by Meg Cabot
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 that's 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?"
7
"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.
"Not that again," he said. "Listen, Suze, I told you. . . . Well, I guess it doesn't matter what I told you. You're going to believe what you want to believe. But, seriously, you could have gotten out of there any time you wanted to."
"But Jesse couldn't have," I hissed at him. "Could he? Thanks to you."
"Well," Paul said with an uncomfortable shrug. "No. Not Jesse. But, really, Suze, don't you think you're overreacting? I mean, what's the big deal? The guy's already dead - "
"You," I said, my trembling voice giving the statement somewhat iffy conviction, "are a pig."
Then I started to stride away. I say started to because I didn't get very far before Paul's calm voice stopped me.
"Uh, Suze," Paul said. "Aren't you forgetting something?"
I turned my head to glare at him. "Oh, you mean, did I forget to tell you not to speak to me again? Yes."
"No," Paul said with a wry smile. "Aren't those your shoes under there?" He pointed down at my Jimmy Choos, without which I'd been about to stalk from the room. Like Sister Ernestine wouldn't have had too big a coronary if she'd caught me wandering around school in my bare feet.
"Oh," I said, mad that my dramatic exit had been spoiled. "Yeah." I went back to my desk so I could jam my feet into my mules.
"Before you go, Cinderella," Paul said, still smiling, "you might also want to take this." He held out my trig homework. I could tell with a single glance that he'd finished it, neatly and, I could only assume, correctly.
"Thanks," I said, taking the notebook from him, feeling more and more sheepish with every passing second. I mean, why, exactly, was I always flying off the handle with this guy? Yeah, he'd tried to kill me - and Jesse - once. At least, I thought he had. But he kept saying I was wrong. What if I was wrong? What if Paul wasn't the monster I'd always thought him? What if he was . . .
What if he was just like me?
"About this Craig guy," Paul added.
"Paul." I sank down into the chair beside him. I had felt the gaze of Mrs. Tarentino, the teacher assigned to supervise the computer lab, boring into me. Popping in and out of your chair in the lab is not smiled upon, unless you are going back and forth from the printer.
But that wasn't the only reason I sat down again. I'll admit that. I was curious, too. Curious over what he'd say next. And that curiosity was almost stronger than my fear.
"Seriously," I said. "Thanks. But I do not need your help."
"I think you do," Paul said. "What's this Craig guy want, anyway?"
"He wants what all ghosts want," I said tiredly. "To be alive again."
"Well, of course," Paul said. "I mean, what's he want besides that?"
"I don't know yet," I said with a shrug. "He's got this thing with his little brother . . . thinks he should have been the one to die, not him. Jesse thinks - " I stopped talking, suddenly aware that Jesse was the last person I wanted to bring up in front of Paul.
Paul looked only politely interested, however. "Jesse thinks what?"
It was, I saw, too late to keep Jesse out of it. I sighed and said, "Jesse thinks Craig's going to try to kill his brother. You know. Out of revenge."
"Which, will, of course," Paul said, not looking in the least surprised, "get him exactly nowhere. When will they ever learn? Now, if he wanted to be his brother, that would be a different story."
"Be his brother?" I looked at him curiously. "What do you mean?"
"You know," Paul said with a shrug. "Soul transference. Take over his brother's body."
This was a little too much for a Tuesday morning. I mean, I had already had a pretty crummy night's sleep thanks to this guy. Then, to hear something like this come out of his mouth . . . well, let's just say I was not at my sharpest, so what happened next can hardly be described as my fault.
"Take over his brother's body?" I echoed. I had lowered my books until they rested in my lap. Now I reached out and gripped the arms of my computer chair, my nails sinking into the cheap foam-padded armrests. "What are you talking about?"
One of Paul's dark eyebrows hiked up. "Doesn't sound familiar, eh? What has the good father been teaching you, I wonder? Not much, from the sound of things."
"What are you talking about?" I demanded. "How can someone take over someone else's body?"
"I told you," Paul said, leaning back in his chair and folding his hands behind his head, "that there was a lot you didn't know about being a mediator. And a lot more that I could teach you, if you'd just give me the chance."
I stared at him. I really had no idea what he was talking about with this body-swapping thing. It sounded like something from the Sci-Fi channel. And I wasn't sure if Paul was just feeding me a line, something, anything, to get me to do what he wanted.
But what if he wasn't? What if there was seriously a way to -
I wanted to know. My God, I wanted to know more than I had ever wanted anything in my life.
"All right," I said, feeling the sweat that had broken out beneath my palms, making the chair's armrests slick with moisture. But I didn't care. My heart was in my throat, and still I didn't care. "All right. I'll come over to your place after school. But only if you'll tell me about. . . about that."
Something flashed through Paul's blue eyes. Just a gleam, and I saw it only for a moment before it was gone again. It was something animallike, almost feral. I couldn't say just what, exactly, it had been.
All I knew was that the next minute, Paul was smiling at me -
smiling, not grinning.
"Fine," he said. "Ill pick you up by the main gate at three. Be there on time, or I'll leave without you."
8
I wasn't, of course, going to meet him. I mean, despite ample evidence to the contrary, I am not stupid. I have, in the past, met various people at various appointed times and found myself, hours later, either tied to a chair, thrust into a parallel dimension, forced to don one-piece swimsuits, or being otherwise cruelly mistreated. I was not going to meet Paul Slater after school. I was so not.
And then I did anyway.
Well, what else was I supposed to do? The lure was just too great. I mean, actual documented evidence about mediators? Something about people being able to take over other peoples bodies? All the nightmares about long, fog-enshrouded hallways in the world were not going to keep me from finding out the truth at last about what I was and what I could do. I had spent too many years wondering just that to allow an opportunity like this to slip from my fingers. I had never, unlike Father Dominic, been able merely to accept the cards I'd been dealt. ... I wanted to know why they'd been dealt to me and how. I had to know.
And if, in order to find out, I had to spend time with someone who regularly haunted my sleep, so be it. It was worth the sacrifice.
Or I hoped it would be, anyway.
Adam and CeeCee weren't too happy about it, of course. As the last class of the day let out, they met me in the hallway - I was visibly limping, thanks to my shoes, but CeeCee didn't notice. She was too busy consulting the list she'd drawn up in bio.
"All right," she said. "We've got to head on over to Safeway for markers, glitter, glue, and poster board. Adam, does your mom still have those dowels in the garage from when she went on that Amish chair-making kick? Because we could use them for the Vote for Suze placards."
"Uh," I said, hobbling along beside them. "You guys."
"Suze, can we take all the stuff over to your place to assemble it? I'd say we could take it to my place, but you know my sisters. They'll probably roller-skate over it or whatever."