Reunion Read online

Kurt, behind the counter, looked up from his copy of Surf Digest and asked, “What the hell?”

  Then Kurt did a very surprising thing. He reached under the counter and pulled out a baseball bat.

  Gina observed this with great interest.

  “You go, homie,” she said to Kurt.

  Kurt didn’t seem to hear these words of encouragement. He ignored us, and strode over to where the pack of beer lay behind the lotion rack. He looked down at the foaming mess of broken glass and cardboard and asked, again, plaintively, “What the hell?”

  Only this time, he didn’t say hell, if you get my meaning.

  Gina wandered over to look at the wreckage.

  “Now, that’s just a shame,” she said, toeing one of the bigger shards with her platform sandal. “What do you think caused it? Earthquake?”

  When my stepfather, driving Gina back to our house from the airport, had asked her what she most hoped to experience while in California, Gina had replied without hesitation, “The big one.” Earthquakes were the one thing we didn’t get a lot of back in New York.

  “There wasn’t no quake,” Kurt said. “And these beers are from the fridge against that wall back there. How’d they get all the way up here?” he wanted to know.

  Kelly and Debbie joined Gina and Kurt in surveying the damage and wondering about its cause. Only I hung back. I could, I suppose, have offered an explanation, but I didn’t think anyone was going to believe me—not if I told the truth, anyway. Well, Gina probably would have. She knew a little bit—more than anybody else I knew, with the exception, maybe, of my youngest stepbrother, Doc, and Father Dom—about the mediator thing.

  Still, what she knew wasn’t much. I’ve always sort of kept my business to myself. It simplifies things, you know.

  I figured it would be wisest if I just stayed out of the whole thing. I opened my soda and took a deep swallow. Ah. Potassium benzoate. It always hits the spot.

  It was only then, my attention wandering, that I noticed the headline on the front of the local paper. FOUR DEAD, it proclaimed, IN MIDNIGHT PLUNGE.

  “Maybe,” Kelly was saying, “somebody took it out and was gonna buy it, and at the last minute, changed their mind, and left it on the shelf right there—”

  “Yeah,” Gina interrupted enthusiastically. “And then an earthquake shook it off!”

  “There wasn’t no earthquake,” Kurt said. Only he didn’t sound as sure as before. “Was there?”

  “I kind of felt something,” Debbie said.

  Kelly said, “Yeah, I think I did, too.”

  “Just for a minute there,” Debbie said.

  “Yeah,” Kelly said.

  “Damn!” Gina put her hands on her hips. “Are you telling me there was an actual earthquake just now, and I missed it?”

  I took a copy of the paper off of the pile and unfolded it.

  Four seniors from Robert Louis Stevenson High School were tragically killed in a car accident last night as they were returning home from a spring formal. Felicia Bruce, 17; Mark Pulsford, 18; Josh Saunders, 18; and Carrie Whitman, 18, were declared dead at the scene after a head-on collision along a treacherous stretch of California Highway 1 caused their vehicle to to careen past a protective guardrail and into the sea below.

  “What’d it feel like?” Gina demanded. “So I’ll know if there’s another one.”

  “Well,” Kelly said. “This wasn’t a very big one. It was just…well, if you’ve been through enough of them, you can just sort of tell, you know? It’s like a feeling you get on the back of your neck. The hair there kind of raises up.”

  “Yeah,” Debbie said. “That’s just how I felt. Not so much that the ground was moving underneath me, but like a cold breeze moved through me real fast.”

  “Exactly,” Kelly said.

  A thick fog, which rolled in from the sea after midnight last night, causing poor visibility and dangerous driving conditions along the area of the coastline known as Big Sur, is said to have contributed to the accident.

  “That doesn’t sound like any earthquake I’ve ever heard of,” Gina declared, the skepticism in her voice plainly evident. “That sounds more like a ghost story.”

  “But it’s true,” Kelly said. “Sometimes we get tremors that are so little, you can’t really feel them. They’re very localized. For instance, two months ago there was a quake that brought down a sizeable portion of a breezeway at our school. And that was it. No other damage was reported anywhere else.”

  Gina looked unimpressed. She didn’t know what I did, which was that that chunk of the school’s roof had caved in not because of any earthquake, but because of a supernatural occurrence brought about during an altercation between me and a recalcitrant ghost.

  “My dog always knows when there’s going to be a quake,” Debbie said. “She won’t come out from under the pool table.”

  “Was she under the pool table this morning?” Gina wanted to know.

  “Well,” Debbie said. “No….”

  The driver of the other vehicle, a minor whose name has not been made available by the police, was injured in the accident, but was treated and released from Carmel Hospital. It is unknown at this time whether alcohol played a part in the accident, but police say they will be investigating the matter.

  “Look,” Gina said. She bent down and picked something up from the wreckage at her feet. “A sole survivor.”

  She held up a lone bottle of Bud.

  “Well,” Kurt said, taking the bottle from her. “That’s something, I guess.”

  The bell above the door to Jimmy’s tinkled, and suddenly my two stepbrothers, followed by two of their surfer friends, streamed in. They’d changed out of their wetsuits and abandoned their boards somewhere. Apparently, they were taking a beef jerky break, since it was toward the canisters of these, sitting on the counter, that they headed upon entering.

  “Hi, Brad,” Debbie said in this very flirty voice.

  Dopey broke away from the beef jerky long enough to say hi back in an extremely awkward manner—awkward because even though it was Debbie that Dopey was semi-seeing, it was Kelly he really liked.

  What was worse, though, was that since Gina’s arrival, he’d been flirting with her outrageously, too.

  “Hi, Brad,” Gina said. Her voice wasn’t flirty at all. Gina never flirted. She was very straightforward with boys. It was for this reason that she had not been without a date on a Saturday night since the seventh grade. “Hi, Jake.”

  Sleepy, his mouth full of beef jerky, turned around and blinked at her. I used to think Sleepy had a drug problem, but then I found out that that’s how he always looks.

  “Hey,” Sleepy said. He swallowed, and then did an extraordinary thing—well, for Sleepy, anyway.

  He smiled.

  This was really too much. I’d lived with these guys for almost two months, now—ever since my mom married their dad, and moved me all the way across the country so that we could all live together and be One Big Happy Family—and during that time, I’d seen Sleepy smile maybe twice. And now here he was drooling all over my best friend.

  It was sick, I tell you. Sick!

  “So,” Sleepy said. “You girls goin’ back down? To the water, I mean?”

  “Well,” Kelly said, slowly. “I guess that depends—”

  Gina cut to the chase.

  “What are you guys doing?” she asked.

  “Goin’ back down for about another hour,” Sleepy replied. “Then we’re gonna stop and get some ’za. You in?”

  “I could deal,” Gina said. She looked at me questioningly. “Simon?”

  I followed the direction of her gaze, and saw she’d noticed the newspaper in my hands. I hastily put it back.

  “Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”

  I figured I’d better eat while I still could. I had a feeling I was going to be pretty busy soon.

  Chapter

  Three

  “Ah,” Father Dominic said. “The RLS Angels.”

  I
didn’t even glance at him. I was slumped in one of the chairs he keeps in front of his desk, playing with a GameBoy one of the teachers had confiscated from a student, and which had eventually found its way into the bottom drawer of the principal’s desk. I was going to keep Father Dom’s bottom desk drawer in mind when Christmas rolled around. I had a good idea where Sleepy and Dopey’s presents were going to come from.

  “Angels?” I grunted, and not just because I was losing badly at Tetris. “There wasn’t anything too angelic about them, if you ask me.”

  “They were very attractive young people, from what I understand.” Father Dom started shifting around the piles of paper he had all over his desk. “Class leaders. Very bright young things. I believe it was their principal who dubbed them the RLS Angels in his statement to the press concerning the tragedy.”

  “Huh.” I tried to angle an oddly shaped object into the small space allotted for it. “Angels who were trying to lift a twelve-pack of Bud.”

  “Here.” Father Dom found a copy of the paper I’d looked at the day before, only he, unlike me, had taken the trouble to open it. He turned to the obituaries where there were photos of the deceased. “Take a look and see if they are the young people you saw.”

  I passed him the GameBoy. “Finish this game for me,” I said, taking the paper from him.

  Father Dominic looked down at the GameBoy in dismay. “Oh, my,” he said. “I’m afraid I don’t—”

  “Just rotate the shapes to make them fit in the spaces at the bottom. The more rows you complete, the better.”

  “Oh,” Father Dominic said. The GameBoy binged and bonged as he frantically pushed buttons. “Oh, dear. Anything more complicated than computer solitaire, and I’m afraid—”

  His voice trailed off as he became absorbed in the game. Even though I was supposed to be reading the paper, I looked at him instead.

  He’s a sweet old guy, Father Dominic. He’s usually mad at me, of course, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like him. I was, in fact, growing surprisingly attached to him. I’d found that I couldn’t wait, for instance, to come rushing in and tell him all about those kids I’d seen at the Quick Mart. I guess that’s because, after sixteen years of not being able to tell anybody about my “special” ability, I finally had someone to unload on, Father Dom having that same “special” ability—something I’d discovered my first day at the Junipero Serra Mission Academy.

  Father Dominic, however, is a way better mediator than I am. Well, maybe not better. But different, certainly. See, he really feels that ghosts are best handled with gentle guidance and earnest advice—same as the living. I’m more in favor of a sort of get-to-the-point approach that tends to involve my fists.

  Well, sometimes these dead folks just won’t listen.

  Not all of them, of course. Some of them are extremely good listeners. Like the one who lives in my bedroom, for instance.

  But lately, I’ve been doing my best not to think about him any more than I have to.

  I turned my attention to the paper Father Dom had passed me. Yep, there they were, the RLS Angels. The same kids I’d seen the day before in Jimmy’s, only in their school photos they weren’t dressed in their formal wear.

  Father Dom was right. They were attractive. And bright. And leaders. Felicia, the youngest, had been head of the varsity cheerleading team. Mark Pulsford had been captain of the football team. Josh Saunders had been senior class president. Carrie Whitman had been last season’s homecoming queen—not exactly a leadership position, but one that was elected democratically enough. Four bright, attractive kids, all dead as doornails.

  And up, I happened to know, to no good.

  The obituaries were sad and all, but I hadn’t known these people. They attended Robert Louis Stevenson School, our school’s bitterest rival. The Junipero Serra Mission Academy, which my stepbrothers and I attend, and of which Father Dom is principal, is always getting its academic and athletic butt kicked by RLS. And while I don’t possess much school spirit, I’ve always had a thing for underdogs—which the Mission Academy, in comparison with RLS, clearly is.

  So I wasn’t about to get all choked up about the loss of a few RLS students. Especially not knowing what I knew.

  Not that I knew so much. In fact, I didn’t really know anything at all. But the night before, after coming home from “ ’za” with Sleepy and Dopey, Gina had succumbed to jet lag—we’re three hours behind New York, so around nine o’clock, she more or less passed out on the daybed my mother had purchased for her to sleep on in my room during her stay.

  I didn’t exactly mind. The sun had pretty much wiped me out, so I was perfectly content to sit on my own bed, across the room from hers, and do the geometry homework I’d assured my mother I’d finished well before Gina’s arrival.

  It was around this time that Jesse suddenly materialized next to my bed.

  “Shhh,” I said to him when he started to speak, and pointed toward Gina. I’d explained to him, well in advance of her arrival, that Gina was coming all the way from New York to stay for a week, and that I’d appreciate it if he laid low during her visit.

  It’s not exactly a joke, having to share your room with a previous tenant—the ghost of a previous tenant, I should say, since Jesse has been dead for a century and a half or so.

  On the one hand, I can totally see Jesse’s side of it. It isn’t his fault someone murdered him—at least, that’s how I suspect he died. He—understandably, I guess—isn’t too anxious to talk about it.

  And I guess it also isn’t his fault that, after death, instead of going off to heaven, or hell, or on to another life, or wherever it is people go after they die, he ended up sticking around in the room in which he was killed. Because in spite of what you might think, most people do not end up as ghosts. God forbid. If that were true, my social life would be so over…not that it’s so great to begin with. The only people who end up being ghosts are the ones who’ve left behind some kind of unfinished business.

  I have no idea what business it is that Jesse left unfinished—and the truth is, I’m not so sure he knows, either. But it doesn’t seem fair that if I’m destined to share my bedroom with the ghost of a dead guy, the dead guy has to be so cute.

  I mean it. Jesse is way too good-looking for my peace of mind. I may be a mediator, but I’m still human, for crying out loud.

  But anyway, there he was, after I’d told him very politely not to come around for a while, looking all manly and hot and everything in the nineteenth-century outlaw outfit he always wears. You know the kind: with those tight black pants and the white shirt open down to there.…

  “When is she leaving?” Jesse wanted to know, bringing my attention away from the place where his shirt opened, revealing an extremely muscular set of abs, up to his face—which, I probably don’t have to point out, is totally perfect, except for this small white scar in one of his dark eyebrows.

  He didn’t bother whispering. Gina couldn’t hear him.

  “I told you,” I said. I, on the other hand, had to whisper since there was every likelihood I might be overheard. “Next Sunday.”

  “That long?”

  Jesse looked irritated. I would like to say that he looked irritated because he considered every moment I spent with Gina a moment stolen from him, and deeply resented her because of that.

  But to be honest, I highly doubt that that was the case. I’m pretty sure Jesse likes me, and everything….

  But only as a friend. Not in any special kind of way. Why should he? He’s 150 years old—170 if you count the fact that he’d been twenty or so when he died. What could a guy who’d lived through 170 years of stuff possibly see in a sixteen-year-old high school sophomore who’s never had a boyfriend and can’t even pass her driving exam?

  Not a whole heck of a lot.

  Let’s face it, I knew perfectly well why Jesse wanted Gina gone.

  Because of Spike.

  Spike is our cat. I say “our” cat, because even though ordinari
ly animals can’t stand ghosts, Spike has developed this strange affinity for Jesse. His affection for Jesse balances out, in a way, his total lack of regard for me, even though I’m the one who feeds him, and cleans out his litter box and, oh, yes, rescued him from a life of squalor on the mean streets of Carmel.

  Does the stupid thing show me one iota of gratitude? No way. But Jesse, he adores. In fact, Spike spends most of his time outdoors, and only bothers coming around whenever he senses Jesse might have materialized.

  Like now, for instance. I heard a familiar thump on the porch roof—Spike landing there from the pine tree he always climbs to reach it—and then the big orange nightmare was scrambling through the window I’d left open for him, mewing piteously, like he hadn’t been fed in ages.

  When Jesse saw Spike, he went over to him and started scratching him under the ears, causing the cat to purr so loudly I thought he might wake Gina up.

  “Look,” I said. “It’s just for a week. Spike will survive.”

  Jesse looked up at me with an expression that seemed to suggest that he thought I’d slipped down a few notches on the IQ scale.

  “It’s not Spike I’m worried about,” he said.

  This only served to confuse me. I knew it couldn’t be me Jesse was worrying about. I mean, I guess I’d gotten into a few scrapes since I’d met him—scrapes that, more often than not, Jesse’d had to bail me out of. But nothing was going on just then. Well, aside from the four dead kids I’d seen that afternoon in Jimmy’s.

  “Yeah?” I watched as Spike threw his head back in obvious ecstasy as Jesse scratched him underneath the chin. “What is it, then? Gina’s very cool, you know. Even if she found out about you, I doubt she’d run screaming from the room or anything. She’d probably just want to borrow your shirt sometime, or something.”

  Jesse glanced over at my houseguest. All you could really see of Gina was a couple of lumps beneath the comforter, and a lot of bright copper curls spread out across the pillows beneath her head.

  “I’m certain that she’s very…cool,” Jesse said, a little hesitantly. Sometimes my twenty-first-century vernacular throws him. But that’s okay. His frequent employment of Spanish, of which I don’t speak a word, throws me. “It’s just that something’s happened—”