He held a small narrow knife. It looked as sharp as a razor. His sleeves were rolled up.
“This is from Mars,” he said.
The Slider leaned in close to her. The warmth from his face touched hers.
He pressed the knife blade against his upturned lower arm and she watched in horror as blood appeared. He pushed the blade deeply into his flesh, then drew it away quickly and slipped the knife inside his clothes. She watched him tense in pain. The Slider placed his hand over the deep cut to stem the blood as much as possible. The red liquid poured from the cut, bubbling up between his fingers. It looked sticky and thick and hot.
Standing up, he leaned over Jana, still clutching his bleeding wound. He held his cut arm turned up. From the corner of his mouth, he said softly, “See you in homeroom tomorrow, Webster. Make sure you say hi.”
The Slider walked away, limping on his bad leg, bent slightly at the waist. He listed to one side and back with every awkward step. Jana took her first gasp of air since seeing the knife. As her pulse raced to her temples, she felt her heartbeat at both sides of her neck. Jana lowered her head and stared at her hands. They were shaking worse than her mom’s.
Chapter Seven
ARVA WENT ON. And on.
“I can’t believe they let Sliders use the library,” she said on the bus after school. “And they shouldn’t have given you that old guidebook. There’s a newer one.”
Her croaky, breathless voice was weaker at the end of the day, but it didn’t keep her from informing Jana about the evil of Sliders and why it was crucial that she have nothing to do with them.
“I should have gone with you, Jana. I can be with you every minute of the day if you want. For a week or so, I can go to your elective instead of mine. New students are so fragile.”
Jana wasn’t listening. Henry had passed her another note in sixth period. It said Where are you from? And he had added a smiley face.
She’d started to write it down for him, but couldn’t remember the name of her town. She must have hit her head hard enough to forget some things. It would come to her, she was certain.
She waited.
It didn’t.
She finally wrote Tell you later on the note and passed it back to Henry.
As the scenery moved by the windows, Jana glanced toward the back of the bus. Mars was there. She tried to watch him without his knowing it. But every time she looked, he was staring right at her. His friend with half a face kept his leg stuck across the aisle. The tall Slider was never looking at Jana when she looked at him. Then again, he had only one eye to hide.
There were no Sliders in Jana’s fifth-period or sixth-period classes. Arva had told her that some of the Sliders were in vocational training classes in the afternoons. Others were in basic math and English courses designed for Sliders alone.
“They’re like GED students,” Arva had said. “Sort of pass or fail. Some of them are here for a year or two. Others, for a couple months. If they do something bad enough, the school kicks them out. And then they go, you know, down the slide.”
“Down the slide?” Jana asked.
“Yeah, that’s why they call them Sliders. It doesn’t really matter what grades they get. Sliders don’t graduate with the rest of us. If they finish at all.”
“Why are they here?”
“I don’t know, really,” Arva said. “They’re one hundred percent hopeless. They’re given an equivalency test at some point, then they slide on by.”
Jana thought about it. She was catching on to Arva. There were a lot of things her roommate didn’t know.
“Okay, then,” Jana said. “If they’re Sliders, what are we called?”
“Oh, we’re Risers, silly. Didn’t anyone tell you? We’re on the way up when we graduate. We’re going places. Sliders aren’t. They’re earthbound. That’s why they’re dangerous. You don’t want to have anything to do with them. They were doing something bad when they died.”
Arva paused to look at Jana solemnly.
“You can become one,” Arva warned her. “If you break the rules once you’re here, you can become a Slider. So for us, Sliders are against the rules to start with. If you hang out with them, you can be on your way down too. Do you understand me?”
Jana nodded that she understood.
“They’re poison, I swear they are,” Arva went on. “Sliders should come with a skull-and-crossbones label on their foreheads so you know to stay away from them.”
Jana thought of the poison apple in Snow White. She giggled at herself when she thought of Mars as a poison apple. Forbidden fruit.
“Think of this,” Arva continued. “The vacant desk in homeroom used to be somebody. Somebody just like you and me. It can happen to any one of us. Expulsion. You can be expelled, Jana. You can’t take a single step in that direction or . . .”
Arva paused to find enough air to choke out her final words on the subject. “Or,” she said, “it can happen to you.”
The bus of dead kids rolled on.
When she thought Arva wouldn’t notice, Jana looked at Mars again. He looked tired, but he was still smiling at her, his blue eyes lit up like twinkle lights. His hair was tussled and disarranged. Mars seemed radiant and messy at the same time. He should comb his hair, she thought.
“Let them off first,” Arva said when the bus came to a stop in front of a building that reminded Jana of an old three-story motel. “They won’t bother you on the bus,” Arva added. “The driver is watching them.”
The Sliders stood from their seats at the back and filed forward. Like prisoners. They didn’t look as cocky as they had in the morning. Maybe their vocational training involved heavy lifting or endless hammering on things. At her old school, one of the vo-tech classes built an entire house each year.
As he walked by, Mars touched the back of the bench seat she shared with Arva. His fingertips brushed across her shoulder. Jana felt a radiance of warmth pass over her then drift away. A part of her wanted to follow the warmth of Mars, to keep it close to her. The part of her that was an animal, she thought. That part of her hadn’t died either.
Darcee was as pretty as a Virgin, but without the ephemeral glow.
She lay on a gurney against the far wall, her hands crossed over her chest.
“Coma,” Arva said. “Broken brain stem or something. They say the coma Stretchers can hear, that they listen to everything you say, but no one can really prove it. I talk to her sometimes, when I’m trying not to fall asleep. Beatrice put makeup on her once. She was really pretty that way, but we washed it off.”
Jana imagined herself unable to move, unable to open her eyes. She wondered whether it was better to be able to think about things or not to think at all when you were in a coma.
“Why is Darcee here?” Jana asked. “People in comas aren’t dead.”
“Not officially, I guess. She’s caught in between. She doesn’t go to class or anything.” Arva made a face.
Jana thought of Snow White again. There should be a prince to come kiss Darcee and wake her up from her sleep to live happily ever after. Jana went numb at the thought of “happily ever after.” This was Jana’s ever after. This place, this room, these people. She wasn’t happy at all.
There was only one way Jana could be happy again. And that was to be with Michael.
“If Darcee does wake up, she’ll be out of here. Just like that, back to the Planet she goes.”
“The Planet is real life, then?”
“I shouldn’t call it that, I suppose. But everyone does.”
“Where’s the Planet?”
“Oh, it’s all around us,” Arva croaked cheerfully. “We’re right in the middle of it. There’s a boundary between us and the real world. The fences around the dorm and around the school. But it’s more than fences. When they let you leave the campus, you become a spirit. You’ll think you have your body just like you do here, but you don’t. It’s pretty scary.”
“So we’re right here on Earth?”
“Yeah, that’s the cool part. Dead School is in a real school building and the dorm is a real building on the Planet too. They have Dead Schools all over. Around the world, I imagine. They’re vacant buildings. But we get to use them. When a new student shows up, they try to find you a vacancy near to where you live. Your town could be very near, you see. Or maybe we’re right in it.”
“Who are they? You said ‘they’ try to find a Dead School near to where you live.”
“The regents,” Arva said. “There’s a Council of Regents. They oversee everything. They’re like a board of education. I have to find you the student guidebook, don’t I?”
Jana realized Arva didn’t really want to show her a copy of the student guidebook. In fact, Jana decided, Arva was probably keeping it from her on purpose. She enjoyed getting to explain her version of things to Jana.
“Let me get this straight,” Jana said. “The building is real. But it has people and books in it only when we’re there. Same with the dorm. And we’re real too. Our bodies are real while we’re here. But we have bodies only when we’re on campus, when we’re at school, on the bus, or in the dorm.”
“Yes. For Risers, of course. We’re the ones who matter, Jana. Sliders are closer to Earth than we are. And some of them do things on the Planet the rest of us can’t. But you wouldn’t want to do that.”
Arva changed the subject in the middle of her reply.
“That’s the other thing,” she said. “Your body is different here, Jana. If you lie down, for instance, you’ll go to sleep. It’s lights out for you for the rest of the night. The next thing you know you’re on the bus heading to school the next day.”
It was clear to Jana that Arva was uncomfortable talking about the world off campus. In that world, she and Jana were also real. They were real dead. Arva could manage being in Dead School easier than she could manage being dead.
“What about the vacancy in homeroom?”
“She was a Riser,” Arva said. “Kind of horrible, isn’t it? I mean, you would expect it from a Slider.”
“I don’t know what to expect,” Jana confessed. “So, what happened, did she date a Slider or something?”
Arva paused.
“Okay, you’ll probably hear it somewhere else,” Arva said. “There’s a rumor she just left. That she walked away from campus somehow and stayed away overnight. If a student goes off campus and isn’t back in time for classes the next day, they’re expelled. Being expelled is a vacancy.”
“Risers can walk off campus?”
“Oh no. Well, I mean, that’s against the rules. I know all the student rules by heart.”
Jana nodded. She wasn’t sure she trusted everything Arva said. Just because something was against the rules didn’t mean you couldn’t do it.
“I wouldn’t believe the rumors, Jana. What happened was probably worse. But unless someone was there to see it, we don’t really know what she did. Maybe it was suicide.”
“But we’re already dead,” Jana said.
“Remember, your body is still here. If you hold your breath long enough, you’ll pass out. If you want to end it all, if that’s your goal, they’ll let you. If you get hurt some other way, they fix it for you. Every day here you wake up with the body—”
“I know, I know,” Jana interrupted. “The body you died with.”
“So, yes, you can smother yourself or something. Or hang yourself or . . . I don’t know what all.” Arva wheezed out a sigh of air. “Any more questions?”
Jana had enough rules to consider for one day. As soon as she could, she would talk it over with Michael. They’d come up with something.
“You’ll meet Pauline soon,” Arva croaked along, without missing a beat. “She’s down the hall somewhere or in the common room. It’s the lobby, actually. This used to be a motel before it was closed down. Pauline hangs out with other seniors after school. She’s always half one place and half somewhere else.”
Jana looked around her new room. It was larger than she thought a normal dorm room might be. Besides Darcee’s hospital gurney, there were three beds, each in their own little area, and three desks with chairs. Just as Arva had said, Jana’s notebooks from class were stacked on her desk.
Her street clothes were laid out on one of the beds. Jana recognized her capri pants.
A pair of rental bowling shoes sat on the floor at the edge of her bed. Jana made a stink face. Talk about adding insult to injury, she thought. She was supposed to walk through the afterlife in bowling shoes.
Jana would wear her black leather school uniform shoes day and night instead. At least they were all one color. For now, though, she took them off. She switched her school socks for her pair of shortie cottons that were tucked inside the bowling shoes. She picked up her blouse. There was a bloodstain at the back of the collar.
Arva pulled off her plaid skirt, left on her school granny panties, and wrapped herself in a dark blue silk skirt.
“My prom dress,” she said. “Beatrice cut it down for me.”
“It’s pretty,” Jana said, then changed the subject. “I tried to read the original guidebook in the library. But I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.”
“Nobody can,” Arva told her. “Don’t worry about that old thing. It’s in a bunch of ancient languages. It was written a thousand years ago. They just keep it there so we know there is one. Risers put together their own guidebook. We pass it around among ourselves.”
“There’s not one copy for each student?”
“No,” Arva said. “You only need it for a day or two. I thought it was right here. I’ll ask around and make sure you can see it by the end of the week. Until then, if you have any questions, I can tell you everything that’s in it.”
Arva went into the bathroom. She quickly stuck her head back into the dorm room to say, “Remember, don’t lie down while I’m gone. If you do, you’ll go to sleep.”
Jana unbuttoned the waist of her school skirt. The skirt was new and the buttonholes wouldn’t relax. She almost pulled both buttons off working them through the holes, then spied the computer on a small table against the back wall of the room.
She was there in an instant. Jana could email Michael.
A keyboard was attached to a large television screen. A small printer was connected to the computer. It was an old-fashioned daisy wheel printer, the kind that actually typed each letter to print out a page.
Jana sat down and turned on the computer. To her horror, fat green letters appeared on a blank gray screen. There were no icons to click, and for that matter, she couldn’t find a mouse. She hit the keyboard and watched letters and then words appear as she typed.
The computer was nothing more than an antique word processor. There was no internet connection. Without the internet, it wasn’t a computer at all. Jana turned it off, remembering her cell phone. Holding her skirt closed, she rushed to her bed and found her cell in the pocket of her capri pants, along with a tube of peach lip gloss.
Jana flipped open the phone. No signal.
So that was it. She looked over her stuff from real life. Lip gloss, bowling shoes, and a cell phone that wouldn’t work. If she had advice for anyone in high school, it was to die with your best stuff in your arms. Have your pockets full and carry a backpack of the things you care about most at all times. Just in case.
It was silly of her to think about it, but Jana’s secret wish, if she had to die without Michael in the first place, was to have died with her Ken doll. It was someone to talk to when she felt alone. Ken had been her best friend since she was six and she told him everything.
It was Christmas 2001 and her mother wasn’t home. She sent gifts to Jana instead. Same as every Christmas.
Jana’s mother had been hired by Mattel to appear in places around the world as Barbie for the fortieth anniversary of the original Ken doll. Marilyn wore a striped one-piece bathing suit in all the pictures Jana had seen of the international promotion of the new Ken doll. She had her hair tie
d in a ponytail. The model playing Ken wore a tuxedo with a silver, glittery cummerbund.
Inside one of the Christmas packages was the perfect American couple in washable plastic. A new Barbie, dressed in a formal gown, and a Ken dressed in a tuxedo. Jana fell in love with Ken. He was a man, not a boy. And he became her best friend overnight. Two days later, Jana threw away the Barbie. It looked too much like her mother.
Ken could do no wrong.
Jana bought herself small gifts when she was a little older, for her birthdays and for Christmas. She wrapped them and put tags on the boxes that read To Jana, From Ken.
She guessed she wouldn’t be getting gifts from Ken anymore.
“You have your own shelf in here,” Arva said, coming out of the bathroom. She had combed her hair and her face looked freshly scrubbed. “The school gives you a brush, comb, toothbrush, and toothpaste. Things like that.”
Jana was struggling not to cry. There had to be someplace she could get a signal. She wondered if anyone had tried using a cell phone on the roof.
Someone knocked on the door to their room. Arva answered it without opening the door widely enough for Jana to see who it was.
“No,” Arva said in her froggy voice. “You can’t be here. Go away.”
A hand pushed the door open from the outside. In a flash, there stood Mars, grinning. The tall Slider with half a face stood behind him.
“Shut up, Davis,” Mars said. “I’m here to see Webster.”
Chapter Eight
“LET’S GO FOR A WALK.”
Mars glanced briefly at Jana’s clothes from the Planet spread out on the bed, then motioned for her to come outside.
“I don’t think so,” Arva said, speaking for Jana.
Jana had already had an entire day of Arva telling her what she should not do. It was time her roommate learned that Jana had a mind of her own. She left the room to go with Mars.
Dead Rules Page 5