Haunted (8 page)

Too bad his interest in me is apparently completely platonic. Maybe if I’d been a better kisser…But come on, it’s not like I’ve had a lot of opportunity to practice. Guys—normal guys—don’t exactly come flocking to my door. Not that I am a dog or anything. In fact, I think I look quite passable, when fully made up with my hair nicely blown out. It is just that it is a bit hard to have a social life when you are constantly being solicited by the dead.

“I think you should call him,” Jesse said, thrusting the phone at me again. “I am telling you,
querida
. There is more to this Craig than meets the eye.”

I blinked, but not because of what Jesse had said about Craig. No, it was because of what he’d called me.
Querida
. He hadn’t called me that, not once, since that day we’d kissed. I had, in fact, missed hearing the word from his lips so much that I had actually gotten curious about what it meant and looked it up in Brad’s Spanish dictionary.

“Dearest one.” That is what
querida
meant. “Dearest one,” or “sweetheart.”

Which isn’t exactly what you call someone for whom you feel mere friendship.

I hoped.

I didn’t let on, however, that I knew what the word meant, any more than I let on that I’d noticed he’d allowed it to slip out.

“You’re overreacting, Jesse,” I said. “Craig’s not going to do anything to his brother. He loves the guy. He just doesn’t seem to have remembered that yet. And, besides, even if he didn’t—even if he did have homicidal intentions toward Neil—what makes you think all of a sudden that I can’t handle it? I mean, come on, Jesse. It’s not like I’m unaccustomed to bloodthirsty ghosts.”

Jesse put the phone down so hard that I thought he’d cracked the plastic cradle.

“That was before,” he said shortly.

I stared at him. It had grown dark outside, and the only light on in my room was the little one on my dressing table. In its golden glow, Jesse looked even more otherwordly than usual.

“Before what?” I demanded.

Except that I knew. I knew.

“Before
he
came,” Jesse said, with a certain amount of bitter emphasis on the pronoun. “And don’t try to deny it, Susannah. You have not slept a full night since. I have seen you tossing and turning. You cry out in your sleep sometimes.”

I didn’t have to ask who
he
was. I knew. We both knew.

“That’s nothing,” I said, even though of course it wasn’t. It was something. It was definitely something. Just not what Jesse apparently thought it was. “I mean, I’m not saying I wasn’t scared when you and I thought we were trapped in that…place. And, yeah, I have nightmares about it, sometimes. But I’ll get over it, Jesse. I’m getting over it.”

“You aren’t invulnerable, Susannah,” Jesse said with a frown. “However much you might think differently.”

I was more than a little surprised that he’d noticed. In fact, I’d begun to wonder if perhaps it was because I didn’t act vulnerable—or, okay,

feminine—enough that he’d only grabbed and kissed me that once, and never tried to do it again.

Except of course as soon as he accused me of being vulnerable, I had to go and deny it was true.

“I’m fine,” I insisted. No point in mentioning to him that, in fact, I was far from fine…that the mere sight of Paul Slater had nearly caused me to have a heart attack. “I told you. I’m over it, Jesse. And even if I wasn’t, it’s not like it’s going to keep me from helping Craig. Or Neil, really.”

But it was like he wasn’t even listening.

“Let Father Dominic take this one,” Jesse said. He nodded toward the door through which Craig had just walked—literally. “You aren’t ready yet. It’s too soon.”

Now I wished I had told him about Paul…told him nonchalantly, as if it were nothing, to prove to him that’s that what it was to me…nothing.

Except of course it wasn’t. And it never would be.

“Your solicitude,” I said sarcastically in order to hide my discomfort over the whole thing—the fact that I was lying to him, not just about Paul but about myself as well—“is appreciated but misplaced. I can handle Craig Jankow, Jesse.”

He frowned again. But this time, I could see, he really was annoyed. Were we ever to actually date, I knew it would take a lot of
Oprah
viewing before Jesse learned to get over his nineteenth-century machismo
.

“I will go,” he said threateningly, his dark eyes looking black as onyx in the light from my dressing table, “and tell Father Dominic myself.”

“Fine,” I said. “Be my guest.”

Which wasn’t what I’d wanted to say, of course. What I’d wanted to say was,
Why?
Why can’t we be together, Jesse? I know you want to. Don’t even bother denying it. I felt it when you kissed me. I may not have a lot of experience in that department, but I know I’m not wrong about that. You like me, at least a little. So what’s the deal? Why have you been giving me the cold shoulder ever since? WHY?

Whatever the reason might have been, Jesse wasn’t revealing it just then. Instead, he set his jaw, and went, “Fine, I will.”

“Go ahead,” I shot back.

A second later, he was gone.
Poof
, just like that.

Well, who needed him, anyway?

All right. I did. I admit it.

But I tried resolutely to put him out of my head. I concentrated instead on my trig homework.

I was still concentrating on it when fourth period—computer lab, for me—rolled around the next day. I am telling you, there is nothing more devastating to a girl’s ability to study than a handsome ghost who thinks he knows everything.

I was, of course, supposed to be working on a five-hundred-word essay on the Civil War, which had been punitively assigned to the entire eleventh grade by our advisor, Mr. Walden, who had not appreciated the behavior of a few of us during that morning’s nominations for student government positions.

In particular, Mr. Walden had not appreciated my behavior when, after Kelly’s nomination of Paul for vice president had been seconded and passed, CeeCee had raised her hand and nominated me for vice president as well.

“Ow,” CeeCee had cried, when I’d kicked her, hard, beneath her desk. “What is
wrong
with you?”

“I don’t want to be vice president,” I’d hissed at her. “Put your arm down.”

This had resulted in a good deal of snickering, which had not died down until Mr. Walden, never the world’s most patient instructor, threw a piece of chalk at the classroom door and told us we’d all better brush up on our American history—five hundred words on the Battle of Gettysburg, to be exact.

But my objection came too late. CeeCee’s nomination of me was seconded by Adam, and passed a second later, despite my protests. I was now running for vice president of the junior class—CeeCee was my campaign manager, Adam, whose grandfather had left him a healthy trust fund, the main financial contributor to my bid for election—against the new guy, Paul Slater, whose aw-shucks manner and stunning good looks had already won him almost every female vote in the class.

Not that I cared. I didn’t want to be VP anyway. I had enough on my hands, what with the mediator thing and trigonometry and my dead would-be boyfriend. I did not need to have to worry about political mudslinging on top of all that.

It hadn’t been a good morning. The nominations had been bad enough; Mr. Walden’s essay put a nice cap on it.

And then, of course, there was Paul. He’d winked suggestively to me in homeroom, as if to say hello.

As if all of that hadn’t been enough, I had foolishly chosen to wear a brand-new pair of Jimmy Choo mules to school, purchased at a fraction of their normal retail cost at an outlet over the summer. They were gorgeous, and they went perfectly with the Calvin Klein black denim skirt I had paired with a hot pink scoop-neck top.

But of course they were killing me. I already had raw, painful blisters around the bases of all my toes, and the Band-Aids the nurse had given me to cover them so that I could at least hobble between classes were not exactly doing the job. My feet felt like they were about to fall off. If I’d known where Jimmy Choo lived, I would have hobbled right up to his front door and popped him one in the eye.

So I was sitting there in the computer lab, my mules kicked off and my toes throbbing painfully, working on my trig homework when I should have been working on my essay, when a voice I had come to know as well as my own startled me by saying, close to my ear, “Miss me, Suze?”

“Leave me alone,” I said more calmly than I felt.

“Aw, come on, Simon,” Paul said, reaching for a nearby chair, swinging it around, and then straddling it. “Admit it. You don’t hate me half as much as you pretend to.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” I said. I tapped my pencil against my notebook with what I hoped he would take to be irritation but which was, in fact, nervous tension. “Listen, Paul, I have a lot of work to do—”

He plucked the notebook out from beneath my hands. “Who’s Craig Jankow?”

Startled, I realized I had doodled the name in the margin of my worksheet.

“Nobody,” I said.

“Oh, that’s good,” Paul said. “I thought maybe he’d gone and replaced me in your affections. Does Jesse know? About this Craig guy, I mean?”

I glared at him, hoping he’d mistake my fear for anger and go away. He didn’t seem to be getting the message, though. I hoped he couldn’t see how rapidly my pulse was beating in my throat…or that if he did, he didn’t mistake it for something it was not. Paul was not unaware of his good looks, unfortunately. He had on black jeans that fit him in all the right places and an olive-green short-sleeved Polo shirt. It brought out the deepness of his golf-and-tennis tan. I could see the other girls in the computer lab—Debbie Mancuso, for one—peeking at Paul speculatively, then looking quickly back at their computer monitors, trying to act as if they hadn’t been trying to scope him out a minute before.

They were probably seething with jealousy that he was talking to me, of all people—the only girl in their class who didn’t let Kelly Prescott tell her what to do and who didn’t consider Brad Ackerman a hottie.

Little did they know how much I would have appreciated it if Paul Slater hadn’t chosen to grace me with his company.

“Craig,” I whispered, just in case anyone was listening, “happens to be dead.”

“So?” Paul grinned at me. “I thought that was how you liked ’em.”

“You”—I tried to snatch the notebook back from him, but he held it out of my reach—“are insufferable.”

He looked meditative as he studied the problems on my worksheet. “There’s something to be said for having a dead boyfriend, I suppose,” he mused. “I mean, you don’t have to worry about introducing him to your parents, since they can’t see him, anyway….”

“Craig’s not my boyfriend,” I hissed at him, angry at finding myself in a situation where I was explaining anything to Paul Slater. “I’m trying to help him. He showed up at my house yesterday—”

“Oh, God.” Paul rolled his expressive blue eyes. “Not another one of those charity cases you and the good father are always taking on.”

I said with some indignation, “Helping lost souls find their way is my job, after all.”

“Who says?” Paul wanted to know.

I blinked at him. “Well—it just—it just
is
,” I stammered. “I mean, what else am I supposed to do?”

Paul plucked a pencil from a nearby desk and began swiftly and neatly to solve the problems on my worksheet. “I wonder. It doesn’t seem fair to me that we were just handed this mediator thing at birth without so much as a contract or list of employee benefits. I mean, I never signed up for this mediator thing. Did you?”

“Of course not,” I said, as if this was not something about which I complained, in almost those exact words, every time I saw Father Dominic.

“And how do you know what your job responsibilities even consist of?” Paul asked. “Yeah, you think you’re supposed to help the dead move on to their final destination, because once you do, they stop bugging you, and you can get on with your life again. But I’ve got a question for you. Who told you it was up to you? Who told you how it was done, even?”

I blinked at him. No one had told me that, actually. Well, my dad had, sort of. And later, a certain psychic my best friend, Gina, had taken me to back home. And then Father Dom, of course…

“Right,” Paul said, observing from my expression apparently that I didn’t have a real straightforward answer for him. “Nobody told you. But what if I said I knew? What if I told you I’d found something—something that dated back to the first days of actual written communication—that exactly described mediators, though that wasn’t what we were called back then, and their real purpose, not to mention techniques?”

I continued to blink at him. He sounded so…well, convincing. And he certainly looked sincere.

“If you really had something like that,” I said hesitantly, “I guess I’d say…show me.”

“Fine,” Paul said, looking pleased. “Come over to my place after school today, and I will.”

I was up and out of my chair so fast, I practically tipped it over.

“No,” I said, gathering up my books and clutching them in front of my wildly beating heart as if both to hide and protect it. “
No way
.”

Paul regarded me from where he sat, not seeming too surprised by my reaction.

“Hmmm,” he said. “I thought as much. You want to know but not enough to risk your reputation.”

“It isn’t my reputation I’m worried about,” I informed him, managing to make my tone more acid than shaken. “It’s my life. You tried to kill me once, remember?”

I said these words a little too loudly and noticed several people glance at me curiously over the tops of the computer monitors.

Paul, however, just looked bored.