Possessing Jessie

by Nancy Springer

  “Good morning, Sweetie! I thought you were going to sleep all day. You’re late for school. Come on down. I made Belgian waffles.”

  Careful to swagger, Jessie thumped downstairs for breakfast. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to find Mom happy and smiling again.

  Walking into school, tardy, she encountered a bunch of kids changing classes, but she didn’t fold her shoulders or duck her head. The feeling she had experienced at Jason’s grave, a sense of his presence, was still with her, encouraging her. She walked the way Jason would, as if she owned the place.

  A teacher scowled at her. “You’re late, Miss Ressler. Report to the office.”

  Jessie had hardly ever been late before, but she just shrugged. It wouldn’t have bothered Jason, and it didn’t bother her.

  The teacher, a yappy-dog sort of woman, snapped, “Also, you are most inappropriately dressed.”

  Jessie grinned. “Yeah, yeah.”

  Chapter Six

  Alisha’s grandmother from Haiti talked about ghosts and spirits as if they were not only real but commonplace, like cats and dogs. Alisha did not believe a word of it, yet she felt her spine chill and the small hairs on the nape of her neck stand up when she saw Jessie stride into school. There was something–

  Stop it, Alisha ordered herself. The only real change was that Jessie had her head up and was walking tall, like Jason. Acting like Jason, not just dressing like him. That was all. Well, and she wasn’t wearing a bra, but she didn’t really need a bra, so no big deal.

  Yet Alisha felt something like a cold, icy, arctic rat crawl into her belly and start gnawing. At lunchtime, when she saw Jessie sitting at a table by herself, she couldn’t blame anybody for staying away from her. Approaching Jessie was like walking up to a ghost. Nobody wanted to go near her.

  Neither did Alisha. But somebody had to do something.

  She took a firm grip on her tray–mystery meat, ick–and marched herself over to sit across the table from Jessie.

  Her friend, actually eating the rather disgusting lunch, ignored her.

  Pointedly Alisha said, “Hel-LO.” Jessie glanced up, and Alisha looked her in the face.

  Jessie stared back stony-eyed, no smile, even though she was close enough so that Alisha could smell her, and she definitely did not smell like any of Jessie’s favorite perfumes from Victoria’s Secret. Instead, she smelled like Axe.

  “Jessie,” Alisha blurted with more force than she had intended, “you’re sick.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Stop it, Jessie! Talk like yourself.”

  Jessie put down her fork. Her face softened, and her posture relaxed. “What self is that?” she asked in her normal quiet voice. “I don’t have a self.”

  Alisha felt so relieved, she didn’t really hear what Jessie was saying. She just knew that her friend was still in there, under the spiked hair, behind the 250 Club T-shirt, and beneath the Axe.

  Jessie added, “Before I started dressing up like this, I was nothing. Nobody knew who I was.”

  Uh-oh.

  Quietly and carefully Alisha said, “That’s not true. I knew who you were. Plenty of people knew who you were. Just about the smartest person in the school, that’s who you were, probably going to be valedictorian, and you studied hard and stayed out of trouble and you wanted a real future–” Alisha stopped, shocked at herself for saying it all wrong, in the past tense.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Jessie murmured.

  “Don’t disrespect yourself!” Alisha tried to keep her voice down but got loud anyway. “You still are smart and you still are going to be somebody and you still are my best friend.”

  Jessie smiled, but tears shimmered in her eyes.

  Alisha lowered her voice. “You are so a special person.”

  “Yeah, well, tell that to my mother.” Jessie’s misty glance shifted downward to the left. “She looks right through me.”

  “Your mother?” Alisha leaned forward. “Why?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Have you asked her?”

  “She won’t tell me. I told you before, she doesn’t talk to me.” Jessie looked back up at Alisha, her eyes wincing with pain. “She blames me, I guess.”

  “Blames you? What on earth for?”

  “Because I should have died with Jason.”

  Alisha felt her gut lurch. “Now that makes a lot of sense. That would make your mother feel so much better.”

  “I’m not sure it wouldn’t!”

  Alisha asked softly, “Jessie, is the bad movie still running in your mind?”

  “Huh?”

  “You said the accident kept replaying in your head.” And Alicia thought the trauma might have her confused.

  Jessie stared back at her, blank, then bemused. “Nuh-uh. Not at all today. I guess it’s gone.”

  “Good!” Alisha felt hope for her friend. “Then would you please just tell me what’s going on? What happened? Why would your mother blame you?”

  Jessie sighed, then said in a quiet, dead tone, “I was supposed to be teaching Jason how to pass his road test. We had a fight because he wanted to drift Dead End Bend, and–and I slammed out of the car. I told him to go get killed and see if I cared.”

  Alisha felt the pain behind Jessie’s soft words so sharply that she couldn’t speak.

  Jessie said, “Then he went and did it.”

  Alisha found her voice. “Jessie, it’s not–”

  “I also told him to go to hell.”

  “Not your fault! Words don’t make things happen.”

  “I hope not. I hope there isn’t a hell or he’s not in it.”

  “There isn’t, and he’s not, and you’re not to blame.”

  “Yes, I am. I shouldn’t have got mad at him. I should have stayed with him.”

  “And get yourself killed, too?”

  “I should have tried to, you know, like, beg and cry, and tell him I was scared instead of yelling at him and ditching.”

  “I think you had every right to ditch. Did you tell your mother how stupid he was acting?”

  “No. I mean, I wanted to, I tried to, but she just–looks–straight through me.” Jessie started to choke up.

  Alisha sat back in her chair, giving Jessie a couple of minutes to get it together, but also thinking hard.

  “So if your mother doesn’t want to listen,” Alisha said when she thought it was safe, “and she doesn’t know what happened, why would she blame you?”

  Jessie just shook her head. “I was older. In charge. I wasn’t with him when he hit the oak tree. It’s my fault.”

  Alisha felt that Jason’s titanic ego had sunk him and there wasn’t a thing Jessie could have done about it, but she couldn’t say that. Even thinking it made her feel a little bit spooked, because somewhere, probably from her grandmother, she’d heard it was bad luck to think ill of the dead.

  All she said was, “Am I understanding you right? These days your mother won’t talk to you at all unless you dress up like Jason?”

  “Right.”

  Alisha leaned forward to touch her friend’s hand. “Jessie, that is so wrong. I’m sorry; you know I like your mother, but this time she’s wrong.”

  “She’s grieving,” Jessie said, a little angry, a little defensive.

  “Sure, but there are limits. Listen, I have an idea. Please think about this, Jessie–it might really be the answer. You could go live with your father for a while.”

  “What?” Jessie jolted upright as if Alisha had stuck a needle into her. “My father?”

  “Yeah.” It took Alisha some effort to say this, because she knew how Jessie blamed her father for the divorce. She said he never phoned her and she refused to phone him, which was weird, considering that, before her father left, she had been so all about him. Back then her father was wonderful to her and took her side when she got into fights with her mother. Alisha remembered Mr. Ressler as a handsome, all-American kind of guy, nice and mellow even when he drank too much. He liked t
o hang around bars, and he certainly was the kind who was attracted to women and women to him. Which maybe explained why Mrs. Ressler had transferred all her attention and her adoration to Jason.

  And now Jason was gone, Alisha reminded herself, feeling a little shaken because, for a moment, she had forgotten he was dead.

  Jessie was saying, “My father didn’t even bother to come to Jason’s f-f-funeral.…”

  Before Jessie could start crying, Alisha grabbed her by the arm and said, “What if he didn’t know? What if nobody told him?”

  “But–I–how …” Sitting with her mouth open, Jessie looked more like herself and less like Jason than Alisha had seen her all day.

  Alisha challenged, “Listen, Jessie, your mother is not acting rational. Even at the funeral she was still saying it was all a mistake, like, the casket was empty, and Jason would be coming back. Do you really think she phoned your father to tell him Jason was dead?”

  “Don’t go there, okay?” Jessie scowled. “There’s no reason she should phone Dad about anything. And I won’t phone him, either. He wouldn’t help me if he could.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Dad is–just–he would blame me, too.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I should have stayed with Jason.”

  “Jessie, that makes no sense! Listen, call your father. Please?”

  “No. Why should I call him when he never calls me? I need to stay here.”

  “Why?”

  “Just because.”

  “Are you staying with your Mom or not letting go of Jason?”

  “Whatever.”

  Alisha sat with her fists clenched, fighting to keep her voice calm. “Does staying here include wearing Jason’s clothes?”

  “I can wear what I want. There’s no law–”

  “Jessie, how long are you going to keep this up?”

  “As long as I damn well like!” Leaving her lunch, Jessie got up and walked away, her chin high and her shoulders hard.

  Alisha couldn’t eat. She couldn’t even see her lunch tray through the blur in her eyes. Don’t give up, she commanded herself, clenching her teeth, refusing to let the tears fall. Jessie had always been there for her. Jessie was the only one who would sit with her that first month of middle school. Jessie had gone clothes shopping with her. Jessie had helped her with her English papers. Don’t give up on her now that she needs help.

  Chapter Seven

  When Jessie swaggered in from school, Mom was waiting in her shopping clothes–knit top and slacks–instead of her usual housedress. With a big smile on her face, she waved a check. “The life insurance money came through,” she said. “What kind of car should we get?”

  Jessie didn’t give a rat’s hind end about cars, but she knew what Jason would say. He had talked about it all the time. “A Z-car. Nissan.”

  “Okay, let’s go shopping!”

  Not Jessie’s idea of fun. She mumbled almost in her own voice, “Um, I have a lot of homework to do.”

  “Sweetie! Homework can wait!”

  “Okay. Um, yeah, yeah.”

  They took the check to the bank in town first, then headed for the main highway out to the sprawling car lots. Jessie drove because Mom was nervous behind the wheel. Yet Mom didn’t like being a passenger, either. She sat clutching both armrests. Jessie handled the rental car carefully, trying not to spook Mom, and as they approached the Nissan dealer Mom exclaimed, “Sweetie, I had no idea you were such a good driver! You deserve the very best car we can get you.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  From tagging along with her father, Jessie knew that car shopping took a long time. Looking around, comparing costs, miles per gallon, style, performance, then price and warranty negotiation–it took forever. But not this time. They walked onto the lot, and Jessie’s mom asked, “Which one?”

  Not really caring, just being Jason, Jessie pointed toward a row of low, two-seater, sexy-looking sports cars.

  “They’re pretty.” Mom started dodging between cars and peering at sticker prices. Jessie wandered from car to car more casually, ever so cool, with her shoulders square and her hands in her pockets. Pretending not to care, still, she was watching her mother. She remembered her father had once told her that the reason she and her mother didn’t get along was because they were so much alike. Back then, Dad had loved both Mom and her, so it was okay for him to say they were alike, but Jessie had never really understood. Dad had said they were both perfectionists, both idealists, and neither of them accepted reality very well. Jessie wondered what Dad would think if he saw Mom cooing over these expensive cars.

  Anger kicked in. To hell with Dad. He probably had an expensive car, too. If he knew about the insurance money, he would probably want some of it for himself. The amount Jessie had seen printed on the check had been huge. Apparently they paid a lot for dead people.

  Dead. Jason.

  It hit her in the gut as always. Jessie had to bite her lip to keep from sobbing.

  A salesman came out of the showroom. Actually, several sales guys came out and kind of lined up. Jessie noticed they were looking at her as if she freaked them out, but why? These people hadn’t known Jason.

  “Sweetie!” Mom called after the salesman had talked with her awhile. “Automatic or four on the floor?”

  “Four on the floor!” Jessie knew that Jason, who would drive any car anybody would let him get his hands on, had loved to shift gears. Said you could get massively more control that way.

  “That’s the sports package, then. Which color?”

  Jessie opened her mouth and shut it again, struggling within herself. She liked the gold car. She knew Jason would have wanted the black one.

  At that moment she overheard someone whisper, “Is that a boy or a girl?”

  Anger burning, she knew she had to be Jason. “Black!” she yelled. “Do they have leather interior?” Jessie herself would have preferred plush–the gold car had a sort of grayish-violet plush that was to die for–but she couldn’t be herself.

  They had leather. Charcoal. Electronically adjustable seats and windows, super lightweight aluminum-alloy wheels, rear spoiler, Bose stereo, and CD player. It was all settled within minutes after Jessie, as Jason, had condescended to stroll over, take a look, and give her okay, even though the sticker price made her blink. Mom got out her checkbook, and the sales guy led her inside the dealership to sign papers. She was in there for maybe ten minutes while Jessie hung around outside. The people who had been staring went away. Nobody spoke to her.

  Mom came out with a NISSAN bag full of papers, leather-bound owner’s manual, colorful pamphlets. She gave Jessie a frail smile. “I’d like to go home now, Sweetie. I feel as if I need to lie down.”

  All Mom had to do was look fragile, blink her eyelashes, and almost anybody would do almost anything for her, including Jessie. This had been true for as long as Jessie could remember. Already a salesman was calling the insurance company, getting them to arrange pickup of the rental car. All Jessie had to do was hand over the keys. Another salesman backed the Z-car out of its tight parking space, pulled up, and stopped in front of Jessie as if he were bringing Cinderella her carriage. The man got out, tried to smile as he looked at her with too much white showing around the rims of his eyes, and gestured her into the driver’s seat almost with a bow.

  Jessie took her time, adjusting the seat the way she liked it, leaning back a little, and positioning the steering wheel low on her lap, while she studied the instruments. In the passenger seat, Mom yakked, “I’ve never bought such an expensive car in my life! And it was so easy! Just choose the car and give the people the money!”

  “I bet you never bought a car before at all,” Jessie teased.

  “Well, I guess that’s true!”

  Turning the key in the ignition, feeling the smooth hum of the Z-car buzz through her body like a soothing massage, Jessie reached for the stick shift and remembered almost as if it didn’t matter that, spe
aking of things people had never done before, she had never driven a four-on-the-floor.

  But it was okay. She’d let Jason do it. His presence was with her, kind of inside her, like an instinct. With his guidance, she pressed the clutch, shifted into first gear, eased out the clutch, and the Z-car slid off as smoothly as a black python.

  Mom exclaimed, “My, Sweetie, you do drive nicely!”

  Jessie grunted.

  “What would you like for supper, Honey?”

  “Dunno. Later.” Jessie could hardly wait to drop Mom off at home and take the new car out by herself. Supper? Forget it. Homework? Ditto. For once in her life, she could skip homework. So what if her grades slipped a little? What would anybody do to her, hang her by her thumbs?

  “You’re going to take your new toy for a spin? Have fun, darling, and be safe” Mom sang as she got out in front of the house.

  The Z-car purred like a big black cat as Jessie drove through town. It growled more like a black lion as she reached a country road and opened it up, running through the gears. The car responded with seemingly limitless power to her slightest pressure on the accelerator, obeyed her slightest turn of the steering wheel. She felt its surefooted tires mastering the road as she swung around curves. She tried rapid acceleration, shifting from first gear straight to third. The car never broke stride. It could do anything. It made her feel as if it were alive and she were part of it, wanting to sink deeper into its strong, swift, wild black depths.

  She eased the seat back even more, so that she held the steering wheel low, at arm’s length, so that her legs extended full-length to reach the pedals, so that she nearly lounged, like a movie star beside a swimming pool. Jessie had never felt this way about a car. Suddenly and for the first time in her life, she wanted to buy herself some expensive sunglasses. Not to protect her from the sun. To look cool. Brand-name shades.

  Acting on impulse–and Jessie did not often act on impulse–she headed off in another direction, drove to a pricey department store she’d been to only a few times before, parked the Z-car at an angle, taking up two spaces, and strolled toward the entrance.