Dead Rules

by Randy Russell

  She thought of Beatrice. Jana might be strong enough to push an ice pick through his skull. Or, with practice, she could use a hammer and give the handle of an ice pick one solid hit. Would he jump around until he died? Would he struggle if she strangled him? Probably, she decided.

  If she plunged the ice pick into his chest until it pierced his heart while he slept, he might wake up and pull it out. She’d have to hide his cell phone so he couldn’t call 911 for help. What if he struck out at her before he died? She didn’t want Michael hitting her to be the last thing he remembered from real life.

  Jana would drug him. She’d tie his hands and feet to the bed. Then smother him in his sleep. Michael would be a little blue in Dead School. That didn’t matter anyway. Everyone was. Poison, of course. Drugs and poison were the same thing. Everything about Romeo and Juliet was just right.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  ARVA FROWNED AT THE WORLD.

  “I don’t want to know where you went last night,” she said.

  Jana sat between her roommate and the window on the bus to Dead School. Jana smelled like Ivory soap again. Everyone did. The scent of soap reminded Jana of a song from grade school. “We’re all in our places with bright, shining faces.” The ones that had faces.

  “And I don’t want to know what you did.” Arva’s usual hoarse whisper turned into a creaking sound when she tried to be adamant.

  Jana knew Arva was mad because Jana didn’t depend on her for information any longer. Risers thought they had all the answers, but they weren’t the only kids who had tried to figure out what they were supposed to do and not supposed to do at Dead School. And, frankly, Mars and Wyatt had done a better job of it.

  Climbing up on her knees, Jana turned around and placed her arms on the back of the seat. The student behind her had incredibly pink puffy cheeks. His entire face was puffed out like a marshmallow. Or a balloon. His eyes were swollen shut. Bee sting, she thought. Or poison ivy. Jana looked beyond him and saw Mars. She ate Mars for breakfast with her eyes.

  Then she laughed. Jana couldn’t help it. Her natural smile took over and stayed there. She batted her eyelashes. Mars stared at her as if she wore clown makeup and a red rubber nose. She wasn’t good at being naughty yet. She’d get better at it before the day was through, Jana decided. Twenty-three demerits weren’t nearly enough.

  “You went walking through the dead of night with those two Sliders,” Arva said without looking at Jana. “I know you did.” Creak, creak, croak.

  Mars shook his head at Jana, then looked out the window.

  Jana turned around in her seat as the bus began to move. “Arva, we were the dead of night,” she said.

  Christie caught up to Jana before homeroom.

  “Thank you,” she said. “They’re through. I can tell they are.” Christie smiled. It made her hair glow. The slightly diagonal red line across her forehead was barely there when she smiled like that.

  “It wasn’t me. It was Wyatt,” Jana said. “He did it by himself.”

  “Isn’t he a dream?” Christie asked.

  “Just that,” Jana said. She smiled at the thought of a guy who looked like a refugee from a nightmare being Christie’s idea of a dream. Jana realized she was smiling more now that she had decided to be a bad girl. She smiled naturally without thinking about it first. It just happened.

  There was a flyer printed on blue paper on every student’s desk. Jana sat in her seat and read hers. Sock Hop! was centered in large block letters. Third period. In the Gym. In much smaller type near the bottom it read Arva Davis, Publicity Committee.

  Jana turned to ask Arva about it, but her roommate wouldn’t look at her. She turned around and asked Beatrice instead. It was a come-as-you-are school dance. You had to take off your shoes to dance on the gym floor.

  “But we don’t have to hop, do we?”

  Beatrice tilted the yellow yard dart fins to one side. “Can if you want,” she said brightly. She wore a lighter color of blush on her cheeks today. There was a brush of glitter under her eyes. Beatrice sparkled.

  Jana was sure twenty-three demerits were far short of her goal. And she didn’t know what that goal was. Maybe two hundred. Maybe two hundred and fifty. She would have to do better. She opened her homeroom notebook and tore out a page from the back. She wrote a short note and passed it to Henry.

  She couldn’t stop looking at Mars. He seemed brand-new to her. He’d taken her to the world with him and brought her safely back. Now that she was a bad girl, they had something in common.

  Jana knew everything about Michael. It was different with Mars. She had no idea what dreams and sorrows lived behind his darting eyes and perfectly arched eyebrows.

  It was time to act. Second period, Jana waited until Mr. Skinner had drawn his first box on the blackboard. Jana stood from her desk. A few students looked at her.

  She straightened her hair with her hands, tugged up her kneesocks to get them even, then bounced to the front of the class. She lifted the chalk eraser from the tray and, standing next to Mr. Skinner, erased the first maze he’d drawn while he worked on the second.

  Jana turned to the class and bowed from the waist. Two of the Sliders clapped. Others laughed. Mars looked down and massaged the center of his forehead with the thumb and fingers of one hand. Arva buried her head inside her arms crossed in front of her on her desk.

  A Virgin appeared inside the classroom door. She was a little wider and taller than the others and she sang in as low a voice as Jana had ever heard a girl sing. Then she motioned Jana to the door. Outside, a Gray escorted her to the library. Jana had earned detention for the remainder of the hour.

  She was surprised to see Jameson sitting at the table where she’d first met him. He was alone this time. Jana asked if she could sit down. Books were spread out in front of him. He glanced up at her, then returned to his work. His straight brown bangs touched the tops of his glasses. His cowlick looked like a little hand of hair waving hello.

  “You aren’t in class,” Jana said.

  “This is my class,” Jameson told her. “I’m a full-time student librarian. I’m good at languages.”

  “That must be fun,” Jana said politely. “Do you graduate and everything?”

  “Well, no. Not really,” he mumbled.

  “What, then?” Jana asked. “If you don’t graduate, what happens to you?”

  “I shouldn’t tell you.”

  “Go ahead,” Jana said. “I won’t rat you out.”

  “I’m a regent,” he whispered.

  “A what?”

  “A regent. Right now I’m the student representative on the Regents Council. I died too young, I guess.”

  Jana’s mouth dropped open. “You run the place?”

  “No,” Jameson said. He looked up from his books, pushed his glasses against the bridge of his nose, and looked back down. “Not yet,” he added.

  She asked about demerits. Jana told him everything she had done and that she had earned three for skinny-dipping and twenty for leaving campus.

  “Then I got detention,” she said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “I see,” Jameson said absently.

  “I need more demerits,” Jana told him. “A lot more.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “For starters, don’t disrupt class,” he said. “You’ll just end up here. Detention is meant to keep you from bothering other students. You can’t do that in Dead School. Every student gets equal opportunity to learn, to achieve.”

  “To change?” Jana suggested.

  “That’s what you really want, isn’t it?” This time Jameson looked into her eyes, his stare magnified by the lenses in his glasses.

  “I want to be a Slider.”

  “That’s going to take some doing. Demerits are meant to warn Risers. Not much more to it than that. The easiest way to get more is to do the same things again. Since they’re a warning, it won’t be too much the first time you do anything. When you do it again, it is taken much more
seriously because you have already been warned.”

  “I got three demerits for skinny-dipping,” she said. “If I do it again, I’ll get a bunch more?”

  “First of all, you earned three demerits for taking your underwear off at school. They don’t care that you went swimming, and you didn’t know you were skipping class, so they didn’t see that as a choice you made. If you do it again, you’ll get nine demerits or maybe ten. It’s rather subjective.”

  “How many demerits until I go before the Council? Will they make me a Slider?”

  “It’s unclear,” he confessed. “Look, you’re a Riser. You’re one of the good kids. They allow for you to mess up and joke around. That’s why they have demerits in the first place. If you were a Slider, your actions would have more dire consequences. Sliders don’t get demerits. They just get expelled. And that’s an instant vacancy. But as long as Sliders don’t disrupt other students here, they let them do about anything until they finally do something that is . . . bad enough.”

  “How much do I have to do to get the regents to make me a Slider?” Michael had better appreciate this, Jana thought.

  “Risers don’t go before the Regents Council. So you have to become a Slider on your own. Then . . . well, then you don’t want ever to be called before the regents.”

  “I’ll be a good Slider, I promise,” Jana said. “I won’t bother anyone on campus. Just tell me what to do, Jameson. You know it can happen and you know how it’s done.”

  “Yes, it’s possible,” he said. “I can tell you that much. But I can’t tell you exactly how to do it. That would make me a collaborator. Besides, it would be different for everyone. Whatever it is, it would have to be egregious.”

  Having to figure out everything on your own was getting old fast, Jana decided. No wonder Arva wanted to believe in a simple set of rules other students came up with.

  “Okay, but I want it to be soon,” Jana said. “Do they take forever to decide?”

  “Most vacancies happen instantly. Ditto for any change in student status, I would think.”

  “Instantly” would be good, Jana thought.

  “He came to my house last night,” Nathan told Michael.

  “Who?”

  “The guy on Jana’s phone. He was saying I had to tell about the accident or . . .”

  “Or what?”

  “Something about a cliff and what it felt like to fall to your death from real high up. He said you fall so fast, you can’t breathe. That you almost black out. Then he said you wished you had. Look, the guy’s a lunatic. I had to fight him off. It was a real tumble, but I got him out of the yard finally.”

  “Was he alone?” Michael wanted to know.

  “Yeah, the guy from the bowling alley. The guy who saw it happen. So listen, I’ve been thinking about it and—”

  “He’s just trying to scare you,” Michael interrupted. “You ran him off. It’s over.”

  “I don’t think it’s over. Maybe it’s time we tell someone the truth.”

  Michael closed his eyes and took a deep breath. It would ruin him. There would be an investigation of some kind. There would be a record. It would be in the paper, show up online, and Michael would be an Ivy League leper.

  He wasn’t guilty of anything, and it would ruin him. His scholarship to Dartmouth would fly out the window. That would mean he would have to stay local for college. Local college was a joke when it came to the goals he had set for himself.

  Why didn’t she just fall down like anyone else would have and get back up again? It was her fault, really. Not his. It was supposed to be a comedy and she’d made a tragedy out of it.

  “You won’t do that,” Michael said. “You won’t tell anyone anything at all. Because where are you going to go when they fight again? Where are you going to go when your parents start tearing the house apart at three in the morning?”

  “Have you known of any Risers who became Sliders?” Jana asked Jameson.

  He looked at her for almost a minute without answering. He pushed his glasses on up his nose, although they were already there to begin with.

  “Yes,” he finally said.

  That was the easier of the two questions she might have asked. Jameson had been researching the other one for Mars. A Slider becoming a Riser was much more difficult and exacting. It involved free-will atonement for a previous act with absolutely no regard for possible reward or advancement. It had to be an accomplishment by the Slider in a moment that was pure of heart. Perfectly pure of heart. Given too much time to consider the outcome almost nixed the deal for anyone. If you even thought you were doing good on purpose, it didn’t count.

  “How many?” Jana wanted to know.

  “How many what?”

  “How many Risers have become Sliders? That you know of.”

  “One or two.”

  “How did they do it?” Jana could use some pointers.

  “One of them slept around. She was a Slider for part of her last semester here. She’s gone now.”

  Jameson bent back over his work.

  “And the other one?”

  “She committed suicide and it failed,” he said. “She completed the act that would end her existence. It just didn’t work.”

  “How, exactly?” Jana asked.

  “I don’t remember the details,” Jameson said without looking up.

  Jana thought about failed suicide. You carried it through, but it didn’t kill you, for some reason.

  “Like firing a gun into your chest and missing your heart?”

  “Yes, that’s the idea,” Jameson agreed. “You commit the act that would normally kill you and you’re convinced that it will kill you. You take a huge overdose that puts you in a coma, for example. That’s another way. Of course, a coma induced in Dead School only lasts a little while.”

  “And if she had succeeded, she would be a vacancy, right?”

  “Oh yes, successful suicide here is instant vacancy. Your status doesn’t matter on suicide. You’re expelled for good. Grays committed suicide in real life. Once you’re here, it’s simply not tolerated.”

  This path to becoming a Slider wouldn’t work at all. She’d have to kill herself for real and then by some quirk have it fail to take. That left her original plan in place: as many demerits in as short a time as possible.

  Jameson’s talk reminded Jana of an old movie she liked. It was a Julia Roberts one. Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon. And, dang it, she forgot which, one of the Baldwins.

  “There is a window when you die,” Jana said. “Sometimes there is. Your body dies but you don’t totally leave, or something. Like in the movie Flatliners? Have you seen that one? They die and everything, but they can come back from death because that window hasn’t closed.”

  “Yes,” Jameson said. There seemed to be a bit of joy in his voice because Jana had managed to advance the conversation. “People experience death on the Planet. Then they’re resuscitated. It happens all the time. They hit them with the defibrillators and they come back. It would be the same here. The window, I mean. But I don’t think anyone in Dead School has ever had a heart attack.”

  “I guess not,” Jana said. She thought of Darcee. “Maybe people in comas are the ones that get stuck in the window.”

  Jameson looked at her more closely. He touched his glasses with two fingers.

  Their conversation was stolen by a sudden rolling clatter of noise in the hall. It sounded at first like someone was bowling.

  Jana scooted her seat back and stared at the windows that lined the library wall facing the hallway. The noise changed and intensified as it approached the windows. It sounded like tiny bowling balls, several of them rolling in unison on the hardwood floor of the hallway. The sound came nearer and nearer. Then she saw him.

  It was a skateboarder loose in the halls.

  Jana rushed to a window. Jameson followed.

  The kid wore his hair to his shoulders, parted in the middle so the sides closed over his face when he leane
d in. He wore a dark tan tee that reached to his knees, where the lateral rips in his jeans began. Sliders came out of the classroom doorways to watch the boarder work the halls on a platform that looked like it had seen several jumps that had gone askew. Its sides were nicked and the front curve was pocked with scars.

  The skateboarder managed a quick turnaround at the end of the hall by stepping back hard on the plat, lifting the front wheels. He touched the front curve of the board with two fingers and spun in place. The plat came down hard and, with two or three powerful kicks, the boarder sped back toward the library, weaving a mad pattern of S-curves from one side of the hall to the other.

  Mars stepped into the hall from Mr. Skinner’s class.

  “Nice work!” he called to the hall surfer.

  The kid in the oversize tee nearly capsized. He stepped sideways off the board, flipping it while it was still rolling and catching it in his hand. The kid stood perfectly still. But only for a second. He turned a circle, breathing hard, his mouth open. Then he took off running with his board under one arm and never looked back. His long hair bounced along as he passed the library windows.

  “It’s a kid from the Planet,” Jameson told her. “They break in through the basement. They come through here sometimes, but once the Sliders start talking to them, they never come back.”

  “Can they see us?” Jana asked, but she knew the answer.

  “One or two of the Sliders, the ones that practice contact on the Planet, can make themselves heard on campus,” he said. “But not seen. Planet people can’t see any of us here.”

  It should be more fun than it was to be invisible, she thought. Then Jana had another thought. She could kill Michael with a poisonous spider. She could put it on his big toe while he slept.

  When second period was over, she stepped behind a bookshelf and managed some tricky arm gymnastics. Without taking her blouse off, Jana was able to hang her school bra by one of its straps on the push-bar of the library door as she walked into the hall.