Water ran from their hair and faces. Mars gasped for air.
“Are you trying to set some kind of record?” Jana asked. She wondered how long he could stay down there before he was forced to surface.
Dark eyelashes batted away droplets of water from Mars’s blue eyes.
“I thought you were the one trying to set a record, Webster.” Mars tried to look like he was angry with her, but one corner of his smile wouldn’t quite disappear. “Most demerits per minute in the history of the world.”
Jana grinned. Mars understood. She didn’t have to explain anything. She didn’t even care if her ears stuck out of her wet hair.
“I think you should know,” he continued, “demeriting is not an Olympic event.”
“Not yet,” Jana said. The warmth from his body broadcast through the water in a widening circle that included Jana. It was like swimming in heated milk.
“You’re trying to think of a movie, aren’t you?”
“No,” she said. It surprised her that she wasn’t, in fact, doing just that. She was thinking, instead, of an electric blow-dryer dropped into Michael’s bathtub. “They haven’t made this one yet.”
Nathan decided not to go back to school after lunch. Anyone who knew Jana at all had an excuse.
“We have to get this behind us,” Michael said. “It was a joke, a stupid joke. And now it’s over.”
Nathan didn’t want to say the wrong thing. He recognized a bad mood when Michael was having one. They were parked in Nathan’s driveway. He couldn’t get out of the car until Michael was through talking.
“You know, she thought it was all about her,” Michael went on. “When I talked about my plans, she thought I was talking about us, the two of us. Every waking hour, I swear, she was right there next to me. It was humiliating the way she stuck to me like that. She was into this Romeo and Juliet thing to the core. There was no end to it. It’s like her hands were superglued to my belt. She was really holding me back.”
“I can see that,” Nathan said.
“So it was a little joke. That’s all. Listen, there were words I wanted to say that would have hurt her more than falling down at a bowling alley.”
“You were going to have to break up with her sometime,” Nathan said. Michael had told him that a hundred times or more, so it was safe to say.
“Exactly. You know, it’s probably better this way. She died happy. She didn’t know about Sherry and me doing it behind her back. And I swear, it was going to break her into pieces when we split up. Her dying spared her that.”
“You didn’t do it on purpose. It just happened.”
Michael stared bullets at Nathan. “We didn’t do it on purpose,” he said slowly, firing each word from between his teeth.
The Risers were waiting to dive. Mars and Jana climbed out of the pool. Mars turned on the pumps while Jana retrieved her skirt. She needed to get out of her wet blouse and dry off.
“Come with me,” she said. “I want to talk.”
Mars followed her into the girls’ locker room. They both grabbed towels. While he rubbed his chest and legs with his towel, Jana turned her back and slipped off her blouse. She wrapped herself in her towel.
“I thought of one,” she said.
“One what?” Mars stopped rubbing his hair with his towel. It looked terrific half wet and tousled like that, Jana thought.
“Movie,” Jana said. “Wring this for me.” She handed Mars the soaking, dripping lump of cloth and buttons that previously had been her blouse. Jana took another towel for her hair. She’d have to comb it with her hands.
She watched Mars twist her blouse into a snake, water pouring out of it. He folded it over and twisted it tighter. His stomach tightened as he worked, his biceps flexed. She put on her skirt, keeping the towel draped over her shoulders.
Jana spread a fresh towel on the locker room bench. She sat on one end of the towel. Mars unwound her blouse, shook it loose, and draped it over a towel bar by the sinks.
“Come here and sit down,” Jana said. “I’m cold with my hair wet.”
Mars sat next to her.
“So, what’s the movie?”
“It’s silly,” she said. “I bet you saw it when you were a little kid. Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan.”
“Got it, Webster. Tarzan of the Apes.”
“Close. The first one was Tarzan the Ape Man. This was the second one, Tarzan and Jane. It’s Tarzan and His Mate.”
“Me Tarzan. You Jana?” Mars asked. “Is it the way I talk or something?”
“No, you doof. They go swimming. Jane skinny-dips. They show it underwater. They cut the scene out of the movie for years and years. Then they put it back.”
They listened to a diver hit the water from the high board. He messed up, Mars thought. It was too big of a splash.
“So, what do you want to talk about, Webster?”
“I don’t. I want you to talk. I don’t know how to be nice about this, but I want to know how you died and why you want to save a life. I also want to know why you chose me. My first day here, you chose me, Mars, like you pick out something at the store to wear. Why me?”
“It wasn’t your first day here,” Mars said. “It was before that.”
Like most guys, he looked straight ahead while he talked. Jana watched his face, the way his eyes moved when he was remembering things. He told her everything, beginning with when she walked through him at the bowling alley shoe counter and ending with when he frantically blew air into her throat by sealing his lips over hers.
“I almost had you back,” he said. “Your eyelids fluttered. I almost made you breathe again.”
Jana moved the tip of her tongue between her lips and swallowed. Strawberries.
“And you’d been drinking strawberry pop,” she said. “I can still taste it. I guess I brought it with me when I died.” Mars had been trying to breathe air into her mouth, she realized. But it was the same as if he’d been kissing her.
“Listen to me,” Jana continued. “You couldn’t have saved me. It was the little crack at the back of my head. That’s what killed me.”
“But I saw it happen, start to finish. You don’t know how it feels to fail at that. To have someone dying and no matter what you do, they just keep dying . . . until they’re gone. It tore me up.”
Jana touched his leg as a gesture of understanding. The heat from Mars’s body leaped through her hand, up her arm, across her shoulders. It moved down inside her like she was drinking it. Her neck and face reddened. She took her hand away.
“You tried to give me my life back, Mars. Thank you.”
He didn’t say anything. Jana listened to him breathe. She had said enough. He would answer her other request if he wanted to.
“You know, it’s funny,” he finally said. “On the Planet, you meet people and they tell you the story of their life. Here, we tell each other how we died.”
Mars combed his fingers through his wet hair.
“I was drunk,” he said. “Wasted. In the middle of the day. I was drunk and I was angry. I wanted to get away from something and there was nowhere to go, really. So I just drove. I got on the interstate. I drove past three exits, got off at the fourth, and turned around and drove back.”
“Get away from what?” she asked.
“My father,” he said quietly. “He was a drunk. He hated himself and he saw himself in me, I think. And maybe he should have. I was becoming just like him. I hated him and I was becoming just like him. Stupid, huh?”
Jana didn’t answer.
She thought about her mother’s addictions. Alcohol, cocaine, heroin, pharmaceuticals. Mostly her mother was addicted to her own beauty, addicted to being adored. Her mother became dependent on drinking and drugs because not enough people loved and admired her. Her mother was the only star in her own sky, and no matter how strikingly beautiful she was, she could never shine brightly enough. Jana might have loved and admired her too. If her mother had ever been there.
/> “What happened?” Jana asked.
Mars and his car were just alike. Motors roaring, nowhere to go.
The speed of it all, the scream of engine and tires, was under his right foot. His car fishtailed on the interstate ramp. The sound in his head was louder than the engine.
He raced past a semi in the slow lane by driving ninety on the shoulder.
Windows down, the wind rushed through. The sound of the truck was deafening. But not loud enough.
It had to be louder. And faster.
Mars raced through traffic and sunlight, drove past three exits, hit the exit ramp at the fourth. He hit the brakes to hold the curve. He spun the steering wheel to the left, running the stop sign at the end of the ramp.
His hands were meaningless. The car knew where he wanted to go. Motion and direction were thoughts in the pulse of his blood. The car zipped under the highway, cut off traffic as it turned left again, and slid up the reverse direction on the ramp like a bullet in the barrel of a gun.
If he drove fast enough, long enough . . . loud enough, the rage inside would lessen, would become a heartbeat again, would eventually go away.
But not yet.
There was no comfort now in anything but speed. The trees along the highway slammed by. They challenged him to go faster. Speed could make them disappear. And Mars could disappear along with them.
He changed lanes constantly, passing cars, passing trucks, weaving, letting available space among the traffic reveal itself once he was upon it.
It was easy until he topped a long incline, right foot to the floor. His mouth open, dry, his eyes mere slits, Mars was behind traffic just like that. He was moments from plowing into somebody. In that instant before he could touch the brakes, there was nothing to do but swerve.
The swerve, his last chance to avoid an accident, cost him control. Mars was pushed against the inside of the driver’s door. He stomped the brakes. It was too late. His world jolted, turned, lurched, and the brakes merely barked once as the car left the pavement.
The car flew. It was an airplane, with four wheels and no wings. There was no gear for landing. Mars tried to think of a prayer. He didn’t have one. His car flew over the ditch alongside the interstate, nose down into the base of a tree.
It might have saved him if he had a car with air bags. At least Mars was belted in. His harness held. That might have saved him too. But it didn’t. Hitting the tree was like hitting the wall at the Indy 500 straight on. Dead stop.
“That’s what killed me, Webster.”
Mars closed his eyes.
“Coming to a stop killed me. My brain threw itself forward inside my skull. Like you throw a fist against the wall.”
His voice was thick with pain. Mars turned around and stood in front of her.
Jana watched the rise and fall of his flat belly as he breathed. She looked at his bare chest. She could almost see his heart beating. She wanted to place her hand lightly there, to keep it from hurting him so much.
“Look at me, Webster.” Mars tapped a finger against his cheekbone.
His blue eyes glistened with tears. “Look at me,” he said again. She hadn’t stopped. His eyes held hers to the finish. “I wasn’t the only person who died when I wrecked.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
MARS CHANGED.
He came out of the boys’ locker room looking like he’d never been wet. Except his hair was a little more tousled than usual.
Jana looked like she’d been in over her head. Her blouse was badly wrinkled and damp. Her hair was in semi-corded tangles. She looked like a Slider, she thought.
“You saw me the night you died,” Mars told her.
“I don’t remember that.”
“That’s the thing. You looked right at me as you fell. Wyatt and I were ghosting. No one could see me, but you did. Your eyes were wild and wide. When you looked at me, your eyes pleaded for help. That’s when I materialized. I decided to be there for you.”
“There was a moment when things froze,” Jana recalled. “Everything slowed down. For less than a second, everything stopped. But I didn’t see you.”
“When you were on the bus your first day here, I thought you would recognize me. I thought you knew.”
“I’m sorry, Mars. I didn’t know you had been there. I didn’t know you tried to save me.”
“You must have thought I was a total creep.” He grinned and combed his damp hair back from his forehead with his hand.
“I didn’t have to think anything,” Jana said. “Arva told me you were as dangerous as poison.”
“Am I?”
It was Jana’s turn to smile. “Yes, I think you are. But not for any of the reasons you would guess. You’re poison because I’m in love with Michael. He’s my destiny.”
Mars stopped walking. “I turn off here,” he said. “I don’t do classroom work in the afternoons.”
“Vocational training?”
“Yes.”
“I just thought of something,” Jana said quickly. “You know, you don’t have to go to the Planet to do good things for people here. You can save a life right here, Mars, without leaving campus.”
He waited, his perfectly arched eyebrows raised as he gazed at her.
“Beatrice,” Jana said. “Do something to get that dart out of her head. She has to feel like the elephant man every minute of every day. Believe me, you would be saving her life. You guys have metal shop or something, don’t you? You can take pliers and yank it out of her head.”
“It would be there the next day, Webster.”
“There must be something you can do.”
“I’ll think about it,” Mars said. “You better go now and pick up your demerits. The Virgins will be waiting for you.”
“Let me ask you something first? Real quick, I promise.”
He nodded.
“When I kissed you last night on the stairs and we were nose to nose like that, did you want to kiss me back?”
“Maybe,” Mars said, his eyes dancing with mischief.
Jana laughed. “Why didn’t you?”
“You already said it, Webster. I’m not your destiny. He is.” Mars turned and walked away from her. If Jana had been Pauline, she could have left with Mars and stayed with Michael both. But Jana wasn’t Pauline.
Jana did fairly well.
All told, her demerits now neared a hundred. Cutting a class must be a big no-no. Leaving her panties in the locker room at the pool and coming to fifth period commando seemed to have helped.
She was tired of the game for the day. If she acted up in class, she’d get detention again. And she had run out of things she could take off and still live with herself. The only thing to do, she thought, was to jump. If she jumped, they’d have to make her a Slider. Jameson had almost said as much.
When Dead School was over for the day, Jana walked to the back of the bus and rode to the dorm with the Sliders. It didn’t seem to make anyone comfortable. Sliders didn’t talk to Risers on the bus, Jana learned. Not even Wyatt. And he never kept his mouth shut.
Arva left her alone in the room with Darcee. Jana didn’t blame her. Jana’s recent behavior obviously alarmed and dismayed her roommate to no end.
Jana opened a bottle of water. “Is it insane to kill him?” she asked Darcee. “It’s not madness if I know he will be here with me. I’ll be saving both of us. For all time.” Darcee, as always, reserved her comments for later.
“A lifetime isn’t enough time for love,” Jana said. “Not my lifetime, anyway.” She changed into the clothes she’d been wearing the night she died. “A lifetime isn’t enough time, period.”
It was obvious from last night that Jana would have no chance to talk Michael into cooperating. He had gone crazy when he saw her sitting next to him on the bed. It almost broke her heart. Now she thought she understood it. A woman can talk to a ghost. They did it all the time in movies. A man can’t handle it.
Jana considered a nail gun. There wouldn’t be an exit wou
nd and she could shoot Michael in the same spot where her own skull had a hole it in. They’d be just alike in Dead School, sort of. But a nail gun might be too heavy, she decided, and she didn’t know how to work one. She’d have to rent one and take lessons or something. No go.
She returned to favoring electrocution. As a Slider, Jana could materialize long enough to pick up something plugged in and toss it into the bathtub with Michael. And then he’d have really cool spiky hair. Just like Henry’s. Only it would look better on Michael.
When Arva came into the room, there were other students with her. Jana didn’t know any of them, although she had seen them all in class.
“We want to talk to you,” Arva said. Everyone nodded solemnly. Arva held an open notebook in her hands.
“Yearbook staff?” Jana asked, smiling.
“Sit down and listen.” Arva stated it as strongly as her hoarse choking breaths would allow. Hoarse feathers, Jana thought.
“Publicity Committee?” she tried. “I won’t mess up your dance again, I promise. That was a one-time thing and—”
“Intervention,” Arva announced. “You need help, Jana. To stop what you’re doing. You’re destroying yourself and damaging those around you, the people who care about you. We’re here to help you help yourself.”
Suddenly Jana had somewhere else she had to be. Without saying another word, she helped herself out of her dorm room as quickly as possible.
The third floor was her only refuge.
Jana marched out of her room and walked past the lone Gray at the stairwell. As she climbed the steps, the noise grew louder. Upstairs, from one end to the other, the old motel rocked. At least three stereos played different music at the same time. The hall was filled with Sliders.
A metal door in the brick fire wall in the middle of the long hall was propped open with a table from the laundry room. Yellow stenciling on the door read Girls Only.
If this half of the third floor was the girls’ dorm, it was hard to tell. An almost equal number of boys and girls leaned against the walls and sat on the floor. They talked and rocked in place to the music. They didn’t seem to notice her. The air was filled with cigarette smoke. Everyone smelled like beer.
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