Haunted tm-5 Page 3

  Finally, I managed to unlock my jaw and demanded, "Oh, yeah? Well, what about Jake? I mean, Jake's not going to let you have a bunch of your friends over to get wasted."

  Brad just looked at me like I was nuts. "Are you kidding?" he asked. "Who do you thinks providing the beer? Jake's gonna steal me a keg from where he works."

  I narrowed my eyes at him. "Jake? Jake's getting you beer? No way. He would never - " Then comprehension dawned. "How much are you paying him?"

  "A hundred big ones," Brad said. "Exactly half of what he's shy on that Camaro he's been wanting."

  There was little Jake wouldn't do to get his hands on a Camaro all his own, I knew.

  Stymied, I stared at him some more. "What about David?" I asked, finally. "David's going to tell."

  "No, he isn't," Brad said confidently. '"Cause if he does, I'll kick his bony butt from here to Anchorage. And you better not try to defend him, either, or your mom's gonna get a big fat helping of Jesse pie."

  That's when I hit him. I couldn't help it. It was like my fist had a mind of its own. One minute it was at my side, and the next it was sinking into Brad's gut.

  The fight was over in a second. A half second, even. Mr. Gillarte, the new track coach, pulled us apart before Brad had a chance to get in a blow of his own.

  "Walk it off," he ordered me with a shove, while he bent to tend a frantically gasping Brad.

  So I walked it off. Right up to Father D., who was standing in the courtyard, supervising the stringing of fairy lights around the trunk of a palm tree.

  "What can I tell you, Susannah?" he'd said, sounding exasperated when I was finished explaining the situation. "Some people are more perceptive than others."

  "Yeah, but Brad?" I had to keep my voice down because a bunch of the gardeners were around, all helping to set up the decorations for the feast of Father Serra, which was happening on Saturday, the day after Brad's hot tub bacchanal.

  "Well, Susannah," Father D. said. "You couldn't have expected to keep Jesse a secret forever. Your family was bound to find out sometime."

  Maybe. What I couldn't fathom was how Brad, of all people, knew about him when some of my more intelligent family members - like Andy, for instance, or my mom - were totally clueless.

  On the other hand, Max, the family dog, had always known about Jesse - wouldn't go near my room because of him. And on an intellectual level, Brad and Max had a lot in common . . . though Max was a little bit smarter, of course.

  "I sincerely hope," Mrs. Elkins said, when she'd released me and my fellow prisoners at last, "that I won't see you here again this year, Suze."

  "You and me both, Mrs. E.," I'd replied, gathering my things. Then I'd bolted.

  Outside, it was a clear, hot September afternoon in northern California, which meant that the sun was blinding, the sky was so blue it hurt to look at it, and off in the distance, you could see the white surf of the Pacific as it curled up against Carmel Beach. I had missed all of my possible rides home - Adam, who was still eager to take anyone anywhere in his sporty green VW Bug, and of course Brad, who'd inherited the Land Rover from Jake, who now drove a beat-up Honda Civic but only until he obtained his dream car - and it was a two-mile walk to 99 Pine Crest Road. Mostly uphill.

  I'd gotten as far as the gates of the school before my knight in shining armor showed up. At least, that's what I suppose he thought he was. He wasn't on any milk-white palfrey though. He drove a silver BMW convertible, the top already conveniently lowered. It so figured.

  "Come on," he said, as I stood in front of the mission, waiting for the traffic light to change so I could cross the busy highway. "Get in. I'll give you a ride home."

  "No, thank you," I said lightly. "I prefer to walk."

  "Suze." Paul looked bored. "Just get in the car."

  "No," I said. See, I had fully learned my lesson, insofar as the whole getting-into-cars-with-guys-who'd-once-tried-to-kill-me thing went. And it wasn't going to happen again. Especially not with Paul, who'd not only once tried to kill me but who had frightened me so thoroughly while doing it that I continually relived the incident in my dreams. "I told you. I'm walking."

  Paul shook his head, laughing to himself. "You really are," he said, "a piece of work."

  "Thank you." The light changed, and I started across the intersection. I knew it well. I did not need an escort.

  But that's exactly what I got. Paul drove right alongside me, clocking a grand total of about two miles per hour.

  "Are you going to follow me all the way home?" I inquired as we started up the steep incline that gave the Carmel Hills their name. It was a good thing that this particular road was not highly trafficked at four in the afternoon, or Paul just might have made some of my neighbors mad, clogging up the only pathway to civilization the way he was driving.

  "Yes," Paul said. "That is, unless you'll stop acting like such a brat and get into the car."

  "No, thanks," I said again.

  I kept walking. It was hot out. I was beginning to feel a little moist in my sweater set. But no way was I going to get into that guy's car. I trudged along the side of the road, careful to avoid any plants that resembled my deadliest of enemies - before Paul had come along, anyway - poison oak, and silently cursed Critical Theory Since Plato, which seemed to be growing heavier and heavier in my arms with every step.

  "You're wrong not to trust me," Paul remarked as he slithered up the hill alongside me in his silver snakemobile. "We're the same, you and I, you know."

  "I sincerely hope that isn't true," I said. I have often found that with some enemies, politeness can be as strong a deterrent as a fist. I'm not kidding. Try it some time.

  "Sorry to disappoint you," Paul said. "But it is. What'd Father Dominic tell you, anyway? He tell you not to spend any time alone with me? Not to believe a word I say?"

  "Not at all," I said in the same distant tone. "Father Dominic thinks I should give you the benefit of the doubt."

  Paul, behind his leather-covered steering wheel, looked surprised. "Really? He said that?"

  "Oh, yes," I said, noticing a beautiful clump of buttercups growing alongside the road, and carefully skirting them in case they hid any dangerous stalks of poison oak. "Father Dominic thinks you're here because you want to bond with the only other mediators you know. He thinks it's our duty as charitable human beings to allow you to make amends and help you along the path to righteousness."

  "But you don't agree with him?" Paul was staring at me intently. Well, and why not? Considering how slowly he was going, it wasn't like he had to keep an eye on the road or anything.

  "Look," I said, wishing I had a barrette or something I could put my hair up with. It was beginning to stick to the back of my neck. The tortoiseshell hair clip I had started out with that morning had mysteriously disappeared. "Father Dominic is the nicest person I have ever met. All he lives for is to help others. He genuinely believes that human beings are, by nature, good, and that, if treated as such, will respond accordingly."

  "But you," Paul said, "don't agree, I take it?"

  "I think we both know that Father Dom is living in a dreamworld." I looked straight ahead as I trudged up the hill, hoping that Paul wouldn't guess that my staggering heartbeat had nothing to do with the exercise and everything to do with his presence. "But because I don't want to let the guy down, I'm going to keep my personal opinion about you - that you're a user and a psychopath - to myself."

  "A psychopath?" Paul seemed delighted to hear himself described this way . . . further proof that he was, in fact, exactly what I thought him. "I like the sound of that. I've been called a lot of things before but never a psychopath."

  "It wasn't a compliment," I felt compelled to point out, since he seemed to be taking it that way.

  "I know," he said. "That's what makes it so particularly amusing. You're quite a girl, you know that?"

  "Whatever," I said, irritated. I couldn't even seem to insult the guy successfully. "Just tell me one thing."

&nb
sp; "Name it," he said.

  "That night we ran into each other - " I pointed toward the sky " - you know, up there?"

  He nodded. "Yeah. What about it?"

  "How'd you get there? I mean, nobody exorcized you, right?"

  Paul was grinning now. I saw, to my dismay, that I'd asked him exactly the question he'd most wanted to hear.

  "No, nobody exorcized me," he said. "And you didn't need anybody to exorcize you, either."

  This came close to flooring me. I froze in my tracks. "Are you trying to tell me that I can just go strolling around up there whenever I want?" I asked him, truly stunned.

  "There's a lot," Paul said, still grinning lazily, "that you can do that you haven't figured out yet, Suze. Things you've never dreamed of. Things I can show you."

  The silky tone of his voice didn't fool me. Paul was a charmer, it was true, but he was also deadly.

  "Yeah," I said, praying that he couldn't see how fast my heart was beating through all that pink silk. "I'm sure."

  "I'm serious, Suze," Paul said. "Father Dominic is a great guy. I'm not denying it. But he's just a mediator. You're a little something more."

  "I see." I hitched my shoulders and started walking again. We had reached the crest of the hill finally, and I entered some shade afforded by the giant pine trees on either side of the road. My relief at finally being out of the heat was palpable. I only wished I could rid myself of Paul as easily. "So all my life, people have been telling me I'm one thing, and all of a sudden you come along, and you say I'm something else, and I'm just supposed to believe you?"

  "Yes," Paul said.

  "Because you're such a trustworthy person," I quipped, sounding a lot more self-assured than I actually felt.

  "Because I'm all you've got," he corrected me.

  "Well, that's not a real whole lot, is it?" I glared at him. "Or do I need to point out that the last time I saw you, you left me stranded in hell?"

  "It wasn't hell," Paul said, with another one of his trademark eye rolls. "And you'd have found your way out eventually."

  "What about Jesse?" I demanded. My heart was beating more loudly than ever, because this, of course, was what really mattered - not what he'd done, or tried to do to me - but what he'd done to Jesse . . . what I was terrified he'd try to do again.

  "I said I was sorry about that." Paul sounded irritated. "Besides, it all turned out okay in the end, didn't it? It's like I told you, Suze. You're much more powerful than you know. You just need someone to show you your true potential. You need a mentor - a real one, not a sixty-year-old priest who thinks Father Junipero Whoever is the be-all and end-all of the universe."

  "Right," I said. "And I suppose you think you're just the guy to play Mr. Miyagi to my Karate Kid."

  "Something like that."

  We were rounding the corner to 99 Pine Crest Road, perched on a hill overlooking Carmel Valley. My room, at the front of the house, had an ocean view. At night, fog blew in from the sea, and you could almost see it falling in misty tendrils over the sills if I left my windows open. It was a nice house, one of the oldest in Carmel, a former boardinghouse, circa 1850. It didn't even have a reputation for being haunted.

  "What do you say, Suze?" Paul had one arm flung casually across the back of the empty passenger seat beside him. "Dinner tonight? My treat? I'll tell you things about yourself - about what you are - that no one else on this planet knows."

  "Thanks," I said, stepping off the road and into my pine-needle-strewn yard, feeling insanely relieved. Well, and why not? I had survived an encounter with Paul Slater without being hurled into another plane of existence. That was quite an accomplishment. "But no thanks. See you in school tomorrow."

  Then I waded through the heavy carpet of pine needles to my driveway, while behind me, I heard Paul calling, "Suze! Suze, wait!"

  Only I didn't wait. I went straight up the driveway to the front porch, climbed the steps, then opened the front door and went inside.

  I did not look back. I did not look back even once.

  "I'm home," I called, in case there was anybody downstairs who particularly cared. There was. I found myself being interrogated by my stepfather, who was cooking dinner and seemed anxious to know all about "my day." After telling him, then seizing sustenance from the kitchen in the form of an apple and a diet soda, I climbed the steps to the second floor, and flung open the door to my room.

  There was a ghost sitting there on the window-sill. He looked up when I walked in.

  "Hello," Jesse said.

  4

  I didn't tell Jesse about Paul.

  I probably should have. There were a lot of things I probably should have told Jesse, but hadn't exactly gotten around to yet.

  Except I knew what would happen if I did: Jesse would want to rush into some big confrontation with the guy, and all that would result in was somebody getting exorcised again . . . that somebody being Jesse. And I really didn't think I could take it. Not that. Not again.

  So I kept Paul's sudden matriculation at the Mission Academy to myself. I mean, things were weird between Jesse and me, it was true. But that didn't mean I was at all anxious to lose him.

  "So how was school?" Jesse wanted to know.

  "Fine," I said. I was afraid to say anything more. For one thing, I was worried I might start blabbing about Paul. And for another, well, I'd found that the less said between Jesse and me, overall, the better. Otherwise, I had a tendency to prattle nervously. While I'd found that generally, prattling kept Jesse from dematerializing - as he tended to do more often now, with a hasty apology, whenever any awkward silences ensued between us - it did not seem to engender a similar desire to gab from him. Jesse had been almost unbearably quiet since . . .

  Well, since the day we'd kissed.

  I don't know what it is about guys that makes them French you one day, then act like you don't exist the next. But that was the treatment I had been getting from Jesse lately. I mean, not three weeks ago he had pulled me into his arms and laid a kiss on me that I had felt all the way down to the base of my spine. I had melted in his embrace, thinking that at last, at long last, I could reveal to him my true feelings, the secret love I had borne him since the minute - well, almost, anyway - I had first walked into my new bedroom and found it already occupied. Never mind that that occupant had breathed his last over a century and a half ago.

  I should, I suppose, have known better than to fall in love with a ghost. But that's the thing about us mediators. To us, ghosts have as much matter as anyone living. Except for the whole immortal thing, there was no reason in the world why Jesse and I, if we wanted to, couldn't have the torrid affair I'd been dreaming of since he'd first resolutely refused to call me anything but my full name, Susannah, the name no one else but Father Dom ever used.

  Except that no torrid affair followed. After that first kiss - which had been interrupted by my youngest stepbrother - there'd been no other. Jesse had, in fact, apologized profusely for it, then seemed purposefully to avoid me - though I had made it a point to let him know that the whole thing had been all right . . . more than all right ... by me.

  Now I couldn't help wondering if maybe I'd been too accommodating. Jesse probably thought I was easy or something. I mean, back when he'd been alive, ladies slapped men who'd been as forward as he had been. Even men who looked like Jesse, with flashing dark eyes, thick black hair, washboard abs, and irresistibly sexy smiles.

  I still find it hard to believe anybody could have hated a guy like that enough to off him, but that's exactly how Jesse ended up haunting my bedroom, the room he was strangled to death in a hundred and fifty years ago.

  Given the circumstances, I really didn't think there was much point in telling Jesse the details about my day. I just handed him Critical Theory Since Plato and said, "Father Dominic says hello."

  Jesse seemed pleased by the book. Just my luck to be in love with a guy who gets more jazzed by critical theory than he seems to by the idea of my tongue in his mouth.
r />   Jesse thumbed through the book while I poured the contents of my backpack on my bed. I was weighted down with homework already, and it was only the first day back. I could tell that eleventh grade was going to be just jam-packed with fun and adventure. I mean, between Paul Slater and trig, what could be more exciting?

  I should have said something to Jesse about Paul then. I should have just been like, "Hey, guess what? Remember that Paul guy whose nose you tried to break? Yeah, he goes to my school now."

  Because if I'd just been all casual about it, maybe it wouldn't have been a big deal. I mean, yeah, Jesse hated the guy - and with good reason. But I could have downplayed the whole fact that Paul might possibly be Satan's spawn. I mean, the guy does sport a Fossil watch. How malevolent could he be?

  But just as I was kind of getting the guts up to go, "Oh, yeah, and that Paul Slater dude, remember him? He showed up in my homeroom this morning," Brad shrieked up the stairs that dinner was ready.

  Since my stepdad has this big thing about all of us gathering as a family at mealtimes and breaking bread together, I was forced to leave Jesse's side at that point - not that he seemed to care - and go downstairs and actually converse with the household ... a major sacrifice, considering what I could be doing instead: making myself available for more kisses from the man of my dreams.

  Tonight, however, like most nights, didn't look as if it was going to yield any passionate embraces, so I went glumly down the stairs. Andy had prepared steak fajitas, one of his best dishes. I had to give my mother credit for finding a guy who was not only handy around the house but who was also practically a gourmet cook. Given that my mom and I had basically lived on takeout food back before she'd remarried, this was definitely an improvement.

  The fact, however, that Mr. Fix-It had come with three teenaged sons? That part I was still sort of iffy about.

  Brad burped as I entered the dining room. Only he had mastered the art of burping words.

  The word he burped as I walked in was "Loser."

  "You're one to talk," was my witty rejoinder.