Haunted tm-5

by Meg Cabot

  I was sitting there cursing Paul Slater - not to mention Jimmy Choo - for all I was worth when I heard Jesse utter a curse that, even though it was in Spanish, burned my ears.

  11

  "Querida, what have you done to yourself?"

  Jesse stood at the side of the tub looking down at my feet. I had drained out all the dirty water and had run a new tubful to soak them in, so it was pretty easy to see through the clear water, to the angry red blisters below it.

  "New shoes," I said. It was all the explanation I was capable of thinking up at the moment. The fact that I had had to flee in my bare feet from a sexual predator did not seem like the kind of thing that would sit too well with Jesse. I mean, I didn't exactly want to be the cause of any duels or anything.

  Yeah, yeah, I know: I wish.

  Still, he'd called me querida again. That had to mean something, right?

  Except that Jesse had probably called his sisters querida. Possibly even his mom.

  "You did that to yourself on purpose?" Jesse was staring down at my feet in utter disbelief.

  "Well," I said. "Not exactly." Only instead of telling him about Paul, and our clandestine kisses on his dark-gray bedspread, I said, talking about a hundred miles a minute, "It's just that they were new shoes, and they gave me blisters and then .. . and then I missed my ride home, and I had to walk, and my shoes hurt so much I took them off, and I guess the pavement was hot from the sun, since I burned the bottoms of my feet - "

  Jesse looked grim. He sat on the edge of the tub beside me and said, "Let me see."

  I didn't want to show the guy with whom I have been madly in love since the very first day I met him my hideously disfigured feet. I especially didn't want him to see them considering that he didn't know that I had burned them in an effort to get away from a guy I shouldn't have been with in the first place.

  On the other hand, you should be able to go over to boys' houses without them jumping on you and kissing you and making you want to kiss them back. It was all sort of complicated, even to me, and I am a modern young woman with twenty-first-century sensibilities. God only knew what a rancher from the eighteen fifties would make of it all.

  But I could see by Jesses expression that he was not going to leave me alone until I showed him my stupid feet. So I said, rolling my eyes, "You want to see them? Fine. Knock yourself out."

  And I pulled my right foot from the water and showed him.

  I expected, at the very least, some revulsion. Chastisement for my stupidity, I felt quite sure, would soon follow - as if I didn't feel stupid enough.

  But to my surprise, Jesse neither chastised me nor looked revolted. He merely examined my foot with what I would have to describe as almost clinical detachment. When he was through looking at my right foot, he said, "Let me see the other one."

  So I put the right one back in the water and pulled out the left one.

  Again, no revulsion and no cries of "Suze, how could you be so stupid?" Which wasn't actually that surprising, since Jesse never calls me Suze. Instead, he examined my left foot as carefully as he had the other one. When he was through, he leaned back and said, "Well, I have seen worse ... but barely."

  I was shocked by this.

  "You've seen feet that looked worse than this?" I cried. "Where?"

  "I had sisters, remember?" he said, his dark eyes alight with something - I wouldn't have called it amusement, because of course my feet weren't a laughing matter. Jesse wouldn't dare laugh at them . . . would he? "Occasionally they got new shoes, with similar results."

  "Ill never walk again, will I?" I asked, looking woefully down at my ravaged feet.

  "You will," Jesse said. "Just not for a day or two. Those burns look very painful. They'll need butter."

  "Butter?" I wrinkled my nose.

  "The best treatment for burns like those is butter," Jesse said.

  "Uh," I said. "Maybe back in eighteen fifty. Now we tend to rely on the healing power of Neosporin. There's a tube of it in my medicine cabinet behind you."

  So Jesse applied Neosporin to my wounds. When he was through bandaging my feet - which, may I say, looked very attractive with about sixty-eight Band-Aids all over them - I tried to stand up.

  But not for long. It didn't hurt, exactly. It was just that it felt so strange, like I was walking on mushrooms. . . .

  Mushrooms that were growing out of the soles of my feet.

  "That's enough of that," Jesse said. Next thing I knew, he'd scooped me up.

  Only instead of carrying me to my bed and setting me down on it all romantically, you know, like guys do to girls in the movies, he just dumped me onto it, so I bounced around and would have fallen off if I hadn't grabbed the edge of the mattress.

  "Thanks," I said, not quite able to keep all of the sarcasm out of my voice.

  Jesse didn't seem to notice.

  "Not a problem," he said. "Would you like a book or something? Your homework, maybe? Or I could read to you - "

  He lifted Critical Theory Since Plato.

  "No," I said hastily. "Homework is fine. Just hand me my book bag, thanks."

  I was deeply absorbed in my essay on the Civil War - or at least, that's what I was pretending to be doing. What I was really doing, of course, was trying not to think about Jesse, who was over on the window seat reading. I was wondering what it would be like if he laid a couple of kisses like Paul's on me. I mean, if you thought about it, he had me in a really interesting position, considering that I couldn't walk. How many guys would have loved to have a girl basically trapped in her bedroom? A lot of them. Except, of course, for Jesse. Finally Andy called me down to dinner.

  I wasn't going anywhere, however. Not because I wanted to stick around and watch Jesse read some more, but because I really couldn't stand. Finally David came upstairs to see what was taking me so long. As soon as he saw the Band-Aids, he went running back downstairs for my mom.

  May I just say that my mother was a good deal less sympathetic than Jesse? She said I deserved every blister for being so asinine as to wear new shoes to school without breaking them in first. Then she fussed around my room, straightening it up (although since acquiring a roommate of the hot Latino male persuasion, I have become quite conscientious about keeping my room in a fairly neat condition. I mean, I don't exactly want Jesse seeing any of my stray bras lying around. And really, if anything, he was the one who was always messing things up, leaving these enormous piles of books and open CD cases everywhere. And then of course there was Spike).

  "Honestly, Susie," my mom said, wrinkling her nose at the sight of the big orange tabby sprawled out on my window seat. "That cat ..."

  Jesse, who had politely dematerialized when my mom showed up, in order to afford me some modicum of privacy, would have been greatly disturbed to hear his pet disparaged so.

  "How's the patient?" Andy wanted to know, appearing in my doorway with a dinner tray containing grilled salmon with dill and creme fralche, cold cucumber soup, and a freshly baked sourdough dinner roll. You know, unhappy as I'd been at the prospect of my mom remarrying and forcing me to move all the way across the country and acquire three stepbrothers, I had to admit, the food made it all worth it.

  Well, the food and Jesse. At least up until recently.

  "She's definitely not going to be able to go to school tomorrow," my mom said, shaking her head despairingly at the sight of my feet. "I mean, look at them, Andy. Do you think we need to take her to ... I don't know ... PromptCare, or something?"

  Andy bent down and looked at my feet. "I don't know that they could do anything more," he said, admiring Jesse's excellent bandaging job. "Looks like she's taken pretty good care of it herself."

  "You know what I probably do need," I said. "Some magazines and a six-pack of Diet Coke and one of those really big Crunch bars."

  "Don't push it, young lady," my mom said severely. "You are not going to loll around in bed all day tomorrow like some kind of injured ballerina. I am going to call Mr. Walden tonight
and make sure he gets you all of your homework. And I have to say, Susie, I am very disappointed in you. You are too old for this kind of nonsense. You could have called me at the station, you know. I would have come out to get you."

  Uh, yeah. And then she would have found out that I was walking home not from school, like I'd told everyone, but from the home of a guy who had a dead Hell's Angel working for him and who had, oh yeah, tried to put the moves on me with his drooling grandpa right in the next room. Moves I had, at least up to a point, reciprocated.

  No, thanks.

  I overheard Andy, as the two of them left my room, say softly to my mom, "Don't you think you were a little hard on her? I think she learned her lesson."

  My mom, however, didn't answer Andy back softly at all. No, she wanted me to hear her reply: "No, I do not think I was too hard on her. She'll be leaving for college in two years, Andy, and living on her own. If this is an example of the kinds of decisions she'll be making then, I shudder to think what lies ahead. In fact, I'm thinking we should cancel our plans to go away Friday night."

  "Not on your life," I heard Andy say very emphatically from the bottom of the stairs.

  "But - "

  "No buts," Andy said. "We're going."

  And then I couldn't hear them anymore.

  Jesse, who rematerialized at the end of all of this, had a little smile on his face, having clearly overheard.

  "It isn't funny," I said to him sourly.

  "It's a little funny," he said.

  "No," I said, "it isn't."

  "I think," Jesse said, cracking open the book Father Dom had loaned him, "it's time for a little reading out loud."

  "No," I groaned. "Not Critical Theory Since Plato. Please, I am begging you. It's not fair, I can't even run away."

  "I know," Jesse said with a gleam in his eyes. "At last I have you where I want you. . . ."

  I have to admit, my breath kind of caught in my throat when he said that.

  But of course he didn't mean what I wanted him to mean. He just meant that now he could read his stupid book out loud, and I couldn't escape.

  "Ha-ha," I said wittily, to cover the fact that I thought he had meant something else.

  Then Jesse held up a copy of Cosmo he'd hidden between the pages of Critical Theory Since Plato. While I stared at him in astonishment, he said, "I borrowed it from your mothers room. She won't miss it for a while."

  Then he tossed the magazine onto my bed.

  I nearly choked. I mean, it was the nicest - the nicest - thing anyone had done for me in ages. And the fact that Jesse - Jesse, whom I'd become convinced lately hated me - had done it positively floored me. Was it possible that he didn't hate me? Was it possible that, in fact, he liked me a little? I mean, I know Jesse likes me. Why else would he always be saving my life and all? But was it possible he liked me in that special way? Or was he only being nice to me on account of the fact that I was injured?

  It didn't matter. Not just then, anyway. The fact that Jesse wasn't ignoring me for a change - whatever his motive - was all that mattered.

  Happily, I began to read an article about seven ways to please a man, and didn't even mind so much that I didn't have one - a man, I mean, of my very own. Because at last it seemed that whatever weirdness had existed between Jesse and me since the day of that kiss - that all too brief, sense-shattering kiss - was going away. Maybe now things would get back to normal. Maybe now he'd start to realize how stupid he'd been.

  Maybe now he'd finally get it through his head that he needed me. More than needed me. Wanted me.

  As much, I now knew on no uncertain terms, as Paul Slater did.

  Hey, a girl can dream, right?

  And that was exactly what I did. For eighteen blissful hours, I dreamed of a life where the guy I liked actually liked me back. I put all thoughts of mediation - shifting and soul transference, Paul Slater and Father Dominic, Craig and Neil Jankow - from my mind. The last part was easy - I asked Jesse to keep an eye on Craig for me, and he happily agreed to do so.

  And I won't lie to you: it was great. No nightmares about being chased down long, fog-enshrouded hallways toward a bottomless drop-off. Yeah, it wasn't quite like the old, prekiss days, but it came close. Sort of. Until the next day when the phone rang.

  I picked it up, and CeeCee's voice shrieked at me, loudly enough that I had to hold the receiver away from my head.

  "I cannot believe you decided to take a sick day," CeeCee ranted. "Today, of all days! How could you, Suze? We have so much campaigning to do!"

  It took me a few seconds before I realized what she was talking about. Then I went, "Oh, you mean the election? CeeCee, look, I - "

  "I mean, you should see what Kelly's doing. She's handing out candy bars - candy bars - that say Vote Prescott/Slater on the wrappers! Okay? And what are you doing? Oh, lolling around in bed because your feet hurt, if what your brother says is true."

  "Stepbrother," I corrected her.

  "Whatever. Suze, you can't do this to me. I don't care what you do - put on some fuzzy bunny slippers if you have to - just get here and be your usual charming self."

  "CeeCee," I said. It was kind of hard to concentrate because Jesse was nearby. Not just nearby, but touching me. And okay, only putting more Band-Aids on my feet, but it was still way distracting. "Look. I'm pretty sure I don't want to be vice president - "

  But CeeCee didn't want to hear it.

  "Suze," she yelled into Adam's cell phone. I knew she was using Adam's cell phone and that she was on her lunch break, because I could hear the sound of gulls screaming - gulls flock to the school assembly yard during lunch, hoping to score a dropped French fry or two - and I could also hear Adam in the background cheering her on. "It is bad enough that Kelly Mousse-for-Brains Prescott gets elected president of our class every year. But at least when you got elected vice president last year, some semblance of dignity was accorded to the office. But if that blue-eyed rich boy gets elected - I mean, he is just Kelly's pawn. He doesn't care. He'll do whatever Kelly says."

  CeeCee had one thing right: Paul didn't care. Not about the junior class at the Junipero Serra Mission Academy, anyway. I wasn't sure just what, exactly, Paul did care about, since it certainly wasn't his family or mediating. But one thing he definitely was not going to do was take his position as vice president very seriously.

  "Listen, CeeCee," I said. "I'm really sorry. But I truly did screw up my feet, and I really can't walk. Maybe tomorrow."

  "Tomorrow?" CeeCee squawked. "The election's Friday! That gives us only one full day to campaign!"

  "Well," I said, "maybe you should consider running in my place."

  "Me?" CeeCee sounded disgusted. "First of all, I was not duly nominated. And second of all, I will never swing the male vote. I mean, let's face it, Suze. You're the one with the looks and the brains. You're like the Reese Witherspoon of our grade. I'm more like . . . Dick Cheney."

  "CeeCee," I said, "you are way underestimating yourself. You - "

  "You know what?" CeeCee sounded bitter. "Forget it. I don't care. I don't care what happens. Let Paul Look-at-My-New-BMW Slater be our class vice president. I give up."

  She would have slammed the receiver down then, I could tell, if she'd been holding a normal phone. As it was, she could only hang up on me. I had to say hello a few more times, just to be sure, but when no one answered, I knew.

  "Well," I said, hanging up. "She's mad."

  "It sounded like it," Jesse said. "Who is this new person, the one running against you, who she is so afraid will win?"

  And there it was. The direct question. The direct question, the truthful answer to which was, "Paul Slater." If I did not answer it that way - by saying "Paul Slater" - I would really and truly be lying to Jesse. Everything else I'd told him lately had been only half-truths, or maybe white lies.

  But this one. This was the one that later, if he ever found out the truth, was going to get me in trouble.

  I didn't know then, of course, that l
ater was going to be three hours later. I just assumed later would be, you know, next week, at the earliest.

  Maybe even next month. By which point, I'd have thought up an appropriate solution to the Paul Slater problem.

  But since I thought I had plenty of time to sort the whole thing out before Jesse got wind of it, I said, in response to his question, "Oh, just this new guy."

  Which would have worked out fine if, a few hours later, David hadn't knocked on my bedroom door and went, "Suze? Something just came for you."

  "Oh, come on in."

  David threw open my door, but I couldn't see him. All I could see from where I lay on my bed was a giant bouquet of red roses. I mean, there had to have been two dozen at least.

  "Whoa," I said, sitting up fast. Because even then, I had no clue. I thought Andy had sent them.

  "Yeah," David said. I still couldn't see his face, because it was blocked by all the flowers. "Where should I put 'em?"

  "Oh," I said with a glance at Jesse, who was staring at the flowers almost as astonishedly as I was. "Window seat is good."

  David lowered the flowers - which had come complete with a vase - carefully onto my window seat, shoving a few of the cushions aside first to make a place for them. Then, once he'd gotten them stable, he straightened and said, plucking a small white tag from the green leaves, "Here's the card."

  "Thanks," I said, tearing the tiny envelope open.

  Get well soon! With love from Andy, was what I had expected it to say.

  Or We miss you, from the junior class of Junipero Serra Mission Academy.

  Or even, You are a very foolish girl, from Father Dominic.

  What it said, instead, completely shocked me. The more so because of course Jesse was standing close enough to read over my shoulder. And even David, standing halfway across the room, could not have missed the bold, black script: