by Meg Cabot
Before I'd finished, Neil was at my side, steering me toward the closest bar stool and making me sit on it. He said, "Hey. Hey, it's all right now," all nervously. It was clear he didn't have a whole lot of experience dealing with hysterical girls. He kept patting my shoulder and offering me things, like free lemonade and tiramisu.
"Ill... I'll take some lemonade," I said, finally, worn down from my recital of woes.
"Sure," Neil said. "Sure thing. Jorge, get her some lemonade, will you?"
The bartender hurried to pour me some lemonade from a pitcher he kept in a little fridge behind the bar. He put it in front of me, eyeing me warily, like I was some lunatic who might start spouting off New Age poetry at any minute. It was heartening to know this was the first impression I was giving people. Not.
I drank some of the lemonade. It was cool and tart. I put the glass down after a few gulps and said to Neil, who was looking at me with concern.
"Thanks. I feel better.. You're nice."
Neil looked embarrassed. "Um. Thanks. Look, I have a cell phone. Do you want to borrow it? You can call someone. Maybe you could call, you know, Jake."
Jake? Oh, God no. My eyes wide, I shook my head. "No," I said. "Not Jake. He ... he wouldn't understand."
Neil was beginning to look panicky. You could tell all he wanted was to get rid of me. And who could blame him, really? "Oh, okay. Your mom, then? How about your mom?"
I shook my head some more. "No, no. I don't... I mean, I don't want them to know how stupid I was."
Jorge, the bartender, went, "You know, we're pretty much done here, Neil. You can go, if you want___"
And take her with you. He didn't say the words, but his tone implied them. It was clear that Jorge wanted the crazy girl with the sore feet out of his bar, and pronto ... like before the first customers of the evening started to trickle in.
Neil looked pained. It was very gratifying to know that my appearance was so heinous at that moment, that college boys hesitated to allow me into their vehicles. Really. I can't tell you how much I appreciated that fact. Bad enough I was jailbait, but I also appeared to be jailbait with bloody feet and a wicked case of the frizzies, thanks to the salt air.
Neil, who'd had his cell phone out, closed it and stuck it back in the pocket of his Dockers.
"Um," he said. "I guess, you know. I could drive you home myself. If you want."
The delivery left a little to be desired, but I don't think I could have been more grateful, even if he'd said he knew a place that sold Prada wholesale.
"That would be so, so great," I gushed.
I guess my gushing was a little too effusive, since Neil's face turned as pink as my blisters, and he hurried away. Mumbling about how he just had to finish up a few things. I didn't care. Home! I was getting a ride home! No embarrassing phone calls, no more walking . . . Oh, thank God, no more walking. I don't think I could have stood on my feet for another minute. Just looking down at them made me feel a little light-headed. They were almost black with dirt, and let's just say the Band-Aids had taken a licking, and sure weren't doing much sticking. Lovely oozing sores gleamed redly at me. I didn't even want to look at what was going on with the soles of my feet. All I knew was that I couldn't feel them anymore. They were completely numb.
"That," observed a voice at my elbow, "is one wicked pedicure. You should ask for your money back."
10
I didn't even have to turn my head to see who it was.
"Hi, Craig," I said out of the corner of my mouth. Neil and Jorge were too deeply absorbed in the beverage order they were just finishing up discussing to pay attention to me, anyway.
"So." Craig settled onto the bar stool next to mine. "This is how you mediators work? Get your feet all wrecked, then mooch rides off the siblings of the deceased?"
"Not usually," I murmured discreetly.
"Oh." Craig fiddled with a book of matches from the bar. "Because I was going to say. You know. Great technique. Really making some stellar progress on my case there, aren't you?"
I sighed. Really, after everything I'd been through, I did not need some dead guy making wisecracks.
But I guess I deserved them.
"How are you doing?" I asked, trying to keep my tone light. "You know, with the whole being dead thing?"
"Oh, jim-dandy," Craig said. "Loving every minute of it."
"You'll get used to it," I said, thinking of Jesse.
"Oh, I'm sure I will," Craig said. He was looking at Neil.
I should, of course, have gotten a clue then. But I didn't. I was too caught up in my own problems . . . not to mention my feet.
Then Neil handed his clipboard to Jorge, shook his hand, and turned to me.
"Are you ready, Susan?" he asked.
I didn't bother to correct him about my name. I just nodded and slid down from the bar stool. I had to look to make sure my feet had hit the floor, because I couldn't feel it. The floor, I mean. The skin on the bottoms of my feet had gone completely numb.
"You really did a number on yourself," was Craig's comment.
But he, unlike his brother, very helpfully slipped an arm around my waist and guided me toward the door, where Neil was waiting, his car keys in his hand.
I must have looked particularly peculiar as I approached - I was definitely leaning some of my weight into Craig, which must have given me an odd appearance, since of course Neil couldn't see Craig - because Neil said, "Um, Susan, are you sure you want to go straight home? I think maybe you might want to pay a little visit to the emergency room. ..."
"No, no," I said lightly. "I'm fine."
"Right," Craig snickered in my ear.
Still, with his help, I made it out to Neil's car all right. Like Paul, Neil had a convertible BMW. Unlike Paul's, Neil's appeared to be secondhand.
"Hey!" Craig cried, when he saw the vehicle. "That's my car!"
This was, I felt, the natural reaction of a guy who'd found his car in the possession of another. Jake would undoubtedly have said the same thing. Over and over again.
Craig got over his indignation long enough to steer me into the front seat. I was about to give him a grateful smile when he then hopped into the backseat. Even then, of course, I didn't figure it out. I just assumed Craig wanted to come along for the ride. Why not? It wasn't like he had anything better to do, so far as I knew.
Neil started the engine, and Kylie Minogue began to wail from his CD player.
"I can't believe he's listening to this garbage," Craig said disgustedly from the backseat, "in my car."
"I like her," I said, a little defensively.
Neil looked at me. "You say something?"
Realizing what I'd done, I said no quickly.
"Oh."
Without another word - he wasn't apparently much of a conversationalist - Neil pulled his car out from the Sea Mist Cafe parking lot and headed down Scenic Drive for downtown Carmel, which we'd have to cut through to make it back to my house. Cutting through downtown Carmel was never a picnic, because it was usually crammed with tourists and the tourists never knew where they were going, because none of the streets had names ... or stoplights.
But it can be especially dangerous navigating downtown Carmel-by-the-Sea when there happens to be a homicidal ghost in your backseat.
I didn't realize this right away, of course. I was attempting to do some, you know, mediation. I figured, as long as I had the two brothers together, I might as well try to patch things up between them. I had no idea at the time just how badly their relationship had disintegrated, of course.
"So, Neil," I said conversationally, as we went down Scenic Drive at a pretty good clip. The ocean breeze tugged at my hair and felt deliciously cool after the way the sun had beat down on me earlier. "I heard about your brother. I'm really sorry."
Neil didn't take his gaze off the road. But I saw his fingers tighten on the steering wheel.
"Thanks," was all he said in a quiet voice.
It is generally considered ru
de to pry into the personal tragedies of others - particularly when the victims of said tragedy were not the ones who introduced the subject - but for a mediator, being rude is all part of the job. I said, "It must have been really awful, out there on that boat."
"Catamaran," both Craig and Neil corrected me at the same time - Craig derisively, Neil gently.
"I mean catamaran," I said. "How long did you hang on for, anyway? Like eight hours or something?"
"Seven," Neil said softly.
"Seven hours," I said. "That's a long time. The water must have been really cold."
"It was," Neil said. He was clearly a man of few words. I did not allow that to dissuade me from my mission, however.
"And I understand," I said, "that your brother was, what, a champion swimmer or something?"
"Damned straight," Craig said from the backseat. "Made all-state - "
I held up a hand to silence him. It was not Craig I wanted to hear from just then.
"Champion swimmer," Neil said, his voice not much louder than the purr of the BMW's engine. "Champion sailor. You name it, Craig was better at it than anybody."
"See?" Craig leaned forward. "See? He's the one that should be dead. Not me. He even admits it!"
"Shhh," I said to Craig. To Neil I said, "That must have really surprised people, then. I mean, when you survived the accident, and Craig didn't."
"Disappointed them, is more like it," Neil muttered. Still, I heard him.
So did Craig.
He settled back against the seat, looking triumphant. "I told you so."
"I'm sure your parents are sad about losing Craig," I said, ignoring the ghost in the backseat. "And you're going to have to give them some time. But they're happy not to have lost you, Neil. You know they are."
"They aren't," Neil said as matter-of-factly as if he'd been saying the sky is blue. "They liked Craig better. Everybody did. I know what they're thinking. What everybody is thinking. That it should have been me. I should have been the one to die. Not Craig."
Craig leaned forward again. "See?" he said. "Even Neil admits it. He should be the one back here, not me."
But I was now more concerned for the living brother than I was for the dead one. "Neil, you can't mean that."
"Why not?" Neil shrugged. "It's the truth."
"It's not true," I said. "There's a reason you lived and Craig didn't."
"Yeah," Craig said sarcastically. "Somebody messed up. Big time."
"No," I said, shaking my head. "That's not it. Craig hit his head. Plain and simple. It was an accident, Neil. An accident that wasn't your fault."
Neil looked, for a moment, like someone upon whom the sun had begun to shine after months of rain . . . like he hardly dared believe it.
"Do you really think so?" he asked eagerly.
"Absolutely," I said. "That's all there is to it."
But while this news appeared to have made Neil's day - possibly his week - it caused Craig to scowl.
"What is this?" he wanted to know. "He should have died! Not me!"
"Apparently not," I said quietly enough so that only Craig could hear me.
This, however, did not prove to be the right answer. Not because it wasn't true - because it was - but because Craig did not like it. Craig did not like it one little bit.
"If I have to be dead," Craig declared, "then so should he."
And with that, he lunged forward and seized the steering wheel.
Neil was driving down a particularly quaint street, shady with trees and crowded with tourists. Art galleries and quilt shops - the kind my mother squealed over delightedly, and that I avoided like the plague - lined it. We were crawling along at a snails pace because there was an RV in front of us and a tourist bus in front of that.
But when Craig grabbed the wheel, the back of the RV suddenly loomed large in our field of vision. That's because Craig also managed to bring a leg over the backseat, and rammed his foot over Neil's on the accelerator, something Neil couldn't feel. All he knew was he hadn't pressed the gas pedal. If Neil hadn't reacted by slamming on the brake with his other foot - and I hadn't dived into the fray, yanking the wheel hard back the other way - we would have zoomed into the rear of that RV - or worse, into a thick knot of tourists on the sidewalk - killing ourselves, not to mention taking a few innocent bystanders out with us.
"What is wrong with you?" I shrieked at Craig.
But it was Neil who responded shakily, "It wasn't me, I swear. The wheel just seemed to turn without my doing anything. . . ."
But I wasn't listening. I was screaming at Craig, who seemed as stunned as Neil was by what had transpired. He kept looking down at his hands, like they had acted of their own volition or something.
"Don't you ever," I yelled at him, "do that again. Not ever! Do you understand?"
"I'm sorry," Neil cried. "But it wasn't my fault, I swear it!"
Craig, with a pitiful little moan, suddenly gave a shimmer and disappeared. Just like that. He dematerialized, leaving Neil and me to deal with his mess.
Which fortunately wasn't that bad. I mean, a lot of people were looking at us, because we had stopped in the middle of the street and done a lot of screaming and yelling. But neither of us was hurt - nor, mercifully, was anyone else. We hadn't so much as tapped the back of the RV. A second later, it started rolling forward, and we followed it, our hearts in our throats.
"I better take this car in for an overhaul," Neil said, clutching the steering wheel with white-knuckled fingers. "Maybe the oil needs to be changed or something."
"Or something," I said. My heart was drumming in my ears. "That'd be a good idea. Maybe you should start taking the bus for a little while." Or until I figure out what to do about your brother, I added mentally.
"Yeah," Neil said faintly. "The bus might not be so bad."
I don't know about Neil, but I was still somewhat shaken by the time he pulled up in front of my house. I had had quite a day. It wasn't often I got French-kissed and nearly murdered in the course of only a few hours.
Still, in spite of my own unease, I wanted to say something to Neil, something that would encourage him not to be so depressed over his being the sibling who'd lived . .. and also set him on his guard against his brother, who had seemed angrier than ever when he'd disappeared minutes earlier.
But all I could come up with, when it came down to it, was a very lame, "Well. Thanks for the ride."
Really. That was it. Thanks for the ride. No wonder I was winning all those mediation awards. Not.
Neil didn't look as if he was paying much attention anyway. He seemed to just want to get rid of me. And why not? I mean, what college boy wants to be saddled with a crazy-looking high school girl with giant blisters on her feet? None that I know of.
The minute I'd stepped from the car, he tore down our deeply shaded, pine-tree-lined driveway, apparently unconcerned about the accident he'd nearly suffered just moments before.
Or maybe he was so glad to be rid of me, he didn't care what happened to him or his car.
All I know is, he was gone, leaving me with the long, long walk up to my front door.
I don't know how I made it. I really don't. But going slowly - as slowly as a very, very old woman - I made it up the stairs to the porch, then through the front door.
"I'm home," I yelled, in case there was anybody around who'd care. Only Max came running to greet me, sniffing me all over in hopes I had food hidden in my pockets. Since I didn't, he soon went away, leaving me to make my way up the stairs to my room.
I did it, step by agonizing step. It took me, I don't know, like ten minutes or something. Normally I bound up and down two steps at a time. Not today.
I was, I knew, going to have a lot of explaining to do when I finally ran into someone besides Max. But the person I least wanted to have to face was going to be, I felt certain, the first person I'd see: Jesse. Jesse would be, more likely than not, in my room when I hobbled through the door. Jesse, who was not going to understand what
I was doing at Paul Slater's house in the first place. Jesse, from whom I thought it was going to be difficult to hide the fact that I had just been playing tonsil hockey with another guy.
And that I'd sort of liked it.
It was, I told myself as I stood with my hand on the doorknob, Jesse's fault. That I'd gone off and made out with another guy. Because if Jesse had shown me the slightest shred of affection these past few weeks, I would never even have considered kissing Paul Slater back. Not in a million years.
Yeah, that was it. It was all Jesse's fault.
Not that I was ever going to tell him that, of course. In fact, if I could possibly avoid it, I was going to keep from bringing up Paul's name altogether. I needed to think up some story - any story, other than the truth - to explain my poor, abused feet. . . . . . not to mention my bruised lips.
But to my relief, when I threw open the door to my room, Jesse wasn't there. Spike was, sitting on the windowsill, washing himself. But not his master. Not this time.
Alleluia.
I threw down my book bag and shoes and headed to my bathroom. I had one thing, and one thing only on my mind, and that was to wash my feet. Maybe all they needed was a thorough cleaning. Maybe, if I soaked them long enough in warm, soapy water, some of the feeling in them would come back. . . .
I opened the taps full blast, put the stopper in place, and sitting on the edge of the tub, swung my legs painfully over it and into the water.
It was all right for a second or two. In fact, it was a soothing relief.
Then the water hit my blisters, and I nearly keeled over with the pain. Never again, I vowed, clutching the side of the tub in an effort not to pass out. No more designer shoes. From now on, it was strictly Aerosoles for me. I don't care how ugly they might look. Not even looking good was worth this.
The pain ebbed enough for me to make a tentative foray with a bar of Cetaphil and a sponge. It wasn't until I had gently scrubbed for nearly five minutes before I got through the final layer of dirt and saw why the bottoms of my feet were so desensitized. Because they were covered - literally covered - with giant red burn blisters, some of them blood filled and all of them getting bigger by the minute. I realized, with horror, that it was going to be days - maybe even a week - before the swelling was going to go down enough for me to walk normally again, let alone put on shoes.
