"What do you say, Suze?" Paul had one arm flung casually across the back of the empty passenger seat beside him. "Dinner tonight? My treat? I'll tell you things about yourself - about what you are - that no one else on this planet knows."

"Thanks," I said, stepping off the road and into my pine-needle-strewn yard, feeling insanely relieved. Well, and why not? I had survived an encounter with Paul Slater without being hurled into another plane of existence. That was quite an accomplishment. "But no thanks. See you in school tomorrow."

Then I waded through the heavy carpet of pine needles to my driveway, while behind me, I heard Paul calling, "Suze! Suze, wait!"

Only I didn't wait. I went straight up the driveway to the front porch, climbed the steps, then opened the front door and went inside.

I did not look back. I did not look back even once.

"I'm home," I called, in case there was anybody downstairs who particularly cared. There was. I found myself being interrogated by my stepfather, who was cooking dinner and seemed anxious to know all about "my day." After telling him, then seizing sustenance from the kitchen in the form of an apple and a diet soda, I climbed the steps to the second floor, and flung open the door to my room.

There was a ghost sitting there on the window-sill. He looked up when I walked in.

"Hello," Jesse said.

4

I didn't tell Jesse about Paul.

I probably should have. There were a lot of things I probably should have told Jesse, but hadn't exactly gotten around to yet.

Except I knew what would happen if I did: Jesse would want to rush into some big confrontation with the guy, and all that would result in was somebody getting exorcised again . . . that somebody being Jesse. And I really didn't think I could take it. Not that. Not again.

So I kept Paul's sudden matriculation at the Mission Academy to myself. I mean, things were weird between Jesse and me, it was true. But that didn't mean I was at all anxious to lose him.

"So how was school?" Jesse wanted to know.

"Fine," I said. I was afraid to say anything more. For one thing, I was worried I might start blabbing about Paul. And for another, well, I'd found that the less said between Jesse and me, overall, the better. Otherwise, I had a tendency to prattle nervously. While I'd found that generally, prattling kept Jesse from dematerializing - as he tended to do more often now, with a hasty apology, whenever any awkward silences ensued between us - it did not seem to engender a similar desire to gab from him. Jesse had been almost unbearably quiet since . . .

Well, since the day we'd kissed.

I don't know what it is about guys that makes them French you one day, then act like you don't exist the next. But that was the treatment I had been getting from Jesse lately. I mean, not three weeks ago he had pulled me into his arms and laid a kiss on me that I had felt all the way down to the base of my spine. I had melted in his embrace, thinking that at last, at long last, I could reveal to him my true feelings, the secret love I had borne him since the minute - well, almost, anyway - I had first walked into my new bedroom and found it already occupied. Never mind that that occupant had breathed his last over a century and a half ago.

I should, I suppose, have known better than to fall in love with a ghost. But that's the thing about us mediators. To us, ghosts have as much matter as anyone living. Except for the whole immortal thing, there was no reason in the world why Jesse and I, if we wanted to, couldn't have the torrid affair I'd been dreaming of since he'd first resolutely refused to call me anything but my full name, Susannah, the name no one else but Father Dom ever used.

Except that no torrid affair followed. After that first kiss - which had been interrupted by my youngest stepbrother - there'd been no other. Jesse had, in fact, apologized profusely for it, then seemed purposefully to avoid me - though I had made it a point to let him know that the whole thing had been all right . . . more than all right ... by me.

Now I couldn't help wondering if maybe I'd been too accommodating. Jesse probably thought I was easy or something. I mean, back when he'd been alive, ladies slapped men who'd been as forward as he had been. Even men who looked like Jesse, with flashing dark eyes, thick black hair, washboard abs, and irresistibly sexy smiles.

I still find it hard to believe anybody could have hated a guy like that enough to off him, but that's exactly how Jesse ended up haunting my bedroom, the room he was strangled to death in a hundred and fifty years ago.

Given the circumstances, I really didn't think there was much point in telling Jesse the details about my day. I just handed him Critical Theory Since Plato and said, "Father Dominic says hello."

Jesse seemed pleased by the book. Just my luck to be in love with a guy who gets more jazzed by critical theory than he seems to by the idea of my tongue in his mouth.

Jesse thumbed through the book while I poured the contents of my backpack on my bed. I was weighted down with homework already, and it was only the first day back. I could tell that eleventh grade was going to be just jam-packed with fun and adventure. I mean, between Paul Slater and trig, what could be more exciting?

I should have said something to Jesse about Paul then. I should have just been like, "Hey, guess what? Remember that Paul guy whose nose you tried to break? Yeah, he goes to my school now."

Because if I'd just been all casual about it, maybe it wouldn't have been a big deal. I mean, yeah, Jesse hated the guy - and with good reason. But I could have downplayed the whole fact that Paul might possibly be Satan's spawn. I mean, the guy does sport a Fossil watch. How malevolent could he be?

But just as I was kind of getting the guts up to go, "Oh, yeah, and that Paul Slater dude, remember him? He showed up in my homeroom this morning," Brad shrieked up the stairs that dinner was ready.

Since my stepdad has this big thing about all of us gathering as a family at mealtimes and breaking bread together, I was forced to leave Jesse's side at that point - not that he seemed to care - and go downstairs and actually converse with the household ... a major sacrifice, considering what I could be doing instead: making myself available for more kisses from the man of my dreams.

Tonight, however, like most nights, didn't look as if it was going to yield any passionate embraces, so I went glumly down the stairs. Andy had prepared steak fajitas, one of his best dishes. I had to give my mother credit for finding a guy who was not only handy around the house but who was also practically a gourmet cook. Given that my mom and I had basically lived on takeout food back before she'd remarried, this was definitely an improvement.

The fact, however, that Mr. Fix-It had come with three teenaged sons? That part I was still sort of iffy about.

Brad burped as I entered the dining room. Only he had mastered the art of burping words.

The word he burped as I walked in was "Loser."

"You're one to talk," was my witty rejoinder.

"Brad," Andy said severely. "Go and get the sour cream, please."

Rolling his eyes, Brad slid out from his place at the table and trudged back into the kitchen.

"Hi, Susie," my mother said, coming up and ruffling my hair affectionately. "How was your first day back?"

Only my mother, out of all the human beings on the planet, is allowed to call me Susie. Fortunately I had already made this abundantly clear to my stepbrothers, so that they did not even snicker when she did it anymore.

I didn't feel it would have been appropriate to have answered my mother's question truthfully. After all, she is unaware of the fact that her only child is a liaison between the living and the dead. She is not acquainted with Paul, or with the fact that he once tried to kill me, nor is she aware of the existence of Jesse. My mother thinks merely that I am a late bloomer, a wallflower who will come into her own soon enough, and then have boyfriends to spare. Which is surprisingly naive for a woman who works as a television news journalist, even if it is only for a local affiliate.

Sometimes I envy my mom. It must be nice to live on her planet.

"My day was all right," was how I responded to my mother's question.

"'S not going to be so good tomorrow," Brad pointed out, as he came back with the sour cream.

My mother had taken her seat at one end of the table and was flipping out her napkin. We use only cloth napkins. Another Andy-ism. It is more ecologically responsible and makes the presentation of the meal way more Martha Stewart.

"Really?" Mom said, her eyebrows, dark as mine, rose. "How so?"

"Tomorrows when we give the nominations for student body government," Brad said, sliding back into his place. "And Suze is going down as VP."

Flipping out my own napkin and laying it delicately across my lap - along with the giant head of Max, the Ackermans' dog, who spent every meal with his muzzle resting on my thigh, waiting for whatever might fall from my fork and into my lap, a practice I was now so used to, I hardly even noticed anymore - I said, in response to my mother's questioning gaze, "I have no idea what he's talking about."

Brad looked innocent. "Kelly didn't catch you after school?"

Not exactly, given that I'd been in detention after school, something Brad knew perfectly well.

He intended to torture me about it for a while though, you could tell.

"No," I said. "Why?"

"Well, Kel's already asked someone else to be her running mate this year. That new guy, Paul Whatsit." Brad shrugged his shoulders, from which his thick wrestlers neck sprouted like a tree trunk from between a couple of boulders. "So I guess Suze's reign as VP is finite."