Possessing Jessie (7 page)

The bartender said, “Move along, young lady.”

No sooner had she stepped onto the sidewalk outside when her cell phone rang. It was her mother. “Alisha, where the heck are you?”

Tired of lying, she told the truth, sort of. “Downtown.”

“Downtown! What for?”

“Trying to find out where Mr. Ressler is.”

“Find out where Mr. Ressler is? Why?”

Alisha heard a screech from her grandmother. “You tell that girl she riling the spirits, riling the spirits! You tell her she sticking her hand in ghost snake's nest!”

Ignoring this, Alisha pleaded, “Mom, if I could get him to talk to Jessie–”

“If I could get you to mind your own business! You come on home
right now
!”

Alisha walked toward a bus stop, telling herself that she would try again tomorrow. But she felt like crying, because tomorrow might be too late.

She heard footsteps behind her.

Stiffening, she stopped and turned.

A man was ambling out of the bar. Old guy who somehow reminded her of a white rabbit, maybe because of his white fuzz of beard and hair. Maybe more because of his weak face. Harmless looking. Although never relaxing completely, Alisha stood still and let him walk up to her. He handed her a dirty napkin on which was inked a phone number.

“Rick Ressler's cell,” he mumbled, his speech a bit slurred, his breath reeking of beer. Clownishly, he smiled. “Didn't want the guys to see me. Ruin my reputation of being no good for anything.” He meandered down the sidewalk while Alisha stared after him, so surprised she didn't even think to say thank you.

After he disappeared around the corner, she jumped, coming out of her daze. Muttering “Duh!” at herself, she grabbed her cell phone. With a shaking hand she fingered the numbers.

Right around dark, Jessie got into the black Z-car, revved it, and zoomed off into the twilight, heading toward Dead End Bend.

There had been no need to come up with a story to tell her mother. Jason had always done what he wanted, and Jessie was being Jason. She had just said, “See ya, Mud,” on her way out the door.

Now, driving across town, she kept finding herself getting lead-footed. She kept trying to slow down to somewhere near the speed limit, but it was as if the Z-car had a mind of its own. It
wanted
to go fast.

Almost out of town, heading through the commercial strip of video rentals, Kwik-Marts, pizza places, and burger joints, Jessie heard a siren bleep, looked in the rearview mirror, and saw the flashing lights of the police car behind her.

She pulled over and stopped at once, thinking with amusement,
Going too fast past the fast food
. Jessie had never been stopped by the police, and she had always thought that she would just
die
if she ever got a ticket. But for some reason now she didn't care. Maybe since Jason was dead, dumb stuff like speeding tickets didn't seem so important anymore. Jessie felt cool, like this wasn't even worth getting nervous about, like it might be fun. She pressed the button that rolled her window down, took off her sunglasses, and laid her hands in plain sight on the hub of the steering wheel, but she felt herself grinning.

Another police car pulled in front of her. The first cop had called for backup? Sweet!

Now the police officer parked behind her walked up to her window, and when he looked at her, something seemed to bother him. He stared, his face taut and gray. In robotic tones he said, “Driver's license and registration, please.”

Jason had no driver's license, only a learner's permit, so Jessie handed over her own license along with the pink paper that served as temporary registration for the new car.

The cop looked at her driver's license, glared at her and said, “You look just like that dead punk, freak me out, and now you hand me a
girl's
license?”

“That's me,” Jessie said in her normal, soft voice. “I've changed my hair, that's all.” But she couldn't seem to stop grinning.

The other cop had come over. “Wipe that stupid grin off your face.”

Jessie had to wipe it off literally, smoothing both hands across her cheeks and mouth. “Honestly, I'm not trying to be smart,” she said quietly before they could react to the gesture.

“What do you make of this?” The first cop passed her driver's license to the other.

“Jessie Ressler, huh?” The second cop studied her. “You Jason Ressler's sister?”

Suddenly Jessie's throat closed on her voice. She nodded.

The first cop said suddenly, “Yeah, you're a girl, okay. I see it.” Either he had been checking her narrow shoulders, her barely visible boobs, or he could tell now by the look on her face. “Young lady, I don't know what to ask you first, why you're going sixty in a thirty-five-miles-an-hour zone, or why you're dressed like …”

“Just let it go” muttered the other cop, grudging sympathy in his eyes.

“The speeding, or the cross-dressing?”

“You do what you want about the speeding.”

The cop who had stopped Jessie asked her, “Did you know how fast you were going?”

“Yes, sir. I can't seem to help it. This car just wants to go fast.” Jessie was starting to smile again.

“Kid like you shouldn't be driving that car. You know I ought to give you a citation. You could end up with a big fat fine and points on your driving record.”

“I know. It's okay.”

“Okay? What do you mean, okay?” The cop was getting worked up.

“I just mean I take responsibility.”

“For the speeding or the cross-dressing?”

The other cop put in quietly, “She's dressed like her dead brother. Might be some sort of coping thing.”

“Well, I can't cope with it! This whole thing's too damn Twilight Zone for me.” He thrust Jessie's license and registration back at her. “Girl, I'm letting you off with a warning. I don't ever want to see you again. Shut your mouth, don't say a word to me, and get out of here.”

Jessie did as instructed. Although she did not actually lay a patch, unmistakably she exhibited excess speed as she pulled away. And she managed to get only a short distance down the road before laughter exploded from her. Driving fast, faster, she laughed and kept laughing, louder.

Chapter Eleven

Shane already had things set up down at Dead End Bend. He had stuck a homemade bright-red bandanna flag in the shoulder of the road on the downward slope, and directly opposite on the upward slope, another flag. Distance between the flags, exactly half a mile. The turn was so tight that both flags could be observed by one guy with a stopwatch who stood in the middle of the vacant field in between. The contestant's speed in miles per hour around Dead End Bend could be figured by the time it took him to do half a mile between the two flags. They didn't teach math at school for nothing.

Shane was of course the guy with the stopwatch, and Alisha stood nearby. In fact, Shane had brought her down there with him in his pickup truck. Alisha had been standing near the bus stop but not quite at it, not wanting to go home and face her mother's anger and her grandmother's voodoo pits full of ghost snakes, when Shane had pulled over and offered her a ride.

“Thanks,” she had said, getting in, and then, because it mattered so much she had to tell somebody, she blurted, “Guy from the bar came after me and gave me the phone number.”

“Huh?”

“Jessie's father's phone number. I called him about five times.”

“Jessie's father!”

“Yeah. But he's not answering. I keep getting his voice mail, and it cuts me off after about three seconds. Not that I know what to say to him anyway.”

Amazingly, Shane seemed to follow. “I don't know what the hell
anybody
can say.”

Alisha wondered if Shane had any clue about Jessie's crush on him. Jessie had good taste. Shane seemed like a super-nice guy as well as a hunk. Jeez, just when Alisha thought life couldn't get much weirder, here she was in Shane's pickup truck. Poor Jessie; she would be jealous if she were in her right mind.

Alisha said softly, “I have to try to call again. Later tonight. I have to try to do something.”

At Dead End Bend, standing in the bed of Shane's pickup truck parked in the field, Alisha watched others arriving. Word had gotten around even faster than usual. There were plenty of kids interested. Like,
really
interested, wanting to see whether Jessie would show up. Those who planned to compete waited along the roadside uphill from the starting flag. Those who wanted to watch bumped through a ditch and over ruts and grass to park in the field. Whoever owned this land had put up fences that had been torn down, placed concrete barriers that had been pushed away, and had finally given up trying to keep the kids out. The people in the few neighboring houses had likewise gotten tired of calling the cops, who never showed up in time anyway. This night, this wasteland, this unobstructed view of Dead End Bend belonged to the teenagers.

Kids sat on the hoods or tops of their cars, talking, joking, flirting, or play-fighting, drinking soda or beer, smoking cigarettes or joints. Some, like Alisha, kept a watch on the cars lining up to compete, more or less visible in the glare of one another's headlights. When Alisha saw the Z-car blacker than the night coming down the hill, she was not the only one who exclaimed aloud. But she
was
the only one who took off running, running out of the field and up the road to try to talk with her best friend.

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.