Haunted

Paul’s blue-eyed gaze bore into me. There wasn’t the slightest hint of a smile on his face anymore. “Suze, when are you going to get it?”

That was when I finally noticed how close his face was to mine. Just inches away, really. I started instinctively to pull away, but the fingers that had been holding down Dr. Slaski’s papers suddenly lifted and seized my wrist. I looked down at Paul’s hand. His tanned skin was very dark against mine.

“Jesse’s dead,” Paul said. “But that doesn’t mean you have to act like you are, too.”

“I don’t,” I protested. “I—”

But I didn’t get to finish my little speech, because right in the middle of it, Paul leaned over and kissed me.

Fog. That’s all I can see. Just fog
, the kind that pours in from the bay every morning, seeping over my bedroom windowsills and spilling onto the floor in cold, ropy tendrils….

Only here there are no windows, or even a floor. I am in a corridor lined with doors. There is no ceiling overhead, just coldly winking stars in an inky black sky. The long hall made up of closed doors seems to stretch out forever in all directions.

And now I’m running. I’m running down the corridor, the fog seeming to cling to my legs as I go, the closed doors on either side of me a blur. There’s no point, I know, in opening any of these doors. There’s nothing behind them that can help me. I’ve
got to get out of this hallway, only I can’t, because it just keeps getting longer and longer, stretching out into the darkness, still blanketed in that thick white fog….

And then suddenly, I’m not alone in that fog. Jesse is there with me, holding my hand. I don’t know if it’s the warmth of his fingers or the kindness of his smile that banishes my fear, but suddenly, I am convinced that everything is going to be all right.

At least until it becomes clear that Jesse doesn’t know the way out any more than I do. And now even the fact that my hand is in his can’t squelch the feeling of panic bubbling up inside of me.

But wait. Someone is coming toward us, a tall figure striding through the fog. My frantically beating heart—the only sound I can hear in this dead place, with the exception of my own breathing—slows somewhat. Help. Help at last.

Except that when the fog parts and I recognize the face of the person ahead of us, my heart starts pounding more loudly than ever. Because I know he won’t help us. I know he won’t do a thing.

Except laugh.

And then I’m alone again, only this time, the floor beneath me has dropped away. The doors disappear, and I am teetering on the brink of a chasm
so deep, I cannot see the ground below. The fog swirls around me, spilling into the chasm and seeming intent on taking me with it. I am waving my arms to keep from falling, grabbing frantically for something, anything, to hold on to.

Only there’s nothing to grab. A second later, an unseen hand gives a single push.

And I fall.

“Well, well, well,” said a distinctly masculine voice from behind me. “If it isn’t Susannah Simon.”

Look, I won’t lie to you. When a cute guy talks to me—and you could tell from this guy’s voice that he was easy on the eyes; it was in the selfconfidence of those
well, well, well
s, the caressing way he said my name—I pay attention. I can’t help it. I’m a sixteen-year-old girl, after all. My life can’t revolve entirely around Lilly Pulitzer’s latest tankini print and whatever new innovations Bobbi Brown has made in the world of stay-put lip liner.

So I’ll admit that, even though I have a boyfriend—even if
boyfriend
is a little optimistic a term for him—as I turned around to see the hottie who was addressing me, I gave my hair a little bit of a toss. Why shouldn’t I? I mean, considering all the product I’d layered into it that morning, in honor of the first day of my junior year—not to mention the marine fog that regularly turns my head into a frizzy mess—my coiffure was looking exceptionally fine.

It wasn’t until I’d given the old chestnut mane a flip that I turned around and saw that the cutie who’d said my name was not someone I’m too fond of.

In fact, you might say I have reason to be scared to death of him.

I guess he could read the fear in my eyes—carefully done up that morning with a brand-new combination of eye shadows called Mocha Mist—because the grin that broke out across his good-looking face was slightly crooked at one end.

“Suze,” he said in a chiding tone. Even the fog couldn’t dull the glossy highlights in his raffishly curly dark hair. His teeth were dazzlingly white against his tennis tan. “Here I am, nervous about being the new kid at school, and you don’t even have a hello for me? What kind of way is that to treat an old pal?”

I continued to stare at him, perfectly incapable of speech. You can’t talk, of course, when your mouth has gone as dry as…well, as the adobe brick building we were standing in front of.

What was he doing here?
What was he doing here?

The thing of it was, I couldn’t follow my first impulse and run screaming from him. People tend to talk when they see impeccably garbed girls such as me run screaming from seventeen-year-old studlies. I had managed to keep my unusual talent from my classmates for this long, I wasn’t about to blow it now, even if I was—and believe me, I
was
—scared to death.

But if I couldn’t run away screaming, I could certainly move huffily past him without a word, hoping he would not recognize the huffiness for what it really was—sheer terror.

I don’t know whether or not he sensed my fear. But he sure didn’t like my pulling a prima donna on him. His hand flew out as I attempted to sweep past him, and the next thing I knew, his fingers were wrapped around my upper arm in a viselike grip.

I could, of course, have hauled off and slugged him. I hadn’t been named Girl Most Likely to Dismember Someone back at my old school in Brooklyn for nothing, you know.