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  "You know," I said as I worked the combination to my locker door, "the Gap sells the same old stuff all over the country."

  "Hello," Gina said. "Who cares about the Gap? I'm talking about hotties."

  "Oh." I got rid of my world civ book, and fished out my bio, which I had next. "Sorry. I forgot."

  "That's the problem with you, Simon," Gina said, leaning against the locker next to mine. "You don't think enough about guys."

  I slammed my locker door closed. "I think a lot about guys."

  "No, you don't." Gina looked at Cee Cee. "Has she even been out with one since she got here?"

  "Sure, she has," Cee Cee said. "Bryce Martinson."

  "No," I said.

  Cee Cee looked up at me. She was a little shorter than me. "What do you mean, no?"

  "Bryce and I never actually went out," I explained, a little uncomfortably. "You remember, he broke his collar bone - "

  "Oh, yeah," Cee Cee said. "In that freak accident with the crucifix. And then he transferred to another school."

  Yeah, because that freak accident hadn't been an accident at all: the ghost of his dead girlfriend had dropped that crucifix on him, in a totally unfair effort to keep me from going out with him.

  Which unfortunately had worked.

  Then Cee Cee said, brightly, "But you definitely went out with Tad Beaumont. I saw you two together at the Coffee Clutch."

  Gina, excited, asked, "Really? Simon went out with a guy? Describe."

  Cee Cee frowned. "Gee," she said. "It didn't end up lasting very long, did it, Suze? There was some accident with his uncle, or something, and Tad had to go live with relatives in San Francisco."

  Translation: After I'd stopped Tad's uncle, a psychotic serial killer, from murdering us both, Tad moved away with his father.

  That's gratitude for you, huh?

  "Gosh," Cee Cee said, thoughtfully. "Bad things seem to happen to the guys you go out with, huh, Suze?"

  Suddenly feeling a little depressed, I said, "Not all of them," thinking of Jesse. Then I remembered that Jesse:

  (a) was dead, so only I could see him - hardly good boyfriend material - and

  (b) had never actually asked me out, so you couldn't exactly say we were dating.

  It was right about then that something whizzed by us so fast, it was only a khaki blur, followed by the faintest trace of slightly familiar-smelling men's cologne. I looked around and saw that the blur had been Dopey. He was holding Michael Meducci in a headlock while Scott Turner shoved a finger in his face and snarled, "You’re writing that essay for me, Meducci. Got that? A thousand words on Gettysburg by tomorrow morning. And don't forget to doublespace it."

  I don't know what came over me. Sometimes I am simply seized by impulses over which I have not the slightest control.

  But suddenly I'd shoved my books at Gina and stalked over to where my stepbrother stood. A second later I held a pinchful of the short hairs at the back of his neck.

  "Let him go," I said, twisting the tiny hairs hard. This method of torture, I'd discovered recently, was much more effective than my former technique of punching Dopey in the gut. He had, over the past few weeks, greatly built up the muscles in his abdominal wall, undoubtedly as a defense against just this sort of occasion.

  The only way he could keep me from grabbing him by the short hairs, however, was to shave his head, and this had apparently not occurred to him.

  Dopey, opening his mouth to let out a wail, released Michael right away. Michael staggered away, scurrying to pick up the books he'd dropped.

  "Suze," Dopey cried, "let go of me!"

  "Yeah," Scott said. "This doesn't concern you, Simon."

  "Oh, yes, it does," I said. "Everything that happens at this school concerns me. Want to know why?"

  Dopey already knew the answer. I had drilled it into him on several previous occasions.

  "Because you're the vice president," he said.

  "Now let me freakin' go, or I swear I'll tell Dad - "

  I let him go, but only because Sister Ernestine showed up. The novice had apparently run for her. It's become official Mission Academy policy to send for backup whenever fights break out between Dopey and me.

  "Is there a problem, Miss Simon?"

  Sister Ernestine, the vice principal, is a very large woman, who wears an enormous cross between her equally sizeable breasts. She has an uncanny ability to evoke terror wherever she goes, merely by frowning. It is a talent I admire and hope to emulate someday.

  "No, Sister," I said.

  Sister Ernestine turned her attention toward Dopey. "Mr. Ackerman? Problem?"

  Sullenly, Dopey massaged the back of his neck. "No, Sister," he said.

  "Good," Sister Ernestine said. "I'm glad the two of you are finally getting along so nicely. Such sibling affection is an inspiration to us all. Now hurry along to class, please."

  I turned and joined Cee Cee and Gina, who'd stood watching the whole thing.

  "Jesus, Simon," Gina said with disgust as we headed into the bio lab. "No wonder the guys around here don't like you."

  CHAPTER 5

  "Girl," Gina said. "That is so you."

  Cee Cee looked down at the outfit Gina had talked her into purchasing, then had goaded Cee Cee into putting on for our inspection.

  "I don't know," she said, dubiously.

  "It's you," Gina said, again. "I'm telling you. It's so you. Tell her, Suze."

  "It's pretty flicking," I said truthfully. Gina had the touch. She had turned Cee Cee from fashion challenged to fashion plate.

  "But you won't be able to wear it to school," I couldn't help pointing out. "It's too short." I'd learned the hard way that the Mission Academy's dress code, while fairly lenient, did not condone miniskirts under any circumstances. And I highly doubted Sister Ernestine would approve of Cee Cee's new, navel-revealing faux-fur-trimmed sweater, either.

  "Where am I going to wear it, then?" Cee Cee wanted to know.

  "Church," I answered with a shrug.

  Cee Cee gave me a very sarcastic look. I said, "Oh, all right. Well, you can definitely wear it to the Coffee Clutch. And to parties."

  Cee Cee's gaze, behind the violet lenses of her glasses, was tolerant. "I don't get invited to parties, Suze," she reminded me.

  "You can always wear it to my house," Adam offered helpfully. The startled look Cee Cee threw him pretty much assured me that however much she'd spent on the outfit - and it had to have cost several months' allowance, at least - it had been worth it: Cee Cee had had a secret crush on Adam McTavish for as long as I'd known her, and probably much longer than that.

  "All right, Simon," Gina said, lowering herself into one of the hard plastic chairs that littered the food court. "What were you up to while I was coordinating Ms. Webb's spring wardrobe?"

  I held up my bag from Music Town. "I bought a CD," I said lamely.

  Gina, appalled, echoed, "A what?"

  "A CD." I hadn't even wanted to buy one, but sent out into the wilds of the mall with instructions to return with a new purchase, I had panicked, and headed into the first store I saw.

  "You know malls give me sensory overload," I said, by way of explanation.

  Gina shook her head at me, her copper curls swaying. "You can't really get mad at her," she said to Adam. "She's just so cute."

  Adam shifted his attention from Cee Cee's sassy new outfit to me. "Yeah," he said. "She is." Then his gaze slipped past me, and his eyes widened. "But here come some people I'm not sure will agree."

  I turned my head and saw Sleepy and Dopey sauntering toward us. The mall was like Dopey's second home, but what Sleepy was doing here, I could not imagine. All of his free time, between school and delivering pizzas - he was saving up for a Camaro - was usually spent surfing. Or sleeping.

  Then he slumped down into a chair near Gina's, and said, in a voice I'd never heard him use before, "Hey, I heard you were here."

  Suddenly all became clear.

  "Hey," I said to Cee Cee, w
ho was still gazing rapturously in Adam's direction. She was trying to figure out, I could tell, just what precisely he'd meant when he'd said she could wear her new outfit to his house. Had he been sexually harassing her - as she clearly hoped - or merely making conversation?

  "Yeah?" Cee Cee asked. She didn't even bother to turn her head in my direction.

  I grimaced. I could see I was all alone on this one.

  "You got your mom's present yet?" I demanded.

  Cee Cee said, faintly, "No."

  "Good." I dropped my CD into her lap. "Hang onto this. I'll go get her Oprah's latest pick of the month. How about that?"

  "That sounds great," Cee Cee said, still without so much as a glance at me, although she did wave a twenty in the air.

  Rolling my eyes, I snatched the bill, then stomped off before I burst a blood vessel from screaming as hard as I could. You'd have screamed, too, if you'd seen what I had as I left the food court, which was Dopey trying desperately to squeeze a chair in between Sleepy and Gina.

  I don't get it. I really don't. I mean, I know I probably come off as insensitive and maybe even a little weird, what with the mediator thing, but deep down, I am really a caring person. I am very fair minded and intelligent, and sometimes I'm even funny. And I know I'm not a dog. I mean, I fully blow-dry my hair every morning, and I have been told on more than one occasion (okay, by my mom, but it still counts) that my eyes are like emeralds. So what gives? How come Gina has two guys vying for her attention, while I can't even get one? I mean, even dead guys don't seem to like me so much, and I don't think they have a whole lot of options.

  I was still mulling over this in the bookstore as I stood in line for the cashier, the book for Cee Cee's mother in my hands. That was when something brushed my shoulder. I turned around and found myself staring at Michael Meducci.

  "Um," he said. He was holding a book on computer programming. He looked, in the fluorescent lights of the bookstore, pastier than ever. "Hi." He touched his glasses nervously, as if to assure himself they were still there. "I thought that was you."

  I said, "Hi, Michael," and moved up a space in the line.

  Michael moved up with me. "Oh," he said. "You know my name." He sounded pleased.

  I didn't point out that up until that day, I hadn't. I just said, "Yeah," and smiled.

  Maybe the smile was a mistake. Because Michael stepped a little closer, and gushed, "I just wanted to say thanks. You know. For what you did to your, um, stepbrother today. You know. To make him let me go."

  "Yeah," I said again. "Well, don't worry about it."

  "No, I mean it. Nobody has ever done anything like that for me - I mean, before you came to school at the Mission, no one ever stood up to Brad Ackerman. He got away with everything. With murder, practically."

  "Well," I said. "Not anymore."

  "No," Michael said with a nervous laugh. "No, not anymore."

  The person ahead of me stepped up to the cashier, and I moved into her place. Michael moved, too, only he went a little too far, and ended up colliding with me. He said, "Oh, I'm sorry," and backed up.

  "That's okay," I said. I began to wish, even if it had meant risking a brain hemorrhage, that I'd stayed with Gina.

  "Your hair," Michael said in a soft voice, "smells really good."

  Oh, my God. I thought I was going to have an aneurism right there in line. Your hair smells really good? Your hair smells really good? Who did he think he was? James Bond? You don't tell someone their hair smells good. Not in a mall.

  Fortunately, the cashier yelled, "Next," and I hurried up to pay for my purchase, thinking that by the time I turned around again, Michael would be gone.

  Wrong. So wrong.

  Not only was he still there, but it turned out he already owned the book on computer programming - he was just carrying it around - so he didn't even have to make a stop at the cashier's counter … which was where I'd planned on ditching him.

  No. Oh, no. Instead, he followed me right out of the store.

  Okay, I told myself. The guy's sister is in a coma. She went to a pool party, and ended up on life support. That's gotta screw a person up. And what about the car accident? The guy was just in a horrifying car accident. It's entirely possible that he may have killed four people. Four people! Not on purpose, of course. But four people, dead, while you yourself escaped perfectly unscathed. That and the comatose sister … well, that's gotta give a guy issues, right?

  So cut him a little slack. Be a little nice to him.

  The trouble was that I had already been a little nice to him, and look what had happened: he was practically stalking me.

  Michael followed me right into Victoria's Secret, where I'd instinctively headed, thinking no boy would follow a girl into a place where bras were on such prominent display. Boy, was I ever wrong.

  "So, what'd you think," Michael wanted to know as I stood there fingering a cheetah print number in rayon, "about our group report? Do you agree with your, uh, friend that Kelly's argument was fatuous?"

  Fatuous? What sort of word was that?

  A saleslady came up to us before I had a chance to reply. "Hello," she said, brightly. "Have you noticed our sales table? Buy three pairs of panties, get a fourth pair free."

  I couldn't believe she'd said the word panties in front of Michael. And I couldn't believe that Michael just kept standing there smiling! I couldn't even say the word panties in front of my mother! I whirled around and headed out of the store.

  "I don't normally come to the mall," Michael was saying. He was sticking to me like a leech. "But when I heard you were going to be here, well, I thought I'd come over and see what it's all about. Do you come here a lot?"

  I was trying to head in the general direction of the food court, in the vague hope that I might be able to ditch Michael in the throng in front of Chick Fill-A. It was tough going, though. For one thing, it looked as if just about every kid in the peninsula had decided to go to the mall after school. And for another, the mall had had one of those events, you know, that malls are always having. This one had been some kind of screwed-up mardi gras, with floats and gold masks and necklaces and all. I guess it had been a success, since they'd left a lot of the stuff up, like these big shiny purple and gold puppets. Bigger than life-size, the puppets were suspended from the mall's glass atrium ceiling. Some of them were fifteen or twenty feet long. Their appendages dangled down in what I suppose was intended to be a whimsical manner, but in some cases made it hard to maneuver through the crowds.

  "No," I said in reply to Michael's question. "I try never to come here. I hate it."

  Michael brightened. "Really?" he gushed, as a wave of middle schoolers poured around him. "Me, too! Wow, that's really a coincidence. You know, there aren't a whole lot of people our age who dislike places like this. Man is a social animal, you know, and as such is usually drawn toward areas of congregation. It's really an indication of some biological dysfunction that you and I aren't enjoying ourselves."

  It occurred to me that my youngest stepbrother, Doc, and Michael Meducci had a lot in common.

  It also occurred to me that pointing out to a girl that she might be suffering from a biological dysfunction was not exactly the way to win her heart.

  "Maybe," Michael said, as we dodged a large puppet hand dangling down from an insanely grinning puppet head some fifteen feet above us, "you and I could go somewhere a bit quieter. I have my mom's car. We could go get coffee or something, in town, if you want - "

  That's when I heard it. A familiar giggle.

  Don't ask me how I could have heard it over the chatter of the people all around us, and the piped-in mall Muzak, and the screaming of some kid whose mother wouldn't let him have any ice cream. I just heard it, is all.

  Laughter. The same laughter I'd heard the day before at Jimmy's, right before I'd spotted the ghosts of those four dead kids.

  And then the next thing I knew, there was a loud snap - the kind of sound a rubber band that's been stretched too tig
htly makes when it breaks. I yelled, "Look out!" and tackled Michael Meducci, knocking him to the ground.

  Good thing I did, too. Because a second later, exactly where we'd been standing, crashed a giant grinning puppet head.

  When the dust settled, I lifted my face from Michael Meducci's shirtfront and stared at the thing. It wasn't made of papier-mache, like I'd thought. It was made of plaster. Bits of plaster were everywhere; clouds of it were still floating around, making me cough. Chunks of it had been wrenched from the puppet's face, so that, while it was still leering at me, it was doing so with only one eye and a toothless smile.

  For half a beat, there was no sound whatsoever, except for my coughing and Michael's unsteady breathing.

  Then a woman screamed.

  All hell broke loose after that. People fell over themselves in an effort to get out from under the puppets overhead, as if all of them were going to come crashing down at once.

  I guess I couldn't exactly blame them. The thing had to have weighed a couple hundred pounds, at least. If it had landed on Michael, it would have killed, or at least badly hurt, him. There was no doubt in my mind about that.

  Just as there was no doubt, even before I spotted him, who owned the jeering voice that drawled a second later, "Well, look what we have here. Isn't this cozy?"

  I looked up and saw that Dopey - along with a breathless Gina, Cee Cee, Adam, and Sleepy - had all hurried over.

  I didn't even realize I was still lying on top of Michael until Sleepy reached down and pulled me off.

  "Why is it," my stepbrother asked in a bored voice, "that you can't be left alone for five minutes without something collapsing on top of you?"

  I glared at him as I stumbled to my feet. I have to say, I really can't wait until Sleepy goes away to college.

  "Hey," Sleepy said, reaching down to give Michael's cheeks a couple of slaps, I suppose in some misguided attempt to bring him around, though I doubt this is a method espoused by EMS. Michael's eyes were closed, and even though I could see he was breathing, he didn't look good.

  The slaps worked, though. Michael's eyelids fluttered open.