Haunted (3 page)

“Although I don’t honestly know what I could have done,” Father Dom said, rifling through Paul’s file, “to prevent his being admitted. His test scores, grades, teacher evaluations…everything is exemplary. I am sorry to say that on paper, Paul Slater comes off as a far better student than you did when you first applied to this school.”

“You can’t tell anything,” I pointed out, “about a person’s moral fiber from a bunch of test scores.” I am a little defensive about this topic, on account of my own test scores having been mediocre enough to have caused the Mission Academy to balk at accepting my application eight months ago when my mother announced we were moving to California so that she could marry Andy Ackerman, the man of her dreams, and now my stepfather.

“No,” Father Dominic said, tiredly removing his glasses and cleaning them on the hem of his long black robe. There were, I noticed, purple shadows beneath his eyes. “No, you cannot,” he agreed with a deep sigh, placing his wire rims back over the bridge of his perfectly aquiline nose. “Susannah, are you really so certain this boy’s motives are less than noble? Perhaps Paul is looking for guidance. It’s possible that, with the right influence, he might be made to see the error of his ways….”

“Yeah, Father Dom,” I said sarcastically. “And maybe this year I’ll get elected Homecoming Queen.”

Father Dominic looked disapproving. Unlike me, Father Dominic tended always to think the best of people, at least until their subsequent behavior proved his assumption of their inherent goodness to be wrong. You would think that in the case of Paul Slater, he’d have already seen enough to form a solid basis for judgment on that guy’s behalf, but apparently not.

“I am going to assume,” Father D. said, “until we’ve seen something to prove otherwise, that Paul is here at the Mission Academy because he wants to learn. Not just the normal eleventh-grade curriculum, either, Susannah, but what you and I might have to teach him as well. Let us hope that Paul regrets his past actions and truly wishes to make amends. I believe that Paul is here to make a fresh start rather like you did last year, if you’ll recall. And it is our duty, as charitable human beings, to help him do just that. Until we learn otherwise, I believe we should give Paul the benefit of the doubt.”

I thought this was the worst plan I had ever heard in my life. But the truth was, I didn’t have any evidence that Paul was, in fact, here to cause trouble. Not yet, anyway.

“Now,” Father D. said, closing Paul’s file and leaning back in his chair, “I haven’t seen you in a few weeks. How are you, Susannah? And how’s Jesse?”

I felt my face heat up. Things were at a sorry pass when the mere mention of Jesse’s name could cause me to blush, but there it was.

“Um,” I said, hoping Father D. wouldn’t notice my flaming cheeks. “Fine.”

“Good,” Father Dom said, pushing his glasses up on his nose and looking over at his bookshelf in a distracted manner. “There was a book he mentioned he wanted to borrow—Oh, yes, here it is.” Father Dom placed a giant, leatherbound book—it had to have weighed ten pounds at least—in my arms. “
Critical Theory Since Plato
,” he said with a smile. “Jesse ought to like that.”

I didn’t doubt it. Jesse liked some of the most boring books known to man. Possibly this was why he wasn’t responding to me. I mean, not the way I wanted him to. Because I was not boring enough.

“Very good,” Father D. said distractedly. You could tell he had a lot on his mind. Visits from the archbishop always threw him into a tizzy, and this one, for the feast of Father Serra, whom several organizations had been trying unsuccessfully to have made a saint, was going to be a particularly huge pain in the butt, from what I could see.

“Let’s just keep an eye on our young friend Mr. Slater,” Father Dom went on, “and see how things go. He might very well settle down, Susannah, in a structured environment like the one we offer here at the academy.”

I sniffed. I couldn’t help it. Father D. really had no idea what he was up against.

“And if he doesn’t?” I asked.

“Well,” Father Dominic said. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. Now run along. You don’t want to waste the whole of your lunch break in here with me.”

Reluctantly, I left the principal’s office, carrying the dusty old tome he’d given me. The morning fog had dispersed, as it always did around eleven, and now the sky overhead was a brilliant blue. In the courtyard, hummingbirds busily worked over the hibiscus. The fountain, surrounded by a half-dozen tourists in Bermuda shorts—the mission, besides being a school, was also a historic landmark and sported a basilica and even a gift shop that were must-sees on any touring bus’s schedule—burbled noisily. The deep green fronds of the palm trees waved lazily overhead in the gentle breeze from the sea. It was another gorgeous day in Carmel-by-the-Sea.

So why did I feel so wretched?

I tried to tell myself that I was overreacting. That Father Dom was right—we didn’t know what Paul’s motives in coming to Carmel were. Perhaps he really had turned over a new leaf.

So why could I not get that image—the one from my nightmares—out of my head? The long dark hallway and me running through it, looking desperately for a way out, and finding only fog. It was a dream I had nearly once a night, and from which I never failed to wake in a sweat.

Truthfully, I didn’t know which was scarier: my nightmare or what was happening now while I was awake. What was Paul doing here? Even more perplexing, how was it that Paul seemed to know so much about the talent he and I shared? There’s no newsletter. There are no conferences or seminars. When you put the word
mediator
into any search engine online, all you get is stuff about lawyers and family counselors. I am as clueless now, practically, as I’d been back when I was little and known only that I was…well, different from the other kids in my neighborhood.

But Paul. Paul seemed to think he had some kinds of answers.

What could he know about it, though? Even Father Dominic didn’t claim to know exactly what we mediators—for lack of a better term—were, and where we’d come from, and just what, exactly, was the extent of our talents…and he was older than both of us combined! Sure, we can see and speak to—and even kiss and punch—the dead…or rather, the spirits of those who had died and left things untidy, something I’d found out at the age of six, when my dad, who’d passed away from a sudden heart attack, came back for a little post-funeral chat.

But was that it? I mean, was that all mediators were capable of? Not according to Paul.

Despite Father Dominic’s assurances that Paul likely meant well, I could not be so sure. People like Paul did not do anything without good reason. So what was he doing back in Carmel? Could it be merely that, now that he’d discovered Father Dom and me, he wished to continue the relationship out of some kind of longing to be with his own kind?

It was possible. Of course, it’s equally possible that Jesse really does love me and is just pretending he doesn’t, since a romantic relationship between the two of us really wouldn’t be all that kosher….

Yeah. And maybe I really
will
get that Homecoming Queen nomination I’ve been longing for….

I was still trying not to think about this at lunch—the Paul thing, not the Homecoming Queen thing—when, sandwiched on an outdoor bench between Adam and CeeCee, I cracked the pull tab on a can of diet soda and then nearly choked on my first swallow after CeeCee went, “So, spill. Who’s this Jesse guy anyway? Answer please this time.”

Soda went everywhere, mostly out of my nose. Some of it got on my Benetton sweater set.

CeeCee was completely unsympathetic. “It’s diet,” she said. “It won’t stain. So how come we haven’t met him?”

“Yeah,” Adam said, getting over his initial mirth at seeing soda come out of my nostrils. “And how come this Paul guy knows him, and we don’t?”

Dabbing myself with a napkin, I glanced in Paul’s direction. He was sitting on a bench not too far away, surrounded by Kelly Prescott and the other popular people in our class, all of whom were laughing uproariously at some story he’d just told them.

“Jesse’s just a guy,” I said, because I had a feeling I wasn’t going to be able to get away with brushing their questions off. Not this time.

“Just a guy,” CeeCee repeated. “Just a guy you are apparently going out with, according to this Paul.”

“Well,” I said uncomfortably. “Yeah. I guess I am. Sort of. I mean…it’s complicated.”

Complicated? My relationship with Jesse made
Critical Theory Since Plato
look like
The Poky Little Puppy
.

“So,” CeeCee said, crossing her legs and nibbling contentedly from a bag of baby carrots in her lap. “Tell. Where’d you two meet?”

I could not believe I was actually sitting there, discussing Jesse with my friends. My friends whom I’d worked so hard to keep in the dark about him.

“He, um, lives in my neighborhood,” I said. No point in telling them the absolute truth.

“He go to RLS?” Adam wanted to know, referring to Robert Louis Stevenson School and reaching over me to grab a carrot from the bag in CeeCee’s lap.

“Um,” I said. “Not exactly.”

“Don’t tell me he goes to Carmel High.” CeeCee’s eyes widened.

“He’s not in high school anymore,” I said, since I knew that, given CeeCee’s nature, she’d never rest until she knew all. “He, um, graduated already.”

“Whoa,” CeeCee said. “An older man. Well, no wonder you’re keeping him a secret. So, what is he, in college?”

“Not really,” I said. “He’s, uh, taking some time off. To kind of…find himself.”

“Hmph.” Adam leaned back against the bench and closed his eyes, letting the strong midday sun caress his face. “A slacker. You can do better, Suze. What you need is a guy with a good solid work ethic. A guy like…Hey, I know. Me!”

CeeCee, who had had her eye on Adam for as long as I’d known them both, ignored him.

“How long have you guys been going out?” she wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling pretty miserable now. “It’s all sort of new. I mean, I’ve known him for a while, but the whole dating angle of it…that’s new. And it isn’t really…Well, I don’t really like to talk about it.”

“Talk about what?” A shadow loomed over our bench. Squinting, I looked up and saw my younger stepbrother, David, standing there, his red hair glowing like a halo in the hot sun.

“Nothing,” I said, quickly.

Out of everyone in my family—and yes, I did think of the Ackermans, my stepdad and his sons, as part of my family now, the little family that used to be made up of just my mom and me after my dad died—thirteen-year-old David was the one closest to knowing the truth about me. That I wasn’t the merely somewhat discontented teenaged girl I pretended to be, that is.

What’s more, David knew about Jesse. Knew, and yet didn’t know. Because while he, like everyone in the house, had noticed my sudden mood swings and mysterious absence from the family room every night, he could not even begin to imagine what was behind it all.

Now he stood in front of our bench—which was pretty daring, since the upperclassmen did not tend to take kindly to eighth graders like David coming over to what they considered their side of the assembly yard—trying to look like he belonged there, which, considering his hundred-pound frame, braces, and sticky-out ears, could not have been further from the truth.

“Did you see this?” he asked now, shoving a piece of paper beneath my nose.

I took the paper from him. It turned out to be a flyer advertising a hot tub party at 99 Pine Crest Drive on this coming Friday night. Guests were invited to bring a swimsuit if they wanted to have some “hot ’n’ frothy fun.” Or if they chose to forsake a suit, that was all right, particularly if they happened to be of the female persuasion.

There was a crude drawing on the flyer of a tipsy-looking girl with large breasts downing a can of beer.

“No, you can’t go,” I said, handing the flyer back to David with a snort. “You’re too young. And somebody ought to show this to your class adviser. Eighth graders shouldn’t be having parties like this.”

CeeCee, who’d taken the flyer from David’s hands, went, “Um, Suze.”

“Seriously,” I continued. “And I’m surprised at you, David. I thought you were smarter than that. Nothing good ever comes from parties like that. Sure, some people will have fun. But ten to one somebody will end up having to get his stomach pumped or drown or crack his head open or something. It’s always fun until someone gets hurt.”

“Suze.” CeeCee held the flyer up in front of my face just inches from my nose. “Ninety-nine Pine Crest Drive. That’s your house, isn’t it?”

I snatched the flyer away from her with a gasp. “David! What can you be thinking?”

“It wasn’t me,” David cried, his already wobbly voice going up another two or three octaves. “Somebody showed it to me in social studies. Brad’s passing them around. Some of the seventh graders got some, even—”

I narrowed my eyes in my stepbrother Brad’s direction. He was leaning against the basketball pole, trying to look cool, which was pretty hard for a guy whose cerebral cortex was coated, as far as I could tell, with WD-40.

“Excuse me,” I said, standing up. “I have to go commit a murder.” Then I stalked across the basketball court, the bright orange flyer in my hand.

Brad saw me coming. I noted the look of naked panic that flitted across his features as his gaze fell upon what I had in my hand. He straightened up and tried to run, but I was too quick for him. I cornered him by the drinking fountain and held the flyer up so that he could see it.

“Do you really think,” I asked, calmly, “that Mom and Andy are going to allow you to have this…this…whatever it is?”

The panic on Brad’s face had turned to defiance. He stuck out his chin and said, “Yeah, well, what they don’t know isn’t going to hurt them.”

“Brad,” I said. Sometimes I felt sorry for him. I really did. He was just such a doofus. “Don’t you think they’re going to notice when they look out their bedroom window and see a bunch of naked girls in their new hot tub?”