Possessing Jessie (2 page)

So Jason was supposed to listen to Jessie, and as they drove through town, she tried again. “Look, Jason, pull over. You have to move the seat forward, straighten it up, and steer with both hands.”

“You just want me to drive like a
girl
.”

Jessie felt a dull anger she didn't bother mentioning, she was so used to it. All she said was, “Just pull over.”

He did, and he moved the seat up as she'd told him, then sent the red Mustang recklessly darting out into traffic again.

“Wait! Pull over.” Jessie's voice was rising, even though she'd sworn to herself that she'd be cool. “You didn't fasten your seat belt.”

“It won't reach when the seat's too far front like this.”

“Of course it will. You
adjust
it.”

“
You
adjust your attitude. Don't try to boss me around.”

Jessie kept her voice calm and reasonable. “I'm supposed to be teaching you things. Such as, slow down. The speed limit here is thirty-five, and you're doing fifty.”

“You sound like Mom. Lighten up, Sis, or you're gonna be a lost cause just like her.” Jason pressed on the accelerator, pushing the speed up to sixty. They were almost at the edge of town, speed limit fifty-five, so it didn't really matter, but Jessie felt her usually quiet anger begin to sizzle. Lost cause? How could he say that? Mom let him do whatever he wanted, absolutely whatever. She made special snack mix and served it to him as he watched TV. Doing the laundry, Mom bleached his athletic socks snowy white. She bought him clothes and clothes, and so many different kinds of shoes–Converse, New Balance, Adidas, all the brand names–he had more stuff to wear than Jessie did. Mom's sun rose and set on Jason. He was her world.

“Jason, slow down” Jessie ordered sharply as the road narrowed.

“For gosh sake, Sis, cool it!” he said, pushing the Mustang up to sixty-five on the hilly, curving country road. “Come on, relax.” He smiled, and his tone changed, eager, teasing yet serious. “I'm going to show you how to live a little.”

Jessie didn't feel like living a little. She just felt scared. She would have begged him to slow down, but her fear flipped into anger. He was supposed to be doing what she said, damn it!

“If you're not going to listen” she snapped at him, “then turn around and we'll go home. It's getting dark.”

“Good! Going fast is even cooler in the dark.” Jason switched the headlights on, high beam, but showed no signs of slowing down.

“Look, I'm not doing your homework for you anymore unless you stop this car and turn around.”

“Whoa! Now you're threatening me.” He sounded amused as he drifted the Mustang through a curve, tires squealing, tree trunks flashing dizzying white in the headlights. “You really need to learn to have some fun, Sis. Tell you what. We're going to see how fast we can take Dead End Bend.”

He was talking about the hairpin turn in the next dark road to the left, which plunged down a steep hill. At the bottom, two narrow “cow-path” roads had once crossed at a sharp angle. When the county had put the reservoir in, they had dead-ended both roads right at the intersection, so that they became one road doubled back beside the woods near the edge of the water, a small road seldom used by anybody except the few people who lived down that way.

And by boys trying to set speed records. Bright yellow barriers with black arrows had been knocked down and smashed so many times that the county no longer bothered to replace them. And barriers weren't the only things that had gotten smashed. Cars, totaled. Kids, hurt. One boy had been paralyzed, was going to spend his life in a wheelchair.

Jessie's reaction to the Dead End Bend idea was instant and panicky. “Jason, no! Don't be stupid!” Just as instantly, she knew she had made a mistake, that she should try to sweet-talk Jason, not shout at him, but she couldn't help it. She was terrified, and angrier than she'd ever been in her life. He was not respecting her. “Jason, slow down!”

He sped up, screeching around the left turn toward Dead End Bend. “This Mustang isn't bad, but a Z-car would be awesome. I bet it would do sixty-five. The fastest I've been able to drift Dead End Bend in this car is fifty.”

“Jason, stop acting like an idiot! Do you want to get us both killed?”

“If I can get it up to sixty, I'll beat the record. You're my witness.”

“Jason, no! Please!” Damn, he had her so scared, she was pleading with him after all.

Jason grinned. “Don't be such a wuss, Jess. You'll thank me afterward.”

“No, I won't. Stop the car
now
. Please!”

“Just hang on.” Night flashed past as they whizzed down the hill at sixty-five, seventy–

Left-handed, Jessie reached over and snatched the keys out of the ignition.

“Hey! What the–”

With the engine off and the power steering gone, Jason hit the brakes hard as he swore at her, grabbing for the keys. She clutched them in her hand, and his hand closed around hers so fiercely she cried out. “Jason, you're hurting me!”

“Good! I'll hurt you more if you don't give those keys back!” As the car slowed to a stop, he grabbed her forearm with his other hand, wrenching it until she started crying, until she had to let go of the keys. They dropped to the floor. He searched for them, grabbed them. But not before she had unbuckled her seat belt, opened her door, and stumbled out of the car. As he was putting the keys back into the ignition she slammed the door.

“Hey!” Revving the Mustang, Jason popped his door and shouted at her over the roof, “What the hell do you think you're doing?”

Sobbing almost too hard to speak, Jessie yelled back, “Go kill yourself and see if I care!”

“Are you crazy? Get back in here.”

It was kind of crazy, because she was miles from anywhere. Still, she told him, “No.”

“I said get in!”

“Go to hell.”

“God damn it, Sis, get in this car.”

“No.” Jessie started to walk away along the dark, grassy edge of the road.

Jason threw the Mustang into reverse and cut her off, still swearing at her. “Dumb-ass, I can't just leave you out here. Get in the damn car!”

“No.”

He stared at her. “Jessie, what's with you?” he asked almost as if he were the one pleading now. “You PMSing or something? I've never seen you like this.”

Because she had never before felt so helpless, so desperate for control. “You get out and give me the keys.” Since he had lowered his voice, she lowered hers. “I'll drive us home.”

“No way.” He grinned at her, friendly again. “I came out here to set the world's record going around Dead End Bend, and I'm gonna do it.”

“Jason, no!” She wasn't crying anymore. She felt too dry with terror to cry.

“Oh, for God's sake, Jessie, don't get your panties in a bunch.” Jason swung back into the car. “You don't have to come with me if you don't want to. Just stay where you are.”

“
Jason
!”

“Stay put. I'll be back in a minute.”

“Don't go!”

“Chill out, Jessie! I'll come
back
for you. I promise.”

So as he sped off, Jessie stood at the side of the dark road, hearing the roar of his motor become more and more distant, trying to tell herself it would be all right; he was a good driver, even driving fast; he would be back–

Then she had heard the scream, scream, screaming of the tires, and the sickening, shattering sound of the crash.

But the tape in her head wouldn't rest there. It kept playing. Blurry, out of sequence, sometimes soundless, sometimes migraine-loud, but never stopping. The police and ambulance sirens shrieking, the lurid lights. But before that must have been the blackness and running, running down the hill in the dark toward Dead End Bend, telling herself her brother was all right, he had to be all right, they would take him to the hospital and make him better. Running, running so hard she could hardly breathe, but still the tears flowed. She had left her cell phone in her purse in the car, and how could she have been so stupid? She had to get to the cell phone and call 911 so Jason would live–Jason had to live.

The red Mustang had crossed ten feet of gravel shoulder and another six feet of grass to climb the biggest oak tree. Like a rumpled, mutant circus pony, it stood on its hind wheels, headlights shining into the sky, dashboard lights on and dashboard alarms peeping like little frogs. Jessie found Jason not in the car but under it, his arm sprawled on the mossy ground as if he were sleeping, the strong tendons of his fingers and perfect bend of his wrist, so beautiful, like a sculpture by Michelangelo.

They said she found her purse hanging from a limb of the tree, but she remembered only holding the cell phone in her hand and pressing the 9, the 1, and the 1. The police must have taken her away before the firemen lifted the car off Jason. She remembered riding in the back of the police car, and it felt right: she should go to jail; it was all her fault, telling Jason to go get killed. She remembered waiting in a room at the hospital, but it was like black-and-white TV, no colors, and more policemen bringing her mother in and Jessie stood up but her mother looked right through her as if she weren't there. At first there was no sound. Then someone turned the sound on. Jessie heard herself sobbing. She heard her mother saying very calmly and firmly, “No. There's been a mistake. No, my son is fine. He's just gone away for a little while. He'll be back.”

Days following, still black and white. Mom saying the same thing as she signed papers, the same thing to the undertaker. To Jessie she said nothing, sitting but not looking, not listening, as Jessie tried to tell her what had happened. Mom was just going through denial, the pastor from church told Jessie. The first of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Jessie herself seemed to have skipped straight to depression.… Stripping off her nail polish, scrubbing away every speck of color as if it were a sin, then clipping the fingernails short. And crying, crying all the time.

The kids from school stopped by to take Jessie with them when they placed the white wooden cross in front of the oak tree. They talked of Jason, memories of Jason, the time he had gotten a girl he met at an out-of-town dance to autograph her bra for him to keep, the time he had stretched clear plastic over the locker-room urinals, the time he had gotten all his friends to pad the ballot box so Jessie's poem won the contest, the time he had made a bet with Coach and lost and had to wear a ribbon in his hair. And then he had somehow swiped a pair of Coach's big baggy plaid boxer shorts and run them up the flagpole to get even.

They laughed and cried. They put pictures of Jason on the oak, and the tree was already so terribly wounded by the car that Jessie could hardly bear the blows,
bang, bang, bang
as they hammered the nails in. She knew the tree would die, too. Some boys nailed up a wrestling-team sweatshirt, while the girls piled angel dolls, teddy bears, baseballs, stuffed rubber-faced monsters, flowers and letters, all sorts of gifts for a ghost around the cross that stood near the twisted roots of the tree.

Jessie had nothing to leave at the shrine. Her offerings were in her head. Several times at the hospital and the morgue and the funeral home she tried to see Jason's body. People wouldn't let her without her mother's permission. Mother wasn't talking. The autopsy was private. The casket was closed. Jessie never did get to see her dead brother, say good-bye. She wept on Alisha's shoulder amid flowers that had no colors and no fragrance.

Mom did not shed a tear.

Dad was not there. How could her father, her dead brother's father, not be there?

How could Mom not cry, not cook, not eat, not sleep, not speak? How could she just sit as if she were waiting for someone?

Colors and fragrances came back. How could they do that?

How could Jessie get up two days after the accident and go back to school? How could days go on? How could school go on?

But that was last week, Jessie told herself, determined to silence the replay in her mind. That was last week. Things were different now, because she couldn't stand it, wasn't going to stand it anymore, and she was going to make things different. She had already started to make things different.

Chapter Four

At lunch, Alisha saw Jessie at a table by herself. Okay, Jessie wasn't one of the popular crowd, but she was nice, and she normally ate with some of the B-list girls plus maybe some debate-team nerds or computer geeks. But now this thing, Jessie dressing up like her dead brother, had everybody freaked.

Including Alisha, some. But too bad.
Get over it
, she told herself as she took her tray and went to sit with Jessie.

She liked Jessie better than just about anybody she'd ever met. Jessie had a rare kind of goodness: Jessie did not care whether a kid was a prep, a jock, a punk, a goth, or a scrub. She had the brains of a prep, but she didn't wear preppy clothes, just okay clothes from Wal-Mart or somewhere. She didn't belong to any of the cliques. She didn't fit in or not fit in; she was just Jessie. She didn't care whether anybody was Jewish or Creationist or Catholic or pagan or whatever, or whether they were gay or bi or straight. She just didn't think that way. Alisha knew that when Jessie looked at her she never once thought “Black.” They were just Alisha and Jessie together.

Alisha had been Jessie's best friend for long enough to know that Jessie might be too good for her
own
good. Too good, for instance, to realize what a selfish, manipulative–making her cover for him when he ditched school, sweet-talking her into doing his science projects, persuading
her
to pay for getting
his
hair done–what an ego-on-smelly-feet toe fungus her brother was.

Or used to be. Jason was dead. Which would not have bothered Alisha a bit, if it wasn't for Jessie, heartbroken. Taking it so hard.