“WHAT’S THAT?”
“It’s a newspaper, Webster. Surely you’ve heard of them.”
“I meant what are you reading?”
“A little something about your boyfriend.” Wyatt handed Jana the local newspaper. He’d had to stay up all night to sneak off campus early to get it.
She sat next to Wyatt at the back. Other than the Virgin in the front seat, they were first on the bus. She had folded the top of her high-waisted uniform skirt down inside itself and tied the tails of her school blouse into a knot in front. She smelled a little less of Ivory soap this morning.
Michael’s fall had made the front page. The paper headlined Lookaway Rock as a new Lovers’ Leap.
The article reported that Michael Haynes of Asheville, distraught over the recent death of his girlfriend, had launched himself from the granite precipice late at night. His body had been found near a gun that had been fired twice.
“Suicides are like that sometimes,” a county detective was quoted. “They have more than one way to kill themselves in mind and decide which at the last moment.”
In county documents filed by the coroner, Haynes’s cause of death was ruled as coronary asphyxiation.
“The boy was dead before he hit the rocks,” the coroner stated in a telephone interview with the newspaper reporter. “When you fall that far, it is possible to stop breathing. In this case, the trauma of beginning the fall stopped the boy’s heart. He was dead of a heart attack in midair. It was fear, maybe. Or shock.”
Nathan Mills, of Asheville, a close friend of the deceased, expressed the more popular theory circulating among students at Central High School in Asheville, where Haynes was a senior preparing for early college coursework this summer.
“Broken heart is more like it,” Mills said. “His girlfriend, Jana Webster, died in a freak bowling accident and he couldn’t handle it. They’re burying him next to her at the cemetery. Everyone in school is calling him Romeo Haynes now.”
There was a new student on the bus.
“How come he gets to sit up there?” Jana stared at the back of Michael’s head, where he sat near the front in a seat next to Henry Sixkiller.
“Maybe it was self-defense,” Wyatt suggested. He draped his crooked arm over Jana’s shoulder and leaned back. “Or maybe he didn’t mean to shoot me.”
“Why does he get to look so good? He should be all broken up.”
“He died before he hit the bottom, Webster. Remind me to do that the next time I’m on a motorcycle.”
“It’s not fair,” she complained.
“Now you’re catching on,” Wyatt said. “Brains and beauty, what’s to become of you?”
“I don’t have beauty, Wyatt. I wished you’d quit saying that.”
“Well, see, there’s something for you to learn yet. You’re the most beautiful girl in Dead School, Webster. And you were the prettiest girl in your real school too. It’s hard to believe you never noticed.”
Fart, fudge, and popcorn. Wyatt had made her blush.
Mars turned around from his aisle seat right behind Arva’s and looked at Jana once. He started to smile. She flipped him off. He looked silly with his hair combed and his school clothes ironed. Mars smiled anyway before turning to look front. Jana tasted strawberries every time she looked at him.
“You got that boy wrapped around your little finger,” Wyatt said.
“Which boy?” Jana grinned when she said it.
“All of them. All of them except one.”
“You mean you?”
“That I do, Webster. That I do.”
Beatrice and Christie sat together on the bus. Jana looked at Christie’s hair and wondered if she could get her own hair to look like that. Beatrice got out of her seat, as if Jana’s looking at her had been a cue. She walked to the back of the bus to talk to Wyatt. She wasn’t supposed to.
She stood right next to Jana and grinned like a watermelon cut in half. Beatrice wore less makeup than usual. She lightly touched the top of her head where her hair was combed over the sawn-off inch of yard dart tip still in her head. Only the portion that killed her had to stay with her after death.
“I just wanted to thank you,” Beatrice said to Wyatt.
Sliders weren’t allowed to talk to Risers on the bus. Wyatt nodded and winked his only eye.
“And thank the others too,” she added before walking back to her seat.
“Talk about wrapped,” Jana said to Wyatt, shaking her head.
“I am a handsome devil, aren’t I?”
Sliders left the bus first at Dead School. Jana had a crazy thought. The aisle between the bus seats, the aisle they walked to file out, could be the aisle in a chapel. The Virgin up front was dressed for a wedding, after all. Jana tugged Michael’s ring from her finger and buried it in her fist.
With her empty hand she touched the back of Mars’s seat as she walked by, trailing two fingers gently across his shoulder. She knew the warmth he was feeling when she did that. She had kissed him once.
She paused next to Henry’s seat. Jana reached her arm across in front of him. Palm down, she opened her fist. The heavy class ring dropped into Michael’s lap. He looked up at Jana with his mouth open and blinked. It didn’t mean anything, his mouth being open. It was always like that now. Michael’s mouth was a permanent circular cave waiting for the scream to come out. It probably echoed when he talked. He looked like an idiot, Jana thought.
She glanced back at Mars and smiled. Even as a Riser, his blue eyes blazed under perfect brows when he smiled in return. She had kissed him once and she would kiss him again.
Jana had the jitters. For Mars.
She’d fallen for him.