But of course they were killing me. I already had raw, painful blisters around the bases of all my toes, and the Band-Aids the nurse had given me to cover them so that I could at least hobble between classes were not exactly doing the job.

My feet felt like they were about to fall off. If I'd known where Jimmy Choo lived, I would have hobbled right up to his front door and popped him one in the eye.

So I was sitting there in the computer lab, my mules kicked off and my toes throbbing painfully, working on my trig homework when I should have been working on my essay, when a voice I had come to know as well as my own startled me by saying, close to my ear, "Miss me, Suze?"

7

"Leave me alone," I said more calmly than I felt.

"Aw, come on, Simon," Paul said, reaching for a nearby chair, swinging it around, and then straddling it. "Admit it. You don't hate me half as much as you pretend to."

"I wouldn't bet on it," I said. I tapped my pencil against my notebook with what I hoped he would take to be irritation but which was, in fact, nervous tension. "Listen, Paul, I have a lot of work to do - "

He plucked the notebook out from beneath my hands. "Who's Craig Jankow?"

Startled, I realized I had doodled the name in the margin of my worksheet.

"Nobody," I said.

"Oh, that's good," Paul said. "I thought maybe he'd gone and replaced me in your affections. Does Jesse know? About this Craig guy, I mean?"

I glared at him, hoping he'd mistake my fear for anger and go away. He didn't seem to be getting the message, though. I hoped he couldn't see how rapidly my pulse was beating in my throat... or that if he did, he didn't mistake it for something it was not. Paul was not unaware of his good looks, unfortunately. He had on black jeans that fit him in all the right places and an olive-green short-sleeved polo shirt. It brought out the deepness of his golf-and-tennis tan. I could see the other girls in the computer lab - Debbie Mancuso, for one - peeking at Paul speculatively, then looking quickly back at their computer monitors, trying to act as if they hadn't been trying to scope him out a minute before.

They were probably seething with jealousy that he was talking to me, of all people - the only girl in their class who didn't let Kelly Prescott tell her what to do and who didn't consider Brad Ackerman a hottie.

Little did they know how much I would have appreciated it if Paul Slater hadn't chosen to grace me with his company.

"Craig," I whispered, just in case anyone was listening, "happens to be dead."

"So?" Paul grinned at me. "I thought that was how you liked 'em."

"You - " I tried to snatch the notebook back from him, but he held it out of my reach " - are insufferable."

He looked meditative as he studied the problems on my worksheet. "There's something to be said for having a dead boyfriend, I suppose," he mused. "I mean, you don't have to worry about introducing him to your parents, since they can't see him, anyway. . .."

"Craig's not my boyfriend," I hissed at him, angry at finding myself in a situation where I was explaining anything to Paul Slater. "I'm trying to help him. He showed up at my house yesterday - "

"Oh, God." Paul rolled his expressive blue eyes. "Not another one of those charity cases you and the good father are always taking on."

I said with some indignation, "Helping lost souls find their way is my job, after all."

"Who says?" Paul wanted to know.

I blinked at him. "Well - it just - it just is," I stammered. "I mean, what else am I supposed to do?"

Paul plucked a pencil from a nearby desk and began swiftly and neatly to solve the problems on my worksheet. "I wonder. It doesn't seem fair to me that we were just handed this mediator thing at birth without so much as a contract or list of employee benefits. I mean, I never signed up for this mediator thing. Did you?"

"Of course not," I said, as if this was not something about which I complained, in almost those exact words, every time I saw Father Dominic.

"And how do you know what your job responsibilities even consist of?" Paul asked. "Yeah, you think you're supposed to help the dead move on to their final destination, because once you do, they stop bugging you, and you can get on with your life again. But I've got a question for you. Who told you it was up to you? Who told you how it was done, even?"

I blinked at him. No one had told me that, actually. Well, my dad had, sort of. And later, a certain psychic my best friend, Gina, had taken me to back home. And then Father Dom, of course . . .

"Right," Paul said, observing from my expression apparently that I didn't have a real straightforward answer for him. "Nobody told you. But what if I said I knew. What if I told you I'd found something - something that dated back to the first days of actual written communication - that exactly described mediators, though that wasn't what we were called back then, and their real purpose, not to mention techniques?"

I continued to blink at him. He sounded so ... well, convincing. And he certainly looked sincere.

"If you really had something like that," I said hesitantly, "I guess I'd say . . . show me."

"Fine," Paul said, looking pleased. "Come over to my place after school today, and I will."

I was up and out of my chair so fast, I practically tipped it over.

"No," I said, gathering up my books and clutching them in front of my wildly beating heart as if both to hide and protect it. 'No way"

Paul regarded me from where he sat, not seeming too surprised by my reaction.

"Hmmm," he said. "I thought as much. You want to know but not enough to risk your reputation."

"It isn't my reputation I'm worried about," I informed him, managing to make my tone more acid than shaken. "It's my life. You tried to kill me once, remember?"

I said these words a little too loudly and noticed several people glance at me curiously over the tops of the computer monitors.

Paul, however, just looked bored.

"Not that again," he said. "Listen, Suze, I told you. . . . Well, I guess it doesn't matter what I told you. You're going to believe what you want to believe. But, seriously, you could have gotten out of there any time you wanted to."

"But Jesse couldn't have," I hissed at him. "Could he? Thanks to you."

"Well," Paul said with an uncomfortable shrug. "No. Not Jesse. But, really, Suze, don't you think you're overreacting? I mean, what's the big deal? The guy's already dead - "

"You," I said, my trembling voice giving the statement somewhat iffy conviction, "are a pig."

Then I started to stride away. I say started to because I didn't get very far before Paul's calm voice stopped me.

"Uh, Suze," Paul said. "Aren't you forgetting something?"

I turned my head to glare at him. "Oh, you mean, did I forget to tell you not to speak to me again? Yes."

"No," Paul said with a wry smile. "Aren't those your shoes under there?" He pointed down at my Jimmy Choos, without which I'd been about to stalk from the room. Like Sister Ernestine wouldn't have had too big a coronary if she'd caught me wandering around school in my bare feet.

"Oh," I said, mad that my dramatic exit had been spoiled. "Yeah." I went back to my desk so I could jam my feet into my mules.

"Before you go, Cinderella," Paul said, still smiling, "you might also want to take this." He held out my trig homework. I could tell with a single glance that he'd finished it, neatly and, I could only assume, correctly.

"Thanks," I said, taking the notebook from him, feeling more and more sheepish with every passing second. I mean, why, exactly, was I always flying off the handle with this guy? Yeah, he'd tried to kill me - and Jesse - once. At least, I thought he had. But he kept saying I was wrong. What if I was wrong? What if Paul wasn't the monster I'd always thought him? What if he was . . .

What if he was just like me?

"About this Craig guy," Paul added.

"Paul." I sank down into the chair beside him. I had felt the gaze of Mrs. Tarentino, the teacher assigned to supervise the computer lab, boring into me. Popping in and out of your chair in the lab is not smiled upon, unless you are going back and forth from the printer.

But that wasn't the only reason I sat down again. I'll admit that. I was curious, too. Curious over what he'd say next. And that curiosity was almost stronger than my fear.

"Seriously," I said. "Thanks. But I do not need your help."

"I think you do," Paul said. "What's this Craig guy want, anyway?"

"He wants what all ghosts want," I said tiredly. "To be alive again."

"Well, of course," Paul said. "I mean, what's he want besides that?"

"I don't know yet," I said with a shrug. "He's got this thing with his little brother . . . thinks he should have been the one to die, not him. Jesse thinks - " I stopped talking, suddenly aware that Jesse was the last person I wanted to bring up in front of Paul.

Paul looked only politely interested, however. "Jesse thinks what?"

It was, I saw, too late to keep Jesse out of it. I sighed and said, "Jesse thinks Craig's going to try to kill his brother. You know. Out of revenge."

"Which, will, of course," Paul said, not looking in the least surprised, "get him exactly nowhere. When will they ever learn? Now, if he wanted to be his brother, that would be a different story."

"Be his brother?" I looked at him curiously. "What do you mean?"

"You know," Paul said with a shrug. "Soul transference. Take over his brother's body."

This was a little too much for a Tuesday morning. I mean, I had already had a pretty crummy night's sleep thanks to this guy. Then, to hear something like this come out of his mouth . . . well, let's just say I was not at my sharpest, so what happened next can hardly be described as my fault.