Tinted glass in the windows made the black car like a hooded thing, impenetrable. When Alisha knocked on the driver’s-side window and it rolled down, she was still facing tinted glass she could not see into, Jessie’s expensive eyeglasses on a hard face that might as well have been Jason’s.
“Jessie,” Alisha appealed, “what are you doing?”
“What’s it look like?” The hard voice was Jason’s.
“Please, Jessie, talk like yourself.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Please!”
“Okay, Alisha.” Jessie’s face softened along with her voice. “Would you stop worrying about me so much? I’m all right.”
Alisha didn’t think so. “You’re going to try to run Dead End Bend?”
“Yes. So Jason’s friends will let up on me.”
“But, Jessie, are you really going to push the car?”
“Of course.”
“But you can’t!”
“Who says?”
“I mean, you know what could happen!” How could Jessie, who was so smart, intend to do the same stupid thing that had gotten her brother killed? But Alisha found herself reluctant, no, afraid, really afraid, to speak of Jason, as if mentioning him might be bad luck. “Jessie,” she appealed, “do you want to crash?”
Jessie breathed out through puffed lips as if dealing with a dense kindergartener. She spoke with exaggerated patience. “I won’t crash. I won’t get hurt. I won’t get killed.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“I just know. Alisha, stop bothering me and get out of here.”
“The hell I will. I’m coming with you.” Alisha started toward the passenger-side door.
“No.” The hard voice also might as well have been Jason’s. With a click of a switch, Jessie locked both car doors, then said more softly, “Alisha, don’t be an idiot. He’ll protect me, but he won’t protect you.”
Alisha froze, staring at the dark surface of a pair of sunglasses that might have hidden anyone’s eyes, unable to force her voice through her throat to whisper, “What do you mean?”
She couldn’t speak the words. Because she didn’t really have to ask what Jessie meant. She knew.
“Protect?” she wanted to cry. “You call it protection?”
But she could not bear what she was thinking. It was crazy, impossible. She could not face Jessie another moment. Blindly she turned away from her friend and ran back into the night.
Jessie’s laughter after the cops had pulled her over had spun out of the dark joke at the core of her recent life, irony she hadn’t appreciated before that moment. Jessie the perfectionist had done very little giggling in her life. Jessie the idealist had taken everything very seriously. Jessie the scholar had even looked up “stark” in the library after school today. “Stark” meant stiff like starch, severe, grim, and also rigid like a dead body.
But Jessie speeding the powerful car toward danger along the country road laughed out loud with delight that she felt no need for any of the usual Jessie worries. She laughed because she was not Jessie right now; she was Jason, and therefore she could not possibly get killed, because Jason was already dead. So what was the worst that could happen?
Waiting at Dead End Bend, she wanted to go strutting over to Shane, but she was sure to go all blushy girl if she tried to really talk with him, and she couldn’t let that happen yet. Maybe later tonight, or tomorrow. Wow, he had finally noticed her; he was finally talking to her! Her whole life was changing so fast–
The first car got moving. Jessie watched intently as a yellow Firebird zoomed back up the road to get a good start, then came tearing down past the red-bandanna flag, flashed its brake lights briefly before entering the bend, revved, spun out onto the wide gravel shoulder, fishtailed, managed to get itself lined up with the ascending road, and roared uphill past the finish flag. The kids watching clapped and cheered. Good run.
The next car drifted around the bend like a racecar cornering but took no chances. Average run.
By this time, Jessie noticed, the yellow car had returned and parked on the grass. The boy who was driving had gotten out and was talking with Shane, probably finding out his time. Then he joined some friends sitting on another car, watching. Someone gave him a pat on the back.
The next car whizzed past Jessie, went into Dead End Bend fast, spun, couldn’t pull out of the spin, did a 180, and jammed on the brakes to stop before it ran off the gravel into the trees. Disqualified. The great oak that had taken Jason shadowed it. At the tree’s base, visible in the headlights as the car made its shuddering stop, stood a four-foot homemade white wooden cross.
Jessie started watching not the cars, but the cross that caught their headlights as they approached Dead End Bend: Jason’s cross marking the heart of the danger. Shadowed, then shining white, then shadowed again in the gloom of the oak, then once more bright in the headlights. Stuffed animals–teddy bears, woolly lambs, white unicorns, bright red Tasmanian devils–at its base. She could not see them at this distance, but she knew what they were. She could see a wreath of white flowers hanging on the cross like a choker necklace.
Jason wouldn’t like that, a necklace. And he had never liked flowers. And he pretty much hated stuffed animals.
Staring at Jason’s cross, Jessie did not even realize it was her turn until her foot stomped on the accelerator and her hands spun the wheel, swerving her onto the road. She did not go uphill to get a good start. No need. The Z-car did zero to sixty in–
Sixty?
Stark terror seized Jessie. White cross getting big bigger and blazing white, so white she blinked even behind her Oakley shades, wavering fiery white and almost as huge as the dark oak tree towering. The oak tree. This was crazy. Please, no, she did not want to die. Jessie tried to hit the brakes.
Something wouldn’t let her.
It was the same something that had shown her how to drive a stick shift. The presence she had kept to herself until now–but here, at Dead End Bend, the only way she could come out alive was if she let Jason take over completely. Let him take total control. Heck, he had already taken over. Jessie knew she might have the body of a girl but really she was like Luke Skywalker using the Force; she was her brother’s sister-self, she was inhabited and aided by a supernatural boy, and as her car spun into the curve, her fear spun beyond terror into a long ascending spiral of ecstasy. Jason was here! Jason lounged in the seat; Jason gripped the wheel; Jason pressed the accelerator. Leaving her along the dark road that awful night a week and a half ago, Jason had said he would come back for her, and now he had done it! He had come back because he loved her the way she loved him; he had to. He would never let anything bad happen to her. She was invincible.
Chapter Twelve
Alisha stayed around only because she needed a ride home with Shane. She stood near him yet felt all alone in the crowd watching from the grassy slope. Shivering in the warm night, she wrapped her arms tight around herself, trying to hold together.
She saw Jessie in the Z-car take off like a black tornado. She didn’t hear everybody screaming, because she was screaming too, screaming herself deaf, watching the black car swerve off the road toward the trees, not even trying to make the bend, wrong, all wrong, deadly! Why hadn’t she thought, why hadn’t she realized that Jessie was suicidal and meant to die? Why hadn’t she known?
Alisha couldn’t scream anymore; she couldn’t catch her breath. She couldn’t watch. Shutting her eyes tight, she bowed her head, hands over her face, shuddering.
But in that instant the screams all around her turned to shouts, yells, and Alisha smelled scorching rubber, and as her head came up and her eyes opened like sunrise, she saw the black car slew almost impossibly sideways and hit the white cross, avoiding the big oak tree by inches but knocking down the cross and running it over as the tires spun in the dirt, as the car drifted into a perfect line to take the uphill slope. Alisha heard thunder, the Z-car’s engine thunder and the thunder of leaping, stamping fee
t and pounding hands. And she saw lightening–but no, there couldn’t have been lightning. She saw Jessie’s Z-car barreling up the other side of the bend, safe, thank God, safe, and as it flashed past–nothing made sense, there must have been lightning, because for a blue-strobe moment she saw. Everyone saw.
Oakley shades.
Grinning face.
Hand, waving.
Then the car passed by.
In a weird silence the crowd of teenagers listened to the roar of its engine fading into the distance. It was not coming back.
Shane was the first to speak. He whispered, “That was Jason.”
Alisha said numbly, “No.” But her reply was lost in the hubbub all around as the group lost its purpose, its cohesion, and broke to pieces. Some kids headed for their cars as if all they wanted was to get out of there. Some clung to one another. One nerd asked what Jason’s, or rather Jessie’s, time had been. Shane didn’t know. He hadn’t clicked the stopwatch.
In the same stunned whisper he said, “Jason. Took out that cross. On purpose.”
Several kids had run across Dead End Bend to look at the shattered cross with ghoulish zest, as if it were a hit-and-run victim–but even from the distance, Alisha could see how they stiffened and stopped in their tracks. One of them screamed, “There’s nothing here!”
“Whatcha mean?” somebody from the other side of the road shouted back.
“I mean nothing! Not even a piece of wood! Not even the stump!”
Alisha appealed, “Shane, please take me home.”
But he was already jogging away from her, downhill and across the road to the place where the cross wasn’t.
Where the white flowers were not. Or the teddy bears. Or the angel dolls. Nothing.
Alisha did not go down there. She climbed into Shane’s pickup truck’s cab, lay down on the seat, and curled up, hugging her own knees. She lay like that for a long time.
She said nothing to Shane when he came back. She didn’t sit up or look at him. He said nothing to her as he started the pickup and drove very slowly, very carefully, back to town.
After her final blast of speed in the Z-car, Jessie slowed down, too, because her hands started wobbling on the wheel and her vision blurred. She felt limp, physically weak, shaken, aching all over as if she had been in a fight or–maybe this was what it felt like to give birth, so utterly exhausted and joyous. Jason’s name sang in her mind, Jason, Jason had saved her. Jason had saved her life. Only his force of will surging through her and turning the steering wheel with more physical strength and skill than she possessed had kept her from smashing into the oak. She vaguely remembered a small crash, like she had run over something, but so what? She had rounded Dead End Bend on four screeching tires and had left it alive, at top speed, and victorious in Jason’s love. That was all that mattered.
So wiped out that she stumbled as she walked, she let herself into the dark house, staggered upstairs, and collapsed onto her bed in her clothes. Rather, she collapsed onto Jason’s bed in Jason’s clothes. Whatever.
She slept like a dead person.
Dreamless.
Motionless.
Not long enough. The alarm clock rang far too early.
She forced herself to get up for school–thank God it was Friday–so bleary and nearly asleep on her feet that she did not even brush her teeth or look in the mirror to spike her hair with her fingers. She just stumbled down to breakfast still in the same clothes as the day before.
And there was Mom piling corn pancakes hot from the skillet onto a platter. Jessie felt her stomach respond with a rumble of hunger, her mouth with a smile as she sat down and dug into a short stack of three pancakes with butter and maple syrup. Yum. Corn pancakes were her favorite–Wait a minute. They were Jason’s favorite. Jessie had never particularly liked them.
Well, maybe it was just because she was so hungry that they tasted good. She couldn’t remember when she had felt so cavernously hungry. As she gulped down the pancakes in big bites, Mom brought her another stack, then sat down to sip coffee, smiling at her.
Mom said, “You were out late last night. Showing off the new car? With your friends?”
Jessie gave a nod and a grunt.
“We really have to get your driver’s license, Sweetie. Sooner or later the cops are going to stop you.”
They already had. Jessie smiled to herself, thinking about that poor belligerent cop trying to wrap his slow mind around a “punk kid” who looked like a boy and drove like a boy but had a girl’s slim body, pert little breasts, slender manicured hands.
“You’re going to be late for school,” Mom said.
“Yeah, yeah.”
As Jessie headed out the door, her mother gave her a swat on the butt. Mom had never done that to her before. Just to Jason. Jessie felt her heart swell. It felt so good to be her mom’s pet, to finally be–go ahead and think it–loved. It was hard to believe that only five days ago she had been a miserable, mousy, grieving girl whose own mother wouldn’t speak to her. And that she had been smart or desperate enough to come up with this Jason game. Now she laughed at cops, laughed at teachers, wasn’t afraid of anything–she had to give herself credit. Her life was so much better since–
“Wait a minute,” Mom said.
Pausing on her way out the door, Jessie turned back to her mother, who stood studying her in the light from outside.
Mom reached up to stroke Jessie’s face. “Son,” she said with proud love in her voice, “you’re growing up. You’re going to have to start shaving soon.”
Jessie lifted her hand and felt prickly hairs growing out of her chin.
Chapter Thirteen
Jessie drove to school in a daze, her mind spinning. She could pluck the chin hairs out when it was time, or wax them off, or there were other ways, laser surgery–
Rounding a corner a little too fast for safety, she noticed her own hand on the steering wheel, her own flexed wrist and muscular lower arm, like a sculpture by Michelangelo, so beautiful in the sunlight, strong tendons of her fingers and perfect–
Just like the hand and arm she had seen sprawling out from under the wrecked red Mustang.
“No,” she whispered.
What was the first stage of grief? Denial?
“No!” she said fiercely out loud.
Reaching school, she parked in a single space instead of diagonally across two. What the hell, the Z-car was scratched up anyway from whatever she had hit last night. She got out, started walking across the parking lot toward the school building, and hey, there was Alisha heading toward her.
But then Alisha stopped dead and stared at her. In a sort of moan, Alisha murmured, “I was so upset I forgot. I didn’t call him. God help me.”
Jessie wanted to say hi, but her voice came out sounding like Jason’s. “Hey, babe. ’Sup?”
Alisha stepped closer, and in a shaky voice she said, “My God, Jessie, go someplace, now. Get away before it’s too late.”
“What the hell you talking about?”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“Aw, get over yourself.”
“Please,” Alisha whispered. There she stood, Jessie’s best friend, tears in her eyes. Jessie should have felt something.
Great boobs. Look at the boobs on her.
Jason’s voice. Right inside Jessie’s mind.
Jessie did feel something. Shock. Shame. “No!” she yelled. “Shut up! It’s just a game!” Alisha probably thought she was yelling at her, which made Jessie feel worse. Turning away, she fled, nearly running, toward the school.
Jason told her, For God’s sake, Sis, chill out. Everything’s okay.
Despite her panic there was calm strength in his presence. Jessie felt soothed the way she had been that night at his grave. She remembered what he had done for her yesterday evening at Dead End Bend, and she lifted her head. She slowed to his oh-so-cool walk. With a proud strut she entered homeroom.
Faces turned to look. Voices fal
tered to silence. Stark eyes stared. Shane faced her, his handsome face ghost-white.
Jessie greeted him. “Yo, Shane, what was my time?” Going around Dead End Bend last night, she meant.
Shane licked his lips but could not seem to answer.
“Whatever.” Jessie sprawled in her desk chair. In the too-long silence, she started to worry again. Hair on her chin. Jason in her head. Jason’s hands on her steering wheel. Still half-asleep and numb with fatigue, she felt as if it were all a dream. Had to be. With her head wobbling, she stared at the wall.
A voice blared over the loudspeaker. “Jessica Ressler, report to the office.”
She felt the whole classroom full of kids staring at her again as she got up to go.
Whatever they wanted in the office, she didn’t care. She had more important things to worry about. They could suspend her or expel her, no problem. She just wanted to go home and go back to bed. Her own bed. Start the day over.
“Jessica Ressler,” the secretary in the school office told her, “we cannot have you calling yourself Jason on your school papers.”
Jessie wanted to ask why not.
Or she wanted to say it didn’t matter, because everybody knew she was Jessie.
Really she wanted to say, “Okay, I’ll be Jessie from now on. I’m done dressing like my brother.” In that moment she suddenly and badly wanted her own pretty clothes back, and her makeup and her Wildflowers in the Rain perfume and her jewelry and her hair, which would grow out of the top of her head, not her chin.
But the trouble was, the way the secretary spoke to her–Jessica Ressler, that tone of voice–it affected her the way that skinny douche bag of a psychologist had pissed her off. With a new kind of anger. With the quick rage of a rebel.
Possessing Jessie Page 6
