by Meg Cabot
At one point during Felicia and Carrie's assault, I tripped over something - something that was warm and somewhat soft. I wasn't sure what it was - I couldn't see it, of course - until it moaned my name.
"Suze," it said.
At first I didn't recognize the voice. Then I realized Michael's throat must have been crushed by that seatbelt. All he could do was croak.
"Suze," he wheezed. "What's happening?"
The terror in his voice, I thought, showed that he was probably as frightened now as Josh, Carrie, Mark, and Felicia had been when he'd rammed their car and sent them plummeting to their deaths. It served him right, I thought, in some distant part of my mind that wasn't concentrating on trying to escape the blows that were raining down on me.
"Suze," Michael moaned, beneath me. "Make it stop."
As if I could. As if I had anything like control over what was happening to me. If I lived through this - which didn't seem likely - some big changes were going to be made. First and foremost, I was going to practice my kick-boxing a lot more faithfully.
And then something happened. I can't tell you what it was because, like I said, I couldn't see.
But I could hear. And what I heard was perhaps the sweetest sound I'd ever heard in my life.
It was a siren. Police or firetruck, ambulance or paramedic, I couldn't tell. But it was coming closer, and closer, and closer still, until suddenly, I could hear the vehicle's tires crunching on the gravel in front of me. The blows that had been raining down on me abruptly ceased, and I sagged against Michael, who was pushing at me feebly, saying, "The cops. Get off me. It's the cops. I gotta go."
A second later, hands were touching me. Warm hands. Not ghost hands. Human hands.
Then a man's voice was saying, "Don't worry, miss. We've got you. We've got you. Can you stand up?"
I could, but standing caused waves of pain to go shooting through me. I recognized that pain. It was the kind of pain that was so intense, it seemed ridiculous … so ridiculous, I started to giggle. Really. Because it was just funny that anything could hurt that much. It meant, pain like that, that something, somewhere, was broken.
Then something soft was pressed beneath me, and I was told to lie down. More pain - burning, searing pain that left me chuckling weakly. More hands touched me.
Then I heard a familiar voice calling my name as if from somewhere very far away.
"Susannah. Susannah, it's me, Father Dominic. Can you hear me, Susannah?"
I opened my eyes. Someone had wiped the blood from them. I could see again.
I was lying on an ambulance gurney. Red and white lights were flashing all around me. Two emergency medical technicians were messing with the wound in my scalp.
But that wasn't what hurt. My chest. Ribs. I'd cracked a few. I could tell.
Father Dominic's face loomed over my gurney. I tried to smile - tried to speak - but I couldn't. My lip was too sore to move it.
"Gina called me," Father Dominic said, I suppose in answer to the questioning look I'd given him. "She told me you were going to meet Michael. I guessed - after she told me what you'd said about the accident today - that this was where you'd bring him. Oh, Susannah, how I wish you hadn't."
"Yeah," one of the EMTs said. "Looks like he worked her over pretty good."
"Hey." His partner was grinning. "Who you kidding? She gave as good as she got. Kid's a mess."
Michael. They were talking about Michael. Who else could they be talking about? None of them - except Father Dominic - could see Jesse, or the RLS Angels. They could see only the two of us, Michael and me, both beaten, apparently, almost to death. Of course they assumed we'd done it to each other. Who else was there to blame?
Jesse. Reminded of him, my heart began to hammer in my broken chest. Where was Jesse? I lifted my head, looking around for him frantically in what had become a sea of uniformed police officers. Was Jesse all right?
Father Dominic misread my panic. He said, soothingly, "Michael's going to be all right. A severely bruised larynx, and some cuts and bruises. That's all."
"Hey." The EMT straightened. They were getting ready to load me into the ambulance. "Don't sell yourself short, kid." He was talking to me. "You got him real good. He won't be forgetting this little escapade for a long time to come, believe me."
"Not with all the time he's going to be spending behind bars for this," his partner said with a wink.
And sure enough, as they lifted me into the ambulance, I could see that Michael was sitting not, as I'd expected, in an ambulance of his own, but in the back of a squad car. His hands appeared to be cuffed behind his back. His throat may have been hurting him, but he was speaking. He was speaking rapidly and, if the expression on his face was any indication, urgently to a man in a suit I could only assume was a police detective of some kind. Occasionally, the man in the suit jotted something down on a clipboard in front of him.
"See?" The first EMT grinned down at me. "Singing like a canary. You're not going to have to worry about running into him in school on Monday. Not for a real long time."
Was Michael confessing? I wondered. And if so, what about? About the Angels? About what he'd done to the Rambler?
Or was he merely explaining to the detective what had happened to him? That he'd been attacked by some unseen, unmanageable force - the same force that had broken my ribs, split open my head, and busted my lip?
The detective didn't look as if anything Michael was telling him was all that extraordinary. But I happen to know from experience that this is the way detectives always look.
Just as they were closing the ambulance doors, Father Dominic cried, "Don't worry, Susannah. I'll tell your mother where to find you."
Can I just tell you that if this was supposed to comfort me, it totally didn't.
But right after that the morphine kicked in. And I found that, happily, I didn't care anymore.
CHAPTER 19
"This," Gina said, "is so not how I pictured spending my spring break."
"Hey." I looked up from the copy of Cosmo she'd brought me. "I said I was sorry. What more do you want?"
Gina seemed surprised by the vehemence in my tone.
"I'm not saying I haven't had fun," she said. "I'm just saying it's not how I pictured it."
"Oh, right." I tossed the magazine aside. "Yeah, it's been real fun, visiting me in the hospital."
I couldn't talk very fast with the stitches in my lip. Nor could I enunciate too well, either. I had no idea how I looked - my mother had instructed everyone, including the hospital staff, not to allow me access to mirrors, which of course led me to believe that I looked hideous; it had probably been a wise move, however, considering how I get when all I've got is a zit. Still, one thing for sure, I certainly sounded stupid.
"It's just for a few more hours," Gina said. "Until they get the results of your second MRI. If it comes out normal, you're free to go. And you and I can hit the beach again. And this time" - she glanced at the door to my private room to make sure it was all the way closed and no one could overhear her - "there won't be any pesky ghosts to ruin everything."
Well, that much was true, anyway. Michael's arrest, while anticlimactic, had nevertheless satisfied the Angels. They probably would have preferred to see him dead, but once Father Dominic convinced them of how miserable a sensitive boy like Michael was going to find the California penal system, they snapped right out of their murderous rage. They even asked Father Dominic to tell Jesse and me that they were sorry about the whole beating us into a bloody pulp thing.
I, for one, was not exactly ready to forgive them, even after Father D had assured me that the Angels had moved on to their afterlife destinations - whatever those might be - and would be troubling me no more.
Jesse's opinion on the matter I did not know. He had not deigned to grace either Father Dom or me with his presence since the night the Angels had attacked us. He was, I feared, extremely upset with me. Seeing as how the whole thing had been my fault, I didn't exactl
y blame him. Still, I wished he'd stop by, if only to yell at me some more. I missed him. More, I knew, than was probably healthy.
Damn that Madame Zara, anyway, for being right.
"You should hear what everyone at school is saying about you," Gina said. She was perched on the end of my hospital bed, already clad in her bikini, over which she'd thrown a leopard print baby doll dress. She wanted to waste as little time as possible when we finally got to the beach.
"Oh, yeah?" I tried to drag my thoughts from Jesse. It wasn't easy. "What are they saying?"
"Well, your friend Cee Cee's writing this story about you in the school paper … you know, the whole amateur sleuth angle of it all, how you caught on that it was Michael who'd committed all these heinous crimes and set out to trap him - "
"Something," I said drily, "that I'm sure she heard from you."
Gina looked innocent. "I don't know what you're talking about. Adam sent you those" - Gina pointed at an enormous bouquet of pink roses on the window sill - "and Mr. Walden, according to Jake, is taking up a collection to get you a complete set of Nancy Drew books. He apparently thinks you have a crime-solving fixation."
Mr. Walden was right about that. But my fixation wasn't on solving crimes.
"Oh, and your stepdad's thinking about buying a Mustang to replace the Rambler," Gina informed me.
I made a face, then regretted it. It was hard to make expressions of any kind with my sore lip, not to mention the stitches in my scalp.
"A Mustang?" I shook my head. "How are we all supposed to fit into a Mustang?"
"Not for you guys. For himself. He's giving you guys the Land Rover."
Well, that, at least, made sense.
"What about …" I wanted to ask her about Jesse. After all, she was sharing a room with him - alone, thanks to my being held overnight in the hospital for observation. The thing is, she didn't know it. About Jesse, I mean. I still hadn't told her about him.
And now, well, there didn't seem to be any reason to. Not now that he wasn't speaking to me anymore.
"What about Michael?" I asked instead. None of my other visitors - my mother and stepfather; Sleepy, Dopey, and Doc; Cee Cee and Adam; even Father Dom - would tell me anything about him. The doctors had advised them that the topic might be "too painful" for me to discuss.
As if. You want to know what's painful? I'll tell you what's painful. Having two broken ribs, and knowing that for weeks, you're going to have wear a one-piece to the beach in order to hide the black and blue marks.
"Michael?" Gina shrugged. "Well, you were right. What you said about him keeping stuff on his computer. The police got a warrant and confiscated his PC, and it was all there - journals, emails, the schematics of the Rambler's brake system. Plus they found the wrench he used. You know, on the bolts that held the guardrail in place? They matched the metal tracings. And the clippers he used to snip the Rambler's brake line. They got brake fluid off the blades. The boy didn't do such a good job cleaning up after himself, it appears."
I'll say.
He was arrested on four counts of first-degree murder - the RLS Angels - and six counts of attempted murder: five for those of us who'd been in the Rambler the afternoon the brakes had given out, and one for what the police were convinced Michael had done to me out at the Point.
I didn't correct them. I mean, it wasn't like I was about to sit there and go, "Uh, yeah, about my injuries? Yeah, Michael didn't inflict them. No, the ghosts of his victims did that because I wouldn't let them kill him."
I figured it was just as well to let them go on thinking it was Michael who was responsible for my broken ribs and the fourteen stitches in my scalp … not to mention the two in my lip. I mean, after all, he'd been going to kill me. The Angels had just interrupted him. If you thought about it, they'd actually saved my life.
Yeah. So they could kill me themselves.
"So listen," Gina was saying. "Your grounding - you know, for sneaking out and getting into a car with Michael when your mother had told you expressly not to - isn't supposed to start until after I leave. I say we spend the next four days at the beach. I mean, there's no way you're going to school. Not with broken ribs. You wouldn't be able to sit down. But you can certainly lie down, you know, on a towel. I should be able to talk your mom into letting you do that, at least."
"Sounds good to me," I said.
"Ex," Gina said. She apparently meant excellent, only she'd shortened it - much in the way Sleepy often shortened words because he was too lazy to say all the syllables. Thus pizza became " 'za," Gina became "G." She had, I realized, more in common with Sleepy than I'd ever guessed.
"I'm going to get a Diet Coke," she said, climbing down from my bed - careful not to jostle the mattress since the nurse had already come in twice and warned her not to. Like I hadn't consumed enough Tylenol with codeine to block out the pain. Somebody could have dropped a safe on my head and I probably wouldn't have felt it.
"You want?" Gina asked, pausing by the door.
"Sure," I said. "Just make sure - "
"Yeah, yeah," she said over her shoulder as the door swung slowly shut behind her. "I'll find a straw somewhere."
Alone in my room, I adjusted the pillows behind me carefully, and then sat there, staring at nothing. People who are on as many painkillers as I was tend to do that a lot.
But I wasn't thinking about nothing. I was thinking, actually, about what Father Dominic had told me when he'd visited a few hours ago. In what could only be the cruelest of ironies, the morning after Michael's arrest, his sister, Lila Meducci, had wakened from her coma.
Oh, it wasn't like she'd sat up and asked for a bowl of Cheerios, or anything. She was still severely messed up. According to Father D, it was going to take her months, even years, of rehabilitation to get her back to the way she'd been before the accident - if ever. It would be a long, long time before she'd be able to walk, talk, even eat on her own again like she used to.
But she was alive. She was alive and she was conscious. It wasn't much of a consolation prize for poor Mrs. Meducci, but it was something.
It was as I was reflecting over the vagaries of life that I heard a rustle. I turned my head just in time to catch Jesse trying to dematerialize.
"Oh, no, you don't," I said, sitting up - and jolting my ribs quite painfully, I'd like to add. "You come back here right now."
He came back, a sheepish expression on his face.
"I thought you were asleep," he said. "So I decided to come back later."
"Baloney," I said. "You saw I was awake, so you decided to come back later when you were sure I was asleep." I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe what I'd caught him trying to do. This hurt, I discovered, way more than my ribs. "What, you're only going to visit me when I'm unconscious now? Is that it?"
"You've been through an ordeal," Jesse said. He looked more uncomfortable than I'd ever seen him. "Your mother - back at the house - I heard her tell everyone they weren't to do anything to upset you."
"Seeing you won't upset me," I said.
I was hurt. I really was. I mean, I'd known Jesse was mad at me for what I'd done - you know, that whole tricking-Michael-into-coming-out-to-the-Point-so-the-RLS-Angels-could-kill-him thing - but not even to want to talk to me anymore....
Well, that was harsh.
The hurt I felt must have shown in my face since when Jesse spoke, it was in the gentlest voice I'd ever heard him use.
"Susannah," he said. "I - "
"No," I interrupted him. "Let me go first. Jesse, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for that whole thing last night. It was all my fault. I can't believe I did it. And I'll never, ever forgive myself for dragging you into it."
"Susannah - "
"I am the worst mediator," I went on. Once I had the ball rolling, I found it was hard to stop it. "The worst one that ever lived. I should be thrown out of the mediator organization. Seriously. I can't believe I actually did something that stupid. And I wouldn't blame you if you never spoke to me again.
Only - " I looked up at him, aware that there were tears in my eyes. Only this time, I wasn't ashamed to let him see them. "It's just that you've got to understand: he tried to kill my family. And I couldn't let him get away with that. Can you understand that?"
Jesse did something then that he'd never done before. I doubt he'll ever do it again, either.
And it happened so fast, I wasn't even sure afterward if it had really happened, or if, in my drugged-out state, I imagined it.
But I'm pretty sure he reached out and touched my cheek.
That's all. Sorry if I got your hopes up. He just touched my cheek, the only part of me, I imagine, that wasn't scraped, bruised, or broken.
But I didn't care. He'd touched my cheek. Grazed it, actually, with the backs of his fingers, not the tips. Then he dropped his hand.
"Yes, querida," he said. "I understand."
My heart started beating so fast, I was certain he could hear it. Plus, I probably don't need to tell you, my ribs really, really ached. Each pulse seemed to send my heart slamming into them.
"And the only reason I got so angry was because I didn't want to see this happen to you."
On the word this, he gestured toward my face. I must, I realized, have looked pretty bad.
But I didn't care. He'd touched my cheek. His touch had been gentle, and, for a ghost, warm.
Am I pathetic, or what, that a simple gesture like that could make me so head-over-heels happy?
I said, idiotically, "I'll be all right. I won't even need any plastic surgery, they said."
As if a guy born in 1830 even knows what plastic surgery is. God, can I spoil a mood, or what?
Still, Jesse didn't exactly draw away. He stood there looking down at me like he wanted to say more. I was perfectly willing to let him, too. Especially if he called me querida again.
Only it turned out he didn't call me anything. Because at that moment Gina came bursting back into the room clutching two cans of soda in her hands.
"Guess what?" she said as Jesse shimmered, and then, with a smile to me, disappeared. "I ran into your mom in the hallway, and she said to tell you your second MRI came out normal, and you can start getting ready to go home. She's having all the paperwork done right now. Isn't that great?"