by Meg Cabot
So, holding my shoes in my hand, I began to mince my way down the road barefoot, keeping a sharp eye out for bits of glass and any poison oak that might be growing alongside the street.
Paul had been right about one thing: it was a five-mile walk from his house to mine. Worse, it was about a mile walk from his house to the first commercial structure at which I might reasonably expect to find a pay phone where I could start calling around to see if I could get someone to pick me up. I could, I supposed, have gone up to one of the huge houses belonging to Paul’s neighbors, rung the bell, and asked if I could use their phone. But how embarrassing would that be? No, a pay phone. That was all I needed. And I’d find one, soon enough.
There was only one real flaw in my plan, and that was the weather. Oh, don’t get me wrong. It was a beautiful September day. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
That was the problem. The sun was beating down mercilessly upon Scenic Drive. It had to have been ninety degrees at least—even though the cool breeze from the sea didn’t make it seem uncomfortable. But the pavement beneath my bare feet wasn’t affected by the breeze. The road, which had seemed comfortably warm beneath the soles of my feet when I’d first come barreling out of Paul’s cold, cold house, was actually extremely hot. Burning hot. Like fry-an-egg-on-it hot.
There wasn’t anything I could do about it, of course. I couldn’t put my shoes back on. My blisters hurt more than the soles of my feet. Maybe if a car had gone by, I’d have tried to flag it down—but probably not. I was too embarrassed by my predicament, really, to have to explain it to a total stranger. Besides, given my luck, I’d probably manage to flag down a serial killer and find myself out of the frying pan—literally—and smack in the middle of the fire.
No. I kept walking, cursing myself and my stupidity. How could I have been so dumb as to have agreed to go to Paul Slater’s house? True, the stuff he’d showed me about the shifters had been interesting. And that thing about soul transference…if there really was such a thing. I didn’t even want to let myself think about what that might mean. To put a soul in someone else’s body.
Shifting, I said to myself. Concentrate on the whole shifting thing. Better that, of course, than on the soul transference thing…or worse, the even more unpleasant topic of how I could be so carried away by the kisses of someone other than the guy I happened to be in love with.
Or was it just that, after Jesse’s seeming rejection, I was simply relieved to find that I was attractive to somebody…even somebody whom I did not particularly like? Because I did not like Paul Slater. I did not. I think the fact that I had been having bad dreams about him for the past few weeks was proof enough of that…no matter how fast my traitorous heart might beat when his lips were pressed against mine.
It felt good, as I walked, to concentrate on this instead of my extremely sore feet. It was slow going, walking down Scenic Drive without any protection from the shards of gravel and, of course, the hot pavement beneath my soles. Of course, in a way I felt that the pain was punishment for my very bad behavior. True, Paul had lured me to his house with promises that he would reveal some information I had very badly wanted. But I ought to have resisted just the same, knowing that someone like Paul would have to have a hidden agenda.
And that that agenda would most likely involve my mouth.
What galled me was that for a minute or so back there, I hadn’t cared. Really. I’d liked it, even. Bad Suze. Very bad Suze.
Oh, God. I was in trouble.
Then, finally, after about half an hour of painful mincing, I saw the most beautiful sight in the world: a seaside café. I hurried toward it—well, as fast as I could on feet that felt as if they had been hacked off at the ankle—mentally ticking off who I could safely call when I got there. My mom? Never. She’d ask too many questions and probably kill me besides for agreeing to go to the house of a boy she’d never met. Jake? No. Again, he’d ask too many questions. Brad? No, he would just as soon leave me stranded, as he happened to hate my guts. Adam?
It was going to have to be Adam. He was the only person I knew who would not only happily drive out to get me but who would relish his role as rescuer…not to mention also greatly enjoy hearing about how Paul had sexually harassed me without afterward desiring to beat Paul into a bloody pulp. Adam would have the sense to know that Paul Slater could kick his ass any day of the week. I would not mention to Adam, of course, the part where I’d sexually harassed Paul right back.
The Sea Mist Café—that was the restaurant I was limping toward—was an upscale restaurant with outdoor seating and valet parking. It was too late for lunch and too early for it to be serving dinner, so there were no diners there, just the wait staff, setting up for the supper rush. As I came hobbling up, a waiter was just writing the specials on the chalkboard by the door.
“Hey,” I said to him in my brightest, least look-at-me-I-am-a-victim voice.
The waiter glanced at me. If he noticed my disheveled, shoeless appearance, he did not comment upon it. He turned back to his chalkboard.
“We don’t start seating for dinner until six,” he said.
“Um.” This was, I saw, going to be more difficult than I’d thought. “That’s fine. I just want to use your pay phone, if you have one.”
“Inside,” the waiter said with a sigh. Then, his gaze flicking over me scathingly, he added, “No shoes, no service.”
“I’ve got shoes,” I said, holding up my Jimmy Choos. “See?”
He rolled his eyes and turned back to his chalk- board.
I don’t know why the world has to be populated by so many unpleasant people. I really don’t. It really takes an effort to be rude, too. The amount of energy people expend on being a jerk astounds me sometimes.
Inside the Sea Mist, it was cool and shady. I limped past the bar toward the little sign I’d seen, as soon as my eyes adjusted to the dim light—compared to the blazing sun outside—that said
PHONE/RESTROOMS. It was sort of a long walk to the Phone/Restrooms for a girl with what I was pretty sure were massive third-degree burns on the soles of her feet. I had gotten halfway there when I heard a guy’s voice say my name.
I was sure it was Paul. I mean, who else could it have been? Paul had followed me from his house and wanted to apologize.
And probably make out some more.
Well, if he thought I was going to forgive him—let alone kiss him again—he had another think coming, let me tell you. Well, actually, maybe the kissing part—
No. No.
I turned around slowly.
“I told you,” I said, keeping my voice even with an effort. “I don’t ever want to speak to you again….”
My voice trailed off. It wasn’t Paul Slater standing behind me. It was Jake’s friend from college, Neil Jankow. Neil Jankow, Craig’s brother, standing there by the bar with a clipboard, looking thinner than ever…and now that I knew what he’d been through, sadder than ever, too.
“Susan?” he said, hesitantly. “Oh, it is you. I wasn’t sure.”
I blinked at him. And his clipboard. And the bartender who was standing near him, holding a similar clipboard. Then I remembered what Neil had said, about his dad owning a lot of restaurants in Carmel. Craig and Neil Jankow’s father, I realized, must own the Sea Mist Café.
“Neil,” I said. “Hi. Yeah, it’s me, Suze. How…um, how are you doing?”
“I’m fine,” Neil said, his gaze going to my extremely dirty feet. “Are you…are you all right?”
The concern in his voice was, I knew immediately, actually heartfelt. Neil Jankow was worried about me. Me, a girl whom he’d met only the night before. Whose name he hadn’t even gotten right. The fact that he could be so concerned about me while other people—namely Paul Slater, and yes, I was willing to admit it now, Jesse—could be so very, very mean, brought tears to my eyes.
“I’m okay,” I said.
And then, before I could stop it, the whole story came pouring out. Nothing about the ghosts and t
he whole mediator thing, of course. But the rest of it, anyway. I don’t know what came over me. I was just standing there in the middle of Neil’s dad’s café, going, “And then he made a move on me, and I told him to get off and he wouldn’t so I had to jab my thumb in his eye, and then I ran away but my shoes really hurt and so I had to take them off and I don’t have a cell phone so I couldn’t call anyone and this is the first place with a pay phone that I could find—”
Before I’d finished, Neil was at my side, steering me toward the closest bar stool and making me sit on it. He said, “Hey. Hey, it’s all right now,” all nervously. It was clear he didn’t have a whole lot of experience dealing with hysterical girls. He kept patting my shoulder and offering me things, like free lemonade and tiramisu.
“I’ll…I’ll take some lemonade,” I said, finally, worn down from my recital of woes.
“Sure,” Neil said. “Sure thing. Jorge, get her some lemonade, will you?”
The bartender hurried to pour me some lemonade from a pitcher he kept in a little fridge behind the bar. He put it in front of me, eyeing me warily, like I was some lunatic who might start spouting off New Age poetry at any minute. It was heartening to know this was the first impression I was giving people. Not.
I drank some of the lemonade. It was cool and tart. I put the glass down after a few gulps and said to Neil, who was looking at me with concern, “Thanks. I feel better. You’re nice.”
Neil looked embarrassed. “Um. Thanks. Look, I have a cell phone. Do you want to borrow it? You can call someone. Maybe you could call, you know, Jake.”
Jake? Oh, God no. My eyes wide, I shook my head. “No,” I said. “Not Jake. He…he wouldn’t understand.”
Neil was beginning to look panicky. You could tell all he wanted was to get rid of me. And who could blame him, really? “Oh, okay. Your mom, then? How about your mom?”
I shook my head some more. “No, no. I don’t…I mean, I don’t want them to know how stupid I was.”
Jorge, the bartender, went, “You know, we’re pretty much done here, Neil. You can go, if you want…. ”
And take her with you. He didn’t say the words, but his tone implied them. It was clear that Jorge wanted the crazy girl with the sore feet out of his bar, and pronto…like before the first customers of the evening started to trickle in.
Neil looked pained. It was very gratifying to know that my appearance was so heinous at that moment, that college boys hesitated to allow me into their vehicles. Really. I can’t tell you how much I appreciated that fact. Bad enough I was jailbait, but I also appeared to be jailbait with bloody feet and a wicked case of the frizzies, thanks to the salt air.
Neil, who’d had his cell phone out, closed it and stuck it back in the pocket of his Dockers.
“Um,” he said. “I guess, you know. I could drive you home myself. If you want.”
The delivery left a little to be desired, but I don’t think I could have been more grateful, even if he’d said he knew a place that sold Prada wholesale.
“That would be so, so great,” I gushed.
I guess my gushing was a little too effusive, since Neil’s face turned as pink as my blisters, and he hurried away. Mumbling about how he just had to finish up a few things. I didn’t care. Home! I was getting a ride home! No embarrassing phone calls, no more walking…Oh, thank God, no more walking. I don’t think I could have stood on my feet for another minute. Just looking down at them made me feel a little light-headed. They were almost black with dirt, and let’s just say the Band-Aids had taken a licking, and sure weren’t doing much sticking. Lovely oozing sores gleamed redly at me. I didn’t even want to look at what was going on with the soles of my feet. All I knew was that I couldn’t feel them anymore. They were completely numb.
“That,” observed a voice at my elbow, “is one wicked pedicure. You should ask for your money back.”
chapter
ten
I didn’t even have to turn my head to see who it was.
“Hi, Craig,” I said out of the corner of my mouth. Neil and Jorge were too deeply absorbed in the beverage order they were just finishing up discussing to pay attention to me, anyway.
“So.” Craig settled onto the bar stool next to mine. “This is how you mediators work? Get your feet all wrecked, then mooch rides off the siblings of the deceased?”
“Not usually,” I murmured discreetly.
“Oh.” Craig fiddled with a book of matches from the bar. “Because I was going to say. You know. Great technique. Really making some stellar progress on my case there, aren’t you?”
I sighed. Really, after everything I’d been through, I did not need some dead guy making wisecracks.
But I guess I deserved them.
“How are you doing?” I asked, trying to keep my tone light. “You know, with the whole being dead thing?”
“Oh, jim-dandy,” Craig said. “Loving every minute of it.”
“You’ll get used to it,” I said, thinking of Jesse.
“Oh, I’m sure I will,” Craig said. He was looking at Neil.
I should, of course, have gotten a clue then. But I didn’t. I was too caught up in my own problems…not to mention my feet.
Then Neil handed his clipboard to Jorge, shook his hand, and turned to me.
“Are you ready, Susan?” he asked.
I didn’t bother to correct him about my name. I just nodded and slid down from the bar stool. I had to look to make sure my feet had hit the floor, because I couldn’t feel it. The floor, I mean. The skin on the bottoms of my feet had gone completely numb.
“You really did a number on yourself,” was Craig’s comment.
But he, unlike his brother, very helpfully slipped an arm around my waist and guided me toward the door, where Neil was waiting, his car keys in his hand.
I must have looked particularly peculiar as I approached—I was definitely leaning some of my weight into Craig, which must have given me an odd appearance, since of course Neil couldn’t see Craig—because Neil said, “Um, Susan, are you sure you want to go straight home? I think maybe you might want to pay a little visit to the emergency room….”
“No, no,” I said lightly. “I’m fine.”
“Right,” Craig snickered in my ear.
Still, with his help, I made it out to Neil’s car all right. Like Paul, Neil had a convertible BMW. Unlike Paul’s, Neil’s appeared to be secondhand.
“Hey!” Craig cried, when he saw the vehicle. “That’s my car!”
This was, I felt, the natural reaction of a guy who’d found his car in the possession of another. Jake would undoubtedly have said the same thing. Over and over again.
Craig got over his indignation long enough to steer me into the front seat. I was about to give him a grateful smile when he then hopped into the backseat. Even then, of course, I didn’t figure it out. I just assumed Craig wanted to come along for the ride. Why not? It wasn’t like he had anything better to do, so far as I knew.
Neil started the engine, and Kylie Minogue began to wail from his CD player.
“I can’t believe he’s listening to this garbage,” Craig said disgustedly from the backseat, “in my car.”
“I like her,” I said, a little defensively.
Neil looked at me. “You say something?”
Realizing what I’d done, I said no quickly.
“Oh.”
Without another word—he wasn’t apparently much of a conversationalist—Neil pulled his car out from the Sea Mist Café parking lot and headed down Scenic Drive for downtown Carmel, which we’d have to cut through to make it back to my house. Cutting through downtown Carmel was never a picnic, because it was usually crammed with tourists and the tourists never knew where they were going, because none of the streets had names…or stoplights.
But it can be especially dangerous navigating downtown Carmel-by-the-Sea when there happens to be a homicidal ghost in your backseat.
I didn’t realize this right away, of course
. I was attempting to do some, you know, mediation. I figured, as long as I had the two brothers together, I might as well try to patch things up between them. I had no idea at the time just how badly their relationship had disintegrated, of course.
“So, Neil,” I said conversationally, as we went down Scenic Drive at a pretty good clip. The ocean breeze tugged at my hair and felt deliciously cool after the way the sun had beat down on me earlier. “I heard about your brother. I’m really sorry.”
Neil didn’t take his gaze off the road. But I saw his fingers tighten on the steering wheel.
“Thanks,” was all he said in a quiet voice.
It is generally considered rude to pry into the personal tragedies of others—particularly when the victims of said tragedy were not the ones who introduced the subject—but for a mediator, being rude is all part of the job. I said, “It must have been really awful, out there on that boat.”
“Catamaran,” both Craig and Neil corrected me at the same time—Craig derisively, Neil gently.
“I mean catamaran,” I said. “How long did you hang on for, anyway? Like eight hours or something?”
“Seven,” Neil said softly.
“Seven hours,” I said. “That’s a long time. The water must have been really cold.”
“It was,” Neil said. He was clearly a man of few words. I did not allow that to dissuade me from my mission, however.
“And I understand,” I said, “that your brother was what, a champion swimmer or something?”
“Damned straight,” Craig said from the backseat. “Made all-state—”
I held up a hand to silence him. It was not Craig I wanted to hear from just then.
“Champion swimmer,” Neil said, his voice not much louder than the purr of the BMW’s engine. “Champion sailor. You name it, Craig was better at it than anybody.”
“See?” Craig leaned forward. “See? He’s the one that should be dead. Not me. He even admits it!”
“Shhh,” I said to Craig. To Neil I said, “That must have really surprised people, then. I mean, when you survived the accident, and Craig didn’t.”