by Meg Cabot
That’s when it hit me. She was making the water boil. She was making the water boil with the force of her rage.
“Heather,” I said, from my bench. “Heather, listen to me. You’ve got to calm down. We can’t talk when you’re—”
“You…said…” Heather’s eyes, I was alarmed to see, had rolled back into her head. “I…could…start…over!”
Okay. It was time to do something. I didn’t need the bench beneath me to start shaking so violently that I was nearly thrown from it. I knew it was time to get up.
I did so, fast. Fast so that I wouldn’t get hit by the bench. Fast so that I could reach Heather before she noticed, and deck her as hard as I could with a right beneath the chin.
Only to my astonishment, she didn’t even seem to feel it. She was too far gone. Way too far gone. Hitting her had no effect whatsoever—except that it really hurt my knuckles. And, of course, it seemed to make her even madder, always a plus when dealing with a severely disturbed individual.
“You,” Heather said in a deep voice that was nothing like her normal cheerleader chirp, “are going to be sorry now.”
The water in the fountain suddenly reached boiling point. Giant waves of it began sloshing over the side of the basin. The jets, which normally bubbled a mere four feet into the air, suddenly shot up to ten, twenty feet, cascading back down into a bubbling, steaming cauldron. The birds in the treetops took off as one, their wings momentarily blocking out the light from the moon.
I had a funny feeling Heather was serious. What’s more, I had a feeling she could do it, too. Without even lifting a finger.
And I had confirmation of that fact when suddenly, Junipero Serra’s head was whipped from his statue’s body. That’s right. It just snapped off as easily as if the solid bronze it was made out of was actually spun candy. Noiselessly, too, she broke it off. The head hung in the air for a moment, its look of sympathetic compassion transformed from the bizarre angle at which it hung over my face into a demonic sneer. Then, as I stood there, transfixed, staring at the way the floodlights winked against the metal ball, I saw it dip suddenly…
Then plunge toward me, hurtling so fast it was only a blur in the night sky, like a comet, or a—
I didn’t get a chance to think what else it reminded me of because a split second later something heavy hit me in the stomach and sent me sprawling to the dirt, where I lay, looking up at the starry sky. It was so pretty. The night was so black, and the stars so cold and far off and twinkly—
“Get up!” A man’s voice sounded harshly in my ear. “I thought you were supposed to be good at this!”
Something exploded in the dirt just an inch from my cheek. I turned my head and saw Junipero Serra’s head grinning obscenely at me.
Then Jesse was yanking me to my feet and pulling me toward the breezeway.
Chapter
Eleven
We made it back into Mr. Walden’s classroom. I don’t know how, but we did it, the statue’s head hurtling after us the whole way, the velocity with which it was traveling causing it to whistle eerily, as if Father Serra were screaming. The head collided with all the force of a cannonball against the heavy wooden door just as we slammed it closed behind us.
“Jesucrísto,” Jesse sputtered, as we leaned, panting, with our backs pressed up against the door as if with our sheer weight, we could keep her out—Heather, who could walk through walls if she wanted to.” ‘I can take care of myself,’ you said. ‘I’ll just have to get rid of her first,’ you told me. Right!”
I was trying to catch my breath, think what to do. I had never seen anything like that. Never. “Shut up,” I said.
“Cadaver breath.” Jesse turned his head to look down at me. His chest was rising and falling. “Do you realize that’s what you called me? That hurt, you know, querida. It really hurt.”
“I told you—” Something heavy was buffeting against the door. I could feel it knocking against my spine. It didn’t take a genius to guess it was the founder of a certain mission’s head. “—not to call me that.”
“Well, I would appreciate if you didn’t make disparaging remarks about my—”
“Look,” I said. “This door isn’t going to hold up forever.”
“No,” he agreed, just as the metal head managed to smash its way partly through a spot it had weakened in the wood. “May I make a suggestion?”
I was staring, horrified, down at the head, which had turned, halfway in and halfway out of the door, to look up at me with cold, bronze eyes. It’s crazy, but I could have sworn it was smiling at me. “Sure,” I said.
“Run.”
I wasted no time in taking his advice. I ran for the windowsill and, heedless of the shards of broken glass, swung myself up onto it. It only took a few seconds to open the window again, but that was long enough for Jesse, still pushing against what had begun to sound like a hurricane with all the banging and wailing, to say, “Uh, hurry, please?”
I jumped down into the parking lot. It was kind of funny how, outside the thick adobe walls of the Mission, you couldn’t tell at all that there was a severe paranormal disturbance going on inside. The parking lot was still empty, and still quiet, except for the gentle, rhythmic sound of ocean waves. It’s just amazing what can be going on beneath people’s noses, and they have no idea…no idea at all.
“Jesse!” I hissed through the window. “Come on!” I had no idea if Heather might decide to take out her rage with me on an innocent party—or, if she did, whether Jesse had any cool tricks, like the one she’d pulled with the statue’s head, of his own. All I knew was that the sooner the both of us got out of her range, the better.
Okay, let me state right now that I am not a coward. I’m really not. But I’m not a fool, either. I think if you recognize that you are up against a force greater than your own, it is perfectly okay to run.
It’s not okay to leave others behind, though.
“Jesse!” I screamed through the window.
“I thought I told you,” said a very irritated voice from behind me, “to run.”
I gasped and spun around. Jesse stood there on the asphalt of the parking lot, the moon at his back, casting his face into shadow.
“Oh my God.” My heart was beating so fast, I thought it was going to explode. I had never been so scared in all my life. Never.
Maybe that’s why I did what I did next, which was reach out and grab the front of Jesse’s shirt in both my hands. “Oh my God,” I said again. “Jesse, are you all right?”
“Of course I’m all right.” He sounded surprised I’d even bother to ask. And I guess it was stupid. What could Heather do to Jesse, after all? She couldn’t exactly kill him. “Are you all right?”
“Me? I’m fine.” I turned my head to search the darkened windows of Mr. Walden’s classroom. “Do you think she’s…done?”
“For now,” Jesse said.
“How do you know?” I was shocked to find that I was shaking—really shaking—all over. “How do you know she won’t come bursting through that wall there and start uprooting all those trees and hurling them at us?”
Jesse shook his head, and I could see that he was smiling. You know, for a guy who died before they invented orthodontia, he had pretty nice teeth. Almost as nice as Bryce’s. “She won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because she won’t. She doesn’t know she can. She’s too new at all this, Susannah. She doesn’t know yet all that she can do.”
If that was supposed to make me feel better, it didn’t work. The fact that he admitted she could uproot trees and start hurling them at me—she was that powerful—and only hadn’t due to lack of experience, was enough to stop my shaking cold, and drop the handfuls of shirt I held. Not that I didn’t think Heather could have followed me if she wanted to. She could, the same way Jesse had followed me down to the Mission. But the thing of it was, Jesse knew he could. He’d been a ghost a lot longer than Heather. She was only just beginning to explore her
new powers.
That was the scariest part. She was so new at all of this…and already that powerful.
I started pacing around the parking lot like a crazy woman.
“We’ve got to do something,” I said. “We’ve got to warn Father Dominic—and Bryce. My God, we’ve got to warn Bryce not to come to school tomorrow. She’ll kill him the minute he sets foot on campus—”
“Susannah,” Jesse said.
“I guess we could call him. It’s one in the morning, but we could call him, and tell him—I don’t know what we could tell him. We could tell him there’s been a death threat on him or something. That might work. Or—we could leave a death threat. Yeah, that’s what we could do! We could call his house and I could disguise my voice, and I could be like ‘Don’t come to school tomorrow, or you’ll die.’ Maybe he’d listen. Maybe he’d—”
“Susannah,” Jesse said again.
“Or we could have Father Dom do it! We could have Father Dom call Bryce and tell him not to come to school, that there’s been some kind of accident or something—”
“Susannah.” Jesse stepped in front of me just as I turned around to retread the same five feet I’d been pacing for the past few minutes. I came up short, startled by his sudden proximity, my nose practically banging into the place where his shirt collar was open. Jesse seized both my arms quickly, to steady me.
This was not a good thing. I mean, I know a minute ago I had grabbed him—well, not really him, but his shirt. But I don’t like being touched under normal circumstances, and I especially don’t like being touched by ghosts. And I especially don’t like being touched by ghosts who have hands as big and as tendony and strong-looking as Jesse’s.
“Susannah,” he said again, before I could tell him to get his big tendony hands off me. “It’s all right. It’s not your fault. There was nothing you could do.”
I sort of forgot about being mad about his hands. “Nothing I could do? Are you kidding me? I should have kicked that girl back into her grave!”
“No.” Jesse shook his head. “She’d have killed you.”
“Bull! I totally could have taken her. If she hadn’t done that thing with that guy’s head—”
“Susannah.”
“I mean it, Jesse, I could totally have handled her if she hadn’t gotten so mad. I bet if I just wait a little while until she’s calmed down and go back in there, I can talk her into—”
“No.” He let go of my arms, but only so he could wrap one of his own around my shoulders and start steering me away from the school and toward the Dumpster where I’d parked my bike. “Come on. Let’s go home.”
“But what about—”
The grip on my shoulders tightened. “No.”
“Jesse, you don’t understand. This is my job. I have to—”
“It’s Father Dominic’s job, too, no? Let him take it from here. There’s no reason why you have to be burdened with all the responsibility yourself.”
“Well, yes, there is. I’m the one who screwed up.”
“You put the gun to her head and pulled the trigger?”
“Of course not. But I’m the one who got her so mad. Father Dom didn’t. I can’t ask Father Dom to clean up my messes. That is totally unfair.”
“What is totally unfair,” Jesse explained—patiently, I guess, for him, “is for anyone to expect a young girl like yourself to do battle with a demon from hell like—”
“She isn’t a demon from hell. She’s just mad. She’s mad because the one guy she thought she could trust turned out to be a—”
“Susannah.” Jesse stopped walking suddenly. The only reason I didn’t lurch forward and fall flat on my face was that he still kept hold of my shoulder.
For a minute—just a minute—I really thought…well, I thought he was going to kiss me. I’d never been kissed before, but it seemed as if all the necessities for a kiss to happen were there: You know, his arm was around me, there was moonlight, our hearts were racing—oh, yeah, and we’d both just narrowly escaped being killed by a really pissed-off ghost.
Of course, I didn’t know how I felt about my first kiss coming from one of the undead, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers, and let me tell you something, Jesse was way cuter than any live guy I’d met lately. I’d never seen such a nice-looking ghost. He couldn’t, I thought, have been more than twenty when he died. I wondered what had killed him. It’s usually hard to tell with ghosts, since their spirits tend to take on the shape their body was in just before they stopped functioning. My dad, for instance, doesn’t look any different when he appears to me now than he did the day before he went out for that fatal jog around Prospect Park ten years ago.
I could only assume Jesse had died at someone else’s hands since he looked pretty damned healthy to me. Chances were he’d been a victim of one of those bullet holes downstairs. Nice of Andy to frame it for posterity’s sake.
And now this extremely nice-looking ghost looked as if he were going to kiss me. Well, who was I to stop him?
So I sort of leaned my head back and looked out at him from underneath my eyelids, and sort of let my mouth get all relaxed, you know? And that’s when I noticed his attention wasn’t focused anywhere near my lips, but way below them. And not my chest, either, which would have been an okay second.
“You’re bleeding,” he said.
Well, that pretty much spoiled the moment. My eyes popped wide open at that remark.
“I am not,” I said automatically since I didn’t feel any pain. Then I looked down. There were smallish stains flowering on the pavement below my feet. You couldn’t tell what color they were because it was so dark. In the moonlight, they looked black. There were similar dark stains, I saw with horror, on the front of Jesse’s shirt.
But they were definitely coming from me. I checked myself out, and found that I’d managed to open what was probably one of the smaller, but still fairly important, veins in my wrist. I’d peeled off my gloves and stuffed them in my pockets while I’d been talking to Heather, and in my haste to escape during her fit of rage, I’d forgotten to put them back on. I’d probably sliced myself on the broken glass still littering the windowsill in Mr. Walden’s classroom when I’d vaulted up onto it during my escape. Which just proved my theory that it’s always on the way out that you get stuck.
“Oh,” I said, watching the blood ooze out. I couldn’t think of anything else to say but, “What a mess. I’m sorry about your shirt.”
“It’s nothing.” Jesse reached into one of the pockets of his dark, narrow-fitting trousers and pulled out something white and soft that he wrapped around my wrist a few times, then tied into place like a tourniquet, only not as tight. He didn’t say anything as he did this, concentrating on what he was doing. I have to say this was the first time a ghost had ever performed first aid on me. Not quite as interesting as a kiss would have been, but not entirely boring, either.
“There,” he said when he was finished. “Does that hurt?”
“No,” I said, since it didn’t. It wouldn’t start hurting, I knew from experience, for a few hours. I cleared my throat. “Thanks.”
“It’s nothing,” he said.
“No,” I said. Suddenly, ridiculously, I felt like crying. Really. And I never cry. “I mean it. Thanks. Thanks for coming out here to help me. You shouldn’t have done it. I mean, I’m glad you did. And…well, thanks. That’s all.”
He looked embarrassed. Well, I suppose that was natural, me going all mushy on him the way I had just then. But I couldn’t help it. I mean, I still couldn’t really believe it. No ghost had ever been so nice to me. Oh, my dad tried, I guess. But he wasn’t exactly what you’d call reliable about it. I could never really count on him, especially in a crisis.
But Jesse. Jesse had come through for me. And I hadn’t even asked him to. In fact, I’d been pretty unpleasant to him, overall.
“Never mind,” was all he said, though. And then he added, “Let’s go home.”
Chapter
Twelve
Let’s go home.
It had a very cozy feel to it, that “Let’s go home.”
Except, of course, that the house we shared didn’t quite feel like home to me yet. How could it? I’d only lived there a few days.
And, of course, he shouldn’t have been living there at all.
Still, ghost or not, he’d saved my life. There was no denying that. He’d probably only done it to get on my good side so I wouldn’t kick him out of the house entirely.
But regardless of why he’d done it, it had still been pretty nice of him. Nobody had ever volunteered to help me before—mostly because, of course, nobody knew I needed help. Even Gina, who’d been there when Madame Zara had first pronounced me a mediator, never knew why it was I would show up to school so groggy-eyed, or where it was I went when I cut class—which I did all too frequently. And I couldn’t exactly explain. Not that Gina would have thought I was crazy or anything, but she’d have told someone—you can’t keep something like this secret unless it’s happening to you—who’d have told someone else, and eventually, somewhere along the line, I knew someone would have told my mother.
And my mother would have freaked. That is, naturally, what mothers do, and mine is no exception. She’d already stuck me in therapy where I was forced to sit and invent elaborate lies in the hopes of explaining my antisocial behavior. I did not need to spend any time in a mental institution, which was undoubtedly where I’d have ended up if my mother had ever found out the truth.
So, yeah, I was grateful to have Jesse along, even though he sort of made me nervous. After the debacle at the Mission, he walked me home, which was gentlemanly and all. He even, in deference to my injury, insisted on pushing the bike. I suppose if anybody had looked out the window of any of the houses we were passing, they would have thought their eyes were playing tricks on them: They’d have seen me plodding along with this bike rolling effortlessly beside me—only my hands weren’t touching the bike.