Until Mr. Walden, who’d settled behind his desk and was trying to read his latest issue of Surf Magazine, roared, “Do you people want to stay after school to finish up those tests? Because I’ll be happy to keep you here; I’ve got nothing better to do. Now, shut up, all of you, and get to work.”
That had a significant impact on the amount of chitchat going on around the room.
Miserably, I filled in the little bubbles. My misery didn’t just stem, of course, from the fact that I was operating on zero sleep. While that didn’t exactly help, there was the more pressing concern than career aptitude tests. Yeah, they don’t much apply to me. My fate is already laid out for me… has been laid out for me since birth. I’m destined to be one thing when I grow up and one thing only. And any other career I choose is just going to get in the way of my true calling, which is, of course, helping the undead to their final destinations.
I glanced over at Paul. He was bent over his Scantron sheet, filling in the answer bubbles with a little smile on his face. I wondered what he was putting down as fields of interest. I hadn’t noticed any entries for extortion. Or felony theft.
Why, I wondered, was he even bothering? It wasn’t like it was going to do us any good. We were always going to be mediators first, whatever other careers we might choose. Look at Father Dominic. Oh sure, he had managed to keep his mediator status a secret… a secret even from the church, since, as Father D. put it, his boss is God, and God invented mediators.
Of course, Father D. isn’t just a priest. He’d also been a teacher for years and years, winning some awards, even, until he’d been promoted to principal.
But it’s different for Father Dom. He really believes that his ability to see and speak to the dead is gift from God. He doesn’t see it for what it really is: a curse.
Except… except, of course, that without it, I never would have met Jesse.
Jesse. The little blank bubbles in front of me grew decidedly blurry as my eyes filled up with tears.
Oh, great. Now I was crying. At school.
But how could I help it? Here I was, my future laid out in front of me… graduation, college, career. Well, you know, pseudo-career, since we all know what my real career was going to be.
But what about Jesse? What future did he have?
“What’s wrong with you?” CeeCee hissed.
I reached up and dabbed at my eyes with the sleeve of my Miu Miu shirt. “Nothing,” I whispered back. “Allergies.”
CeeCee looked skeptical, but turned back to her test booklet.
I’d asked him once what he’d wanted to be. Jesse, I mean. You know, before he’d died. I’d meant what he’d wanted to be as a far as a career went, but he hadn’t understood. When I’d finally explained, he’d smiled but in a sad way.
“Things were different when I was alive, Susannah,” he’d said. “I was my father’s only son. It was expected that I would inherit our family’s ranch and work it to support my mother and sisters after my father died.”
He didn’t add that part of the plan had also included his marrying the girl whose dad owned the farm next door, so that their land would be united into one supersized ranchero. Nor did he mention the fact that she was the one who’d had him killed, because she’d liked another fella better, a fella her dad hadn’t exactly approved of. Because I already knew all of that.
Things were tough, I guess, even way back in the 1850s.
“Oh,” was what I’d said in response. Jesse hadn’t spoken with any detectable rancor, but it seemed like a raw deal to me. I mean, what if he hadn’t wanted to be a rancher? “Well, what would you have liked to be? You know, if you’d had a choice?”
Jesse had looked thoughtful. “I don’t know. It was different then, Susannah. I was different. I did think… sometimes… that I might have liked to have been a doctor.”
A doctor. It made perfect sense—at least to me. All those times I’d staggered home with various parts of me throbbing in pain—whether from poison oak or blisters on my feet—Jesse had been there for me, his touch soft as cashmere. He’d have made a great doctor, actually.
“Why didn’t you, then?” I’d wanted to know. “Become a doctor? Just because of your dad?”
“Yes, mostly that,” he’d said. “I’d never even dared mention it to anyone. I could barely be spared from the ranch for a few days, let alone the years medical school would have taken. But I would have liked that, I think. Medical school. Though back when I was alive,” he’d added, “people didn’t know nearly as much about medicine as they do today. It would be more exciting to work in the sciences now, I think.”
And he would know. He’d had 150 years to hang around and watch as inventions—electricity, automobiles, planes, computers… not to mention penicillin and vaccines for diseases that in the past had routinely killed millions— changed the world into something unrecognizable from the one in which he’d grown up.
But rather than clinging stubbornly to the past, as some would have, Jesse had followed along excitedly, reading whatever he could get his hands on, from paperback novels to encyclopedias. He said he had a lot to catch up on. His favorite books seem to be the nonfiction tomes he borrows from Father Dom, everything from philosophy to explorations on emerging viruses—the kind of books I’d have given to my dad on Father’s Day, if my dad wasn’t, you know, dead. My stepdad, on the other hand, is more the cookbook type. But you get my drift. To Jesse, stuff that seems dry and uninteresting to me is vitally exciting. Maybe because he’d seen it all unfolding before his eyes.
Sighing, I looked down at the hundreds of career options in front of me. Jesse was dead, but even he knew what he’d wanted to be… would have been, if he hadn’t died. Or not been, considering what he’d said about his father’s expectations for him.
And here I was, with every advantage in the world, and all I could think that I wanted to be when I grew up was…
Well, with Jesse.
“Twenty more minutes.” Mr. Walden’s voice boomed out across the classroom, startling me from my thoughts. I found that my gaze had become fixed on the sea less than a mile from the Mission and viewable through most of the school’s classroom windows… to the detriment of students like me. I hadn’t grown up, like most of my classmates, around the sea. It was a constant source of wonder and interest to me.
Kind of, I realized, like Jesse’s fascination with modern science.
Only unlike Jesse, I actually had a chance to do something with my interest.
“Ten more minutes,” Mr.Walden announced, startling me again.
Ten more minutes. I looked down at my answer sheet, which was half empty. At the same time, I noticed CeeCee shooting me an anxious look from her desk beside mine. She nodded to the sheet. Get to work, her violet eyes urged me.
I picked up my pencil and began to haphazardly fill in bubbles. I didn’t care what answers I chose. Because, truthfully, I didn’t care about my future. Without Jesse, I had no future. Of course, with him, I had no future, either. What was he going to do, anyway? Follow me to college? To my first job? My first apartment?
Yeah. That’ll happen.
Paul was right. I’m so stupid. Stupid to have fallen in love with a ghost. Stupid to think we had any kind of future together. Stupid.
“Time’s up.” Mr. Walden pulled his feet from the top of his desk. “Lay your pencils down, please. Then pass your answer sheets to the front.”
I wasn’t all that surprised when Paul came up to me after Mr. Walden had dismissed us for lunch. “That was pointless,” he said in a low voice, as we made our way toward our lockers. “I mean, we have our career paths cut out for us, don’t we?”
“Well, you can’t really make a living doing what we do,” I said, then remembered, too late, that Paul certainly seemed to have managed to.
“An honest living,” I amended.
But instead of feeling ashamed of himself, as I’d meant him to, Paul just grinned.
“That’s why I’ve decided o
n a career in the legal profession,” he said. “Your dad was a lawyer, right?”
I nodded. I don’t like talking about my dad with Paul. Because my dad was everything that was good. And Paul is everything that… isn’t.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Paul went on. “Nothing’s black and white with the law. It’s all sort of gray. So long as you can find a precedent.”
I didn’t say anything. I could easily see Paul as a lawyer. Not a lawyer like my dad had been, a public defender, but the kind of lawyer who’d defend rich celebrities, people who thought they were above the law… and because they had limitless funds to pay for their defense, they were above it, in a way.
“You, on the other hand,” Paul said. “I think you’re destined for a career in the social services. You’re a natural-born do-gooder.”
“Yeah,” I said, as I stopped beside my locker. “Maybe I’ll follow in Father D.’s footsteps, and become a nun.”
“Now that,” Paul said, leaning against the locker next to mine, “would just be a waste. I was thinking more along the lines of a social worker. Or a therapist. You’re very good, you know, at taking on other people’s problems.”
Wasn’t that the truth? It was the reason I was so bleary-eyed and tired today. Because after I’d left Jesse the night before, I’d driven home and gone up to bed… only not to sleep. Instead, I’d lain awake, blinking at the ceiling and mulling over what Jesse had told me. Not about Paul, but about what Paul had made me read aloud earlier that day: The shifter’s abilities didn’t merely include communication with the dead and teleportation between their world and our own, but the ability to travel at will throughout the fourth dimension as well.
The fourth dimension. Time.
The very word caused the hairs on my arms to stand up, even though it was another typically beautiful autumn day in Carmel and not cold at all. Could it really be true? Was such a thing even possible? Could mediators—or shifters, as Paul and his grandfather insisted on calling us—travel through time as well as between the realms of the living and the dead?
And if—a big if—it were true, what on earth did it mean?
More important, why had Paul been so intent on making sure I knew about it?
“You look strung out,” Paul observed as I stowed my books away and reached for the paper bag containing the lunch my stepfather had made me: tandoori chicken salad. “What’s the matter? Trouble sleeping?”
“You should know,” I said, glaring at him.
“What’d I do?” he asked, sounding genuinely surprised.
I don’t know if it was my exhaustion, or the fact that that the career aptitude test had got me thinking about my future… my future and Jesse’s. Suddenly, I was just very tired of Paul and his games. And I decided to call him on the latest one.
“The fourth dimension,” I reminded him. “Time travel?”
He just grinned, however. “Oh, good, you figured it out. Took you long enough.”
“You really think shifters are capable of time travel?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” Paul said. “I know so.”
Again, I felt a chill when I shouldn’t have. We were standing in the shade of the breezeway, it was true, but just a few feet away in the Mission courtyard, the sun was blazing down. Hummingbirds flitted from hibiscus blossom to hibiscus blossom. Tourists snapped away with their digital cameras.
So what was up with the goose bumps?
“Why?” I demanded, my throat suddenly dry. “Because you’ve done it?”
“Not yet,” he said, casually. “But I will. Soon.”
“Yeah,” I said, fear making me sarcastic. “Well, maybe you could travel back to the night you stole Mrs. Gutierrez’s money and not do it this time.”
“God, would you let it go already?” He shook his head. “It was two thousand lousy bucks. You act like it was two million.”
“Hey, Paul.” Kelly Prescott broke away from her clique—the Dolce and Gabbana Nazis as CeeCee had taken to calling them—and sauntered over, fluttering her heavily mascaraed eyelashes. “You coming to lunch?”
“In a minute,” Paul said to her… not very nicely, considering she was his date for next weekend’s dance. Kelly, though stung, nevertheless pulled herself together enough to send me a withering glance before heading for the yard where we dined daily, al fresco.
“So I don’t get it.” I stared at him. “What if we can travel through time? Big deal. It’s not like we can change anything once we get there.”
“Why?” Paul’s blue eyes were curious. “Because Doc from Back to the Future said so?”
“Because you can’t… you can’t mess up the natural order of things,” I said.
“Why not? Isn’t that what you do every day when you mediate? Aren’t you interfering with the natural order of things by sending spirits off to their just reward?”
“That’s different,” I said.
“How so?”
“Because those people are already dead! They can’t do anything that might change the course of history.”
“Like Mrs. Gutierrez and her two thousand dollars?” Paul’s glance was shrewd. “You think if you’d given it to her son, it wouldn’t have changed the course of history? Even in some small way?”
“But that’s different than entering another dimension to change something that already happened. That’s just… wrong.”
“Is it, Suze?” A corner of Paul’s mouth lifted. “I don’t think so. And you know what? I think this time, your boy Jesse is going to agree. With me.”
And suddenly, it seemed to get even colder than ever under that breezeway.
Chapter
six
Please be home, please be home, please be home, I prayed as I waited for someone to answer the doorbell. Please please please please…
I don’t know if someone heard my prayer, or if it was just that invalid archeologists don’t get out that much. In any case, Dr. Slaski’s attendant answered the front door, recognition dawning when he saw that it was me who’d been ringing the bell with so much urgency.
“Oh hi, Susan,” he said, getting the name wrong, but the face that went with it right. Sort of. “You looking for Paul? Because far as I know, he’s still in school—”
“I know he’s still at school,” I said, stepping hurriedly inside the Slaters’ foyer, before the attendant could close the door. “I’m not here to see him. I stopped by to see his grandfather, if that’s all right.”
“His grandfather?” The attendant looked surprised. And why shouldn’t he? For all he knew, his patient hadn’t had a lucid conversation with anyone in years.
Except that he had. And it had only been a few months ago. With me.
“You know, Susan, Paul’s grandpa isn’t… he’s not real well,” the assistant said slowly. “We don’t like to talk about it in front of him, but his last round of tests… Well, they didn’t look so good. In fact, the doctors aren’t giving him all that much longer to live….”
“I just need to ask him a question,” I said. “Just one little question. It’ll only take a second.”
“But…” The attendant, a young guy who, judging from his sun-bleached dreads, probably used whatever spare time he got to hit the waves, scratched his chin. “I mean, he can’t… he doesn’t really talk all that much anymore. The Alzheimer’s, you know…”
“Can I just try?” I asked, not caring that I sounded like a whacko. I was that desperate. Desperate for answers that I knew only one person on earth could give me. And that person was just right upstairs. “Please? I mean, it couldn’t hurt, could it?”
“No,” the attendant said slowly. “No, I guess it couldn’t hurt.”
“Great,” I said, slipping past him and starting up the stairs two at a time. “I’ll just be a couple of minutes. You won’t mind leaving us alone, will you? I’ll call you if he looks like he might need you.”
The attendant, closing the front door in a distracted sort of way, went, “Ok
ay. I guess. But… shouldn’t you be in school?”
“It’s lunchtime,” I informed him cheerfully, as I made my way up the stairs and then down the hall toward Dr. Slaski’s room.
I wasn’t lying, either. It was lunchtime. The fact that we weren’t technically supposed to leave school grounds at lunch? Well, I didn’t feel that was important to mention. I was less worried about facing the wrath of Sister Ernestine when she found out I was skipping school than I was about explaining to my stepbrother Brad why I’d so desperately needed the keys to the Land Rover. Just because Brad had happened to get his driver’s license about five seconds before I’d gotten mine (well, okay, a few weeks before I’d gotten mine, actually), he seems to feel that the ancient Land Rover, which is supposed to be the “kids’ car,” belongs solely to him, and that only he’s allowed to ferry the two of us, plus his little brother, David, to and from school every day.
I’d had to resort to using the words “feminine hygiene products” and “glove compartment” just to get him to surrender the keys. I had no idea what he was going to do when I didn’t return before the end of lunch and he discovered the car was gone. Narc on me, doubtlessly. It seemed to be his one joy in life.
Sadly, I never seem able to return the favor, thanks to Brad generally having some kind of goods on me.
In any case, I wasn’t going to squander what precious little time I had wondering what Brad was going to say about my taking the car. Instead, I hurried into Paul’s grandfather’s bedroom.
As usual, the Game Show Network was on. The attendant had parked Dr. Slaski’s wheelchair in front of the plasma screen television. Dr. Slaski himself, however, appeared to be paying no attention whatsoever to Bob Barker. Instead, he was staring fixedly at a spot in the center of the highly polished tile floor.
I wasn’t fooled by this, however.
“Dr. Slaski?” I picked up the remote and turned the TV volume down, then hurried to the doctor’s side. “Dr. Slaski, it’s me, Suze. Paul’s friend, Suze? I need to talk to you for a minute.”