Free Possessing Jessie by Nancy Springer Page A

breath. She couldn’t watch. Shutting her eyes tight, she bowed her head, hands over her face, shuddering.
    But in that instant the screams all around her turned to shouts, yells, and Alisha smelled scorching rubber, and as her head came up and her eyes opened like sunrise, she saw the black car slew almost impossibly sideways and hit the white cross, avoiding the big oak tree by inches but knocking down the cross and running it over as the tires spun in the dirt, as the car drifted into a perfect line to take the uphill slope. Alisha heard thunder, the Z-car’s engine thunder and the thunder of leaping, stamping feet and pounding hands. And she saw lightening–but no, there couldn’t have been lightning. She saw Jessie’s Z-car barreling up the other side of the bend, safe, thank God, safe, and as it flashed past–nothing made sense, there must have been lightning, because for a blue-strobe moment she saw. Everyone saw.
    Oakley shades.
    Grinning face.
    Hand, waving.
    Then the car passed by.
    In a weird silence the crowd of teenagers listened to the roar of its engine fading into the distance. It was not coming back.
    Shane was the first to speak. He whispered, “That was Jason.”
    Alisha said numbly, “No.” But her reply was lost in the hubbub all around as the group lost its purpose, its cohesion, and broke to pieces. Some kids headed for their cars as if all they wanted was to get out of there. Some clung to one another. One nerd asked what Jason’s, or rather Jessie’s, time had been. Shane didn’t know. He hadn’t clicked the stopwatch.
    In the same stunned whisper he said, “Jason. Took out that cross. On purpose.”
    Several kids had run across Dead End Bend to look at the shattered cross with ghoulish zest, as if it were a hit-and-run victim–but even from the distance, Alisha could see how they stiffened and stopped in their tracks. One of them screamed, “There’s nothing here!”
    â€œWhatcha mean?” somebody from the other side of the road shouted back.
    â€œI mean nothing ! Not even a piece of wood! Not even the stump!”
    Alisha appealed, “Shane, please take me home.”
    But he was already jogging away from her, downhill and across the road to the place where the cross wasn’t.
    Where the white flowers were not. Or the teddy bears. Or the angel dolls. Nothing.
    Alisha did not go down there. She climbed into Shane’s pickup truck’s cab, lay down on the seat, and curled up, hugging her own knees. She lay like that for a long time.
    She said nothing to Shane when he came back. She didn’t sit up or look at him. He said nothing to her as he started the pickup and drove very slowly, very carefully, back to town.
    After her final blast of speed in the Z-car, Jessie slowed down, too, because her hands started wobbling on the wheel and her vision blurred. She felt limp, physically weak, shaken, aching all over as if she had been in a fight or–maybe this was what it felt like to give birth, so utterly exhausted and joyous. Jason’s name sang in her mind, Jason, Jason had saved her. Jason had saved her life. Only his force of will surging through her and turning the steering wheel with more physical strength and skill than she possessed had kept her from smashing into the oak. She vaguely remembered a small crash, like she had run over something, but so what? She had rounded Dead End Bend on four screeching tires and had left it alive, at top speed, and victorious in Jason’s love. That was all that mattered.
    So wiped out that she stumbled as she walked, she let herself into the dark house, staggered upstairs, and collapsed onto her bed in her clothes. Rather, she collapsed onto Jason’s bed in Jason’s clothes. Whatever.
    She slept like a dead person.
    Dreamless.
    Motionless.
    Not long enough. The alarm clock rang far too early.
    She forced herself to get up for school–thank God it