And when her mouth opened, a deep voice came out. “I am Jason,” she said.
“Nonsense.” But the secretary was staring at her. “Jason died. He is no longer in our files.”
But as if she wasn’t so sure anymore, the secretary pulled out a drawer and looked through some papers.
Her eyes widened.
She hurried to her computer and typed something on the keyboard.
When she looked at the screen, her mouth opened. At first no sound came out. But then in a voice stretched like a rubber band she called, “Excuse me!” She headed toward the principal’s private office in the back.
Jessie heard noise behind her and turned around. In the hallway, on the other side of the office’s glass wall, some of Jason’s wrestling buddies had gathered. When she looked at them, their faces lit up with grins. God, they were actually glad to see her. Glad. Finally some kids were on her team. It felt great. Jessie grinned back and swaggered out there.
“Hey, dude!”
“Jason! Welcome back!”
“Way to go, man!” One of them punched her hard in the shoulder. She didn’t mind. Her muscles were big and strong enough to take it–when had she become so tall, so strong? Jason’s Nikes fit her. His jeans fit her.
Or him.
Behind her in the office, the principal’s voice was yelling, “I don’t care what the system says, the Ressler boy was killed in an accident! We can’t all go crazy.”
“How’d you do it?” one of Jason’s buddies asked.
“Used a girl.”
“Cool, man, that’s what they’re for.”
The school counselor stuck his bald head out the office door. “Jessica–”
“Jason.”
“Miss Ressler, you are excused for the day. Until we get this straightened out. Sign this release slip and go home.”
In big, messy handwriting she scrawled JASON Ressler. Then she headed for the door.
“You rock, dude!” one of her wrestling buddies called after her.
“Hi, Jason,” said a girl who was coming in the door as Jessie went out. “I heard you were back!”
“Hi, Jason! Welcome back!” said another girl on the sidewalk outside.
Jessie knew who the girls were, but they had never said hi to her before.
Now look at them smiling.
Jessie smiled back. Jessie walked tall as she strode toward her car.
Alisha was still standing in the parking lot, crying. For a big, strong Black girl she sure looked pitiful, sobbing with her cell phone in her hand. “All I get is a busy signal!” she wailed.
Jessie opened her mouth to talk with Alisha, but Jason’s voice came out. “Yo, babe, you wanna go somewhere?”
“Jessie!” Alisha screamed as if somebody were dying. “Try to get away! Try!”
Love those boobs. I’d like to–
Wait a minute. What were girls for? To be used?
No way.
Jessie smoothed her hands across her T-shirt front, checking for her own rosebud breasts. They were gone. All she felt was hard chest. But she couldn’t let that bother her too much right now. One thing at a time. Like the facial hair, just another problem to take care of with plastic surgery or whatever, as soon as she went back to being Jessie.
She tried to say something to Alisha in her own voice. It was very, very difficult, like lifting a huge weight, but she did it. “Hey, I’m okay.” She could speak only a few words. “This is fun.”
Which was true. Being Jason was great. Being a boy was great. Jessie had never in her life felt so bold and strong and not worried about things. She had never felt so cool, with kids envying her car, saying hi to her. And Mom smiling, and cooking stuff especially for her–or for Jason–it was like being a hero, that she had been able to do this, to give Jason back to her mother.
“It’s horrible,” Alisha whispered. “It’s sick.” Alisha thrust a paper at her, a dirty napkin, actually. “Jessie, please listen. This is your father’s phone number. Please call him. Maybe he can help you. I don’t know what else to do.”
Jessie took the paper napkin, but Jason’s voice told Alisha, “What for? I don’t need help. See ya.” Jessie got into her Z-car and zoomed out of the school parking lot. Not that there was any hurry. She just liked the rush. She took the corner with her tires screaming.
Standing like a wet-eyed zombie, Alisha shuddered, hearing that sound. The world ought to be screaming, she thought.
Chapter Fourteen
Jessie’s mother was on the phone when Jessie walked into the kitchen.
“Yo, Mudder.”
Mom put her hand over the receiver. “It’s the school.” She smiled a tender, triumphant smile. “You really did it,” she whispered. “I knew you would, somehow. At first I just didn’t know how. But I knew you’d come back.” She uncovered the receiver. “Yes, it has been a very difficult time,” she told somebody with quiet dignity. “Please let your records show that I’ve lost a daughter.” She said this as if it made her a little bit sad.
Jessie stood there like she’d been shot. “I’m not dead!” But her voice wouldn’t come out loud enough. Her mother did not hear her.
Talking on the phone, Mom lifted her head. “However, I still have my wonderful son.”
Then finally it hit Jessie. Mom didn’t care what happened to her.
And it wasn’t just about her mother.
Jessie didn’t have a life anymore.
Like you ever did? mocked Jason’s voice inside her head.
Pretend to be Jason? Ha. Forget that. She was not being Jason. Jason was being Jason.
In her.
Way more alive than she was, and way stronger. She could feel him taking over, so cool, so selfish–she was no match for his ego.
Yeah, yeah. So what else is new?
But she had not known–she had never dreamed what he was really like. Always before, when they were both alive, she had loved him.
And she had assumed–she had thought–she had hoped he loved her back.
But now she knew the truth. Now she knew how he really felt about her.
Stupid. Clueless. My sister, who thinks she’s so smart–such a loser.
Oh, God.
She had been so used.
Standing in the kitchen like a dummy in a store window, Jessie saw her mother hang up the phone and head toward the stairs. Mom wasn’t just walking–she was almost dancing.
And Mom was humming a little tune that sounded so happy Jessie couldn’t stand it. Panic got her moving. She ran after her mother.
But upstairs, Jessie stopped as if she had been shot again. In her room–Jessie’s room–there was Mom taking the stuffed animals off the bed.
“Mom,” Jessie called. “Mother.”
But her voice came out a whisper, and her mother didn’t hear her.
“Mom, it’s Jessie. Please. Please, Mom, see me, please talk to me.…”
Mom hadn’t really spoken to her, Jessie, not one word, since …
Since who had died?
Mom threw the yellow armadillo and all Jessie’s other cuddly babies into a black garbage bag. She stripped the bed and folded the pink plaid comforter, but instead of putting it away, she draped it over one arm, hefted the bag of stuffed animals with the other, carried the things downstairs and dumped them into the big thrift shop box in the closest.
Thrift shop?
Shocked beyond response, Jessie stood petrified in the hallway. She could hear her mother downstairs making a phone call. Then Mom came up again and started scraping Jessie’s makeup and jewelry off the dresser into a shoebox.
Including the ruby necklace-and-earrings set Daddy had given her …
As if a blood-red button had clicked inside her, letting her move again, Jessie spun around and ran downstairs and out of the house, to the car where she had left the rumpled paper napkin Alisha had given her. With trembling hands she grabbed the cell phone out of her pocket.
W. Richard Ressler, sitting in t
he insurance office where he worked, shut his cell phone and knew in his stricken heart that all bad times before were nothing compared to this, the worst day of his life.
His ex-wife had just called to inform him that their daughter was dead.
Jessie. Sweet, smart Jessie. Dead.
A tormented sound forced its way out of Rick Ressler’s throat, a sound so anguished it seemed barely human, and he laid his head on his desk because he didn’t seem to have the strength to sit upright.
He heard startled, anxious co-workers gathering around him, asking what was wrong. He could not answer. Sobbing too hard. His tears soaked the claims forms he had been working on. People died; survivors claimed insurance. It hadn’t seemed so wrong up until now.
His ex. Her voice. So cool. The funeral was already over, she said. Jessie was buried.
He should have been furious at her for not notifying him before. But he couldn’t react, really, because it was all just impossible. It couldn’t be happening. Funeral or no funeral, how could he ever say good-bye to Jessie, oh, beautiful Jessie, oh, his little girl, Jessica?
People were bringing him glasses of water, cold wet paper towels, kneeling beside him and talking about calling a doctor, getting him sedatives. No, thank you. With an effort he raised his head and pressed the towels to his eyes. He blew his nose. He managed to choke out a few words of explanation. Daughter. Dead. Car accident.
His cell phone rang again.
It took most of his remaining strength to reach out and open it. He would not have answered the call except that he saw it came from his old area code, although the phone number itself was unfamiliar.
He put the phone to his ear, mumbled hello. The day felt like a bad dream, so it should have been no surprise that the voice he heard seemed to issue straight out of a nightmare. It said, “Daddy?” but it was the hollow, husky, whispering voice of a specter.
From his own childhood he knew how cruel kids could be. Jason wouldn’t do this, but he had a pretty low opinion of some of Jason’s friends. His anguish flipped into anger as he barked into the phone, “Who is this?”
“Daddy, it’s Jessie.” The voice sounded nothing at all like Jessie’s. It sounded labored, muffled, some prankster’s idea of words forced out from under stone, from the tomb, the crypt. “Help me. Please.”
Jessie’s father barely heard the last words as he lurched to his feet, exploding, “You goddamn heartless punk, how can you do this? My daughter’s dead, and you torment me? Go to hell!” Just snapping the phone shut was not enough. He threw it across the room with such force that it shattered against the wall. Then he collapsed into his chair again, sobbing.
Dad had just told her to go to hell. Mom loved Jason, not her being Jason, not her in any way. Standing beside the Z-car, Jessie wanted to smash it with the cell phone, batter the car and the phone and her miserable self into a pulp. But Jason wouldn’t let her. He told her, “Don’t try talking anymore,” and he put the phone away.
Whose hands were ripping up the paper napkin and tossing the shreds into the gutter? Jessie twisted the passenger-side mirror and looked into it.
Jason’s handsome face looked back at her. Jason grinned.
Jessie wanted to curse him and tell him to go to hell, but she could barely speak. “I will get you somehow,” she whispered. “I’m not done yet. I’m not dead.”
“Shut up. I told you no more talking.” Jason’s voice grew vicious, and his grin twisted into a sneer. “You’re gone, Sis. Your body is in my coffin. They’re putting up a grave marker with your name on it. You’re nothing. You thought you were somebody? Forget that. You’ve always been nothing, and you will always be nothing.”
Just his saying it made it so true that she could no longer speak aloud. She could only say inside his mind, I–am–still–Jessie.…
“Not if you know what’s good for you. You want to go to wrestling practice, into the locker room? You want to smell the sweat and hear the jokes and have a look around the shower?”
Stop it!
“No, you stop it. Don’t kid yourself about what’s inside my pants. Which I intend to use. You want to go on dates and see how much you can score? You want to get laid by one of your girlfriends?”
That’s sick! You’re cruel! You–
“Starting to get a clue, huh? I’m going to do whatever I want to. For starters, I’m going to get my hands on Alisha somehow.”
No!
“Hey, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to know. All you have to do is shut up and go to sleep and stay that way.”
If I do that… Jessie felt terribly tired, more tired than she had ever been in her life, even more tired than she had been getting out of bed this morning. Hazily, as if from a previous existence in another world, she remembered that the third stage of grief was bargaining. If I go to sleep, will you let Alisha alone?… Promise?…
“Stupid, I don’t have to promise anything. Don’t bug me anymore or you’ll be sorry. Bye-bye.”
She flickered, a little campfire going out, no heart left to fight.
Nothingness.
Whistling, Jason walked back to the house, tossing the car keys into the air to hear their happy metallic cry.
About the Author
Nancy Springer has passed the fifty-book milestone with novels for adults, young adults, and children, in genres including mythic fantasy, contemporary fiction, magic realism, horror, and mystery—although she did not realize she wrote mystery until she won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America two years in succession. Born in Montclair, New Jersey, Springer moved with her family to Gettysburg, of Civil War fame, when she was thirteen. She spent the next forty-six years in Pennsylvania, raising two children (Jonathan and Nora), writing, horseback riding, fishing, and bird-watching. In 2007 she surprised her friends and herself by moving with her second husband to an isolated area of the Florida Panhandle where the bird-watching is spectacular, and where, when fishing, she occasionally catches an alligator.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Nancy Springer
Cover design by Drew Padrutt
ISBN: 978-1-4976-8881-0
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
EBOOKS BY NANCY SPRINGER
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Possessing Jessie Page 7
