Haunted tm-5 Page 4

  "Brad," Andy said severely. "Go and get the sour cream, please."

  Rolling his eyes, Brad slid out from his place at the table and trudged back into the kitchen.

  "Hi, Susie," my mother said, coming up and ruffling my hair affectionately. "How was your first day back?"

  Only my mother, out of all the human beings on the planet, is allowed to call me Susie. Fortunately I had already made this abundantly clear to my stepbrothers, so that they did not even snicker when she did it anymore.

  I didn't feel it would have been appropriate to have answered my mother's question truthfully. After all, she is unaware of the fact that her only child is a liaison between the living and the dead. She is not acquainted with Paul, or with the fact that he once tried to kill me, nor is she aware of the existence of Jesse. My mother thinks merely that I am a late bloomer, a wallflower who will come into her own soon enough, and then have boyfriends to spare. Which is surprisingly naive for a woman who works as a television news journalist, even if it is only for a local affiliate.

  Sometimes I envy my mom. It must be nice to live on her planet.

  "My day was all right," was how I responded to my mother's question.

  "'S not going to be so good tomorrow," Brad pointed out, as he came back with the sour cream.

  My mother had taken her seat at one end of the table and was flipping out her napkin. We use only cloth napkins. Another Andy-ism. It is more ecologically responsible and makes the presentation of the meal way more Martha Stewart.

  "Really?" Mom said, her eyebrows, dark as mine, rose. "How so?"

  "Tomorrows when we give the nominations for student body government," Brad said, sliding back into his place. "And Suze is going down as VP."

  Flipping out my own napkin and laying it delicately across my lap - along with the giant head of Max, the Ackermans' dog, who spent every meal with his muzzle resting on my thigh, waiting for whatever might fall from my fork and into my lap, a practice I was now so used to, I hardly even noticed anymore - I said, in response to my mother's questioning gaze, "I have no idea what he's talking about."

  Brad looked innocent. "Kelly didn't catch you after school?"

  Not exactly, given that I'd been in detention after school, something Brad knew perfectly well.

  He intended to torture me about it for a while though, you could tell.

  "No," I said. "Why?"

  "Well, Kel's already asked someone else to be her running mate this year. That new guy, Paul Whatsit." Brad shrugged his shoulders, from which his thick wrestlers neck sprouted like a tree trunk from between a couple of boulders. "So I guess Suze's reign as VP is finite."

  My mother glanced at me concernedly. "You didn't know about this, Susie?"

  It was my turn to shrug. "No," I said. "But it's cool. I never really thought of myself as the student government type."

  This reply did not have the desired effect, however. My mother pressed her lips together, then said, "Well, I don't like it. Some new boy coming in and taking Susie's place. It isn't fair."

  "It may not be fair," David pointed out, "but it's the natural order of things. Darwin proved that the strongest and fittest of the species tend to be the most successful, and Paul Slater is a superb physical specimen. Every female who comes in contact with him, I've noticed, has a distinct propensity to exhibit preening behavior."

  My mother heard this last comment with some amusement. "My goodness," she said mildly. "And you, Susie? Does Paul Slater cause you to exhibit preening behavior?"

  "Hardly," I said.

  Brad burped again. This time when he did it, he said, "Liar."

  I glared at him. "Brad," I said. "I do not like Paul Slater."

  "That's not what it looked like to me," Brad said, "when I saw the two of you in the breezeway this morning."

  "Wrong," I said hotly. "You could not be more wrong."

  "Oh," Brad said. "Give it up, Suze. There was definite preenage going on. Unless you just had so much mousse in your hair that your fingers got stuck in there."

  "Enough," my mother said, as I drew breath to deny this, too. "Both of you."

  "I do not like Paul Slater," I said again, just in case Brad hadn't heard me the first time. "Okay? In fact, I hate him."

  My mother looked aggrieved. "Susie," she said, "I'm surprised at you. It's wrong to say you hate anyone. And how could you hate the poor boy already? You only just met him today."

  "She knows him from before," Brad volunteered. "From over the summer at Pebble Beach."

  I glared at him some more. "How do you know that?"

  "Paul told me," Brad said with a shrug.

  Feeling a sense of dread - it would be just like Paul to spill the whole mediator thing to my family just to mess with me - I asked, trying to sound casual, "Oh, yeah? What else did he tell you?"

  "Just that," Brad said. Then his tone grew sarcastic. "Much as it might come as a surprise to you, Suze, people do have other stuff to talk about besides you."

  "Brad," Andy said in a warning tone as he came out of the kitchen carrying a tray of sizzling strips of beef and another of soft, steaming tortillas. "Watch it." Then, lowering the twin trays, his gaze fastened on the empty chair beside me. "Where's Jake?"

  We all glanced blankly at one another. It hadn't even registered that my eldest stepbrother was missing. None of us knew where Jake was. But all of us knew from Andy's tone that when Jake got home, he was a dead man.

  "Maybe," my mother ventured, "he got held up in a class. You know it is only his first week of college, Andy. His schedule may not be the most regular for a while."

  "I asked him this morning," Andy said in an aggrieved tone, "if he was going to be home in time for supper, and he said he was. If he was going to be late, the least he could have done was call."

  "Maybe he's stuck in some line at registration," my mom said soothingly. "Come on, Andy. You've made a lovely meal. It would be a shame not to sit down and eat it before it gets cold."

  Andy sat down, but he didn't look at all eager to eat. "It's just," he said, in a speech we'd all heard approximately four hundred times before, "when someone goes to the trouble to prepare a nice meal, it's only polite that everybody shows up for it on time - "

  It was as he was saying this that the front door slammed, and Jakes voice sounded from the foyer: "Keep your shirt on, I'm here." Jake knew his father well.

  My mom shot Andy a look over the bowls of shredded lettuce and cheese we were passing around. The look said, See. Told you so.

  "Hey," Jake said, coming into the dining room at his usual far-less-than-brisk pace. "Sorry I'm late. Got held up at the bookstore. The lines to buy books were unbelievable."

  My mom's told-you-so look deepened.

  All Andy did was growl, "You're lucky. This time. Sit down and eat." Then, to Brad, he said, "Pass the salsa."

  Except that Jake didn't sit down and eat. Instead, he stood there, one hand in the front pocket of his jeans, the other still dangling his car keys.

  "Uh," he said. "Listen . . ."

  We all looked up at him, expecting something interesting to happen, like for Jake to say that the pizza place had messed up his schedule again, and that he couldn't stay for dinner. This generally resulted in some major fireworks from Andy.

  But instead, Jake said, "I brought a friend with me. Hope that's okay."

  Since my stepfather would rather have a thousand people crowded around our dinner table than a single one of us missing from it, he said equably, "Fine, fine. Plenty for everyone. Take another place setting from the counter."

  So Jake went to the counter to grab a plate and knife and fork, while his "friend" came slouching into view, having apparently dawdled in the living room, no doubt taken aback by the plethora of family photos my mother had plastered all over the walls there.

  Sadly, Jake's friend was not of the feminine variety, so we could not look forward to teasing him about it later. Neil Jankow, as he was introduced, was nevertheless, as David would pu
t it, an interesting specimen. He was well-groomed, which set him apart from most of Jake's surf buddies. His jeans did not sag somewhere midway down his thighs but were actually belted properly around his waist, a fact that also put him a cut above most young men his age.

  This did not mean, however, that he was a hottie. He wasn't, by any means. He was almost painfully thin, and pasty-skinned as well, and had longish blond hair. Still, I could tell my mother approved of him, since he was excruciatingly polite, calling her ma'am - as in "Thank you very much for letting me stay for dinner, ma'am" - though his implication, that my mother had prepared the meal, was somewhat sexist, since Andy was the one who had done all the cooking.

  Still, nobody seemed to take offense, and room was made for young master Neil at the table. He sat down and, following Jake's lead, began to eat. . . not very heartily but with an appreciation that seemed unfeigned. Neil, we soon learned, was in Jake's Intro to English Literature seminar. Like Jake, Neil was just entering his first year at NoCal - the local slang for Northern California State College. Like Jake, Neil was from the area. His family, in fact, lived in the valley. His father owned a number of restaurants in the area, including one or two at which I had actually eaten. Like Jake, Neil wasn't so sure what he wanted to major in, but, also like Jake, he expected to enjoy college much more than he had high school, since he'd arranged his schedule so that he didn't have a single morning class, and so could spend the a.m. hours sleeping in, or, if he happened to wake before eleven, taking advantage of a few waves over at Carmel Beach before his first class.

  By the end of the meal, I had many questions about Neil. I had a big one about one thing in particular. It was something that, I was fairly certain, hadn't bothered anyone besides me. And yet I really felt that I was owed some sort of explanation, at least. Not that I could have said anything about it. Not with so many people around.

  That was part of the problem. There were too many people around. And not just the people gathered around the dinner table, either. No, there was the guy who'd come into the room and stood there during the entire course of our meal, right behind Neil's chair, watching him in complete silence, with a baleful look on his face.

  This guy unlike Neil, was good-looking. Dark-haired and cleft-chinned, you could tell that, beneath his Dockers and black Polo, he was cut. . . he'd worked long and hard, I hadn't any doubt, to cultivate those triceps, not to mention what I guessed would be a killer set of washboard abs.

  That wasn't the only difference between this guy and Jake's friend Neil, though. There was also the little fact that Neil, to the best of my knowledge, was noticeably alive, while the guy standing behind him was, well. . . Dead.

  5

  It was so like Jake to bring home a haunted guest.

  Not that Neil appeared to know he was being haunted. He seemed perfectly oblivious of the ghostly presence behind him - as was the rest of my family, with the exception of Max. The minute Neil sat down, Max took off for the living room with a whine that caused Andy to shake his head and say, "That dog gets more neurotic every day."

  Poor Max. I so know how he felt.

  Except that unlike the dog, I couldn't slink from the dining room and go cower in another part of the house, the way I wanted to. I mean, doing so would only engender unnecessary questions.

  Besides, I'm a mediator. Dealing with the undead is kind of unavoidable for me.

  Though there are definitely times when I wished I could get out of it. Now was one of those times.

  Not that I could do anything about it. No, I was stuck at the table, trying to choke down steak fajitas while being stared at by a dead guy, a great end to my already way-less-than-perfect day.

  The dead guy, for his part, looked pretty peeved. Well, and why not? I mean, he was dead. I had no idea how he'd come to be parted with his soul, but it must have been sudden, because he didn't seem very accustomed to the whole thing yet. Whenever anybody asked to be passed something that was near him, he reached for it... only to have it swept out from underneath his ghostly fingers by one of the living at the table. This caused him to look annoyed. But most of his animosity, I noticed, seemed reserved for Neil. Every bite of fajita Jake's new friend took, every chip he dipped into his guacamole, seemed to enrage the dead guy more. His jaw muscles twitched, and his fists tightened convulsively each time Neil replied in his quiet voice, "Yes, ma'am" or "No, ma'am," to any of the many questions my mom put to him.

  Finally I couldn't stand it anymore - it was creepy, sitting there at the table with this enraged ghost that only I could see . . . and I'm used to being stared at by ghosts - so I got up and started clearing everybody's empty plates, even though it was Brad's turn to do it. He gaped at me - providing us all with a very lovely view of some chewed-up steak he still had in his mouth - but didn't say anything about it. I think he was afraid that if he did, it might snap me out of whatever delusion I was under that it was my night to do the dishes. Either that or he figured I was trying to stay in his good graces so he wouldn't tell on me about the "guy" I was entertaining nightly in my room.

  Anyway, my getting a move on with the dishes seemed to act as a signal that the meal was over, since everyone else got up and went out onto the deck to look at the new hot tub, which Andy was still showing proudly to every single person who walked through the front door, whether they asked to see it or not. It was while I was in the kitchen rinsing the plates before placing them in the dishwasher that Neil's walking shadow and I ended up alone together. He stood near enough to me - gazing through the sliding glass doors at everybody out on the deck - that I was able to reach out with a sudsy hand and tug on his shirt without anybody noticing.

  I startled him pretty badly. He swung around, his gaze furious and yet incredulous at the same time. Clearly, he hadn't been aware that I could see him.

  "Hey," I whispered to him, while everybody else was chatting about chlorine and the flan Andy had made for dessert. "You and I should talk."

  The guy looked shocked.

  "You - you can see me?" he stammered.

  "Obviously," I said.

  He blinked, then glanced out the sliding glass doors. "But they - they can't?"

  "No," I said.

  "Why?" he asked. "I mean, why you and not. . . them?"

  "Because I'm a mediator," I explained.

  He looked blank. "A what?"

  "Hang on a sec," I said, because I could see my mother suddenly coming toward the sliding glass doors from the deck.

  "Brr," she said, as she pulled the door shut behind her. "It gets cold out there when the sun starts to go down. How are you doing with those dishes, Susie? Do you need any help?"

  "Nope," I said cheerfully. "It's all good."

  "Are you sure? I thought it was Brad's turn to clear the table."

  "I don't mind," I said with a smile I hoped she didn't notice was completely forced.

  It didn't work.

  "Susie, honey," she said. "You aren't upset, are you? Over what Brad was saying about this other boy being nominated for vice president in your place?"

  "Uh," I said, with a glance at Ghost Boy, who looked pretty annoyed at the interruption. I couldn't really blame him. I guess it was kind of unprofessional of me to have a mother-daughter bonding session in the middle of a mediation. "No, not really, Mom. I'm fine with it, actually."

  I wasn't lying, either. Not being in the student government this year was going to free up a lot of time for me. Time I had no idea what I was going to do with, of course, since it didn't look as if I'd be spending any of it being lifted to any romantic heights by Jesse. Still, hope springs eternal.

  My mom continued to hover in the doorway, looking concerned.

  "Well, Susie, honey," she said, "you're going to have to replace it with some other extracurricular, you know. Colleges look for that sort of thing in their applicants. You're less than two years away from graduation. You'll be leaving us soon."

  Geez! My mom didn't even know about Jesse, and she was still d
oing all she could to keep the two of us apart, unaware that Jesse himself was taking care of that all on his own.

  "Fine, Mom," I said, eyeing Ghost Guy uncomfortably. I mean, I wasn't exactly thrilled that he was privy to all this. "I'll join the swim team. Will that make you happy? Having to drive me to five a.m. practices every day?"

  "That wasn't even very convincing, Susie," my mom said in a dry voice. "I know perfectly well you'd never join the swim team. You're too obsessed with your hair and what all those pool chemicals might do to it."

  And then she drifted off into the living room, leaving Ghost Guy and me alone in the kitchen.

  "All right," I said quietly. "Where were we?"

  The guy just shook his head. "I still can't believe you can see me," he said in a shocked voice. "I mean, you don't know ... you can't know what it's been like. It's like everywhere I go, people just look through me."

  "Yes," I said, tossing aside the dish towel I'd been using to dry my hands. "That's because you're dead. The question is, what made you that way?"

  Ghost Guy seemed taken aback by my tone. I guess it was a little curt. But then, I wasn't having the best day.

  "Are you . . ." He eyed me sort of warily. "Who did you say you were again?"

  "My name's Suze," I told him. "I'm a mediator."

  "A what?"

  "Mediator," I repeated. "It's my job to help the dead pass on to the other side . . . their next life, or whatever. What's your name, anyway?"

  Ghost Boy blinked again. "Craig," he said.

  "Okay. Well, listen, Craig. Somethings screwy, because I highly doubt the cosmos intended for you to be hanging around my kitchen as part of your whole afterlife experience. You have got to move on."

  Craig knit his dark brows, "Move on where?"

  "Well, that's for you to find out when you get there," I said. "Anyway, the big question isn't where you're going but why you haven't gotten there already."

  "You mean . . ." Craig's hazel eyes were wide. "You mean this isn't. . . it?"

  "Of course this isn't it," I said, a little amused. "You think after they die, everybody ends up at ninety-nine Pine Crest Road?"