a fat spider leg reaching out of her mouth.

  “Don’t look now, but someone is watching us,” Christie said.

  Jana turned around to see who. That’s what you do when someone tells you not to look. But she didn’t see Mars Dreamcote’s blue eyes staring at their table from across the room. Instead, she saw a girl walking behind their table carrying her head on a cafeteria tray.

  “Fart, fudge, and popcorn!” Jana gasped and turned abruptly back to the girls at her table.

  Beatrice and Christie laughed.

  “Freshman,” Arva said, shaking her head. “She should be wearing it when she’s in the cafeteria. She has to wear it in class.”

  “Show-off,” Beatrice added.

  “She can put it on anytime she wants to,” Arva explained. “If she couldn’t keep her head on, she’d be a Stretcher.”

  “They’re all over the place,” Christie warned Jana. “Your first day or two, you have to be careful where you look. Then you get used to it.”

  Arva noticed the wet feather on her own lip and plucked it from her mouth.

  Christie involuntarily jerked her shoulders and said, “Ouch.” Her hair bounced. “Wait till you meet Pauline,” she added.

  “Who’s Pauline?” Jana asked.

  “One of our roommates,” Arva said. “She’s a senior. Her cafeteria break is on another rotation from ours. And there’s Darcee. There are four to a dorm room, and we have our own bathroom.”

  Jana didn’t want to meet more dead people. But she figured she was going to.

  Chapter Six

  JANA STOOD ALONE.

  The Dead School library was grim. It had only books. She’d never been in a library that didn’t have computers.

  Long bookshelves stood against the back wall. Tables and chairs were arranged in the middle of the room. The outer wall was a row of windows that looked into the hallway. A group of Sliders occupied the far table, elbowing one another and giving her the eye. They were kind of cute, but scruffy. Like lost dogs.

  Jana approached two gray students who stood behind a counter just inside the door, their heads bowed.

  “I’m Jana Webster,” she said. “I don’t have an elective yet. I was told to come here.”

  One of the Grays handed her a piece of paper. Her named was typed at the top in all caps. Below was a list of elective classes. An elective called Speech & Drama (Acting) was highlighted in yellow, along with the teacher’s name and a room number.

  “You start tomorrow.” The Gray who had handed Jana her elective registration took back the sheet of paper.

  “Okay,” Jana said. “So what do I do now?”

  Without saying a word, the Gray reached under the counter and brought out Jana’s notebooks from her first three class periods. He slid them toward her across the counter. He set two sharpened pencils on top.

  Jana sat at the nearest table, her back to the gawking Sliders.

  She looked at the first page of each of her class notebooks. She opened all three and placed them side by side, overlapping the pages so that the hand-printed notes were across from one another.

  Murder. It was murder. And from third period, You were murdered.

  Nope, she thought. It just wasn’t so.

  Still, someone had taken the time to write the notes in that precise lettering. Jana figured it was a game the Sliders played with new students. She ran her fingers across the words of the third note and felt the penciled letters smudge under the press of her skin.

  Jana decided to make a list. She opened a new page in her first-period homeroom notebook and titled it Things to Do.

  Under that she wrote: 1. Talk to Michael ASAP. She wanted to write it a hundred times.

  Then she wrote: 2. Mom. Jana probably needed to check on her mother. No doubt Jana’s death was reason enough for her mother to double down on drinking and pills again.

  Jana’s list was too short. There had to be more to her life she cared about. But what could she write down? Get a job. Travel. Neck, cuddle, and kiss. That stuff seemed unimportant now. Finally she thought of another thing and added it to the list.

  3. Transfer.

  This was the wrong school for Jana. She didn’t fit in here. She didn’t fit in anywhere without Michael.

  Thinking it over, Jana crossed off item 2. Her mother had never checked on her, after all. And there was a neighbor who was paid to take care of her mom when Jana couldn’t.

  Her mother owned the house Jana grew up in and that was about it as far as mothering had gone. Until her retirement a year ago, Jana’s mother had never actually lived there. Instead, her mother lived a glamorous life in glitzy apartments on one coast or the other. Throughout Jana’s life, it seemed, she had had no mother at all.

  Jana had never known who her father was and, apparently, neither had her mother. When Marilyn was twenty-two, the year Jana was born, she was already famous and had briefly dated any number of musicians, tennis handsomes, and pro-ball players. During the time Jana was conceived, Marilyn often woke up in the mornings after dazzling parties not knowing the name
of the man sleeping next to her.

  Jana had been raised by nannies, overnight babysitters, and neighbors. When she was thirteen, one of them had tried to take her home for Christmas so Jana wouldn’t be alone.

  She declined the invitation. They waited in silence for the overnight sitter to show up. So what if Jana didn’t have a family to spend Christmas with? It didn’t mean she wanted a fake one. Besides, she was accustomed to being alone. It’s what she knew how to do.

  And she had something secret in mind for Christmas Eve. She’d bought her Ken doll a complete ski outfit, had wrapped it, and was going to throw a little party for the two of them. You couldn’t do that in front of other people. They wouldn’t understand a thirteen-year-old playing with a doll.

  Before Jana met Michael, Ken and the people in movies had been her only friends.

  A Slider walked behind her and bumped Jana’s shoulder. She turned in her chair. He was already walking back to his kennel of shaggy brethren. He had touched her back lightly with his hand, just above her bra clasp. His touch was warm, as warm as Mars’s hand had been when he had reached for her notebook in the hall.

  It must have been a dare from the others.

  “What is this, third grade?” she said out loud. As a practiced dramatist, Jana knew how to project her voice without shouting, without turning her head.

  The table of boys snickered. Jana studied her list and wrote one more thing to do.

  4. Find out why Mars Dreamcote stares at me.

  There was something different in the way he looked at her. It was like he’d known her before and was waiting for her to remember. Or like he was waiting for her to catch on. Catch on to what?

  She’d ask him. First chance she had. Mars didn’t scare her even a little. As far as Jana was concerned, she was still Webster and Haynes. She had backup.

  Michael must be thinking about her constantly.

  He likely couldn’t sleep. He would use the extra time to think of a way to find her. She was still here, after all. She was right here.

  Jana didn’t want Michael to kill himself instantly. But the sooner the better, she supposed. For both of them. He would live an empty, mournful life until then. He’d find a way to be with her somehow. He had to.

  She finished her list:

  5. Come on, Michael. Find me!

  Mars stood poised at the edge of the swimming pool in the school basement.

  Two Risers loitered nearby, watching him. They were waiting to use the high dive. Once Mars had spent his time in the water and climbed out, they’d turn on the pumps that circulated water from the bottom of the pool into power surface jets to either side of the diving board. This kept the surface of the water roiling in the diving area. Hitting the flat surface of water just right could break your neck.

  Just jump in! Mars wanted to say. You can’t be afraid of everything. You’re already dead.

  Most Risers, though, didn’t have the courage to break the rules. They wouldn’t even leave campus. They wanted to know what would happen before they did anything. Not knowing was the point. Finding out what would happen was the adventure. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but the cat learned something first.

  What kind of life did you have if you never found your way around a few fences? Okay, Mars thought, life wasn’t the right word. But just because you were dead didn’t mean you were supposed to stop using your brain to figure out something new. That’s why Dead School existed in the first place. You had to see some things for yourself. You had to touch them, to figure out how they worked.

  Mars dove in from the side of the pool. He pushed himself underwater with powerful kicks for as long as he could, pushed himself further than his breath would allow. Mars was stronger than they were because he worked at it. “Anything worth doing,” his father had said, “is worth doing harder.” Then he’d taken the belt to Mars.

  Touching the far end of the pool, he came up for his first breath. Mars lifted his head through the surface of the pool and let the water run from his eyes. He swam to the middle. Two quick breaths, and he slipped underwater again. Allowing the air to escape his lungs in a rapid ascent of bubbles, Mars dropped to the bottom of the pool and sat there.

  This was his one place to be entirely alone. No one could touch him here. No one could talk to him. He could cry underwater if he needed to and no one would know. Today he didn’t need to.

  Today, he was remembering the last time he’d seen the new girl. The girl with dark brown hair, a killer smile, and beautiful jade green eyes. He’d seen her on the Planet. He’d seen her in real life. Mars thought it was planned that way sometimes: to have you cross paths with a stranger you would meet in the afterlife. It had to mean something when that happened. Didn’t it?

  Jana wrote a new list.

  This one was a rapidly growing number of questions she had for Arva. She started slowly, then pushed herself to write quickly so she didn’t forget anything. Halfway through, she took a deep breath and paused.

  Jana didn’t have to ask Arva anything right now, she realized. All she had to do was read the guide-book. Arva had said there was a copy in the library.

  Scooting her chair back, she smoothed her skirt. Her hands felt cold as she touched the skin of her legs at her skirt’s hem. The Sliders were talking a mile a minute at the back table. She ignored them. Jana returned to the checkout counter.

  “It’s at the tutoring table,” a Gray told her. “First-day students have priority. They’ll give it to you there.”

  “What’s the tutoring table?” Jana asked.

  “Where they’re being loud,” he said.

  It was time to confront the bad boys. Jana strode to their crowded table and stood in her best posture in front of the Sliders. Michael would have been proud.

  There were five of them. They all looked messy but one. The one in the middle wore his student uniform clothes correctly. He had thick-rimmed glasses and very straight brown hair that was combed forward to form bangs. There was a prominent cowlick in back. A large open book was on the table in front of him.

  He stared awkwardly at Jana, while the others jostled and joked under their breaths. Standing in the immediate area of the Sliders, Jana felt warmth, actual heat, radiating from the group.

  “The guidebook, please,” she said firmly. “It’s my first day.” She tried out her version of Beatrice’s upside-down smile on the boys. It was a great way to smile without flirting, or being nice at all, when Jana did it.

  “Hey, it’s Webster, the girl who pokes herself in class,” the tall one with the mangled leg said. The others went quiet when he spoke. She’d seen him before, limping in the hall, sitting at the back of class with Mars. He kept one side of his face turned away from the table. The boy in glasses closed the book in front of him and started to push it across the table toward Jana.

  A Slider’s hand fell on top of the closed book and held the volume in place.

  Jana opened her eyes wide, arched her brows, and tilted her chin up slightly to the side.

  “It’s ours for the hour,” a Slider said. “Our tutor is reading us bedtime stories.”

  The boy in glasses grinned stupidly. He was the tutor, Jana realized. He was the object of ridicule with these guys, but seemed happy to be accepted among them at any level. Jana was the outsider now. He was no longer the bait.

  “We need this more than you,” the tall Slider said. Jana could see a portion of the side of his face he kept turned from the others. It was scarlet and rough. Brow to chin, that side of his face was badly disfigured. It looked as if it had been rubbed across a cheese grater. His death must have been painful.

  Jana brought her hand to her neck and made a circle of her mouth. She was acting.

  “My oh my,” she drawled. “But I do have only a few minutes remaining and I’d like the book to while away my time.” She batted her eyelashes.

  The tall Slider snickered. The others stared. She had them locked in place. They knew she was messing with them, but
they were unsure how.

  “I don’t think so,” the disfigured one snarled, using only one side of his mouth again. “We need this right now. You just want it.” The others mumbled a few words, agreeing with the pack leader. The only one she heard clearly added, “She wants it.” They laughed.

  If they knew Michael, they would have given her the book already. As Jana considered her options, the Sliders suddenly turned quiet. They dropped their arms and sat upright. They were staring obediently at something, or someone, behind Jana.

  She turned to see two Virgins, side by side, as translucent and simultaneously white as ever. They sang two perfect notes each, in low alto voices. One note up, then one note down. It was a warning.

  The boy in glasses stood abruptly, pushing his chair back. He picked up the book and leaned across the table, offering it to Jana.

  “Here,” he said. “Please.”

  Jana accepted the book from him. The Sliders looked elsewhere, not at one another and not at Jana. When she turned around to walk back to her table with the student guidebook in her arms, the Virgins were gone.

  The book was large and heavy, bound in covers that looked like dried sheepskin. It seemed ancient, its pages written by hand in faded brown ink. The florid lettering looked like that of one of those religious books that monks copied and hid from authorities hundreds of years ago. The writing was large and clear, but each letter was crafted with a pattern of flourishes that made it very difficult to read. Some of the writing looked upside down.

  Jana thought she’d been given the wrong book. She looked at page after page and couldn’t make sense of it. The words weren’t English. The writing was full of funny-looking Js and far too many letters were topped with tailed dots and little caret-shaped thingies.

  Her concentration was broken when Jana felt a warm breeze at her back. A Slider was close to her. She didn’t look up. He sat down in the empty chair on her side of the table and pulled close to her.

  “Okay, what?” she finally said. She gave him an icicle glare.

  It was the tall Slider with half a face. Jana could see him clearly now. The scalded red side was missing an eye. That side of his mouth had no lips. She could see his teeth and gums. Even when his mouth was supposedly closed, the bad side wasn’t. His eyelid was red and shriveled and looked like it had been sealed shut with glue. He kept his crooked arm in his lap, under the table. He nodded down to his hands.