Free Possessing Jessie by Nancy Springer

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