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외국 문학 작품이라면 요즘 영화로도 개봉해 인기있는 Twilight 도 상관이 없나요?

text 파일은 아니지만 작가인 stephenie meyer 의 홈페이지에 들어가면 한 chapter 씩 미리보기가 있어요

Midnight Sun 같은 경우는 유출이 된 관계로 작가가 직접 PDF 파일로 올려놓았구요.

이외에도 Meg Cabot 같은 미국 유명 작가들의 홈페이지에 들어가면 미리보기 식으로 한 챕터씩 있어요.

stephenie meyer 의 홈페이지는 www.stepheniemeyer.com 이고, meg cabot 은 www.megcabot.com 입니다

 

Avalon High by Meg Cabot

CHAPTER ONE

And by the moon the reaper weary,
Piling sheaves in uplands airy,
Listening, whispers
“’Tis the fairy Lady of Shalott.”

 

“You are so lucky.”

Trust my best friend Nancy to see things that way. Nancy is what you would call an optimist.

Not that I’m a pessimist, or anything. I’m just . . . practical. At least according to Nancy. Apparently, I’m also lucky.

“Lucky?” I echoed into the phone. “In what way am I lucky?”

“Oh, you know,” Nancy said. “You get to start over. In a whole new school. Where no one knows you. You can be whoever you want to be. You can give yourself a total personality makeover, and there won’t be anyone around to be all, ‘Who do you think you’re kidding, Ellie Harrison? I remember when you ate paste in first grade.’ ”

“I never thought of it that way,” I said. Because I hadn’t. “Anyway, you were the one who ate paste.”

“You know what I mean.” Nancy sighed. “Well. Good luck. With school and everything.”

“Yeah,” I said, sensing even over the thousand-mile difference between us, that, it was time to hang up. “Bye.”

“Bye,” Nancy said. Then added, “You’re so lucky.”

Really, up until Nancy said this, I hadn’t thought there was anything lucky about my situation at all. Except maybe the fact that there’s a pool in the backyard of our new house. We never had a pool of our own. Before, if Nancy and I wanted to go to the pool, we had to get on our bikes and ride five miles—mostly uphill—to Como Park.

I have to say, when my parents broke the news about the sabbatical, the fact that they were quick to add, “And we’re renting a house with a pool!” was the only thing that kept down the vomit that started coming up in my throat. If you are a child of professors, sabbatical is probably about the dirtiest word in your own personal vocabulary. Every seven years, most professors get offered one—basically a yearlong vacation, so they can recharge and try to write and publish a book.

Professors love sabbaticals.

Their kids hate them.

Because would you really want to uproot and leave all your friends, make all new friends at a whole new school and just be getting to think, “Okay, this isn’t so bad,” only to have to uproot yourself again a year later and go back where you came from?

No. Not if you’re sane, anyway.

At least this sabbatical isn’t as bad as the last one, which was in Germany. Not that there’s anything wrong with Germany. I still exchange e-mails with Anne-Katrin, the girl I shared a desk with in the weird German school I went to there.

But come on. I had to learn a whole other language!

At least with this one, we’re still in America. And okay, we’re outside Washington, D.C., which isn’t like the rest of America. But everyone here speaks English. So far. And there’s a pool.

Having your own pool is a lot of responsibility, it turns out. I mean, every morning you have to check the filters and make sure they aren’t all jammed up with leaves or dead moles. There’s almost always a frog or two in ours. Usually, if I get out there early enough, they’re still alive. So then I have to conduct a frog rescue expedition.

The only way you can rescue the frogs is to reach down into the water to pull the filter basket out, so I’ve ended up touching all sorts of really gross stuff that floats in there, like dead beetles and newts and, a few times, drowned mice. Once there was a snake. It was still alive. I pretty much draw the line at touching anything that is capable of sending paralyzing streams of poison into my veins, so I yelled to my parents that there was a snake in the filter basket.

My dad is the one who yelled back, “So? What do you want me to do about it?”

“Get it out,” I said.

“No way,” my dad said. “I’m not touching any snake.”

My parents aren’t like other parents. For one thing, other people’s parents actually leave the house to go to work. Some of them are gone for as many as forty-five hours a week, I’ve heard.

Not mine. Mine are home all the time. They never leave! They’re always in their at-home offices, writing or reading. Practically the only time they come out of their offices is to watch Jeopardy! and then they yell out the answers at each other.

No one else’s parents know all the answers to Jeopardy! or yell them out if they do. I know, I’ve been to Nancy’s house and seen the evidence for myself. Her parents watch Entertainment Tonight after dinner, like normal people.

I don’t know any of the answers on Jeopardy! That’s why I sort of hate that show.

My dad grew up in the Bronx, where there aren’t any snakes. He completely hates nature. He totally ignores our cat, Tig. Which of course means that Tig is crazy about him.

And if my dad sees a spider, he screams like a girl. Then my mom, who grew up on a ranch in Montana and has no patience for spiders or my dad’s screaming, will come in and kill it, even though I’ve told her a million times that spiders are extremely beneficial to the environment.

Of course, I knew better than to tell my mom about the snake in the pool filter, because she’d probably have come out and snapped its head clean off right in front of me. In the end, I found a forked branch, and pulled it out that way. I let it go in the woodsy area behind the house we’re renting. Even though the snake didn’t turn out to be that scary once I finally got the guts to save it, I kind of hope it doesn’t come back.

There’s other stuff you have to do if you have your own pool, besides clean out the filter baskets. You have to vacuum the pool floor—this is kind of fun—and you have to test the water all the time, for chlorine and pH. I like testing the water. I do it a few times a day. You put the water in these little test tubes, and then add a couple drops of this stuff, and then if the water in the test tubes turns the wrong color, you have to drop some powder into the filter baskets. It’s a lot like chemistry, only better, because when you’re done, instead of a stinky mess like the kind I always ended up with last year in chem class, you get beautiful clear blue water.

I spent most of the summer that we moved to Annapolis messing around with the pool. I say “messing around with.” My brother Geoff—he left for his first year of college the second week in August—put it a different way. He said I was “acting like a freak about it.”

“Ellie,” he said to me so many times I lost count, “relax. You don’t need to be doing this. We’ve got a contract with a pool company. They come every week. Let them do it.” But the pool guy doesn’t really care about the pool. I mean, he’s just doing it for the money. He doesn’t see the beauty of it. I’m pretty sure.

But I guess I can see where Geoff was coming from. I mean, the pool did sort of start taking up a lot of my time. When I wasn’t cleaning it, I was floating on top of the water, on one of these inflatable rafts I made my mom and dad buy for us over at the Wawa. That’s the name of the gas stations here in Maryland. Wawas. They don’t have any Wawas back home in Minnesota. Just, like, Mobils and Exxons or whatever.

Anyway, we filled them up at the Wawa, too—the rafts—with the air hose meant for people to use on their tires, even though you aren’t supposed to use an air hose to fill a raft. It says so right on the raft.

But when Geoff pointed this out to my dad, he just went, “Who cares?” and filled them up anyway.

And nothing bad happened.

I tried to keep the same routine going for the whole summer. Every day I got up and put on my bikini. Then I grabbed a Nutri-Grain bar and headed down to the pool to check the filter baskets for frogs or whatever. Then when the pool was all clean, I got onto one of the rafts with a book and started floating.

By the time Geoff left for school, I was so good at floating that I could do it without even getting my hair wet or anything. I could go all morning without a break, right up until my mom or dad would come out onto the deck and say, “Lunch.”

Then I’d go inside and Mom and Dad and I would have peanut butter and jelly, if I was the one cooking that day, or ribs from Red Hot and Blue down the road if it was one of my parents’ turn, on account of them both being too busy writing books to cook.

Then I’d go back out to the pool until my mom or dad came out and said, “Dinner.”

I didn’t think this was a bad way to pass the last few weeks of summer.

But my mom did.

I don’t know why she had to go and make it her business how I spend my time. I mean, she’s the one who let Dad drag us out here in the first place, on account of the book he’s researching. She could have written her own book—on my namesake, Elaine of Astolat, the Lady of Shalott—back home in St. Paul.

Oh yeah. That’s the other thing about having professors as parents: They name you after totally random authors—like poor Geoff, after Geoffrey Chaucer—or characters from literature, such as the Lady of Shalott, aka Lady Elaine, who killed herself because Sir Lancelot liked Queen Guinevere—you know, the one Keira Knightley played in that King Arthur movie—better than he liked her.

I don’t care how beautiful the poem is about her. It’s not exactly cool to be named after someone who killed herself over a guy. I have mentioned this several times to my parents, but they still don’t get it.

The name thing’s not the only thing they don’t get, either.

“Don’t you want to go to the mall?” my mom started asking me every single day, before I could escape to the pool. “Don’t you want to go to the movies?”

But now that Geoff had left for college, I had no one to go to the mall or the movies with—no one except my parents. And no way was I going with them. Been there, done that. Nothing like going to the movies with two people who have to dissect the film to within an inch of its life. I mean, it’s Vin Diesel, okay? What do they expect?

“School’s going to start soon enough,” I’d say to my mom. “Why can’t I just float until then?”

“Because it’s not normal,” my mom would say, when I’d ask her this.

To which I would reply, “Oh, and you would know what normal is,” because, let’s face it, she and my dad are both freaks.

But she wouldn’t even get mad. She’d just shake her head and say, “I know what normal behavior for a teenage girl is. And floating in that pool by yourself all day is not it.”

I thought this was unnecessarily harsh. There’s nothing wrong with floating. It’s actually pretty fun. You can lie there and read, or, if your book gets boring or you finish it and are too lazy to go inside and get a new one or whatever, you can watch the way the sunlight reflects off the water onto the backs of the leaves of the trees above you. And you can listen to the birds and cicadas and, off in the distance, the rat-tat-boom of gunnery practice down at the Naval Academy.

We saw them, sometimes. The middies, I mean, or “midshipmen” as they preferred to be called, the student officers. In their spotless white uniforms, walking in pairs downtown, whenever my parents and I went to buy a new book for me to read and coffee for them at Hard Bean Coffee and Booksellers. My dad would point and say, “Look, Ellie. Sailors.” Which isn’t that weird, really. I guess he was trying to make girl talk. You know, because I can’t get any of that from my mom, the spider killer.

I guess I was supposed to think the middies were cute, or something. But I wasn’t going to talk about cute guys with my dad. I mean, I appreciated the effort, and all, but in a way it was just as bad as Mom’s “Why don’t you let me take you to the mall?” thing.

And it’s not like my dad spent his days doing anything all that exciting. The book he’s writing is even worse than Mom’s, on the boredom barometer. Because his is about a sword. A sword! It isn’t even a pretty sword, with jewels or gold or anything. It’s all old and has these rust spots and isn’t worth a dime. I know because the National Gallery over in D.C. let my dad bring it home so he could study it closer. That’s why we moved here . . . so he can look at this sword up close. It’s sitting in his office—well, the office of the professor whose house we’re renting while he’s in England on his own sabbatical, probably studying something even more worthless than Dad’s sword.

Museums let you borrow stuff and bring it home if it’s of academic interest (in other words, not worth anything) and if you’re a professor.

I don’t know why my parents had to choose medieval times as their field of study. It’s the most boring era of all, except possibly prehistoric times. I know I’m in the minority in thinking this, but that’s because most people have this really messed up idea about what things were like in the Middle Ages. Most people think it was like what they show in the movies and on TV. You know, women floating around in pointy hats and pretty dresses saying “thee” and “thou,” and knights thundering up to save the day.

But when your parents are medievalists, you learn at a pretty early age that things weren’t like that at all. The truth is, everyone back in the Middle Ages had totally bad B.O. and no teeth and died of old age at, like, twenty, and the women were all oppressed and had to marry people they didn’t even like and everybody blamed them for every little thing that went wrong.

I mean, look at Guinevere. Everyone thinks it’s all her fault Camelot doesn’t exist anymore. I’m so sure.

Except that I discovered at an early age that sharing information like this can make you kind of unpopular at Sleeping Beauty birthday parties. Or at that Medieval Times restaurant. Or during games of Dungeons & Dragons.

But what am I supposed to do, remain silent on the subject? I genuinely can’t help it. Like I’m really going to sit there and go, “Oh yeah, things were all really great back then. I wish I could find a time portal and go back to, like, the year 900 and visit and get lice and have all my hair frizz out because there was no conditioner, and oh, by the way, if you got strep throat or bronchitis you died because there weren’t any antibiotics.”

Um, not. As a consequence, I’m not at the top of anybody’s list when it comes time to send out invites to the Renaissance Fayre.

But whatever. I ended up giving in to my mom in the end. Not about the mall. About running with my dad.

I didn’t want to go, or anything.

 

Shadowland by Meg Cabot

CHAPTER ONE

They told me there'd be palm trees.

I didn't believe them, but that's what they told me. They told me I'd be able to see them from the plane.

Oh, I know they have palm trees in southern California. I mean, I'm not a complete moron. I've watched 90210, and everything. But I was moving to northern California. I didn't expect to see palm trees in northern California. Not after my mom told me not to give away all my sweaters.

“Oh, no,” my mom had said. “You'll need them. Your coats, too. It can get cold there. Not as cold as New York, maybe, but pretty chilly.”

Which was why I wore my black leather motorcycle jacket on the plane. I could have shipped it, I guess, with the rest of my stuff, but it kind of made me feel better to wear it.

So there I was, sitting on the plane in a black leather motorcycle jacket, seeing these palm trees through the window as we landed. And I thought, Great. Black leather and palm trees. Already I'm fitting in, just like I knew I would. . . .

. . . Not.

My mom isn't particularly fond of my leather jacket, but I swear I didn't wear it to make her mad, or anything. I'm not resentful of the fact that she decided to marry a guy who lives three thousand miles away, forcing me to leave school in the middle of my sophomore year; abandon the best—and pretty much only—friend I've had since kindergarten; leave the city I've been living in for all of my sixteen years.

Oh, no. I'm not a bit resentful.

The thing is, I really do like Andy, my new stepdad. He's good for my mom. He makes her happy. And he's very nice to me.

It's just this moving-to-California thing that bugs me.

Oh, and did I mention Andy's three other kids?

They were all there to greet me when I got off the plane. My mom, Andy, and Andy's three sons. Sleepy, Dopey, and Doc, I call them. They're my new stepbrothers.

“Susie!” Even if I hadn't heard my mom squealing my name as I walked through the gate, I wouldn't have missed them—my new family. Andy was making his two youngest boys hold up this big sign that said welcome home, susannah! Everybody getting off my flight was walking by it, going, “Aw, look how cute,” to their travel companions, and smiling at me in this sickening way.

Oh, yeah. I'm fitting in. I'm fitting in just great.

“Okay,” I said, walking up to my new family fast. “You can put the sign down now.”

But my mom was too busy hugging me to pay any attention. “Oh, Susie!” she kept saying. I hate when anybody but my mom calls me Susie, so I shot the boys this mean look over her shoulder, just in case they were getting any big ideas. They just kept grinning at me from over the stupid sign, Dopey because he's too dumb to know any better, Doc because—well, I guess because he might have been glad to see me. Doc's weird that way. Sleepy, the oldest, just stood there, looking . . . well, sleepy.

“How was your flight, kiddo?” Andy took my bag off my shoulder, and put it on his own. He seemed surprised by how heavy it was, and went, “Whoa, what've you got in here, anyway? You know it's a felony to smuggle New York City fire hydrants across state lines.”

I smiled at him. Andy's this really big goof, but he's a nice big goof. He wouldn't have the slightest idea what constitutes a felony in the state of New York since he's only been there, like, five times. Which was, incidentally, exactly how many visits it took him to convince my mother to marry him.

“It's not a fire hydrant,” I said. “It's a parking meter. And I have four more bags.”

“Four?” Andy pretended he was shocked. “What do you think you're doing, moving in or something?”

Did I mention that Andy thinks he's a comedian? He's not. He's a carpenter.

“Suze,” Doc said, all enthusiastically. “Suze, did you notice that as you were landing, the tail of the plane kicked up a little? That was from an updraft. It's caused when a mass moving at a considerable rate of speed encounters a counter-blowing wind velocity of equal or greater strength.”

Doc, Andy's youngest kid, is twelve, but he's going on about forty. He spent almost the entire wedding reception telling me about alien cattle mutilation, and how Area 51 is just this big cover-up by the American government, which doesn't want us to know that We Are Not Alone.

“Oh, Susie,” my mom kept saying. “I'm so glad you're here. You're just going to love the house. It just didn't feel like home at first, but now that you're here . . . Oh, and wait until you've seen your room. Andy's fixed it up so nice. . . .”

Andy and my mom spent weeks before they got married looking for a house big enough for all four kids to have their own rooms. They finally settled on this huge house in the hills of Carmel, which they'd only been able to afford because they'd bought it in this completely wretched state, and this construction company Andy does a lot of work for fixed it up at this big discount rate. My mom has been going on for days about my room, which she keeps swearing is the nicest one in the house.

“The view!” she kept saying. “An ocean view from the big bay window in your room! Oh, Suze, you're going to love it.”

I was sure I was going to love it. About as much as I was going to love giving up bagels for alfalfa sprouts, and the subway for surfing, and all that sort of stuff.

For some reason, Dopey opened his mouth, and went, “Do you like the sign?” in that stupid voice of his. I can't believe he's my age. He's on the school wrestling team, though, so what can you expect? All he ever thinks about, from what I could tell when I had to sit next to him at the wedding reception—I had to sit between him and Doc, so you can imagine how the conversation just flowed—is choke holds and body-building protein shakes.

“Yeah, great sign,” I said, yanking it out of his meaty hands, and holding it so that the lettering faced the floor. “Can we go? I wanna pick up my bags before someone else does.”

“Oh, right,” my mom said. She gave me one last hug. “Oh, I'm just so glad to see you! You look so great. . . .” And then, even though you could tell she didn't want to say it, she went ahead and said it anyway, in a low voice, so no one else could hear: “Thought I've talked to you before about that jacket, Suze. And I thought you were throwing those jeans away.”

I was wearing my oldest jeans, the ones with the holes in the knees. They went really well with my black silk T and my zip-up ankle boots. The jeans and boots, coupled with my black leather motorcycle jacket and my Army-Navy surplus shoulder bag, made me look like a teen runaway in a made-for-TV movie.

But hey, when you're flying for eight hours across the country, you want to be comfortable.

I said that, and my mom just rolled her eyes and dropped it. That's the good thing about my mom. She doesn't harp, like other moms do. Sleepy, Dopey, and Doc have no idea how lucky they are.

“All right,” she said, instead. “Let's get your bags.” Then, raising her voice, she called, “Jake, come on. We're going to get Suze's bags.”

She had to call Sleepy by name, since he looked as if he had fallen asleep standing up. I asked my mother once if Jake, who is a senior in high school, has narcolepsy, or possibly a drug habit, and she was like, “No, why would you say that?” Like the guy doesn't just stand there blinking all the time, never saying a word to anyone.

Wait, that's not true. He did say something to me, once. Once he said, “Hey, are you in a gang?” He asked me that at the wedding, when he caught me standing outside with my leather jacket on over my maid of honor's dress, sneaking a cigarette.

            Give me a break, all right? It was my first and only cigarette ever. I was under a lot of stress at the time. I was worried my mom was going to marry this guy and move to California and forget all about me. I swear I haven't smoked a single cigarette since.

And don't get me wrong about Jake. At six foot one, with the same shaggy blond hair and twinkly blue eyes as his dad, he's what my best friend Gina would call a hottie. But he's not the shiniest rock in the rock garden, if you know what I mean.

Doc was still going on about wind velocity. He was explaining the speed with which it is necessary to travel in order to break through the earth's gravitational force. This speed is called escape velocity. I decided Doc might be useful to have around, homework-wise, even if I am three grades ahead of him.

While Doc talked, I looked around. This was my first trip ever to California, and let me tell you, even though we were still only in the airport—and it was the San Jose International Airport—you could tell we weren't in New York anymore. I mean, first off, everything was clean. No dirt, no litter, no graffiti anywhere. The concourse was all done up in pastels, too, and you know how light colors show the dirt. Why do you think New Yorkers wear black all the time? Not to be cool. Nuh-uh. So we don't have to haul all our clothes down to the Laundromat every single time we wear them.

But that didn't appear to be a problem in sunny CA. From what I could tell, pastels were in. This one woman walked by us, and she had on pink leggings and a white Spandex sports bra. And that's all. If this is an example of what's de rigueur in California, I could tell I was in for some major culture shock.

And you know what else was strange? Nobody was fighting. There were passengers lined up here and there, but they weren't raising their voices at the people behind the ticket counter. In New York, if you're a customer, you fight with the people behind the counter, no matter where you are—airport, Bloomingdale's, hot dog stand. Wherever.

Not here. Everybody here was just way calm.

And I guess I could see why. I mean, it didn't look to me like there was anything to get upset about. Outside, the sun was beating down on those palm trees I'd seen from the sky. There were seagulls—not pigeons, but actual big white- and-gray seagulls—scratching around in the parking lot. And when we went to get my bags, nobody even checked to see if the stickers on them matched my ticket stubs. No, everybody was just like, “Buh-bye! Have a nice day!”

Unreal.

Gina—she was my best friend back in Brooklyn; well, okay, my only friend, really—told me before I left that I'd find there were advantages to having three stepbrothers. She should know since she's got four—not steps, but real brothers. Anyway, I didn't believe her any more than I'd believed people about the palm trees. But when Sleepy picked up two of my bags, and Dopey grabbed the other two, leaving me with exactly nothing to carry, since Andy had my shoulder bag, I finally realized what she was talking about: Brothers can be useful. They can carry really heavy stuff, and not even look like it's bothering them.

Hey, I packed those bags. I knew what was in them. They were not light. But Sleepy and Dopey were like, No problem here. Let's get moving.

My bags secure, we headed out into the parking lot. As the automatic doors opened, everyone—including my mom—reached into a pocket and pulled out a pair of sunglasses. Apparently, they all knew something I didn't know. And as I stepped outside, I realized what it was.

It's sunny here.

Not just sunny, either, but bright—so bright and colorful, it hurts your eyes. I had sunglasses, too, somewhere, but since it had been about forty degrees and sleeting when I left New York, I hadn't thought to put them anywhere easily accessible. When my mother had first told me we'd be moving—she and Andy decided it was easier for her, with one kid and a job as a TV news reporter, to relocate than it would be for Andy and his three kids to do it, especially considering that Andy owns his own business—she'd explained to me that I'd love northern California. “It's where they filmed all those Goldie Hawn, Chevy Chase movies!” she told me.

I like Goldie Hawn, and I like Chevy Chase, but I never knew they made a movie together.

“It's where all those Steinbeck stories you had to read in school took place,” she said. “You know, The Red Pony.”

Well, I wasn't very impressed. I mean, all I remembered from The Red Pony was that there weren't any girls in it, although there were a lot of hills. And as I stood in the parking lot, squinting at the hills surrounding the San Jose International Airport, I saw that there were a lot of hills, and the grass on them was dry and brown.

But dotting the hills were these trees, trees not like any I'd ever seen before. They were squashed on top as if a giant fist had come down from the sky and given them a thump. I found out later these were called cypress trees.

And all around the parking lot, where there was evidently a watering system, there were these fat bushes with these giant red flowers on them, mostly squatting down at the bottom of these impossibly tall, surprisingly thick palm trees. The flowers, I found out, when I looked them up later, were hibiscus. And the strange-looking bugs that I saw hovering around them, making a brrr-ing noise, weren't bugs at all. They were humming- birds.

“Oh,” my mom said when I pointed this out. “They're everywhere. We have feeders for them up at the house. You can hang one from your window if you want.”

Hummingbirds that come right up to your window? The only birds that ever came up to my window back in Brooklyn were pigeons. My mom never exactly encouraged me to feed them.

My moment of joy about the hummingbirds was shattered when Dopey announced suddenly, “I'll drive,” and started for the driver's seat of this huge utility vehicle we were approaching.

“I will drive,” Andy said firmly.

“Aw, Dad,” Dopey said. “How'm I ever going to pass the test if you never let me practice?”

“You can practice in the Rambler,” Andy said. He opened up the back of his Land Rover, and started putting my bags into it. “That goes for you, too, Suze.”

This startled me. “What goes for me, too?”

“You can practice driving in the Rambler.” He wagged a finger jokingly in my direction. “But only if there's someone with a valid license in the passenger seat.”

I just blinked up at him. “I can't drive,” I said.

Dopey let out this big horse laugh. “You can't drive?” He elbowed Sleepy, who was leaning against the side of the truck, his face turned toward the sun. “Hey, Jake, she can't drive!”

“It isn't at all uncommon, Brad,” Doc said, “for a native New Yorker to lack a driver's license. Don't you know that New York City boasts the largest mass transit system in North America, serving a population of thirteen point two million people in a four-thousand-square-mile radius fanning out from New York City through Long Island all the way to Connecticut? And that one point seven billion riders take advantage of their extensive fleet of subways, buses, and railroads every year?”

Everybody looked at Doc. Then my mother said carefully, “I never kept a car in the city.”

Andy closed the doors to the back of the Land Rover. “Don't worry, Suze,” he said. “We'll get you enrolled in a driver's ed course right away. You can take it and catch up to Brad in no time.”

I looked at Dopey. Never in a million years had I ever expected that someone would suggest that I needed to catch up to Brad in any capacity whatsoever.

But I could see I was in for a lot of surprises. The palm trees had only been the beginning. As we drove to the house, which was a good hour away from the airport—and not a quick hour, either, with me wedged in between Sleepy and Dopey, with Doc in the “way back,” perched on top of my luggage, still expounding on the glories of the New York City transportation authority—I began to realize that things were going to be different—very, very different—than I had anticipated, and certainly different from what I was used to.

And not just because I was living on the opposite side of the continent. Not just because everywhere I looked, I saw things I'd never have seen back in New York: roadside stands advertising artichokes or pomegranates, twelve for a dollar; field after field of grapevines, twisting and twisting around wooden arbors; groves of lemon and avocado trees; lush green vegetation I couldn't even identify. And arcing above it all, a sky so blue, so vast, that the hot-air balloon I saw floating through it looked impossibly small—like a button at the bottom of an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

There was the ocean, too, bursting so suddenly into view that at first I didn't recognize it, thinking it was just another field. But then I noticed that this field was sparkling, reflecting the sun, flashing little Morse code SOSs at me. The light was so bright, it was hard to look at without sunglasses. But there it was, the Pacific Ocean . . . huge, stretching almost as wide as the sky, a living, writhing thing, pushing up against a comma-shaped strip of white beach.

Being from New York, my glimpses of ocean—at least the kind with a beach—had been few and far between. I couldn't help gasping when I saw it. And when I gasped, everybody stopped talking—except for Sleepy, who was, of course, asleep.

“What?” my mother asked, alarmed. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” I said. I was embarrassed. Ob-viously, these people were used to seeing the ocean. They were going to think I was some kind of freak that I was getting so excited about it. “Just the ocean.”

“Oh,” said my mother. “Yes, isn't it beautiful?”

Dopey went, “Good curl on those waves. Might have to hit the beach before dinner.”

“Not,” his father said, “until you've finished that term paper.”

“Aw, Dad!”

This prompted my mother to launch into a long and detailed account of the school to which I was being sent, the same one Sleepy, Dopey, and Doc attended. The school, named after Junipero Serra, some Spanish guy who came over in the 1700s and forced the Native Americans already living here to practice Christianity instead of their own religion, was actually a huge adobe mission that attracted twenty thousand tourists a year, or something.

I wasn't really listening to my mother. My interest in school has always been pretty much zero. The whole reason I hadn't been able to move out here before Christmas was that there had been no space for me at the Mission School, and I'd been forced to wait until second semester started before something opened up. I hadn't minded—I'd gotten to live with my grandmother for a few months, which hadn't been at all bad. My grandmother, besides being a really excellent criminal attorney, is an awesome cook.

I was still sort of distracted by the ocean, which had disappeared behind some hills. I was craning my neck, hoping for another glimpse, when it hit me. I went, “Wait a minute. When was this school built?”

“The eighteenth century,” Doc replied. “The mission system, implemented by the Franciscans under the guidelines of the Catholic Church and the Spanish government, was set up not only to Christianize the Native Americans, but also to train them to become successful tradespeople in the new Spanish society. Originally, the mission served as a—”

“Eighteenth century?” I said, leaning forward. I was wedged between Sleepy—whose head had slumped forward until it was resting on my shoulder, enabling me to tell, just by sniffing, that he used Finesse shampoo—and Dopey. Let me tell you, Gina hadn't mentioned a thing about how much room boys take up, which, when they're both nearly six feet tall, and in the two-hundred-pound vicinity, is a lot. “Eighteenth century?”

My mother must have heard the panic in my voice, since she turned in her seat and said

soothingly, “Now, Suze, we discussed this. I told you there's a year's waiting list at Robert Louis Stevenson, and you told me you didn't want to go to an all-girls school, so Sacred Heart is out, and Andy's heard some awful stories about drug abuse and gang violence in the public schools around here—”

“Eighteenth century?” I could feel my heart starting to pound hard, as if I'd been running. “That's like three hundred years old!”

“I don't get it.” We were driving through the town of Carmel-by-the-Sea now, all picturesque cottages—some with thatched roofs, even—and beautiful little restaurants and art galleries. Andy had to drive carefully because the traffic was thick with people in cars with out-of-state licenses, and there weren't any stoplights, something that, for some reason, the natives took pride in. “What's so bad,” he wanted to know, “about the eighteenth century?”

My mother said, without any inflection in her voice whatsoever—what I call her bad-news voice, the one she uses on TV to report plane crashes and child murders, “Suze has never been very wild about old buildings.”

“Oh,” Andy said. “Then I guess she isn't going to like the house.”

I gripped the back of his headrest. “Why?” I demanded in a tight voice. “Why am I not going to like the house?”

I saw why, of course, as soon as we pulled in. The house was huge, and impossibly pretty, with Victorian-style turrets and a widow's walk—the whole works. My mom had had it painted blue and white and cream, and it was surrounded by big, shady pine trees, and sprawling, flowering shrubs. Three stories high, constructed entirely from wood, and not the horrible glass-and-steel or terra-cotta stuff the houses around it were made of, it was the loveliest, most tasteful house in the neighborhood.

And I didn't want to set foot in it.

I knew when I'd agreed to move with my mom to California that I'd be in for lots of changes. The roadside artichokes, the lemon groves, the ocean . . . they were nothing, really. The fact was, the biggest change was going to be sharing my mom with other people. In the decade since my father had died, it had been just the two of us. And I have to admit, I sort of liked it like that. In fact, if it hadn't been for the fact that Andy made my mom so obviously happy, I would have put my foot down and said no way to the whole moving thing.

But you couldn't even look at them together—Andy and my mom—and not be able to tell right away that they were completely gaga over each other. And what kind of daughter would I have been if I said no way to that? So I accepted Andy, and I accepted his three sons, and I accepted the fact that I was going to have to leave behind everything I had ever known and loved—my best friend, my grandmother, bagels, SoHo—in order to give my mom the happiness she deserved.

But I hadn't really considered the fact that, for the first time in my life, I was going to have to live in a house.

And not just any house, either, but, as Andy proudly told me as he was taking my bags from the car, and thrusting them into his sons' arms, a nineteenth-century converted boardinghouse. Built in 1849, it had apparently had quite a little reputation in its day. Gunfights over card games and women had taken place in the front parlor. You could still see the bullet holes. In fact, Andy had framed one rather than filling it in. It was a bit morbid, he admitted, but interesting, too. He bet we were living in the only house in the Carmel hills that had a nineteenth-century bullet hole in it.

“Huh,” I said. I bet that was true.

My mother kept glancing in my direction as we climbed the many steps to the front porch. I knew she was nervous about what I was going to think. I was kind of irked at her, really, for not warning me. I guess I could understand why she hadn't, though. If she'd told me she had bought a house that was more than a hundred years old, I wouldn't have moved out here. I would have stayed with Grandma until it came time for me to leave for college.

Because my mom's right: I don't like old buildings.

Although I saw, as old buildings went, this one was really something. When you stood on the front porch, you could see all of Carmel beneath you, the village, the valley, the beach, the sea. It was a breathtaking view, one that people would—and had, judging from the fanciness of the houses around ours—pay millions for; one that I shouldn't have resented, not in the least.

And yet, when my mom said, “Come on, Suze. Come see your room,” I couldn't help shuddering a little.

The house was as beautiful inside as it was outside. All shiny maple and cheerful blues and yellows. I recognized my mom's things, and that made me feel a little better. There was the pie-safe she and I had bought once on a weekend trip to Vermont. There were my baby pictures, hanging on the wall in the living room, right alongside Sleepy's, Dopey's, and Doc's. There were my mother's books in the built-in shelves in the den. Her plants, which she'd paid so exorbitant a price to have shipped because she'd been unable to bear parting with them, were everywhere, on wooden stands, hanging in front of the stained-glass windows, perched on top of the newel post at the end of the stairs.

But there were also things I didn't recognize: a sleek white computer sitting on the desk where my mother used to write out checks to pay the bills; a wide-screen TV incongruously tucked into a fireplace in the den, to which shift-sticks were wired for some sort of video game; surfboards leaning up against the wall by the door to the garage; a huge, slobbery dog, who seemed to think I was harboring food in my pockets since he kept thrusting his big wet nose into them.

These all seemed like obtrusively masculine things, foreign things in the life my mother and I had carved out for ourselves. They were going to take some getting used to.

My room was upstairs, just above the roof of the front porch. My mother had been going on nervously for almost the entire trip from the airport about the window seat Andy had installed in the bay window. The bay windows looked out over the same view as the porch, that sweeping vista that incorporated all of the peninsula. It was sweet of them, really, to give me such a nice room, the room with the best view in the whole house.

And when I saw how much trouble they'd gone to, to make the room feel like home to me—or at least to some excessively feminine, phantom girl . . . not me. I had never been the glass-topped dressing table, princess phone type—how Andy had put cream-colored wallpaper, dotted with blue forget-me-nots, all along the top of the intricate white wainscoting that lined the walls; how the same wallpaper covered the walls of my own personal adjoining bathroom; how they'd bought me a new bed—a four-poster with a lace canopy, the kind my mother had always wanted for me and had evidently been unable to resist—I felt bad about how I'd acted in the car. I really did. I thought to myself as I walked around the room, Okay, this isn't so bad. So far you're in the clear. Maybe it'll be all right, maybe no one was ever unhappy in this house, maybe all those people who got shot deserved it. . . .

Until I turned toward the bay window, and saw that someone was already sitting on the window seat Andy had so lovingly made for me.

Someone who was not related to me, or to Sleepy, Dopey, or Doc.

I turned toward Andy, to see if he'd noticed the intruder. He hadn't, even though he was right there, right in front of his face.

My mother hadn't seen him, either. All she saw was my face. I guess my expression must not have been the most pleasant, since her own fell, and she said with a sad sigh, “Oh, Suze. Not again.”

 

Ninth Key by Meg Cabot

CHAPTER ONE

Nobody told me about the poison oak.

Oh, they told me about the palm trees. Yeah, they told me plenty about the palm trees, all right. But nobody ever said a word about this poison oak business.

“The thing is, Susannah—”

Father Dominic was talking to me. I was trying to pay attention, but let me tell you something: poison oak itches.

“As mediators—which is what we are, you and I, Susannah—we have a responsibility. We have a responsibility to give aid and solace to those unfortunate souls who are suffering in the void between the living and the dead.”

I mean, yeah, the palm trees are nice and everything. It had been cool to step off the plane and see those palm trees everywhere, especially since I'd heard how cold it can get at night in northern California.

But what is the deal with this poison oak? How come nobody ever warned me about that?

“You see, as mediators, Susannah, it is our duty to help lost souls get to where they are supposed to be going. We are their guides, as it were. Their spiritual liaisons between this world and the next.” Father Dominic fingered an unopened pack of cigarettes that was sitting on his desk, and regarded me with those big old baby blues of his. “But when one's spiritual liaison takes one's head and slams it into a locker door . . . well, you can see how that kind of behavior might not build the sort of trust we'd like to establish with our troubled brothers and sisters.”

I looked up from the rash on my hands. Rash. That wasn't even the word for it. It was like a fungus. Worse than a fungus, even. It was a growth. An insidious growth that, given time, would consume every inch of my once smooth, unblemished skin, covering it with red, scaly bumps. That oozed, by the way.

“Yeah,” I said, “but if our troubled brothers and sisters are giving us a hard time, I don't see why it's such a crime if I just haul off and slug them in the—”

“But don't you see, Susannah?” Father Dominic clenched the pack of cigarettes. I'd only known him a couple of weeks, but whenever he started fondling his cigarettes—which he never, by the way, actually smoked—it meant he was upset about something.

That something, at this particular moment, appeared to be me.

“That is why,” he explained, “you're called a mediator. You are supposed to be helping to bring these troubled souls to spiritual fulfillment—”

“Look, Father Dom,” I said. I tucked my oozing hands out of sight. “I don't know what kind of ghosts you've been dealing with lately, but the ones I've been running into are about as likely to find spiritual fulfillment as I'm going to find a decent New York City–style slice of pizza in this town. It ain't gonna happen. These folks are going to hell or they're going to heaven or they're going on to their next life as a caterpillar in Kathmandu, but any way you slice it, sometimes they're gonna need a little kick in the butt to get them there. . . .”

“No, no, no.” Father Dominic leaned forward. He couldn't lean forward too much because a week or so before, one of those troubled souls of his had decided to forgo spiritual enlightenment and tried to snap his leg off instead. She also broke a couple of his ribs, gave him a pretty nifty concussion, tore up the school real good, and, let's see, what else?

Oh, yeah. She tried to kill me.

Father Dominic was back at school, but he was wearing a cast that went all the way down to his toes, and disappeared up his long black robe, who knew how far? Personally, I didn't like to think about it.

He was getting pretty handy with those crutches, though. He could chase the late kids up and down the halls if he had to. But since he was the principal, and it was up to the novices to hand out late slips, he didn't have to. Besides, Father Dom was pretty cool, and wouldn't do something like that even if he could.

Though he takes the whole ghost thing a little too seriously, if you ask me.

“Susannah,” he said, tiredly. “You and I, for better or for worse, were born with an incredible gift—an ability to see and speak to the dead.”

“There you go again,” I said, rolling my eyes, “with that gift stuff. Frankly, Father, I don't see it that way.”

How could I? Since the age of two—two years old—I've been pestered with, pounded on, plagued by restless spirits. For fourteen years, I've put up with their abuse, helping them when I could, punching them when I could not, always fearful of somebody finding out my secret and revealing me to be the biological freak I've always known I am, but have tried so desperately to hide from my sweet, long-suffering mother.

And then Mom remarried and moved me out to California—in the middle of my sophomore year, thanks very much—where, wonder of wonders, I'd actually met someone cursed with the same horrible affliction: Father Dominic.

Only Father Dominic refuses to view our “gift” in the same light as me. To him, it's a marvelous opportunity to help others in need.

Yeah, okay. That's fine for him. He's a priest. He's not a sixteen-year-old girl who, hello, would like to have a social life.

If you ask me, a “gift” would have some plus side to it. Like superhuman strength or the ability to read minds, or something. But I don't have any of that cool stuff. I'm just an ordinary sixteen-year-old girl—well, okay, with above ordinary looks, if I do say so myself—who happens to be able to converse with the dead.

Big deal.

“Susannah,” he said now, very seriously. “We are mediators. We aren't . . . well, terminators. Our duty is to intervene on the spirits' behalf, and lead them to their ultimate destination. We do that by gentle guidance and counseling, not by punching them in the face or by performing Brazilian voodoo exorcisms.”

He raised his voice on the word exorcisms, even though he knew perfectly well I'd only done the exorcism as a last resort. It's not my fault half the school fell down during it. I mean, technically, that was the ghost's fault, not mine.

“Okay, okay, already,” I said, holding up both hands in an I-surrender sort of gesture. “I'll try it your way from now on. I'll do the touchy-feely stuff. Jeez. You West Coasters. It's all backrubs and avocado sandwiches with you guys, isn't it?”

Father Dominic shook his head. “And what would you call your mediation technique, Susannah? Headbutts and chokeholds?”

“That's very funny, Father Dom,” I said. “Can I go back to class now?”

“Not yet.” He puttered around with the cigar-ettes, tapping the pack like he was actually going to open it. That'll be the day. “How was your weekend?”

“Swell,” I said. I held up my hands, knuckles turned toward him. “See?”

He squinted. “Good heavens, Susannah,” he said. “What is that?”

“Poison oak. Good thing nobody told me it grows all over the place around here.”

“It doesn't grow all over the place,” Father Dominic said. “Only in wooded areas. Were you in a wooded area this weekend?” Then his eyes widened behind the lenses of his glasses. “Susannah! You didn't go to the cemetery, did you? Not alone. I know you believe yourself to be indomitable, but it isn't at all safe for a young girl like yourself to go sneaking around cemeteries even if you are a mediator.”

I put down my hands and said, disgustedly, “I didn't catch this in any cemetery. I wasn't working. I got it at Kelly Prescott's pool party Saturday night.”

“Kelly Prescott's pool party?” Father Dominic looked confused. “How would you have encountered poison oak there?”

Too late, I realized I probably should have kept my mouth shut. Now I was going to have to explain—to the principal of my school, who also happened to be a priest, no less—about how a rumor had gone around midway through the party that my stepbrother Dopey and this girl named Debbie Mancuso were going at it in the pool house.

I had of course denied the possibility since I knew Dopey was grounded. Dopey's dad—my new stepfather, who, for a mostly laid-back, California kind of guy, had turned out to be a pretty stern disciplinarian—had grounded Dopey for calling a friend of mine a fag.

So when the rumor went around at the party that Dopey and Debbie Mancuso were doing the nasty in the pool house, I was pretty sure everyone was mistaken. Brad, I kept insisting—everyone but me calls Dopey Brad, which is his real name, but believe me, Dopey fits him much better—was back home listening to Marilyn Manson through headphones, since his father had also confiscated his stereo speakers.

But then someone said, “Go take a look for yourself,” and I made the mistake of doing so, tiptoeing up to the small window they'd indicated, and peering through it.

I had never particularly cared to see any of my stepbrothers in the buff. Not that they are bad looking or anything. Sleepy, the oldest one, is actually considered something of a stud by most of the girls at Junipero Serra Mission Academy, where he is a senior and I am a sophomore. But that doesn't mean I have any desire to see him strutting around the house without his boxers. And of course Doc, the youngest, is only twelve, totally adorable with his red hair and sticky-outy ears, but not what you'd call a babe.

And as for Dopey . . . well, I particularly never wanted to see Dopey in his altogether. In fact, Dopey is just about the last person on earth I'd ever wish to see naked.

Fortunately, when I looked through that window I saw that reports of my stepbrother's state of undress—as well as his sexual prowess—had been greatly exaggerated. He and Debbie were only making out. This is not to say that I wasn't completely repulsed. I mean, I wasn't exactly proud that my stepbrother was in there tongue wrestling with the second stupidest person in our class, after himself.

I looked away immediately, of course. I mean, we've got Showtime at home, for God's sake. I've seen plenty of French kissing before. I wasn't about to stand there gawking while my stepbrother engaged in it. And as for Debbie Mancuso, well, all I can say is, she ought to lay off the sauce. She can't afford to lose any more brain cells than she already has, what with all the hair spray she slathers on in the girls' room between classes.

It was as I was staggering away in disgust from the pool house window, which was situated above a small gravel path, that I believe I stumbled into some poison oak. I don't remember coming into contact with plant life at any other time this past weekend, being a generally indoors kind of girl.

And let me tell you, I really stumbled into those plants. I was feeling light-headed from the horror of what I'd just seen—you know, the tongues and all—plus I had on my platform mules, and I sort of lost my balance. The plants I grabbed on to were all that saved me from the ignominy of collapsing on Kelly Prescott's redwood pool deck.

What I told Father Dominic, however, was an abridged version. I said I must have staggered into some poison oak as I was getting out of the Prescotts' hot tub.

Father Dominic seemed to accept this, and said, “Well, some hydrocortisone ought to clear that up. You should see the nurse after this. Be sure not to scratch it or it will spread.”

“Yeah, thanks. I'll be sure not to breathe, either. That'll probably be just about as easy.”

Father Dominic ignored my sarcasm. It's funny about us two both being mediators. I've never met anybody else who happened to be one—in fact, until a couple of weeks ago, I thought I was the only mediator in the whole wide world.

But Father Dom says there are others. He's not sure how many, or even how, exactly, we precious few happened to be picked for our illustrious—have I mentioned unpaid?—careers. I'm thinking we should maybe start a newsletter or something. The Mediator News. And have conferences. I could give a seminar on five easy ways to kick a ghost's butt and not mess up your hair.

Anyway, about me and Father Dom. For two people who have the same weird ability to talk to the dead, we are about as different as can be. Besides the age thing, Father Dom being sixty and me being sixteen, he's Mister Nice himself, whereas I'm . . .

Well, not.

Not that I don't try to be. It's just that one thing I've learned from all of this is that we don't have very much time here on Earth. So why waste it putting up with other people's crap? Particularly people who are already dead, anyway.

“Besides the poison oak,” Father Dominic said. “Is there anything else going on in your life you think I should know about?”

Anything else going on in my life that I thought he should know about. Let me see. . . .

How about the fact that I'm sixteen, and so far, unlike my stepbrother Dopey, I still haven't been kissed, much less asked out?

Not a major big deal—especially to Father Dom, a guy who took a vow of chastity about thirty years before I was even born—but humiliating, just the same. There'd been a lot of kissing going on at Kelly Prescott's pool party—and some heavier stuff, even—but no one had tried to lock lips with me.

A boy I didn't know did ask me to slow dance at one point, though. And I said yes, but only because Kelly yelled at me after I turned him down the first time he asked. Apparently this boy was someone she'd had a crush on for a while. How my slow dancing with him was supposed to get him to like Kelly, I don't know, but after I turned him down the first time, she cornered me in her bedroom, where I'd gone to check my hair, and, with actual tears in her eyes, informed me that I had ruined her party.

“Ruined your party?” I was genuinely astonished. I'd lived in California for all of two weeks by then, so it amazed me that I had managed to make myself a social pariah in such a short period of time. Kelly was already mad at me, I knew, because I had invited my friends CeeCee and Adam, whom she and just about everyone else in the sophomore class at the Mission Academy consider freaks, to her party. Now I had apparently added insult to injury by not agreeing to dance with some boy I didn't even know.

“Jesus,” Kelly said, when she heard this. “He's a junior at Robert Louis Stevenson, okay? He's the star forward on their basketball team. He won last year's regatta at Pebble Beach, and he's the hottest guy in the Valley, after Bryce Martinson. Suze, if you don't dance with him, I swear I'll never speak to you again.”

I said, “All right already. What is your glitch, anyway?”

“I just,” Kelly said, wiping her eyes with a mani-cured finger, “want everything to go really well. I've had my eye on this guy for a while now, and—”

“Oh, yeah, Kel,” I said. “Getting me to dance with him is sure to make him like you.”

When I pointed out this fallacy in her thought process, however, all she said was, “Just do it,” only not the way they say it in Nike ads. She said it the way the Wicked Witch of the West said it to the winged monkeys when she sent them out to kill Dorothy and her little dog, too.

I'm not scared of Kelly or anything, but really, who needs the grief?

So I went back outside and stood there in my Calvin Klein one-piece—with a sarong tied ever-so-casually around my waist—totally not knowing I had just stumbled into a bunch of poison oak, while Kelly went over to her dream date and asked him to ask me to dance again.

As I stood there, I tried not to think that the only reason he wanted to dance with me in the first place was that I was the only girl at the party in a swimsuit. Having never been invited to a pool party before in my life, I had erroneously believed people actually swam at them, and had dressed accordingly.

Not so, apparently. Aside from my stepbrother, who'd apparently become overwarm while in Debbie Mancuso's impassioned embrace and had stripped off his shirt, I was wearing the least clothes of anybody there.

Including Kelly's dream date. He sauntered up a few minutes later, wearing a serious expression, a pair of white chinos, and a black silk shirt. Very Jersey, but then, this was the West Coast, so how was he to know?

“Do you want to dance?” he asked me in this really soft voice. I could barely hear him above the strains of Sheryl Crow, booming out from the pool deck's speakers.

“Look,” I said, putting down my Diet Coke. “I don't even know your name.”

“It's Tad,” he said.

And then without another word, he put his arms around my waist, pulled me up to him, and started swaying in time to the music.

With the exception of the time I threw myself at Bryce Martinson in order to knock him out of the way when a ghost was trying to crush his skull with a large chunk of wood, this was as close to the body of a boy—a live boy, one who was still breathing—I had ever been.

And let me tell you, black silk shirt notwithstanding, I liked it. This guy felt good. He was all warm—it was kind of chilly in my bathing suit; being January, of course, it was supposed to be too chilly for bathing suits, but this was California, after all—and smelled like some kind of really nice, expensive soap. Plus he was just taller enough than me for his breath to kind of brush against my cheek in this provocative, romance-novel sort of way.

Let me tell you, I closed my eyes, put my arms around this guy's neck, and swayed with him for two of the longest, most blissful minutes of my life.

Then the song ended.

Tad said, “Thank you,” in the same soft voice he'd used before, and let go of me.

And that was it. He turned around and walked back over to this group of guys who were hanging out by the keg Kelly's dad had bought for her on the condition she didn't let anybody drive home drunk, a condition Kelly was sticking strictly to by not drinking herself and carrying around a cell phone with the number of Carmel Cab on redial.

And then for the rest of the party, Tad avoided me. He didn't dance with anybody else. But he didn't speak to me again.

Game over, as Dopey would say.

But I didn't think Father Dominic wanted to hear about my dating travails. So I said, “Nope. Nada. Nothing.”

“Strange,” Father Dominic said, looking thoughtful. “I would have thought there'd be some paranormal activity—”

“Oh,” I said. “You mean has any ghost stuff been going on?”

Now he didn't look thoughtful. He looked kind of annoyed. “Well, yes, Susannah,” he said, taking off his glasses, and pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger like he had a headache all of a sudden. “Of course, that's what I mean.” He put his glasses back on. “Why? Has something happened? Have you encountered anyone? I mean, since that unfortunate incident that resulted in the destruction of the school?”

I said, slowly, “Well . . .”

 

Reunion by Meg Cabot

CHAPTER ONE

“Now this,” Gina said, “is the life.”

I was forced to agree with her. The two of us were stretched out in our bikinis, taking in the rays and balmy seventy-five-degree weather on Carmel Beach. It was March, but you wouldn't have known it by the way the sun was pouring down on us.

Well, this was California, after all.

“I mean it,” Gina said. “I don't know how you do it every day.”

I had my eyes closed. Visions of tall, icy Diet Cokes were dancing in my head. If only they had waiter service on the beach. It was the one thing missing, really. We'd already finished all of the sodas in our cooler, and it was a really long walk up the stairs from the beach to Jimmy's Quick Mart.

“Do what?” I murmured.

“Go to school,” Gina said, “when you've got this fabulous beach just a mile or so away.”

“It is hard,” I admitted, my eyes still closed. “But graduating from high school continues to be considered one of life's important achievements. I mean, I've heard that without a high school diploma, one doesn't have a hope of acquiring one of those high-powered service positions at Starbucks that I know I'll be angling for upon graduation.”

“Seriously, Suze,” Gina said. I felt her stir next to me, and opened my eyes. Gina had leaned up on her elbows, and was scanning the beach through her Ray-Bans. “How can you stand it?”

How, indeed? It was gorgeous. The Pacific stretched out as far as the eye could see, turquoise blue darkening to navy the closer it got to the horizon. The waves were huge, crashing up against the yellow sand, tossing surfers and boogie boarders into the air as if they were pieces of driftwood. To our far right rose the green cliffs of Pebble Beach. To our left, the huge, seal-strewn boulders that were the stepping stones for what eventually turned into Big Sur, a particularly rugged section of the Pacific coastline.

And everywhere, the sun beat down, burning away the fog that earlier that day had threatened to ruin our plans. It was perfection. It was paradise.

If only I could have gotten someone to bring me a drink.

“Oh my God.” Gina tilted her Ray-Bans and peered over the rims. “Check this out.”

I followed her gaze through the tortoiseshell lenses of my Donna Karans. The lifeguard, who'd been sitting in his white tower a few yards away from our towels, suddenly leaped from his chair, his orange flotation device clutched in one hand. He landed with catlike grace in the sand, then suddenly took off toward the waves, his muscles rippling beneath his darkly tanned skin, his long blond hair flowing behind him.

Tourists fumbled for their cameras while sunbathers sat up for a better look. Gulls took off in startled flight, and beachcombers hurried to move out of the lifeguard's way. Then, with his lean, muscular body making a perfect arc in the air, he dove into the waves, only to come up yards away, swimming hard and fast for a kid who was caught in an undertow.

To my amusement, I saw that the kid was none other than Dopey, one of my stepbrothers, who'd accompanied us to the beach that afternoon. I recognized his voice instantly—once the lifeguard had pulled him back to the surface—as he vehemently cursed at his rescuer for attempting to save his life, and embarrassing him in front of his peers.

The lifeguard, to my delight, cursed right back at him.

Gina, who'd watched the drama unfold with rapt attention, said, lazily, “What a spaz.”

Clearly, she had not recognized the victim. Gina had, much to my astonishment, informed me that I was incredibly lucky, because all my stepbrothers were so “cool.” Even, apparently, Dopey.

Gina had never been particularly discriminating where boys were concerned.

Now she sighed, and leaned back against her towel.

“That,” she said, shoving her sunglasses back into place, “was extremely disturbing. Except for the part when the hot lifeguard ran past us. That I enjoyed.”

A few minutes later, the lifeguard came trudging back in our direction, looking no less handsome in wet hair than he had in dry. He swung himself up to his tower, spoke briefly into his radio—probably putting out a B.O.L.O. on Dopey: Be On the Look Out for an extremely stupid wrestler in a wetsuit, showing off for his step-sister's best friend from out of town—then returned to scanning the waves for other potential drowning victims.

“That's it,” Gina declared suddenly. “I am in love. That lifeguard is the man I am going to marry.”

See what I mean? Total lack of discrimination.

“You,” I said disgustedly, “would marry any guy in a swimsuit.”

“That's not true,” Gina said. She pointed at a particularly hairy-backed tourist sitting in a Speedo a few yards away with his sunburned wife. “I do not, for instance, wish to marry him.”

“Of course not. He's taken.”

Gina rolled her eyes. “You're so weird. Come on, let's go get something to drink.”

We climbed to our feet and found our shorts and sandals, then wriggled into them. Leaving our towels where they were, we picked our way across the hot sand toward the steep steps that led up to the parking lot where Sleepy had left the car.

“I want,” Gina declared, when we'd reached the pavement, “a chocolate shake. Not one of those fancy gourmet ones they sell around here, either. I want a completely fake, chemically enhanced one, like they have at Mickey D's.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, trying to catch my breath. It was no joke, climbing up all those steps. And I'm in pretty good shape. I do a kickboxing tape practically every night. “You're going to have to go into the next town for it because there aren't any fast food places around here.”

Gina rolled her eyes. “What kind of hick town is this?” she complained in mock outrage. “No fast food, no traffic lights, no crime, no public transportation.”

But she didn't mean it. Since her arrival from New York City the day before, Gina had been agog at my new life: envious of my bedroom's glorious ocean view, enraptured by my new step-father's culinary abilities, and not in the least contemptuous of my stepbrothers' attempts to impress her. She hadn't once, as I'd expected her to, told either Sleepy or Dopey, both of whom seemed to be vying for her attentions, to get lost.

“Jesus, Simon,” she'd said when I'd questioned her about it, “they're hotties. What do you expect me to do?”

Excuse me? My stepbrothers, hotties?

I think not.

Now, if it was hotties you wanted, you didn't have to look any further than the guy who manned the counter at Jimmy's, the little convenience store right across from the stairs to the beach. Dumb as an inflatable pool toy, Kurt—that was his name, I swear to God—was nevertheless stunning, and after I'd placed the sweating bottle of Diet Coke I'd secured from the refrigerated case on the counter in front of him, I gave him the old hairy eyeball. He was deeply absorbed in a copy of Surf Digest, so he didn't notice my leering gaze. I guess I was sun-drunk, or something, because I just kept standing there staring at Kurt, but what I was really doing was thinking about someone else.

Someone whom I really shouldn't have been thinking about at all.

I guess that's why when Kelly Prescott said hi to me, I didn't even notice. It was like she wasn't even there.

Until she waved a hand in my face and went, “Hello, earth to Suze. Come in, Suze.”

I tore my eyes off Kurt and found myself looking at Kelly, sophomore class president, radiant blonde, and fashion plate. She was in one of her dad's dress shirts, unbuttoned to reveal what she wore beneath it, which was an olive-green bikini made out of yarn. There were skin-colored inserts so you couldn't see her bare skin through the holes in the crochet.

Standing next to Kelly was Debbie Mancuso, my stepbrother Dopey's sometime girlfriend.

“Oh my God,” Kelly said. “I had no idea you were at the beach today, Suze. Where'd you put your towel?”

“By the lifeguard tower,” I said.

“Oh, God,” Kelly said. “Good spot. We're way over by the stairs.”

Debbie went, way too casually, “I noticed the Rambler in the parking lot. Is Brad out on his board?”

Brad is what everyone but me calls my stepbrother, Dopey.

“Yeah,” Kelly said. “And Jake?”

Jake is the stepbrother I call Sleepy. For reasons unfathomable to me, Sleepy, who is in his senior year at the Mission Academy, and Dopey, a sophomore like me, are considered these great catches. Obviously, these girls have never seen my stepbrothers eat. It is truly a revolting sight.

“Yeah,” I said. And since I knew what they were after, I added, “Why don't you two join us?”

“Cool,” Kelly said. “That'd be gr—”

Gina appeared, and Kelly broke off mid-sentence.

Well, Gina is the kind of girl people break off mid-sentence to admire. She's nearly six feet tall, and the fact that she'd recently had her hair done into a mop of prickly-looking copper-colored tendrils, forming a four- or five-inch aura all the way around her head, only made her look taller. She also happened to have on a black vinyl bikini, over which she'd tugged on shorts that appeared to be made from the pull tabs off of a lot of soda cans.

Oh, and the fact that she'd been out in the sun all day had darkened her normally café au lait skin to the color of espresso, always startling when combined with a nose ring and orange hair.

“Score,” Gina said excitedly, as she thumped a six-pack down onto the counter next to my Diet Coke. “Yoo-hoo, dude. The perfect chemical compound.”

“Um, Gina,” I said, hoping she wasn't going to expect me to join her in consuming any of those bottles. “These are some friends of mine from school, Kelly Prescott and Debbie Mancuso. Kelly, Debbie, this is Gina Augustin, a friend of mine from New York.”

Gina's eyes widened behind her Ray-Bans. I think she was astonished by the fact that I had, since moving out here, actually made some friends, something I had certainly not had many of, besides her, back in New York. Still, she managed to control her surprise and said, very politely, “How do you do?”

Debbie murmured, “Hi,” but Kelly got straight to the point: “Where did you get those awesome shorts?”

It was while Gina was telling her that I first noticed the four kids in evening wear hanging out near the suntan lotion rack.

You might be wondering how I'd missed them before. Well, the truth of the matter is that, up until that particular moment, they hadn't been there.

And, then, suddenly, there they were.

Being from Brooklyn, I've seen far stranger things than four teenagers dressed in formal wear in a convenience mart on a Sunday afternoon at the beach. But since this wasn't New York, but California, the sight was a startling one. Even more startling was that these four were in the act of heisting a twelve-pack of beer.

I'm not kidding. A twelve-pack, right in broad daylight with them dressed to the nines, the girls with wrist corsages, even. Kurt's no rocket scientist, it's true, but surely they couldn't think he would simply let them walk out of there with this beer—particularly in prom wear.

Then I lifted up my Donna Karans in order to get a better look at them.

And that's when I realized it.

Kurt wasn't going to be carding these kids. No way.

Kurt couldn't see them.

 

Darkest hour by Meg Cabot

CHAPTER ONE

Summer. Season of long, slow days and short, hot nights.

Back in Brooklyn, where I spent my first fifteen of them, summer—when it hadn't meant camp—had meant hanging out on the stoop with my best friend, Gina, and her brothers, waiting for the ice-cream truck to come by. When it wasn't too hot, we played a game called War, dividing into teams with the other kids in the neighborhood and shooting each other with imaginary guns.

When we got older, of course, we quit playing War. Gina and I also started laying off the ice cream.

Not that it mattered. None of the neighborhood guys, the ones we used to play with, wanted anything to do with us. Well, with me, anyway. I don't think they'd have minded renewing acquaintances with Gina, but by the time they finally noticed what a babe she'd grown into, she'd set her sights way higher than guys from the 'hood.

I don't know what I expected from my sixteenth summer, my first since moving to California to live with my mom and her new husband . . . and, oh, yeah, his sons. I guess I envisioned the same long, slow days. Only these, in my mind, would be spent at the beach rather than on an apartment building's front stoop.

And as for those short, hot nights, well, I had plans for those, as well. All I needed was a boyfriend.

But as it happened, neither the beach nor the boyfriend materialized, the latter because the guy I liked? Yeah, he so wasn't interested. At least, as far as I could tell. And the former because . . .

Well, because I was forced to get a job.

That's right: A job.

I was horrified when one night at dinner, around the beginning of May, my stepfather, Andy, asked me if I'd put in any summer employment applications anywhere. I was all, “What are you talking about?”

But it soon became clear that, like the many other sacrifices I'd been asked to make since my mother met, fell in love with, and married Andy Ackerman—host of a popular cable television home improvement program, native Californian, and father of three—my long hot summer lazing at the beach with my friends was not to be.

In the Ackerman household, it soon unfolded, you had two alternatives for how you spent your summer break: a job, or remedial tutoring. Only Doc, my youngest stepbrother—known as David to everyone but me—was exempt from either of these, as he was too young to work, and he had made good enough grades that he'd been accepted into a month-long computer camp, at which he was presumably learning skills that would make him the next Bill Gates—only hopefully without the bad haircut and Wal-Mart-y sweaters.

My second-youngest stepbrother, Dopey (also known as Brad) was not so lucky. Dopey had managed to flunk both English and Spanish—an astounding feat, in my opinion, English being his native language—and so was being forced by his father to attend summer school five days a week . . . when he wasn't being used as unpaid slave labor on the project Andy had undertaken while his TV show was on summer hiatus: tearing down a large portion of our house's backyard deck and installing a hot tub.

Given the alternatives—employment or summer school—I chose to seek employment.

I got a job at the same place my oldest stepbrother, Sleepy, works every summer. He, in fact, recommended me, an act which, at the time, simultaneously stunned and touched me. It wasn't until later that I found out that he had received a small bonus for every person he recommended who was later hired.

Whatever. What it actually boils down to is this: Sleepy—Jake, as he is known to his friends and the rest of the family—and I are now proud employees of the Pebble Beach Hotel and Golf Resort, Sleepy as a lifeguard at one of the resort's many pools, and me as . . .

Well, I signed away my summer to become a hotel staff babysitter.

Okay. You can stop laughing now.

Even I will admit that it's not the kind of job I ever thought I'd be suited for, since I am not long on patience and am certainly not overly fond of having my hair spat up in. But allow me to point out that it does pay ten dollars an hour, and that that does not include tips.

And let me just say that the people who stay at the Pebble Beach Hotel and Golf Resort? Yeah, they are the kind of people who tend to tip. Generously.

The money, I must say, has gone a long way toward healing my wounded pride. If I have to spend my summer in mindless drudgery, earning a hundred bucks a day—and frequently more—amply compensates for it. Because by the time the summer is over, I should have, without question, the most stunning fall wardrobe of anyone entering the junior class of the Junipero Serra Mission Academy.

So think about that, Kelly Prescott, while you spend your summer lounging by your father's pool. I've already got four pairs of Jimmy Choos, paid for with my own money.

What do you think about that, Little Miss Daddy's AmEx?

The only real problem with my summer job—besides the whiny children and their equally whiny, but loaded, parents, of course—is the fact that I am expected to report there at 8:00 in the morning every day.

That's right. 8:00 a.m. No sleeping in for old Suze this summer.

I must say I find this a bit excessive. And believe me, I've complained. And yet the management staff at the Pebble Beach Hotel and Golf Resort have remained stubbornly unswayed by my persuasive arguments for refraining from offering babysitting services until nine.

And so it is that every morning (I can't even sleep in on Sundays, thanks to my stepfather's insistence that all of us gather around the dining table for the elaborate brunch he prepares; he seems to think we are the Camdens or the Waltons something) I am up before seven. . . .

Which has, I've been surprised to learn, its advantages.

Although I would not list seeing Dopey without a shirt, sweating like a pig, and gulping OJ from the carton as one of them.

There are a lot of girls who go to my school who would, I know, pay money to see Dopey—and Sleepy, too, for that matter—without a shirt, sweat or no sweat. Kelly Prescott, for instance. And her best friend, and Dopey's sometime flame, Debbie Mancuso. I myself do not understand the attraction, but then I can only suppose that these girls have not been around my stepbrothers after a meal in which beans played any sort of role on the menu.

Still, anyone who cared to see Dopey do his calendar pinup imitation could easily do so for free, merely by stopping by our house any weekday morning. For it is in our backyard that Dopey has been, from approximately six in the morning until he has to leave for summer school at ten, stripped to the waist, and performing rigorous manual labor under the eagle eye of his father.

On this particular morning—the one where I caught him, once again, drinking directly from the juice carton, a habit of which my mother and I have been trying, with little success, to cure the entire Ackerman clan—Dopey had apparently been doing some digging, since he left a trail of mud along the kitchen floor, in addition to a dirt-encrusted object on what had once been an immaculate counter (I should know: It had been my turn to 409 it the night before).

“Oh,” I said, as I stepped into the kitchen. “Isn't that a lovely picture.”

Dopey lowered the orange juice container and looked at me.

“Don't you have somewhere to be?” he asked, wiping his mouth with the back of a wrist.

“Of course,” I said. “But I was hoping that before I left, I could enjoy a nice glass of calcium-fortified juice. I see now that that will not be possible.”

Dopey shook the carton. “There's still some left,” he said.

“Mixed with your backwash?” I heaved a shudder. “I think not.”

Dopey opened his mouth to say something—presumably his usual suggestion that I chew on some piece of his anatomy—but his father's voice called from outside the sliding glass doors to the deck.

“Brad,” Andy yelled. “That's enough of a break. Get back out here and help me lower this.”

Dopey slammed down the carton of OJ. Before he could stalk from the room, however, I stopped him with a polite, “Excuse me?”

Because he wore no shirt, I could see the muscles in Dopey's neck and shoulders tense as I spoke.

“All right already,” he said, spinning around and heading back toward the juice carton. “I'll put it away. Jeez, why are you always on me about crap like—”

“I don't care about that,” I interrupted him, pointing at the juice carton—although it had to have been making the counter sticky. “I want to know what that is.”

Dopey looked where I'd moved my finger. He blinked down at the dirt-encrusted oblong object.

“I dunno,” he said. “I found it buried in the yard while I was digging out one of the posts.”

I gingerly lifted what appeared to be a metal box, about six inches long by two inches thick, heavily rusted and covered in mud. There were a few places where the mud had rubbed off, though, and there you could see some words painted on the box. The few I could make out were delicious aroma and quality assured. When I shook the box, it rattled. There was something inside.

“What's in it?” I asked Dopey.

He shrugged. “How should I know? It's rusted shut. I was gonna take a—”

I never did find out what Dopey was going to do to the box, since his older brother, Sleepy, walked into the kitchen at that moment, reached for the orange juice carton, opened it, and downed the remaining contents. When he was through, he crumpled the carton, threw it into the trash compactor, and then, apparently noticing my appalled expression, said, “What?”

I don't get what girls see in them. Seriously. They are like animals.

And not the cute fuzzy kind, either.

Meanwhile, outside, Andy was calling imperiously for Dopey again.

Dopey muttered some extremely colorful four-letter words beneath his breath, then shouted, “I'm coming, already,” and stomped outside.

It was already 7:45, so Sleepy and I really had to “motor,” as he put it, to get to the resort on time. But though my eldest stepbrother has a tendency to sleepwalk through life, there's nothing somnambulistic about his driving. I punched in at work with five minutes to spare.

The Pebble Beach Hotel and Golf Resort prides itself on its efficiency. And it is, in fact, a very smoothly run operation. As a staff babysitter, it's my responsibility, after punching in, to ask for my assignment for the day. That's when I find out whether I'll be washing strained carrots or burger fixings out of my hair after work. On the whole, I prefer burgers, but there's something to be said for strained carrots: generally the people who eat them can't talk back to you.

When I heard my assignment for that particular day, however, I was disappointed, even though it was a burger-eater.

“Simon, Susannah,” Caitlin called. “You're assigned to Slater, Jack.”

“For God's sake,” I said to Caitlin, who was my supervisor. “I was stuck with Jack Slater yesterday. And the day before.”

Caitlin is only two years older than me, but she treats me like I'm twelve. In fact, I'm sure the only reason she tolerates me is because of Sleepy: She is as warm for his form as every other girl on this planet . . . except, of course, me.

“Jack's parents,” Caitlin informed me, without even looking up from her clipboard, “requested you, Suze.”

“Couldn't you have said I was already taken?”

Caitlin did look up then. She looked at me with cool, blue contact-lensed eyes. “Suze,” she said. “They like you.”

I fiddled with my bathing suit straps. I was wearing the regulation navy blue swimsuit beneath my regulation navy blue Oxford T-shirt and khaki shorts. With pleats, no less. Appalling.

I mentioned the uniform, right? I mean, the part where I have to wear a uniform to work? No kidding. Every day. A uniform.

If I'd known about the uniform beforehand, I never would have applied for the job.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know they like me.”

The feeling isn't mutual. It isn't that I don't like Jack, although he's easily the whiniest little kid I have ever met. I mean, you can see why he's that way—just take a look at his parents, a pair of career-obsessed physicians who think dumping their kid off with a hotel babysitter for days on end while they go sailing and golfing is a fine family vacation.

It's actually Jack's older brother I have the problem with. Well, not necessarily a problem…

More like I would just rather avoid seeing him while I am wearing my incredibly unstylish Pebble Beach Hotel and Golf Resort uniform khaki shorts.

Yeah. The ones with the pleats in them.

Except, of course, that every time I've run into the guy since he and his family arrived at the resort last week, I've been wearing the stupid things.

Not that I care, particularly, what Paul Slater thinks about me. I mean, my heart, to coin a phrase, belongs to another.

Too bad he shows no signs whatsoever of actually wanting it. My heart, that is.

Still, Paul—that's his name; Jack's older brother, I mean: Paul Slater—is pretty incredible. I mean, it isn't just that he's a hottie. Oh, no. Paul's hot and funny. Every time I go to pick Jack up or drop him off at his family's hotel suite, and his brother, Paul, happens to be there, he always has some flippant remark to make about the hotel or his parents or himself. Not mean or anything. Just funny.

And I think he's smart, too, because whenever he isn't on the golf course with his dad or playing tennis with his mom, he's at the pool reading. And not your typical pool book, either. No Clancy or Crichton or King for Paul. Oh, no. We're talking stuff by guys like Nietzsche, or Kierkegaard.

Seriously. It's almost enough to make you think he's not from California.

And of course it turns out, he's not: The Slaters are visiting from Seattle.

So you see, it wasn't just that Jack Slater is the whiniest kid I've ever met: There was also the fact that I wasn't really all that enthused about his hottie brother seeing me, yet again, in shorts that make my butt look roughly the size of Montana.

But Caitlin was totally uninterested in my personal feelings on the matter.

“Suze,” Caitlin said, looking down at her clipboard again. “Nobody likes Jack. But the fact is, Dr. and Mrs. Slater like you. So you're spending the day with Jack. Capisce?”

I sighed gustily, but what could I do? Aside from my pride, my tan was the only thing that was really going to suffer from spending yet another day with Jack. The kid doesn't like swimming, or bike riding, or Rollerblading, or Frisbee tossing, or anything, really, to do with the great outdoors. His idea of a good time is to sit inside the hotel room and watch cartoons.

I'm not kidding, either. He is, without a doubt, the most boring kid I ever met. I find it hard to believe he and Paul came from the same gene pool.

“Besides,” Caitlin added, as I was standing there, fuming. “Today is Jack's eighth birthday.”

I stared at her. “His birthday? It's Jack's birthday, and his parents are leaving him with a sitter all day?”

Caitlin shot me a severe look. “The Slaters say they'll be back in time to take him to dinner at the Grill.”

The Grill. Whoopee. The Grill is the fanciest restaurant at the resort, maybe even on the entire peninsula. The cheapest thing they serve there costs about fifteen dollars, and that's the house salad. The Grill is so not a fun place to take a kid on his eighth birthday. I mean, even Jack, the most boring child in the world, couldn't have a fun time there.

I don't get it. I really don't. I mean, what's wrong with these people? And how, seeing the way they treat their youngest child, had their other one managed to turn out so . . .

Well, hot?

At least, that was the word that flashed through my mind as Paul opened the door to his family's suite in response to my knock, then stood there grinning down at me, one hand in the pocket of his cream-colored chinos, the other clutching a book by someone called Martin Heidegger.

Yeah, you know what the last book I read was? That'd be Clifford. That's right. The big red dog. And okay, I was reading it to a five-year-old, but still. Heidegger. Jeez.

“All right. Who called Room Service and ordered the pretty girl?” Paul wanted to know.

Well, okay, that wasn't funny. That was actually sort of sexually harassing, if you think about it. But the fact that the guy saying it was my age, about six feet tall, and olive-complected, with curly brown hair and eyes as blue as the ocean just beyond the Pebble Beach golf course, made it not so bad.

Not so bad. What am I talking about? The guy could sexually harass me anytime he wanted to. At least someone wanted to.

Just my luck it wasn't the guy I wanted.

I didn't admit this out loud, of course. What I said instead was, “Ha ha. I'm here for Jack.”

Paul winced. “Oh,” he said, shaking his head in mock disappointment. “The little guy gets all the luck.”

He held the door open for me, and I stepped into the suite's plush living room. Jack was where he usually was, sprawled on the floor in front of the TV. He did not acknowledge my presence, as was his custom.

His mother, on the other hand, did acknowledge me: “Oh, hi, Susan. Rick and Paul and I will be on the course all morning. And then the three of us are meeting for lunch at the Grotto, and then we've got appointments with our personal trainers. So if you could stay until we all get back, around seven, we'd appreciate it. Make sure Jack has a bath before changing for dinner. I've laid out a suit for him. It's his birthday, you know. Okay, buh-bye, you two. Have fun, Jack.”

“How could he not?” Paul wanted to know, with a meaningful glance in my direction.

And then the Slaters left.

Jack remained where he was—in front of the TV, not speaking to me, not even looking at me. As this was typical Jack behavior, I was not alarmed.

I crossed the room—stepping over Jack on my way—and went to fling open the wide French doors that led out onto a terrace overlooking the sea. Rick and Nancy Slater were paying six hundred dollars a night for their view, which was one of the Monterey Bay, sparkling turquoise under a cloudless blue sky. From their suite you could see the yellow slice of beach upon which, were it not for my well-meaning but misguided stepfather, I would have been whiling away my summer.

It isn't fair. It really isn't.

“Okay, big guy,” I said, after taking in the view for a minute or two and listening to the soothing pulse of the waves. “Go put on your swim trunks. We're hitting the pool. It's too nice out to stay inside.”

Jack, as usual, looked as if I'd pinched him rather than suggested a fun day at the pool.

“But why?” he cried. “You know I can't swim.”

“Which is exactly,” I said, “why we're going. You're eight years old today. An eight-year-old who can't swim is nothing but a loser. You don't want to be a loser, do you?”

Jack opined that he preferred being a loser to going outdoors, a fact with which I was only too well acquainted.

“Jack,” I said, slumping down onto a couch near where he lay. “What is your problem?”

Instead of responding, Jack rolled over onto his stomach and scowled at the carpet. I wasn't going to let up on him, though. I knew what I was talking about, with the loser thing. Being different in the American public—or even private—educational system is not cool. How Paul had ever allowed this to happen—his little brother's turning into a whiny little wimp you almost longed to slap—I couldn't fathom, but I knew good and well Rick and Nancy weren't doing anything to help rectify the matter. It was pretty much all up to me to save Jack Slater from becoming his school's human punching bag.

Don't ask me why I even cared. Maybe because in a weird way, Jack reminded me a little of Doc, my youngest stepbrother, the one who is away at computer camp. A geek in the truest sense of the word, Doc is still one of my favorite people. I have even been making a concerted effort to call him by his name, David . . . at least to his face.

But Doc is—almost—able to get away with his bizarre behavior because he has a photographic memory and a computerlike ability to process information. Jack, so far as I could tell, possessed no such skills. In fact, I had a feeling he was a bit dim. So really, he had no excuse for his eccentricities.

“What's the deal?” I asked him. “Don't you want to learn how to swim and throw a Frisbee, like a normal person?”

“You don't understand,” Jack said, not very distinctly, into the carpet. “I'm not a normal person. I—I'm different than other people.”

“Of course you are,” I said, rolling my eyes. “We're all special and unique, like snowflakes. But there's different, and then there's freakish. And you, Jack, are going to turn freakish, if you don't watch out.”

“I—I already am freakish,” Jack said.

But he wouldn't elaborate, and I can't say I pressed too hard, trying to find out what he meant. Not that I imagined he might like to drown kittens in his spare time, or anything like that. I just figured he meant freakish in the general sense. I mean, we all feel like freaks from time to time. Jack maybe felt like one a bit more often than that, but then, with Rick and Nancy for parents, who wouldn't? He was probably constantly being asked why he couldn't be more like his older brother, Paul. That would be enough to make any kid feel a little insecure. I mean, come on. Heidegger? On summer vacation?

Give me Clifford any day.

I told Jack that worrying so much was going to make him old before his time. Then I ordered him to go and put on his swimsuit.

He did so, but he didn't exactly hurry, and when we finally got outside and onto the brick path to the pool, it was almost 10:00. The sun was beating down hard, though it wasn't uncomfortably hot yet. Actually, it hardly ever gets uncomfortably hot in Carmel, even in the middle of July. Back in Brooklyn, you can barely go outdoors in July, it's so muggy. In Carmel, however, there is next to no humidity, and there's always a cool breeze from the Pacific. . . .

Perfect date weather, actually. If you happened to have one. A date, I mean. Which, of course, I don't. And probably never will—at least with the guy I want—if things keep up the way they've been going.

Anyway, Jack and I were tripping down the brick path to the pool when one of the gardeners stepped out from behind an enormous forsythia bush and nodded to me.

This wouldn't have been at all odd—I have actually gotten friendly with all of the landscaping staff, thanks to the many Frisbees I have lost while playing with my charges—except for the fact that this particular gardener, Jorge, who had been expected to retire at the end of the summer, had instead suffered a heart attack a few days earlier, and, well . . .

Died.

Yet there was Jorge in his beige coveralls, holding a pair of hedge clippers and bobbing his head at me, just as he had the last time I'd seen him, on this very path, a few days before.

I wasn't too worried about Jack's reaction to having a dead man walk up and nod at us, since for the most part, I'm the only one I know who can actually see them. The dead, I mean. So I was perfectly unprepared for what happened next. . . .

Which was that Jack ripped his hand from mine and, with a strangled scream, ran for the pool.

This was odd, but then, so was Jack. I rolled my eyes at Jorge, then hurried after the kid, since I am, after all, getting paid to care for the living. The whole helping-out-the-dead thing has to play second fiddle so long as I'm on the Pebble Beach Hotel and Golf Resort time clock. The ghosts simply have to wait. I mean, it's not as if they're paying me. Ha! I wish.

I found Jack huddled on a deck chair, sobbing into his towel. Fortunately, it was still early enough that there weren't many people at the pool yet. Otherwise, I might have had some explaining to do.

But the only other person there was Sleepy, high up in his lifeguard chair. And it was pretty clear from the way Sleepy was resting his cheek in one hand that his shutters, behind the lenses of his Ray-Bans, were closed.

“Jack,” I said, sinking down onto the neighboring deck chair. “Jack, what's the matter?”

“I . . . I t-told you already,” Jack sobbed into his fluffy white towel. “Suze . . . I'm not like other people. I'm like what you said. A . . . a . . . freak.”

I didn't know what he was talking about. I assumed he was merely continuing our conversation from the room.

“Jack,” I said. “You're no more a freak than anybody else.”

“No,” he sobbed. “I am. Don't you get it?” Then he lifted his head, looked me straight in the eye, and hissed, “Suze, don't you know why I don't like to go outside?”

I shook my head. I didn't get it. Even then, I still didn't get it.

 

Haunted by Meg Cabot

CHAPTER ONE

“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 self-confidence of those well, well, wells, 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.

But I'd wanted to start this year off right—in Mocha Mist and my new black Club Monaco capris (coupled with a pink silk sweater set I'd snagged for a song at the Benetton outlet up in Pacific Grove)—not in a fight. And what would my friends and schoolmates think—and, since they were milling all around us, tossing off the occasional “Hi, Suze,” and complimenting me on my ever-so-spiffy ensemble, they were bound to notice—if I began freakishly to pummel the new guy?

And then there was the unavoidable fact that I was pretty convinced that, if I took a whack at him, he might try to whack me back.

Somehow I managed to find my voice. I only hoped he didn't notice how much it was shaking. “Let go of my arm,” I said.

“Suze,” he said. He was still smiling, but now he looked and sounded slyly knowing. “What's the matter? You don't look very happy to see me.”

“Still not letting go of my arm,” I reminded him. I could feel the chill from his fingers—he seemed to be completely cold-blooded in addition to being preternaturally strong—through my silk sleeve.

He dropped his hand.

“Look,” he said, “I really am sorry. About the way things went down the last time you and I met, I mean.”

The last time he and I met. Instantly I was transported in my mind's eye back to that long corridor—the one I had seen so often in my dreams. Lined with doors on either side—doors that opened into who-knew-what—it had been like a hallway in a hotel or an office building . . . only this hallway hadn't existed in any hotel or office building known to man. It hadn't even existed in our current dimension.

And Paul had stood there, knowing Jesse and I had no idea how to find our way out of it, and laughed. Just laughed, like it was this big colossal joke that if I didn't return to my own universe soon, I'd die, while Jesse would have been trapped in that hallway forever. I could still hear Paul's laughter ringing in my ears. He had kept on laughing . . . right up until the moment Jesse had slammed a fist into his face.

I could hardly believe any of this was happening. Here it was, a perfectly normal September morning in Carmel, California—which meant, of course, a thick layer of mist hung over everything but would soon burn off to reveal cloudless blue skies and a golden sun—and I was standing there in the breezeway of the Junipero Serra Mission Academy, face-to-face with the person who'd been haunting my nightmares for weeks.

Only this wasn't a nightmare. I was awake. I knew I was awake, because I would never have dreamed of my friends CeeCee and Adam sauntering by while I was confronting this monster from my past, and going, “Hey, Suze,” like it was . . . well, like it was simply the first day back at school after summer vacation.

“You mean the part where you tried to kill me?” I croaked, when CeeCee and Adam were out of earshot. This time, I know he heard my voice shake. I know because he looked perturbed—though maybe it was because of the accusation. In any case, he reached up and dragged one of those largish tanned hands through his curly hair.

“I never tried to kill you, Suze,” he said, sounding a little hurt.

I laughed. I couldn't help it. My heart was in my throat, but I laughed anyway. “Oh,” I said. “Right.”

“I mean it, Suze,” he said. “It wasn't like that. I'm just . . . I'm just not very good at losing, you see.”

I stared at him. No matter what he told himself, he had tried to kill me. But worse, he'd done his best to eliminate Jesse, in a completely underhanded manner. And now he was trying to pass the whole thing off as bad sportsmanship?

“I don't get it,” I said, shaking my head. “What did you lose? You didn't lose anything.”

“Didn't I, Suze?” His gaze bore into mine. His voice was the one I'd been hearing over and over in my dreams—laughing at me as I struggled to find my way out of a dark, mist-filled hallway at either end of which was a precipice dropping off into a black void of utter nothingness, over which, right before I woke up, I teetered dangerously. It was a voice filled with hidden meaning. . . .

Only I had no idea what that meaning could be, or what he was implying. All I knew was that this guy terrified me.

“Suze,” he said with a smile. Smiling—and probably even scowling, too—he looked like a Calvin Klein underwear model. And not just his face, either. I had, after all, seen him in a pair of swim trunks.

“Look, don't be this way,” he said. “It's a new school year. Can't we make a new start?”

“No,” I said, glad that my voice didn't shake this time. “We can't. In fact, you—you'd better stay away from me.”

He seemed to find this deeply amusing. “Or what?” he asked, with another one of those smiles that revealed all of his white, even teeth—a politician's smile, I realized.

“Or you'll regret it,” I said, the tremor back in my voice.

“Oh,” he said, his dark eyes widening in mock terror. “You'll sic your boyfriend on me?”

It wasn't something I'd have joked around about, if I were him. Jesse could—and probably would, if he found out the guy was back—kill him. Except that I wasn't exactly Jesse's girlfriend, so it wasn't really his job to protect me from creeps like the one in front of me.

He must have figured out from my expression that all was not copacetic in Suze-and-Jesse-land, since he laughed and said, “So that's how it is. Well, I never really thought Jesse was your type, you know. You need someone a little less—”

He didn't get a chance to finish his sentence, because at that moment, CeeCee, who'd been following Adam in the direction of his locker—even though we'd solemnly sworn to each other the night before over the phone that we were not going to start off the new school year chasing boys—came back toward us, her gaze on the guy standing so close to me.

“Suze,” she said politely. Unlike me, CeeCee had spent her summer working in the non-profit sector, and so had not had a lot of money to blow on a back-to-school wardrobe and makeover. Not that CeeCee would ever spend her money on anything so frivolous as makeup. Which was a good thing, since, being an albino, she had to special-order all of her makeup anyway, and couldn't just stroll on up to the M.A.C. counter and plunk her money down the way anybody else could.

“Who's your friend?” she wanted to know.

I was not about to stand there and make introductions. In fact, I was seriously thinking of heading to the administrative office and asking just what they were thinking, admitting a guy like this into what I had once considered a passably good school.

But he thrust one of those cool, strong hands at CeeCee and said with that grin that I had once found disarming but that now chilled me to the bone, “Hi. I'm Paul. Paul Slater. Nice to meet you.”

Paul Slater. Not really the kind of name to strike terror into the heart of a young girl, huh? I mean, it sounded innocuous enough. Hi, I'm Paul Slater. There was nothing in that statement that could have alerted CeeCee to the truth: Paul Slater was sick, manipulative, and had icicles where his heart should have been.

No, CeeCee had no clue. Because I hadn't told her, of course. I hadn't told anyone.

The more fool I.

If CeeCee found his fingers a little too cold for her liking, she didn't let on.

“CeeCee Webb,” she said, as she pumped his hand in her typically businesslike manner. “You must be new here, because I've never seen you around before.”

Paul blinked, bringing attention to his eyelashes, which were really long, for a guy's. They looked almost heavy on his eyelids, like they'd be an effort to lift. My stepbrother Jake has sort of

the same thing going, only on him, it just makes him look drowsy. On Paul, it had more of a sexy rock-star effect. I glanced worriedly at CeeCee. She was one of the most sensible people I had ever met, but are any of us really immune to the sexy rock-star type?

“My first day,” Paul said with another one of those grins. “Lucky for me, I already happen to be acquainted with Ms. Simon here.”

“How fortuitous,” CeeCee, who, as editor of the school paper, liked big words, said, her white-blond eyebrows raised slightly. “Did you used to go to Suze's old school?”

“No,” I said quickly. “He didn't. Look, we better get to homeroom, or we're going to get into trouble. . . .”

But Paul wasn't worried about getting into trouble. Probably because Paul was used to causing it.

“Suze and I had a thing this past summer,” he informed CeeCee, whose purple eyes widened behind the lenses of her glasses at this information.

“A thing?” she echoed.

“There was no thing,” I hastened to assure her. “Believe me. No thing at all.”

CeeCee's eyes got even wider. It was clear she didn't believe me. Well, why should she? I was her best friend, it was true. But had I ever once been completely honest with her? No. And she clearly knew it.

“Oh, so you guys broke up?” she asked pointedly.

“No, we didn't break up,” Paul said, with another one of those secretive, knowing smiles.

Because we were never going out, I wanted to shriek. You think I'd ever go out with him? He's not what you think, CeeCee. He looks human, but underneath that studly façade, he's a . . . a . . .

Well, I didn't know what Paul was, exactly.

But then, what did that make me? Paul and I had far more in common than I was comfortable admitting, even to myself.

Even if I'd had the guts to say something along those lines in front of him, I didn't get a chance because suddenly a stern, “Miss Simon! Miss Webb! Haven't you ladies got a class you should be getting to?” rang out.

Sister Ernestine—whose three-month absence from my life had not rendered her any less intimidating, with her enormous chest and even bigger crucifix adorning it—came barreling down upon us, the wide black sleeves of her habit trailing behind her like wings.

“Get going,” she tut-tutted us, waving her hands in the direction of our lockers, built into the adobe walls all along the mission's beauti-fully manicured inner courtyard. “You'll be late to first period.”

We got going . . . but unfortunately Paul followed directly behind us.

“Suze and I go way back,” he was saying to CeeCee, as we moved along the porticoed hallway toward my locker. “We met at the Pebble Beach Hotel and Golf Resort.”

I could only stare at him as I fumbled with the combination to my locker. I couldn't believe this was happening. I really couldn't. What was Paul doing here? What was Paul doing here enrolling in my school, making my world—from which I'd thought I'd rid him forever—a real-life nightmare?

I didn't want to know. Whatever his motives for coming back, I didn't want to know. I just wanted to get away from him, get to class, anywhere, anywhere at all . . .

. . . so long as it was away from him.

“Well,” I said, slamming my locker door closed. I hardly knew what I was doing. I had reached in and blindly grabbed the first books my fingers touched. “Gotta go. Homeroom calls.”

He looked down at the books in my arms, the ones I was holding almost as a shield, as if they would protect me from whatever it was—and I was sure there was something—he had in store for me. For us.

“You won't find them in there,” Paul said with a cryptic nod at the textbooks bulging from my arms.

I didn't know what he was talking about. I didn't want to know. All I knew was that I wanted out of there, and I wanted out of there fast. CeeCee still stood beside me, looking bewilderedly from my face to Paul's. Any second, I knew, she was going to begin to ask questions, questions I didn't dare answer . . . because she wouldn't believe me if I tried.

Still, even though I didn't want to, I heard myself asking, as if the words were being torn involuntarily from my lips, “I won't find what in here?”

“The answers you're looking for.” Paul's blue-eyed gaze was intense. “Why you, of all people, were chosen. And what, exactly, you are.”

This time, I didn't have to ask what he meant. I knew. I knew as surely as if he'd said the words out loud. He was talking about the gift we shared, he and I, the one over which he seemed to have so much better control—and of which he seemed to have such superior knowledge—than I did.

 

Twilight by Meg Cabot

CHAPTER ONE

I found the stone exactly where Mrs. Gutierrez had said it would be, beneath the drooping branches of the overgrown hibiscus in her backyard. I shut off the flashlight. Even though there was supposed to have been a full moon that night, by midnight a thick layer of clouds had blown in from the sea, and a dank mist had reduced visibility to nil.

But I didn't need light to see by anymore. I just needed to dig. I sunk my fingers into the wet soft earth and pried the stone from its resting spot. It moved easily and wasn't heavy. Soon I was feeling beneath it for the tin box Mrs. Gutierrez had assured me would be there. . . .

Except that it wasn't. There was nothing beneath my fingers except damp soil.

That's when I heard it—a twig snapping beneath the weight of someone nearby.

I froze. I was trespassing, after all; the last thing I needed was to be dragged home by the Carmel, California, cops.

Again.

Then, with my pulse beating frantically as I tried to figure out how on earth I was going to explain my way out of this one, I recognized the lean shadow—darker than all the others—standing a few feet away. My heart continued to pound in my ears, but now for an entirely different reason.

“You,” I said, climbing slowly, shakily, to my feet.

“Hello, Suze.” His voice, floating toward me through the mist, was deep, and not at all unsteady…unlike my own voice, which had an unnerving tendency to shake when he was around.

It wasn't the only part of me that shook when he was around, either.

But I was determined not to let him know that.

“Give it back,” I said, holding out my hand.

He threw back his head and laughed.

“Are you nuts?” he wanted to know.

“I mean it, Paul,” I said, my voice steady, but my confidence already beginning to seep away, like sand beneath my feet.

“It's two thousand dollars, Suze,” he said, as if I might be unaware of that fact. “Two thousand.”

“And it belongs to Julio Gutierrez.” I sounded sure of myself, even if I wasn't exactly feeling that way. “Not you.”

“Oh, right,” Paul said, his deep voice dripping with sarcasm. “And what's Gutierrez gonna do, call the cops? He doesn't know it's missing, Suze. He never even knew it was there.”

“Because his grandmother died before she had a chance to tell him,” I reminded him.

“Then he won't notice, will he?” Despite the darkness, I could tell Paul was smiling. I could hear it in his voice. “You can't miss what you never knew you had.”

“Mrs. Gutierrez knows.” I'd dropped my hand so he wouldn't see it shaking, but I couldn't disguise the growing unsteadiness in my voice as easily. “If she finds out you stole it, she'll come after you.”

“What makes you think she hasn't already?” he asked, so smoothly that the hairs on my arms stood up . . . and not because of the brisk autumn weather, either.

I didn't want to believe him. He had no reason to lie. And obviously, Mrs. Gutierrez had come to him as well as me, anxious for any help she could get. How else could he have known about the money?

Poor Mrs. Gutierrez. She had definitely put her trust the wrong mediator. Because it looked as if Paul hadn't just robbed her. Oh, no.

But like a fool, I stood there in the middle of her backyard and called her name just in case, as loudly as I dared. I didn't want to wake the grieving family inside the modest stucco home a few yards away.

“Mrs. Gutierrez?” I craned my neck, hissing the name into the darkness, trying to ignore the chill in the air . . . and in my heart. “Mrs. Gutierrez? Are you there? It's me, Suze. . . . Mrs. Gutierrez?”

I wasn't all that surprised when she didn't show. I knew, of course, that he could make the undead disappear. I just never thought he'd be low enough to do it.

I should have known better.

A cold wind kicked up from the sea as I turned to face him. It tossed some of my long dark hair around my face until the strands finally ended up sticking to my lip gloss. But I had more important things to worry about.

“It's her life savings,” I said to him, not caring if he noticed the throb in my voice. “All she had to leave to her kids.”

Paul shrugged, his hands buried deep in the pockets of his leather jacket.

“She should have put it in the bank, then,” he said.

Maybe if I reason with him, I thought. Maybe if I explain . . . “A lot of people don't trust banks with their money—”

But it was no use.

“Not my fault,” he said with another shrug.

“You don't even need the money,” I cried. “Your parents buy you whatever you want. Two thousand dollars is nothing to you, but to Mrs. Gutierrez's kids, it's a fortune!”

“She should have taken better care of it, then,” was all he said.

Then, apparently seeing my expression—though I don't know how, since the clouds overhead were thicker than ever—he softened his tone.

“Suze, Suze, Suze,” he said, pulling one of his hands from his jacket pocket and moving to drape his arm across my shoulders. “What am I going to do with you?”

I didn't say anything. I don't think I could have spoken if I'd tried. It was hard enough just to breathe. All I could think about was Mrs. Gutierrez, and what he'd done to her. How could someone who smelled so good—the sharp clean scent of his cologne filled my senses—or from whom such warmth radiated—especially welcome, given the chill in the air and the relative thinness of my windbreaker—be so . . .

Well, evil?

“Tell you what,” Paul said. I could feel his deep voice reverberating through him as he spoke, he was holding me that close. “I'll split it with you. A grand for each of us.”

I had to swallow down something—something that tasted really bad—before I could reply. “You're sick.”

“Don't be that way, Suze,” he chided. “You have to admit, it's fair. You can do whatever you want with your half. Mail it back to the Gutierrezes, for all I care. But if you're smart, you'll use it to buy yourself a car now that you finally got your license. You could put a down payment on a decent set of wheels with that kind of change, and not have to worry about sneaking your mom's car out of the driveway after she's fallen asleep—”

“I hate you,” I snapped, twisting out from beneath his grip and ignoring the cold air that rushed in to meet the place where his body had been warming mine.

“No, you don't,” he said. The moon appeared momentarily from behind the blanket of clouds overhead, just long enough for me to see that his lips were twisted into a lopsided grin. “You're just mad because you know I'm right.”

I couldn't believe my ears. Was he serious? “Taking money from a dead woman is the right thing to do?”

“Obviously,” he said. The moon had disappeared again, but I could tell from his voice that he was amused. “She doesn't need it anymore. You and Father Dom. You're a couple of real pushovers, you know. Now I've got a question for you. How'd you know what she was blathering about, anyway? I thought you were taking French, not Spanish.”

I didn't answer him right away. That's because I was frantically trying to think of a reply that wouldn't include the word I least liked uttering in his presence, the word that, every time I heard it or even thought it, seemed to cause my heart to do somersaults over in my chest, and my veins to hum pleasantly.

Unfortunately, it was a word that didn't exactly engender the same response in Paul.

Before I could think of a lie, however, he figured it out on his own.

“Oh, right,” he said, his voice suddenly toneless. “Him. Stupid of me.”

Then, before I could think of something to say that would lighten the situation—or at least get his mind off Jesse, the last person in the world I wanted Paul Slater to be thinking about—he said in quite a different tone, “Well, I don't know about you, but I'm beat. I'm gonna call it a night. See you around, Simon.”

He turned to go. Just like that, he turned to go.

I knew what I had to do, of course. I wasn't looking forward to it . . . in fact, my heart had pretty much slipped up into my throat, and my palms had gone suddenly, inexplicably damp.

But what choice did I have? I couldn't let him walk away with all that money. I'd tried reasoning with him, and it hadn't worked. Jesse wouldn't like it, but the truth was, there was no other alternative. If Paul wouldn't give up the money voluntarily, well, I was just going to have to take it from him.

I told myself I had a pretty good chance at succeeding, too. Paul had the box tucked into the inside pocket of his jacket. I'd felt it there when he'd put his arm around me. All I had to do was distract him somehow—a good blow to the solar plexus would probably do the job—then grab the box and chuck it through the closest window. The Gutierrezes would freak, of course, at the sound of the breaking glass, but I highly doubted they'd call the cops . . . not when they found two thousand bucks scattered across the floor.

As plans went, it wasn't one of my best, but it was all I had.

I called his name.

He turned. The moon chose that moment to slip out from behind the thick veil of clouds overhead, and I could see by its pale light that Paul wore an absurdly hopeful expression. The hopefulness increased as I slowly crossed the grass between us. I suppose he thought for a minute that he'd finally broken me down. Found my weakness. Successfully lured me to the dark side.

And all for the low, low price of a thousand bucks.

Not.

The hopeful look left his face, though, the second he noticed my fist. I even thought that, just for a moment, I caught a look of hurt in his blue eyes, pale as the moonlight around us. Then the moon moved back behind the clouds, and we were once again plunged into darkness.

The next thing I knew, Paul, moving more quickly than I would have thought possible, had seized my wrists in a grip that hurt and kicked my feet out from under me. A second later, I was pinned to the wet grass by the weight of his body with his face just inches from mine.

“That was a mistake,” he said, way too casually, considering the force with which I could feel his heart hammering against mine. “I'm rescinding my offer.”

His breath, unlike my own, wasn't coming out in ragged gasps, though. Still, I tried to hide my fear from him.

“What offer?” I panted.

“To split the money. I'm keeping it all, now. You really hurt my feelings, you know that, Suze?”

“I'm sure,” I said as sarcastically as I could. “Now get off me. These are my favorite low-riders, and you're getting grass stains on them.”

But Paul wasn't ready to let me go. He also didn't appear to appreciate my feeble attempt to make a joke out of the situation. His voice, hissing down at me, was deadly serious.

“You want me to make your boyfriend disappear,” he asked, “the way I did Mrs. Gutierrez?”

His body was warm against mine, so there was no other explanation for why my heart went suddenly cold as ice, except that his words terrified me to the point that my blood seemed to freeze in my veins.

I couldn't, however, let my fear show. Weakness only seems to trigger cruelty, not compassion, from people like Paul.

“We have an agreement,” I said, my tongue and lips forming the words with difficulty because they, like my heart, had gone ice cold with dread.

“I promised I wouldn't kill him,” Paul said. “I didn't say anything about keeping him from dying in the first place.”

I blinked up at him, uncomprehending.

“What . . . what are you talking about?” I stammered.

“You figure it out,” he said. He leaned down and kissed me lightly on my frozen lips. “Good night, Suze.”

And then he stood up and vanished into the fog.

It took me a minute to realize I was free. Cool air rushed in to all the places where his body had been touching mine. I finally managed to roll over, feeling as if I'd just suffered a head-on collision with a brick wall. Still, I had enough strength left to call out, “Paul! Wait!”

That's when someone inside the Gutierrez household flicked on the lights. The backyard lit up bright as an airport runway. I heard a window open and someone shout, “Hey, you! What are you doing there?”

I didn't stick around to ask whether or not they planned on calling the cops. I peeled myself up from the ground and ran for the wall I'd scaled a half hour ago. I found my mom's car right where I'd left it. I hopped into it and started my long journey home, cursing a certain fellow mediator—and the grass stains on my new jeans—the whole way.

I had no idea that night how bad things were going to get between Paul and me.

 

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