Dead Rules

by Randy Russell

  Nathan shook his head. “I don’t think so. She was totally devoted to you. I mean, that was the problem, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Michael said. “It was like being smothered. She had our future all mapped out. We were supposed to spend every minute with each other until we got old and died.”

  “I got it,” Nathan said. “He has her cell phone, right? So she has her own voice on there. She recorded voice memos and stuff. School notes or lines from a play. He lifted some of her words, rearranged them, recorded them that way, and played it back.”

  “Maybe,” Michael said. There were all sorts of pauses in the message, like she was having trouble talking.

  “Yeah, that’s it. It’s just that guy, then. In my message, he told us we have to tell someone what we did. Her message wasn’t anything like that. She wasn’t dead when she said those things.”

  “I guess not,” Michael said. “Do you think she knows how she fell?”

  Michael had the creeps again.

  • • •

  Arva didn’t say a word on the bus after school. Jana didn’t care.

  In the dorm, they both said hello to Darcee and changed out of their school clothes. Jana agreed with Arva that their comatose roommate, even though she wasn’t officially dead, was likely listening to the things they said. Jana thought maybe they should prop open Darcee’s eyes once in a while so she could see things too.

  Arva put on her blue cut-down prom dress skirt while Jana slipped into her capri pants. Jana could still smell the pool in her hair, on her skin.

  “That boy has ruined you!” Arva finally announced. “You’re going to end up just like them. You’re going to be a Slider before you’re through.”

  That was the idea, Jana thought, trying not to smile.

  “Relax a little, Arva. I just went swimming. No big deal.”

  “Oh, I know what you did. Everyone is talking about it. You went swimming naked. Why didn’t you just walk off campus and flag down a trucker on the highway?”

  “Can’t,” Jana said. “They wouldn’t see me.”

  Arva sputtered frog words and turned away from Jana. “I’m leaving,” she said. “I’m going across the hall.”

  “Wait,” Jana said. “Please.” Jana needed to do what she wanted to do, but she didn’t want Arva hating her for it.

  “What?”

  “Sit down and talk to me a minute, then you can go.”

  The door opened and Pauline came in. She turned her top half around on her waist to pick up something from the bed.

  “You still in love with that boy, what’s-his-name?” Pauline asked Jana casually on her way back to the door. “Did he cry at the funeral?”

  It took Jana a moment to realize that her senior roommate was talking to her.

  “Michael,” Jana said.

  “Yeah,” Pauline said. “You’re wearing his ring and all. Well, he isn’t going to love you forever. You’re dead, he isn’t. You do the math.”

  With that less than cheerful note, Pauline was out the door. Both halves.

  “I knew I didn’t like her,” Jana said. “Now I know why.”

  “PMS,” Arva told her. “Don’t take it to heart. She died like that and now she has PMS every day.”

  “Aren’t we the lucky ones?”

  “Yes, we are when you think about it,” Arva said, barely whispering. There was a feather at the corner of her mouth. She plucked it away.

  “Aren’t you ever going to run out of those things?” Jana asked.

  Arva shook her head. “I think it’s the same one every time. Either that or I get a new batch when I wake up on the bus every morning. What did you want to talk about?”

  “You and me. I want to get along, Arva. And I just keep upsetting you.”

  “I can’t help it. You just . . . I don’t know . . . You just seem to want to break every rule there is.”

  “It’s tempting,” Jana admitted. “But I don’t think you realize that everything you say to me either begins or ends with ‘better not.’ I’ve started thinking of you as the Better Not Girl. I was going to have a bumper sticker printed with the words Better Not and stick it on your butt.”

  Arva grinned. There was a sense of humor in there somewhere, Jana was pleased to note.

  “I’m sorry,” Arva said, coughing up the words. “It must seem that way to you. But I’m your orientation counselor. It’s my job to tell you what you can’t do.”

  “Maybe we should think about what we can do. You can’t follow every single rule there is even if you tried. I’m not trying to hurt anyone, Arva. I’m really not.”

  “Yourself. You might hurt yourself. When you break the rules, bad things happen. Like Beatrice. She let that guy touch her breast and . . . well, you know.”

  Jana didn’t think it had anything to do with Beatrice. It was something else.

  Arva paused to pluck the small black feather from the corner of her mouth again.

  Jana had seen enough feathers in Arva’s mouth to last an eternity.

  “So, tell me,” Jana said. “How did you die?”

  Arva took a deep breath. It sounded like someone swallowing fuzz.

  “Well, you already know it was prom, since I showed up here in this dress and all. So, it was prom. Only I never got there.”

  Alan was on time.

  Arva had the most beautiful blue dress for prom. She wore a necklace that had been her grandmother’s. It was silver with a topaz teardrop dangle. Her grand-mother called it a blue diamond. She wore her mother’s expensive perfume. She dabbed it behind her ears so Alan would be intoxicated by scent when they danced.

  When Alan had asked her to prom, he was just another guy in school. She hadn’t really noticed him. In the two weeks leading up to prom, Arva began to like him better and better. He turned out to be almost dreamy, in fact. He had an older brother in medical school. He had his college picked out.

  He was a quiet achiever, Arva decided, one of those people in school you would hear about later and not even remember. Except she would remember Alan. He asked her to prom before she even had time to worry about having a date. His family paid for a limo. Arva was thrilled.

  The weather was perfect. Alan’s mother and father had followed the limousine to Arva’s house. They took pictures of the prom couple in the front yard. The driver held open the limo door for both of them. Alan adjusted his cuff links as he stepped in. For a moment, Arva was confused. She thought she’d seen him do that already—lift his foot, adjust his cuff links.

  Alan sneaked champagne into the limo and Arva sipped some from a silver flask he carried inside his tuxedo. They weren’t old enough to drink legally and that made it exciting. Though the champagne had gone flat and it tasted awful, Arva loved sipping it anyway. She felt sophisticated.

  When Alan got the moonroof open, Arva stood on the leather seat and stuck her head and shoulders through the opening. He soon joined her, and the two of them rode through a small portion of her very special evening stuck out the top of a limousine. It was going to be the best night of her life. Until a small bird interrupted it.

  A sparrow flew into Arva’s face. She must have been talking, because her mouth was open. The little bird folded up like a feathered fist and slammed into and in-side Arva’s mouth. She felt like she’d been hit on the lip.

  She had no choice. Arva swallowed it. Almost.

  Arva choked. The bird was stuck in her throat. She couldn’t cough. She couldn’t breathe. With wild eyes, she looked down and saw blood on her dress. It was the sparrow’s.

  Her throat hurt. Arva tried to swallow. Then she tried to heave. She could do neither.

  Arva made no sound at all.

  She started bobbing her head up and down. She didn’t know why, but she thought it would help. Bright lights showed up behind her eyes. Brilliant, stabbing shards of silver light, like fireworks going off. Her grandmother’s necklace came free of its clasp. The topaz teardrop fell silently on its silver chain to the carpet of
the limousine.

  “I must have blacked out then,” Arva said. “That’s all I remember.”

  Bowling was an easier way to die, Jana thought. At least it was faster. It had to have been horrible for Arva. Jana pictured herself enacting the scene. She would bring both hands to her throat, then slowly let her hands fall, keeping her startled eyes open as she died. Her body would drop inside the limo, moments behind the fall of the shimmering topaz necklace.

  “It was my own fault, though.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Jana said. “I don’t think so at all.”

  “No, it was. Sticking your head out of a moonroof in a limousine is against the rules. They tell you not to do it when you ride in one. I broke the rules and I died.”

  Jana considered it. The only thing Arva had done wrong was be happy.

  “But look,” Jana said, “I wasn’t breaking any rules when I died. I guess I could have stayed at home and never gone bowling in my entire life.” She laughed. “I could have lived with that.”

  Arva left.

  Holding her cell phone, Jana sat on her bed with her back against the wall. When she called Michael again, he would answer. And he would say he couldn’t wait to be with her.

  Jana would tell him almost everything. She would tell him she was becoming a Slider to help them be together. She would tell him she was altering her destiny so they could be together forever. The way Jana and Michael would have been if she hadn’t died first.

  “I do bad things,” Jana said out loud. “Arva says so.”

  She bounded off the bed and marched across the room. She hit an imaginary mark, stopped, turned around dramatically, and completed her soliloquy.

  “I’m Jana Webster, dead girl. When there is something bad to be done, I do it.”

  She was doing something that night, in fact. Mars had warned her not to go to sleep. That it would be late. When things outside were really dark.

  She glanced at Darcee and said, “You’re supposed to clap.”

  Jana’s notebooks were stacked neatly on the desk in her dorm room, as they had been the day before, as they would be every day after school. She picked up her second-period notebook from the desk. And a pencil.

  One by one, Jana worked the mazes. They were easy. She did them quickly. But when she got to the last one, she goofed it up. She had to erase her line twice. She spent as much time on the last maze as she had on the first five.

  Turning to a clean page, Jana used her pencil to draw a big heart. I love Michael this much, she thought. No, bigger than that. Then it came to her and she wrote on the page, I love Michael with all my heart.

  Jana said Michael’s name, first and last, ten times fast. So he would know she was thinking about him.

  Pauline was right. Michael would go on with his life without her. She needed to kill him as soon as possible. She couldn’t be a Slider quickly enough unless she could be one that very night. If not, Jana wondered whether she could earn a couple hundred demerits in one day at Dead School and kill Michael tomorrow night.

  It wouldn’t be easy. She’d have to find a way to kill him that wasn’t prolonged or painful. And she wanted Michael to see her when she did it, so the permanent memory of his death would also be of Jana. When he told people at Dead School how he died, she and Michael would hold hands like old couples on the Planet do when they tell a stranger how they met.

  “Sometimes being in love means you have to kill somebody,” she told Darcee.

  You have to love someone a lot to kill them, Jana decided. And she loved Michael at least that much.

  Jana returned to the mazes. She looked at each one in order and traced her lines. When she got to the last one, she saw the difference. She’d worked the first five mazes by taking three left turns at the beginning. The last one, though, started with three right turns and that’s where she had messed up.

  Skinner’s boxes had conditioned Jana to turn left to begin the puzzles, even though she didn’t realize she was making left or right turns. To solve the last puzzle, she had to turn the other direction and she wasn’t used to it.

  • • •

  When Arva came back to the room, she was in a much better mood. She and Jana chatted merrily about this and that. Jana even mentioned Rogues to her in passing.

  Arva finished her last bottle of water for the evening. “What are Rogues?” she asked.

  Jana thought she was kidding. “Rogues, you know. They came to my funeral today. Rogues. The bad guys?”

  Arva still wasn’t getting it.

  “Rogues, Rogues, Rogues,” Jana said. “Dead School dropouts.”

  “There are no Dead School dropouts. You can’t just quit. It’s not in our guidebook. You’re here or you’re a vacancy. There’s nothing in between.”

  “What about the vacancy in homeroom, Arva? You said she walked away and stayed overnight. And she was a Riser.”

  “It’s just a rumor she did that. And if she did, then she’s a vacancy.” Arva coughed and sputtered. She spit out her final croaky words like they were poison. “Not an outlaw dropout monkey snatcher . . . whatever!”

  “Trust me, there are Rogues,” Jana insisted. “I saw them. And they saw me.”

  “No. It’s just not so.”

  “Arva, the guidebook the students put together isn’t everything there is to know about Dead School.”

  “It’s good enough for me,” Arva said. She poked her tongue at a small feather stuck on her lower lip. “It’s good enough for Risers,” she added in a huff. “So it’s good enough for me. And it’s good enough for you.”

  Jana answered a knock at the door.

  It was Mars. She felt his familiar warmth wash over her.

  “Close your eyes, Davis,” he said, peering over Jana’s shoulder. “I’m coming in.”

  Jana waited. Arva sat on the bed with her legs crossed, her eyes squeezed tightly shut. She was frowning.

  “Webster,” Mars said, “you have to ask me.”

  “Ask you what?”

  “To come in. I have to be invited.”

  Arva was shaking her head, but didn’t say a word.

  “Oh, please come in,” Jana said.

  Mars walked to the foot of Jana’s bed. “I have to show you something, Webster.” He picked up her bowling shoes.

  “Come here,” he said. He held a shoe in each hand. As Jana approached, he flipped the right shoe over and held it out to her.

  “Touch the sole. Rub your fingers across the bottom.”

  Jana didn’t really want to, but she did. Her fingers slipped along the bottom of the bowling shoe like they were greased. She cocked her head, her hair falling over her cheek.

  “Now, try this one.” He held the left shoe upside down for her. When Jana rubbed her fingertips across the sole, they found resistance. Her fingers didn’t slide easily and she had to push them along the surface.

  Mars carried the shoes to the bathroom. Jana followed. He set the right one down on the tile floor and gave it nudge. It slid across the bathroom. He did the same with the left shoe and it didn’t move. The left shoe would move across the floor only as long as he kept his hand on it, pushing it. The right one had taken off on its own.

  “Silicone spray,” Mars told her.

  “The bowling alley sprayed my shoe? Do they charge extra for making people fall down?”

  Mars’s cheek dimpled. “Not the bowling alley, Webster. It’s the kind of spray you use to loosen old locks so the key turns smoothly through the tumblers.”

  “So that’s your murder plot?”

  “Silicone spray,” Mars repeated. “Locksmiths use it all the time.”

  “Oh.” It clicked. “Sherry’s dad is a locksmith. That’s what you meant when you told Nathan you knew what he’d done. Sherry and Nathan did it. He was laughing. I remember that. He was laughing at me.”

  She wouldn’t believe him if he told her the truth, Mars decided. Not yet.

  Chapter Twenty

  MARS WAS READY TO GO.r />
  “Let me pack,” Jana said. She wedged her cell phone into the pocket of her striped capri pants. “Okay, then.”

  “You can open your eyes now,” Mars called to Arva as he and Jana left the dorm room.

  The hallway was anything but empty. Doors were open and lights were on. Girls stood in their doorways and chatted, two or three at a time. They were watching Mars, who had just made his rounds. A Gray stood at the far end, at the door to the stairway, watching nothing.

  Wyatt stood in a doorway across the hall from Jana’s room. He had handed Beatrice a small package of makeup and now leaned against the wall with his head ducked, speaking quietly to Christie.

  Christie looked up and smiled at Jana and Mars. Wyatt pulled away and lumbered toward them on his bad leg. Christie caught Jana’s eye and silently mouthed the words thank you. Jana was taken by surprise. She pointed to herself and turned her face into a question mark. Christie nodded vigorously.

  Jana was warm standing next to Mars. As Wyatt reached them, she noticed the warmth increase. When she was a Slider, Jana thought, she would be warm all the time.

  “I got the directions,” Wyatt said to Mars out the side of his mouth that was still there. “It’s way up in Madison County, though. You better find one with lots of gas.”

  Wyatt’s one working eye locked on Jana. “Are you sure she has to come with us?” he asked Mars.

  Mars nodded. Wyatt turned and walked away, his tall form listing from side to side with every step, like the mast of a ship on a tossing sea.

  “Where’s he going?” Jana asked Mars. “You said he was coming with us.”

  “To the fire escape. It’s easier for him than the stairs.”

  The Gray monitor never looked up as Mars and Jana walked past him and into the stairwell.

  “So, these are your contraband operations in action?” Jana asked once the door closed behind them. “You and Wyatt steal things from the Planet and make a killing selling them to Risers?”

  “It’s not as simple as that, Webster.” He talked while she followed him down the stairs. “I don’t steal. I can’t take anything from the Planet and bring it here unless it is given to me.”