I raised my eyebrows. “I don’t know,” I said. “Buddhism has always struck me as kind of cool. That whole reincarnation thing is very appealing.”
“That’s Hinduism, you dink,” Gina said. “And I was talking about smoking.”
“Oh. Okay. No, I never got the hang of it. Why?” I grinned at her. “Didn’t Sleepy tell you about the time he caught me trying to smoke?”
She frowned prettily. “He did not. And I wish you wouldn’t call him that.”
I made a face. “Jake, then. He was pretty peeved about it. You better not let him catch you at it, or he’ll dump you like a hot potato.”
“I highly doubt that,” Gina said with a mysterious smile.
She was probably right. I wondered what it would be like to be Gina, and have every boy you met fall madly in love with you. The only boys who fell madly in love with me were boys like Michael Meducci. And he wasn’t even technically in love with me. He was in love with the idea that I was in love with him. Something I still couldn’t think about, by the way, without shuddering.
I heaved a dejected sigh and looked out the window. About a mile of sloping, cypress-tree-dotted landscape stretched to the sea, teal blue and sparkling in the bright afternoon sunlight.
“I don’t see how you can stand it.” Gina exhaled a plume of gray smoke. She was back to talking about religion class, I could tell from her tone. “I mean, it must all really seem bogus to you, considering the whole mediator thing.”
I shrugged. I had gotten home too late the night before for Gina and I to have our “talk.” She’d been sound asleep when I snuck back into the house. Which was just as well, since I’d been exhausted.
Not exhausted enough, however, to fall asleep.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I haven’t got the slightest idea where the ghosts go after I send them packing. They just…go. Maybe to heaven. Maybe on to their next life. I doubt I’ll ever know until I die myself.”
Gina aimed her next plume of smoke out the window. “You make it,” she said, “sound like a trip. Like when we die, we’re just moving to a new address.”
“Well,” I said. “Personally, I think that’s how it works. Just don’t ask me to tell you what that address is. Because that I don’t know.”
“So.” Her cigarette finished, Gina stamped it out on the adobe beneath us, then flung the butt expertly over the closest stall door, and into the toilet. I heard the plop, and then the sizzle. “What was that all about last night, anyway?”
I told her. About the RLS Angels, and how they thought Michael had killed them. I told her about Michael’s sister, and the accident out on the Pacific Coast Highway. I told her about how Josh and his friends were looking to avenge their deaths, and about how Father Dominic and I had argued with them, long into the night, until we’d finally convinced them to let us try to bring Michael to justice the old-fashioned way—you know, utilizing the appropriate law enforcement agencies, and not a paranormal contract killing.
There was only one thing I didn’t tell her, and that was about Jesse. For some reason, I just couldn’t bring myself to mention him. Maybe because of what the psychic had said. Maybe because I was afraid Madame Zara was right, that I really was this giant loser who was only going to fall in love with one person my entire life, and that person was a guy who:
(a) did not love me back, and
(b) wasn’t exactly someone I could introduce to my mother, since he wasn’t even alive.
Or maybe it was simply because…well, maybe because Jesse was a secret I wanted to hug to myself, like some stupid girl with a crush on Carson Daly, or somebody. Maybe someday I’d take to standing underneath my bedroom window with a big sign that says Jesse, will you go to prom with me? like all those girls who stand around outside the MTV studios, though I sincerely hoped someone would shoot me or something before it came to that.
When I was through, Gina sighed, and said, “Well, it just goes to show. The cute ones always do end up being psychotic murderers.”
She meant Michael.
“Yeah,” I said. “But he’s not even that cute. Except with his clothes off.”
“You know what I mean.” Gina shook her head. “What are you going to do if he doesn’t confess to Father Dominic?”
“I don’t know.” This was something that had contributed to my insomnia of the night before. “I guess we’ll just have to get some proof.”
“Oh, yeah? Where you gonna find that? The evidence store?” Gina yawned, looked at her watch, and then hopped off the window sill. “Two minutes until lunch,” she said. “What do you think it will be today? Corn dogs again?”
“It always is,” I said. The Mission Academy was not exactly known for the culinary excellence of its cafeteria. That was because it didn’t have one. We ate lunch outside, out of these vendor wagons. It was bizarre, even to a couple of chicks from Brooklyn who had seen it all…as was illustrated by Gina’s total lack of surprise about everything that I’d just told her.
“What I want to know,” she said as we made our way out of the girls’ room and into the soon-to-be-flooded-with-humanity breezeway, “is why you never said anything about any of this stuff before. You know, the mediator stuff. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know.”
You don’t know, I thought. Not the worst part, anyway.
“I was afraid you’d tell your mother,” was what I said out loud. “And that she’d tell my mother. And that my mother would stick me in the loony bin. For my own good, of course.”
“Of course,” Gina said. She blinked down at me. “You are an idiot. You know that, don’t you? I never would have told my mother. I never tell my mother anything, if I can avoid it. And I certainly wouldn’t ever have told her—or anybody else, for that matter—about the mediator thing.”
I shrugged uncomfortably. “I know,” I said. “I guess…well, back then I was pretty uptight about everything. I guess I’ve loosened up some since then.”
“They say California does that to people,” Gina observed.
And then the Mission clock struck twelve. All of the classroom doors around us were flung open, and a flood of people started streaming toward us.
It only took about thirty seconds for Michael to find and then glom on to me.
“Hey,” he said, not looking at all like somebody who had just confessed to a quadruple murder. “I’ve been looking for you. What are you doing after school today?”
“Nothing,” I said quickly, before Gina could open her mouth.
“Well, the insurance company finally came through with a rental for me,” Michael said, “and I was thinking, you know, if you wanted to go back to the beach, or something…”
Back to the beach? Did this guy have amnesia, or what? You’d think after what had happened to him the last time he’d gone to the beach, it’d be the one place he wouldn’t want to go.
Still, though he didn’t know it, he’d be perfectly safe there. This was on account of Jesse. He was keeping an eye on the Angels while Father Dom and I tried our hand at bringing their alleged killer to justice.
It was as I was mulling over a reply to this offer that I caught a glimpse of Father Dominic as he came toward us down the breezeway. Right before he was pulled into the teachers’ lounge by an enthusiastically gesticulating Mr. Walden, he shook his head. Michael was standing with his back to him, so he didn’t see. But Father Dom’s message to me was clear:
Michael hadn’t confessed.
Which meant only one thing: it was time to bring in the professionals.
Me.
“Sure,” I said, looking from Father Dom back to Michael. “Maybe you can help me with my geometry homework. I don’t think I’m ever going to get the hang of this stupid Pythagorean theorem. I swear I’m going to flunk out after that last quiz.”
“The Pythagorean theorem isn’t hard,” Michael said, looking amused by my frustration. “The sum of the squares of the lengths of the sides of a right triangle is equal to the square of the l
ength of the hypotenuse.”
I went, “Huh?” in this helpless way.
“Look,” Michael said. “I aced geometry. Why don’t you let me tutor you?”
I looked up at him in what I hoped he would mistake for worshipfulness. “Oh, would you?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Can we start today?” I asked. “After school?” I should get an Oscar. I really should. I had the whole helpless female thing totally down. “At your house?”
Michael only looked a little taken aback. “Um,” he said. “Sure.” Then, when he’d recovered from his surprise, he added, slyly, “My parents won’t be home, though. My dad’ll be at work, and my mom spends most of her time at the hospital. With my sister. You know. I hope that won’t be a problem.”
I did everything but flutter my eyelashes at him. “Oh, no,” I said. “That’ll be fine.”
He looked pleased—and yet at the same time a little uncomfortable.
“Um,” he said, as the hordes of people pushed past us. “Look, about lunch. I can’t sit with you today. I’ve got some stuff to do. But I’ll meet you here right after last period. Okay?”
I went, “Okay,” in this total imitation of Kelly Prescott at her most school-spirited. It must have worked, since Michael went away looking dazed, but pleased.
That was when Gina grabbed my arm, pulled me into a doorway, and hissed, “What are you, high? You’re going to the guy’s house? Alone?”
I tried to shake her off. “Calm down, G,” I said. Sleepy’s nickname for her was kind of catchy, loath as I was to admit anything my stepbrother had come up with might have any sort of merit. “This is what I do.”
“Hang out with possible murderers?” Gina looked skeptical. “I don’t think so, Suze. Did you clear this with Father Dominic?”
“G,” I said. “I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You didn’t, did you? What are you, freelancing? And don’t call me G.”
“Look,” I said, in what I hoped was a soothing tone. “Chances are, Michael won’t say a word about it to me. But he’s a geek, right? A computer geek. And what do computer geeks do when they’re planning something?”
Gina still looked angry. “I don’t know,” she said. “And I don’t care. I’m telling—”
“They write stuff down,” I said calmly. “On their computer. Right? They keep a journal, or they brag to people in chat rooms, or they pull up schematics of the building they want to blow up, or whatever. So even if I can’t get him to admit anything, if I can get some time alone with Michael’s computer, I bet I can—”
“G!” Sleepy strolled up to us. “There you are. You doing lunch now?”
Gina’s lips were pressed together in annoyance with me, but Sleepy did not appear to notice this. Neither did Dopey, who showed up a second later.
“Hey,” he said breathlessly. “What are you guys just standing here for? Let’s go eat.”
Then he noticed me and sneered. “Suze, where’s your shadow?”
I said with a sniff, “Michael will be unable to join us for lunch today, having been unavoidably detained.”
“Yeah,” Dopey said, and then he made a rude remark pertaining to Michael’s having been detained by an inability to get certain parts of his body back into his pants. This was apparently an allusion to Michael’s lack of coordination and not an intimation that he was more endowed than the average sixteen-year-old male.
I chose to ignore this remark, as did Gina, though I think this was because she hadn’t even heard it.
“I sure hope you know what you’re doing,” was all she said, and it was clear she was not speaking to either of my stepbrothers, which puzzled them enormously. Why would any girl bother speaking to me when she could be speaking to them?
“G,” I said with some surprise. “What do you take me for? An amateur?”
“No,” Gina said. “A fool.”
I laughed. I really did think she was just being funny. It wasn’t until much later that I realized there wasn’t anything amusing about it at all.
Because it turned out Gina was one hundred percent right.
Chapter
Fifteen
Here’s the thing about killers. If you know one, I’m sure you’ll agree with me:
They can’t help bragging about what they’ve done.
Seriously. They are totally vain. And that, generally, is their undoing.
Look at it from their point of view: I mean, here they are, and they’ve gotten away with this terrific crime. You know, something totally ingenious that no one would ever think to pin on them.
And they can’t tell anybody. They can’t tell a soul.
That’s what gets them almost every time. Not telling anyone—not letting anyone in on their brilliant secret—well, that just about kills them.
Don’t get me wrong. They don’t want to get caught. They just want somebody to appreciate the brilliance of this thing they’ve done. Yes, it was a heinous—sometimes even unthinkable—crime. But look. Look. They did it without getting caught. They fooled the police. They fooled everybody. They have to tell somebody. They have to. Otherwise, what’s the point?
This is just a personal observation, of course. I have met quite a few killers in my line of work, and this is the one thing they all seem to have in common. Only the ones who kept their mouths shut were the ones who managed to keep from getting caught. Everybody else? Slammer city.
So it seemed to me that Michael—who already believed that I was in love with him—just might decide to brag to me about what he’d done. He’d already started to, a little, when he’d told me how Josh and people like him were just a “waste of space.” It seemed likely that, with a little prompting, I could get him to elaborate…maybe to the tune of a confession that I could then turn around and give to the police.
What’s that you’re saying? Guilty? Won’t I feel guilty for snitching on this guy who had, after all, only been trying to get back at the kids who’d let his sister hurt herself so badly?
Yeah. Right. Listen, I don’t do guilt. In my book, there are two kinds of people. Good ones and bad ones. As far as I was concerned, in this particular case, there wasn’t a single good person to be found. Everybody had done something reprehensible, from Lila Meducci crashing that party and getting herself trashed in the process, to the RLS Angels for throwing the drunken free-for-all in the first place. Maybe some of them had committed crimes a little more heinous than the others—Michael’s killing four people comes to mind—but frankly, in my mind…they all sucked.
So, in answer to your question, no, I didn’t feel guilty about what I was about to do. The way I saw it, the sooner Michael got what was coming to him, the sooner I could get back to what was really important in life: lying on the beach with my best friend, soaking up some rays.
It was as I was in the girls’ room just after last period let out, applying eyeliner in the mirror above the sinks—I have found that wringing confessions from potential murderers is easier when I am looking my best—that I got my first indication that the afternoon was not going to go exactly as I’d planned.
The door opened and Kelly Prescott walked in, followed by her shadow, Debbie Mancuso. They were not, apparently, there either to relieve or coif themselves, since all they did was stand there and stare at me in a hostile manner.
I looked at their reflections in the mirror and went, “If this is about funding for a class trip to the wine country, you can forget it. I already spoke to Mr. Walden about it, and he said it was the most ludicrous thing he’d ever heard of. Six Flags, maybe, but not the Napa Valley. Wineries do card, you know.”
Kelly’s upper lip curled. “This isn’t about that,” she said in a disgusted tone of voice.
“Yeah,” Debbie said. “This is about your friend.”
“My friend?” I had extracted a hairbrush from my backpack, and now I ran it through my hair, feigning unconcern. And I wasn’t concerned. Not really. I
could handle anything Kelly Prescott and Debbie Mancuso dished out. Only I didn’t exactly feel like dealing with this, on top of everything else that had happened lately. “You mean Michael Meducci?”
Kelly rolled her eyes. “As if. Why you would ever want to be seen with that, I cannot imagine. But we happen to be talking about this Gina person.”
“Yeah,” Debbie said, her eyes narrowed to angry little slits.
Gina? Oh, Gina. Gina, who had stolen both Kelly’s and Debbie’s inamoratos. Suddenly all became clear.
“When is she going back to New York?” Kelly demanded.
“Yeah,” Debbie said. “And where is she sleeping? Your room, right?”
Kelly elbowed her, and Debbie went, “Well, don’t act like you don’t want to know, Kel.”
Kelly shot her friend an annoyed look, and then asked me, “There hasn’t been any…well, bed-hopping, has there?”
Bed-hopping?
“Not to my knowledge,” I said. I thought about messing with them, but the thing was, I really did feel for them. I know if some superhot femme fatale ghost had come along and stolen Jesse from me, I’d have been plenty peeved. Not that Jesse had ever even been mine to begin with.
“No bed-hopping,” I said. “Footsie under the dinner table, maybe, but no bed-hopping that I know of.”
Debbie and Kelly exchanged glances. I could see they were relieved.
“And she’s leaving when?” Kelly asked.
When I said “Sunday,” both girls let out a little sigh. Debbie went, “Good.”
Now that she knew she wouldn’t have to put up with her much longer, Kelly was willing to be gracious about Gina. “It isn’t that we don’t like her,” she said.
“Yeah,” Debbie said. “It’s just that she’s…you know.”
“I know,” I said in what I hoped was a comforting manner.
“It’s just because she’s new,” Kelly said. Now she was getting defensive. “That’s the only reason they like her. Because she’s different.”