Reunion (7 page)

Then with my arms, which were still free, I gave a mighty stroke, and broke back through the
water's surface, gulping in a huge lungful of air—and checking to make sure Michael had gotten well and truly away, which he had; the lifeguard was towing him back to shore—before I dove down again, in search of my attackers.

I found them easily enough. They were still in their prom wear, and the girls' dresses were floating all around them like seaweed. I grabbed a handful of one, tugged it toward me, and saw, in the murky water, the very startled face of Felicia Bruce. Before she had a chance to react, I plunged a thumb into her eye. She screamed, but since we were underwater, I didn't hear a thing. I just saw a trail of bubbles racing for the water's surface.

Then someone grabbed me from behind. I reacted by thrusting my head back, as hard as I could, and was delighted to feel my skull make very hard contact with my attacker's forehead. The hands that had been holding me instantly let go, and I spun around, and saw Mark Pulsford swimming hastily away. Some football player he'd been, if he couldn't take a simple head butt.

I felt the urgent need to breathe, so I followed the last of the bubbles from Felicia's scream, and resurfaced just as the ghosts did.

We all bobbed there on the surface: me, Josh,
Felicia, Mark, and a very white-faced Carrie.

“Omigod,” Carrie said. Her teeth, unlike mine, weren't chattering. “It's that girl. That girl from Jimmy's. I told you she can see us.”

Josh, whose broken nose had sprung, cartoon-like, back into place, was nevertheless wary of me. Even if you happen to be dead, getting your nose broken hurts a lot.

“Hey,” he said to me as I treaded water. “This isn't your fight, okay? Stay out of it.”

I tried to say, “Oh, yeah? Well, listen up. I'm the mediator, and you guys have a choice. You can go on to your next life with your teeth in or your teeth out. Which is it going to be?”

Only my own teeth were chattering so hard, all that came out was a bunch of weird noises that sounded like, Oah? Esup. Imameator an—

You get the picture.

Since Father Dominic's technique—reasoning—didn't appear to be working in this particular instance, I abandoned it. Instead, I reached out and grabbed the rope of seaweed they'd tried to strangle Michael with and flung it around the necks of the two girls, who were treading water close to each other, and to me. They looked extremely surprised to find themselves lassoed like a couple of seacows.

And I can't really tell you what I was thinking, but it's probably safe to say my plan—though somewhat haphazardly formed—involved towing them both back to shore where I intended to beat the crap out of them.

While the girls clawed at their necks and attempted to escape, the boys came at me. I didn't care. I was furious all of a sudden. They had ruined my nice time at the beach and tried to drown my date. Granted I wasn't particularly fond of Michael, but I certainly didn't want to see him drowned before my eyes—particularly not now that I knew what a hottie he was under his sweater vest.

Holding on to the girls with one hand, I thrust out the other and managed to grab Josh by—what else?—the short hairs on the back of his neck.

Though this proved highly effective—in that he promptly began thrashing in pain—I'd neglected two things. One was Mark, who continued to swim free. And the other was the ocean, which was still churning waves at me. Any sensible person would have been looking out for these things, but I, in my anger, was not.

Which was why a second later, I was promptly sucked under.

Let me tell you, there are probably pleasanter ways to die than choking on a lungful of saltwater. It burns, you know? I mean, it is, after all,
salt.

And I coughed down a lot of it, thanks first to the wave, which bowled me under. And then I swallowed a lot more when Mark grabbed hold of my ankle, and kept me under.

One thing I have to admit about the ocean: It's very quiet down there. I mean, really. No more shrieking gulls, crashing of the waves, shouts from the surfers. No, under the sea, it's just you and the water and the ghosts who are trying to kill you.

Because, of course, I'd held onto the ends of the seaweed I was using to tow the girls. And I hadn't let go of Josh's hair, either.

I kind of liked it, I discovered, under there. It wasn't so bad, really. Except for the cold, and the salt, and the horrible realization that at any moment, a twenty-foot killer shark could swoop under me and bite my leg off, it was, well, almost pleasant.

I suppose I lost consciousness for a few seconds. I mean, I'd have had to, to have held onto those stupid ghosts so tightly, and think being held under tons and tons of saltwater was pleasant.

The next thing I knew, something was tugging
at me, and it wasn't one of the ghosts. I was being tugged
toward
the surface, where I could see the last rays of the sun winking across the waves. I looked up, and was surprised to see a flash of orange and a lot of blond hair.
Why,
I thought, wonderingly,
it's that nice lifeguard. What's he doing here?

And then I became greatly concerned for him, because, of course, there were a lot of blood-thirsty ghosts around, and it was entirely possible one of them might try to hurt him.

But when I looked around, I found, to my astonishment, that all of them had disappeared. I was still holding the rope of seaweed, and my other hand was still clenched as if on someone's hair. But there was nothing there. Just seawater.

The chickens
, I thought to myself. The lousy chickens. Came up against the mediator and found out you couldn't take it, huh? Well, let that be a lesson to you! You don't mess with the mediator.

And then I did something that will probably live on in mediator infamy for the rest of time: I blacked out.

Okay, I don't know if any of you have ever lost consciousness before, so let me just say here real quickly: Don't do it.

Really. If you can avoid situations in which you might lose consciousness, please do so. Whatever you do, do not pass out. Trust me. It is not fun. It is not fun at all.

Unless, of course, you're guaranteed to wake up having mouth-to-mouth performed on you by a totally hot California lifeguard. Then I say go for it.

That was my experience when I opened my eyes that afternoon on Carmel Beach. One second I was sucking in lungfuls of saltwater, and
the next I was lip-locked with Brad Pitt. Or at least someone who looked very much like him.

Could this
, I asked myself, my heart turning over in my chest,
be my one true love
?

Then the lips left mine, and I saw that it wasn't my true love at all, but the lifeguard, his long blond hair falling wetly around his tanned face. The skin around his blue eyes crinkled with concern—the ravages of sun; he should have used Coppertone—as he asked, “Miss? Miss, can you hear me?”

“Suze,” I heard a familiar voice—Gina? but what was Gina doing in California?—say. “Her name is Suze.”

“Suze,” the lifeguard said, giving my cheeks a couple of rather rough little taps. “Blink if you can understand me.”

This
, I thought,
could not possibly be my one true love
.
He seems to think I'm a moron. Also, why does he keep hitting me?

“Oh my God.” CeeCee's voice was more high-pitched than usual. “Is she paralyzed?”

To prove to them I wasn't paralyzed, I started to sit up.

Then promptly realized this had been a bad decision.

I think I only threw up once. To say that I
spewed like Mount St. Helens is a gross exaggeration on Dopey's part. It is true that a great deal of seawater came up out of me after I tried to sit up. But fortunately, I avoided throwing it up on both myself and the lifeguard, sending most of it neatly into the sand beside me.

After I was done throwing up, I felt a great deal better.

“Suze!” Gina—who I suddenly remembered was in California visiting me—was on her knees beside me. “Are you all right? I was so worried! You just laid there so still….”

Sleepy was a lot less sympathetic.

“What the hell were you thinking?” he demanded. “Did Pamela Anderson die and leave an opening on the
Baywatch
rescue squad, or something?”

I looked up at all the anxious faces around me. Really, I'd had no idea so many people cared. But there were Gina and CeeCee and Adam and Dopey and Sleepy and some of their surfer friends and a few tourists, snapping pictures of the real live drowned girl, and Michael and…

Michael. My gaze snapped back toward him. Michael, who was in so much danger, and hardly seemed aware of it. Michael, who, as he stood dripping over me, seemed unconscious of the fact
that around his throat was a great red welt where the seaweed had bitten into his skin. It looked painfully inflamed.

“I'm all right,” I said, and started to stand up.

“No,” the lifeguard said. “There's an ambulance on its way. Stay where you are until the dudes from EMS have checked you out.”

“Um,” I said. “No, thank you.”

Then I stood up and moved toward my towel, which still rested where I'd left it beside Gina's, a little farther up the beach.

“Miss,” the lifeguard said, hurrying after me. “You were unconscious. You nearly drowned. You've got to be checked out by EMS. It's procedure.”

“You really,” CeeCee said as she jogged along beside me, “should let them check you out, Suze. Rick says he thinks both you and Michael might have been victims of a Portuguese man-of-war.”

I blinked at her. “Rick? Who's Rick?”

“The lifeguard,” CeeCee said with exasperation. Apparently, while I'd been unconscious, everyone had gotten to know one another. “That's why he had them hang out the yellow flag.”

I squinted and peered up at the flag that now fluttered from the top of the lifeguard's chair. Usually green, except when riptides or extreme
undertows were reported, it flew bright yellow, urging beachgoers to use caution in the water.

“I mean, look at Michael's neck,” CeeCee continued. I looked obligingly at Michael's neck.

“Rick says that when he got there, there was something around my neck,” Michael said. He couldn't, I noticed, seem to meet my gaze. “He thought it was a giant squid, at first. But that couldn't be, of course. There's never been one spotted this far north before. So he thought it must have been a man-of-war.”

I didn't say anything. I was quite certain that Rick really did believe that Michael had been the victim of a Portuguese man-of-war. The human mind will do whatever it must to trick itself into believing anything but the truth—that there might be something else out there, something unexplainable…something not quite normal.

Something
para
normal.

So the rope of seaweed that had been wrapped around Michael's throat became the arm of a giant squid, and then, later, the stinging tentacle of a jellyfish. It certainly couldn't have been what it had appeared to be: a piece of seaweed being used with deadly intent by a pair of invisible hands.

“And look at your ankles,” CeeCee said.

I looked down. Around both my ankles were bright red marks, like rope burns. Only they weren't rope burns. They were the places Felicia and Carrie had grabbed me, trying to drag me down to the ocean floor, and to certain death.

Those stupid girls needed manicures, and badly.

“You're lucky,” Adam said. “I've been stung by a man-of-war before, and it hurts like a—”

His voice trailed off as he noticed Gina listening intently. Gina, who had four brothers, had certainly heard every swear word in the book, but Adam was much too gentlemanly to utter any in front of her.

“A lot,” he finished up. “But you guys don't seem to have been hurt too badly. Well, except for that whole drowning thing.”

I reached for my towel, and did my best to wipe off the sand that seemed to be coating me all over. What had that lifeguard done, anyway? Dragged me through the stuff?

“Well,” I said. “I'm okay now. No harm done.”

Sleepy, who'd followed me over along with everybody else, went, exasperatedly, “It is not okay, Suze. Do what the lifeguard tells you. Don't make me have to call Mom and Dad.”

I looked at him in surprise. Not because I was
mad about his threatening to rat me out, but because he'd called my mother
Mom.
He'd never done it before. My stepbrothers' own mother had died years ago.

Well
, I thought to myself.
She
is
the best mother in the world
.

“Go ahead and call them,” I said. “I don't care.”

I saw Sleepy and the lifeguard exchange meaningful looks. I hurried to find my clothes, and started to wiggle into them, pulling them on right over my damp bikini. I wasn't trying to be difficult. Really, I wasn't. It's just that I totally could not afford a trip to the hospital just then, and the three-hour wait it would entail. In those three hours, I was fairly certain the RLS Angels were going launch another attack against Michael…and I could not in good conscience leave him to their devices.

“I am not,” Sleepy said, folding his arms across his chest, a motion that caused the rubber of the wetsuit he was still wearing to squeak audibly, “taking you home unless you let the EMS guys check you out first.”

I turned toward Michael, who looked extremely surprised when I asked him, politely, “Michael, would
you
mind taking me home?”

Now he seemed to have no problem meeting
my gaze. His eyes very wide behind his glasses—he'd evidently found them where I'd abandoned them on my towel—he stammered, “Of c-course!”

This caused the lifeguard to shake his head in disgust and stomp away. Everyone else just stood around looking at me as if I were demented. Gina was the only one who came up to me as I was gathering up my books and preparing to follow Michael to where his car was parked.

“You and I,” she whispered, “are going to be doing some talking when you get home.”

I regarded her with what I hoped was an innocent look. The last slanting rays of the sun had set her aura of copper-colored curls glowing like a flaming halo.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You
know
what I mean,” she said meaningfully.

And then she turned around and sauntered back over to where Sleepy stood, regarding me worriedly.

The truth was, I
did
know what she meant. She meant Michael. What was I doing, messing around with a boy like Michael, who was so obviously not my one true love?

But the thing was, I couldn't tell her. I couldn't tell her that Michael was being stalked by four
ghosts with murderous intent, and that it was my sacred duty as a mediator to protect him.

Although considering what happened later on that night, I probably should have.

“So,” I said, as soon as Michael got the car—his mother's minivan again; his car, he explained, was still in the shop—going. “We need to talk.”

Michael, now that he was back in his glasses and clothes, wasn't nearly the intimidatingly buff male specimen he'd been without them. Like Superman when he was in his Clark Kent attire, Michael had turned back into a stammering geek.

Only I couldn't help noticing, as he stammered, how nicely he filled out that sweater vest.

“Talk?” He gripped the wheel quite tightly as we sat in what, for Carmel, represented rush-hour traffic: a single tour bus and a Volkswagen filled with surfboards. “W-what about?”

“About what happened to you this weekend.”

Michael turned his head sharply to look at me, then just as quickly turned back to face the road. “W-what do you m-mean?” he asked.

“Come off it, Michael,” I said. I figured there was no point in being gentle with him. It was like a Band-Aid that needed to come off: either you did it with agonizing slowness, or you got it over with, hard and quick. “I know about the accident.”

The tour bus finally started moving. Michael put his foot on the gas.

“Well,” he said after a minute, a wry smile on his face, though he kept his eyes on the road, “you must not blame me too much, or you wouldn't have asked for a ride.”

“Blame you for what?” I asked him.

“Four people died in that accident.” Michael picked up a half-empty can of Coke from the cup holder between our seats. “And I'm still alive.” He took a quick swallow and put the can back. “You be the judge.”

I didn't like his tone. It wasn't that it was self-pitying. It was that it wasn't. He sounded hostile. And he wasn't stammering anymore, I noticed.

“Well,” I said carefully. Like I mentioned, Father Dominic is the one who's good at reasoning. I'm more like the muscle of our little mediator family. I knew I was venturing out into deep and troubled waters—if you'll excuse the pun.

“I read in the paper today that your breath test came back negative for alcohol,” I said cautiously.

“So?” Michael exploded, startling me a little. “What does that prove?”

I blinked at him. “Well, that you, at least, weren't drinking and driving.”

He seemed to relax a little. He said, “Oh.” Then he asked, tentatively, “Do you want…”

I looked at him. We were driving along the coastline, and the sun, sinking into the water, had cast everything into either brilliant orange or deep shadow. The light reflecting off the lenses of Michael's glasses made it impossible to read his expression.

“Do you want to see where it happened?” he asked all in a rush, as if he wanted to get the words out before he changed his mind.

“Um, sure,” I said. “If you feel like you want to show me.”

“I do.” He turned his head to look at me, but once again, I couldn't read his eyes behind his glasses. “If you don't mind. It's weird, but…I really feel like you might understand.”

Ha! I thought smugly to myself. Take that, Father Dom! All your nagging about how I always hit first and talk later. Well, look at me now!

“Why did you do it?” Michael asked abruptly, interrupting my self-congratulations.

I threw a startled glance in his direction. “Do what?” I genuinely hadn't the slightest idea what he was talking about.

“Go in,” he said in that same quiet voice, “after me.”

“Oh.” I cleared my throat. “That. Well, you see, Michael…”

“Never mind.”

When I glanced over at him, I saw he was smiling.

“Don't worry about it,” he said. “You don't have to tell me. I know.” His voice dropped about an octave. I looked over at him in alarm. “I know.”

And then he reached across the Coke can, nestled in the cup holder between our seats, and dropped his right hand over my left.

Oh my God! I felt my stomach lurch all over again, just like it had back down at the beach.

Because suddenly it was all very clear to me. Michael Meducci didn't just have a crush on me. Oh, no. It was much, much worse than that:

Michael Meducci thinks
I
have a crush on
him.

Michael Meducci thinks I
more
than just have a crush on him. Michael Meducci thinks I'm in love with him.

I had just one thing to say, and since I couldn't say it out loud, I said it in my head:

EEEEW!

I mean, he might have looked good in a bathing suit and all, but Michael Meducci still
wasn't exactly…

Well, Jesse.

And that
, I thought with a sigh,
is pretty much how my love life is going to go from now on, isn't it?