by Meg Cabot
"Guys," I said. "Look. I appreciate this and all. I really do. But I can't come with you. I've already got plans."
Adam and CeeCee exchanged glances.
"Oh?" CeeCee said. "Meeting the mysterious Jesse, are we?"
"Uh," I said. "Not exactly - "
At that moment, Paul came past us in the hall. He said to me, noticing my limp, "Let me just pull the car around to the side door. That way you won't have to walk to the gate," and breezed on by.
Adam gave me a scandalized look. "Fraternizing with the enemy!" he cried. "For shame, wench!"
CeeCee looked equally stunned. "You're going out with him?" She shook her head so that her stick-straight white-blond hair shimmered. "What about Jesse?"
"I'm not going out with him," I said uncomfortably. "We're just . . . working on a project together."
"What project?" CeeCee's eyes, behind the lenses of her glasses, narrowed. "For what class?"
"It's ..." I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, hoping to find some relief from my cruel shoes, all to no avail. "It's not for school, really. It's more for ... for ... church."
Even as the word came out of my mouth, I knew I'd made a mistake. CeeCee wouldn't mind being left alone with Adam - in fact, she'd probably love it - but she wasn't about to let me off the hook without a good reason.
"Church?" CeeCee looked mad. "You're Jewish, Suze, in case I need to remind you."
"Well, not technically, really," I said. "I mean, my dad was, but my mom isn't - " A car horn sounded just beyond the ornately scrolled gate we were standing behind. "Oops, that's Paul. Gotta go, sorry."
Then, moving pretty quickly for a girl who felt shooting stabs of pain go up her legs with every step, I hightailed it out to Paul's convertible and slid into the passenger seat with a sigh of relief at being in a seated position once more and a feeling that, at last, I was going to find out a thing or two about who - or what - I really was. . . .
But I had an equally strong feeling that I wasn't going to like what I found out. In fact, a part of me was wondering whether or not I was making the worst mistake of my life.
It didn't help matters much that Paul, with his dark sunglasses and easy smile, looked like a movie star. Really, how could I have had so many nightmares about this guy who was so clearly any normal girl's dream date? I didn't miss the envious glances that were being shot in my direction from around the parking lot.
"Did I happen to mention," Paul asked, as I fastened my seat belt, "that I think those shoes are flickin'?"
I swallowed. I didn't even know what flicking meant. I could only assume from his tone that it meant something good.
Did I really want to do this? Was it worth it?
The answer came from deep within ... so deep, I realized that I had known it all along: Yes. Oh, yes.
"Just drive," I said, my voice coming out huskier than usual, because I was trying not to let my nervousness show.
And so he did.
The house he drove me to was an impressive two-storied structure built into the side of a cliff right off Carmel Beach. It was made almost entirely of glass in order to take advantage of its ocean and sunset views.
Paul seemed to notice that I was impressed, since he said, "It's my grandfather's place. He wanted a little place on the beach to retire to."
"Right," I said, swallowing hard. Grandpa Slaters "little" place on the beach had to have cost a cool five million or so. "And he doesn't mind having a roommate all of a sudden?"
"Are you kidding?" Paul smirked as he parked his car in one of the spaces of the house's four-car garage. "He barely knows I'm here. The guy's gorked out on his meds most of the time."
"Paul," I said uncomfortably.
"What?" Paul blinked at me from behind his Ray-Bans. "I'm just stating a fact. Pops is pretty much bedridden and should be in an assisted living facility, but he put up this huge fuss when we tried to move him to one. So when I suggested I move in to kind of keep an eye on things, my dad agreed. It's a win-win situation. Pops gets to live at home - with health-care attendants to look after him, of course - and I get to attend my dream school, the Mission Academy."
I felt my face heat up, but I tried to keep my tone light.
"Oh, so going to Catholic school is your dream?" I asked sarcastically.
"It is if you're there," Paul said, just as lightly... but not quite as sarcastically.
My face promptly turned red as a cherry-dipped cone. Keeping it averted so that Paul wouldn't notice, I said primly, "I don't think this is such a good idea, after all."
"Relax, Simon," Paul drawled. "Pop's day attendant is here, in case you're, you know, suffering from any feminine misgivings about being alone in the house with me."
I followed the direction Paul was pointing. At the end of the steep circular drive sat a rusted-out Toyota Celica. I didn't say anything, but mostly only because I was kind of amazed at how easily Paul seemed to have read my mind. I had been sitting there, suffering from second thoughts about the whole thing. I had never exactly raised the issue with my parents, but I was pretty sure I wasn't allowed to go to guys' houses when their parents weren't home.
On the other hand, if I didn't in this case, I would never find out what I needed - and I was convinced by now that this was something I actually really did need - to know.
Paul slid out from behind the wheel, then walked around to my side of the car and opened the door for me.
"Coming, Suze?" he asked, when I didn't move to undo my seat belt.
"Uh," I said, looking nervously up at the big glass house. It looked disturbingly empty, despite the Toyota.
Paul seemed to read my mind again.
"Would you get off it, Suze?" he said, rolling his eyes. "Your virtue's in no danger from me. I swear 111 keep my hands to myself. This is business.
There'll be plenty of time for fun later."
I tried to smile coolly, so he wouldn't suspect that I am not accustomed to people - okay, guys - saying this sort of thing to me every day. But the truth is, of course I'm not. And it bugged me the way it made me feel when Paul did it. I mean, I did not even like this guy, but every time he said something like that - suggested that he thought I was, I don't know, special - it sent this little shiver down my spine . . . and not in a bad way.
That was the thing. It wasn't in a bad way. What was that all about? I mean, I don't even like Paul. I am fully in love with somebody else. And, yeah, Jesse is presently showing no signs of actually returning my feelings, but it's not like because of that I am suddenly going to start going out with Paul Slater ... no matter how good he might look in his Ray-Bans.
I got out of the car.
"Wise decision," Paul commented, closing the car door behind me.
There was a sort of finality in the sound of that door being slammed shut. I tried not to think about what I might be letting myself in for as I followed Paul up the cement steps to the wide glass front door to his grandfather's house, barefoot, my Jimmy Choos in one hand and my book bag in the other.
Inside the Slaters' house, it was cool and quiet ... so quiet, you couldn't even hear the pounding surf of the ocean not a hundred feet below it. Whoever had decorated the place had taste that ran toward the modern, so everything looked sleek and new and uncomfortable. The house, I imagined, must have been freezing in the morning when the fog rolled in, since everything in it was made of glass or metal. Paul led me up a twisting steel staircase from the front door to the high-tech kitchen, where all the appliances gleamed aggressively.
"Cocktail?" he asked me, opening a glass door to a liquor cabinet.
"Very funny," I said. "Just water, please. Where's your grandfather?"
"Down the hall," Paul said, as he pulled two bottles of designer water from the enormous Sub-Zero fridge. He must have noticed my nervous glance over my shoulder, since he added, "Go take a look for yourself if you don't believe me."
I went to take a look for myself. It wasn't that I didn't trust him . . . well, o
kay, it was. Though it would have been pretty bold of him to lie about something I could so easily check. And what was I going to do if it turned out his grandfather wasn't there? I mean, no way was I leaving before I'd found out what I'd come to learn.
Fortunately, it appeared I wouldn't have to. Hearing some faint sounds, I followed them down a long glass hallway, until I came to a room in which a wide-screen television was on. In front of the television sat a very old man in a very high-tech wheelchair. Beside the wheelchair, in a very uncomfortable-looking modern chair, sat a youngish guy in a blue nurse's uniform, reading a magazine. He looked up when I appeared in the doorway and smiled.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey," I said back, and came tentatively into the room. It was a nice room, with one of the better views in the house, I imagined. It had been furnished with a hospital bed, complete with an IV bag and adjustable frame and metal bookshelves on which rested frame after frame of photographs. Black-and-white photographs mostly, judging by their outfits, of people from the forties.
"Um," I said to the old man in the wheelchair. "Hi, Mr. Slater. I'm Susannah Simon."
The old man didn't say anything. He didn't even take his gaze from the game show that was on in front of him. He was mostly bald and pretty much covered in liver spots, and he was drooling a little. The nurse noticed 'this and leaned over with a handkerchief to wipe the old man's mouth.
"There you go, Mr. Slater," the nurse said. "The nice young lady said hello. Aren't you going to say hello back?"
But Mr. Slater didn't say anything. Instead, Paul, who'd come into the room behind me, went, "How's it going, Pops? Had another riveting day in front of the old boob tube?"
Mr. Slater did not acknowledge Paul, either. The nurse said, "We had a good day, didn't we, Mr. Slater? Took a nice walk in the backyard around the pool and picked a few lemons."
"That's great," Paul said with forced enthusiasm. Then he took my hand and started to drag me from the room. I will admit he didn't have to drag hard. I was pretty creeped out, and went willingly enough. Which is saying a lot, considering how I felt about Paul and everything. I mean, that there was someone who creeped me out more than he did.
"Bye, Mr. Slater," I said, not expecting a response . . . which was a good thing, since I got none.
Out in the hallway, I asked quietly, "What's wrong with him? Alzheimer's?"
"Naw," Paul said, handing me one of the dark-blue bottles of water. "They don't know, exactly. He's lucid enough, when he wants to be."
"Really?" I had a hard time believing it. Lucid people can usually maintain some control over their own saliva. "Maybe he's just. . . you know. Old."
"Yeah," Paul said with another of his trademark bitter laughs. "That's probably it, all right." Then, without elaborating further, he threw open a door on his right and said, "This is it. What I wanted to show you."
I followed him into what was, clearly, his bedroom. It was about five times as big as my own room - and Paul's bed was about five times bigger than mine. Like the rest of the house, everything was very streamlined and modern, with a lot of metal and glass. There was even a glass desk - or Plexiglas, probably - on which rested a brand-new, top-of-the-line laptop. There was none of the kind of personal stuff lying around Paul's room that always seemed to be scattered around mine - like magazines or dirty socks or nail polish or half-eaten boxes of Girl Scout cookies. There was nothing personal in Paul's room at all. It was like a very high-tech, very cold hotel room.
"It's here," Paul said, sitting down on the edge of his boat-sized bed.
"Yeah," I said, more spooked than ever now ... and not just because Paul was patting the empty space on the mattress beside him. No, it was also the fact that the only color in the room, besides what Paul and I were wearing, was what I could see out the enormous plate glass windows: the blue, blue sky and below it, the darker blue sea. "Sure it is."
"I'm serious," Paul said, and he quit patting the mattress like he wanted me to sit beside him. Instead, he reached beneath the bed and pulled out a clear plastic box, like the kind you store wool sweaters in over the summer.
Placing the box beside him on the bed, Paul pulled off the lid. Inside were what looked to be a number of newspaper and magazine articles, each one carefully clipped from its original source.
"Check these out," Paul said, carefully unfolding a particularly ancient newspaper article and spreading it out across the slate-gray bedspread so that I could see it. It came from the London Times, and was dated June 18, 1952. There was a photograph of a man standing before what looked like the hieroglyphic-covered wall of an Egyptian tomb. The headline above the photo and article ran, "Archaeologist's Theory Scoffed at by Skeptics."
"Dr. Oliver Slaski - that's this guy here in the photo - worked for years to translate the text on the wall of King Tut's tomb," Paul explained. "He came to the conclusion that in ancient Egypt there was actually a small group of shamans who had the ability to travel in and out of the realm of the dead without, in fact, dying themselves. These shamans were called, as near as Dr. Slaski could translate, shifters. They could shift from this plane of being to the next, and were hired as spirit guides for the deceased by the deceased's family, in order to ensure their loved one's ending up where he was supposed to instead of aimlessly wandering the planet."
I had sunk down onto the bed as Paul had been speaking so that I could get a better look at the picture he was indicating. I had been hesitant to do so before - I didn't really want to get near Paul at all, especially considering the whole bed thing.
Now, however, I hardly noticed how close we were sitting together. I leaned forward to stare at the picture until my hair brushed against the cracked and yellowed paper.
"Shifters," I said, through lips that had gone strangely cold, as if I had put Carmex on them. Only I hadn't. "What he meant was mediators."
"I don't think so," Paul said.
"No," I said. I was feeling sort of breathless. Well, you would, too, if your whole life you had wondered why you were so different from everyone you knew and then all of a sudden, one day you found out. Or at least got hold of a very important clue.
"That is exactly what it means, Paul," I exclaimed. "The ninth card in the tarot deck - the one called the Hermit - features an old man holding a lantern, just like this guy is doing," I said, indicating the guy in the hieroglyphic. "It always comes up when my cards are read. And the Hermit is a spirit guide, someone who is supposed to lead the dead to their final destination. And okay, the guy in the hieroglyphic isn't old, but they are both doing the same thing. . . . He has to mean mediators, Paul," I said, my heart thudding hard against my ribs. This was big. Really big. The fact that there was actual documented proof of the existence of people like me ... I had never hoped to see such a thing. I couldn't wait to tell Father Dominic. "He has to!"
"But that's not all they were, Suze," Paul said, reaching back into the acrylic box and bringing out a sheaf of papers, also brown with age. "According to Slaski, who wrote this thesis about it, back in ancient Egypt there were your run-of-the-mill mediums, or, if you prefer, mediators. But then there were also shifters. And that," Paul said, looking at me very intently from across the bed, and not very far across the bed, either, as we were leaning only about a foot apart, the pages of Dr. Slaski's thesis between us, "is what you and I are, Suze. Shifters."
Again, I felt the chill. It raced up and down my spine, made the hairs on my arms stand up. I don't know what it was - the word, shifters, or the way Paul said it. But it had an effect on me . . . quite an effect on me. Like sticking my finger in a light socket.
I shook my head. "No," I said in a panicky voice. "Not me. I'm just a mediator. I mean, if I were a shifter, I wouldn't have had to exorcize myself that time - "
"You didn't have to," Paul interrupted, his voice, compared to the high-pitched squeak mine had become, deep and calm. "You could have gotten yourself there - and back - on your own, just by visualizing the place. You could do it right no
w, if you wanted to."
I blinked at him. Paul's eyes, I noticed, above the crinkled pages of Dr. Slaski's thesis, were very bright. They almost seemed to gleam like cat's eyes. I could not tell if he was telling the truth or simply trying to mess with my head. Knowing Paul, either would not have surprised me. He seemed to get pleasure out of blurting things out, then seeing how people - all right, me - reacted.
"No way," was how I responded to his suggestion that I was anything but what I'd always thought I was. Even though the whole reason I was even in his bedroom was because deep down, I knew I was not.
"Try it," Paul urged. "Picture it in your head. You know what the place looks like now."
Did I ever. Thanks to him, I'd been trapped there for the longest fifteen minutes of my life. I was still trapped there, every single night, in my dreams. Even now, I could hear my heartbeat drumming in my ears as I tore down that long dark corridor, fog swirling and then parting around my legs. Did Paul really think that, even for a second, I ever wanted to visit that place again?
"No," I said "No, thanks - "
Paul's smile turned wry.
"Don't tell me Suze Simon is actually afraid of something." His eyes seemed to glow more brightly than ever. "You always act as if you were immune to fear the way some people are immune to chicken pox."
"I'm not afraid." I lied with feigned indignation. "I just don't feel like - what is it called again? Oh, yeah, shifting - right now. Maybe later. Right now I want to ask you about that other thing you mentioned. The thing where somebody can take over somebody else's body. Soul transference."
Paul's smile broadened. "I thought that one might get your attention."
I knew what he was referring to - or thought I did, anyway. I could feel my face heating up. I ignored my burning cheeks, however, and said, with what I hoped sounded like cool indifference, "It sounds interesting, is all. Is it really possible?" I plucked at the crumpled pages of the thesis that lay between us. "Does Dr. Slaski mention it at all?"
"Maybe," Paul said, laying a hand down over the typewritten sheets so that I could not lift them.