Haunted

by Meg Cabot

  “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 snail’s 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 mi
nd, 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.

  I was sitting there cursing Paul Slater—not to mention Jimmy Choo—for all I was worth when I heard Jesse utter a curse that, even though it was in Spanish, burned my ears.

  chapter

  eleven

  “Querida, what have you done to yourself?”

  Jesse stood at the side of the tub looking down at my feet. I had drained out all the dirty water and had run a new tubful to soak them in, so it was pretty easy to see through the clear water to the angry red blisters below it.

  “New shoes,” I said. It was all the explanation I was capable of thinking up at the moment. The fact that I had had to flee in my bare feet from a sexual predator did not seem like the kind of thing that would sit too well with Jesse. I mean, I didn’t exactly want to be the cause of any duels or anything.

  Yeah, yeah, I know: I wish.

  Still, he’d called me querida again. That had to mean something, right?

  Except that Jesse had probably called his sisters querida. Possibly even his mom.

  “You did that to yourself on purpose?” Jesse was staring down at my feet in utter disbelief.

  “Well,” I said. “Not exactly.” Only instead of telling him about Paul, and our clandestine kisses on his dark-gray bedspread, I said, talking about a hundred miles a minute, “It’s just that they were new shoes, and they gave me blisters and then…and then I missed my ride home, and I had to walk, and my shoes hurt so much I took them off, and I guess the pavement was hot from the sun, since I burned the bottoms of my feet—”

  Jesse looked grim. He sat on the edge of the tub beside me and said, “Let me see.”

  I didn’t want to show the guy with whom I have been madly in love since the very first day I met him my hideously disfigured feet. I especially didn’t want him to see them considering that he didn’t know that I had burned them in an effort to get away from a guy I shouldn’t have been with in the first place.

  On the other hand, you should be able to go over to boys’ houses without them jumping on you and kissing you and making you want to kiss them back. It was all sort of complicated, even to me, and I am a modern young woman with twenty-first-century sensibilities. God only knew what a rancher from the 1850s would make of it all.

  But I could see by Jesse’s expression that he was not going to leave me alone until I showed him my stupid feet. So I said, rolling my eyes, “You want to see them? Fine. Knock yourself out.”

  And I pulled my right foot from the water and showed him.

  I expected, at the very least, some revulsion. Chastisement for my stupidity, I felt quite sure, would soon follow—as if I didn’t feel stupid enough.

  But to my surprise, Jesse neither chastised me nor looked revolted. He merely examined my foot with what I would have to describe as almost clinical detachment. When he was through looking at my right foot, he said, “Let me see the other one.”

  So I put the right one back in the water and pulled out the left one.

  Again, no revulsion and no cries of “Suze, how could you be so stupid?” Which wasn’t actually that surprising, since Jesse never calls me Suze. Instead, he examined my left foot as carefully as he had the other one. When he was through, he leaned back and said, “Well, I have seen worse…but barely.”

  I was shocked by this.

  “You’ve seen feet that looked worse than this?” I cried. “Where?”

  “I had sisters, remember?” he said, his dark eyes alight with something—I wouldn’t have called it amusement, because of course my feet weren’t a laughing matter. Jesse wouldn’t dare laugh at them…would he? “Occasionally they got new shoes, with similar results.”

  “I’ll never walk again, will I?” I asked, looking woefully down at my ravaged feet.

  “You will,” Jesse said. “Just not for a day or two. Those burns look very painful. They’ll need butter.”

  “Butter?” I wrinkled my nose.

  “The best treatment for burns like those is butter,” Jesse said.

  “Uh,” I said. “Maybe back in 1850. Now we tend to rely on the healing power of Neosporin. There’s a tube of it in my medicine cabinet behind you.”

  So Jesse applied Neosporin to my wounds. When he was through bandaging my feet—which, may I say, looked very attractive with about sixty-eight Band-Aids all over them—I tried to stand up.

  But not for long. It didn’t hurt, exactly. It was just that it felt so strange, like I was walking on mushrooms….

  Mushrooms that were growing out of the soles of my feet.

  “That’s enough of that,” Jesse said. Next thing I knew, he’d scooped me up.

  Only instead of carrying me to my bed and setting me down on it all romantically, you know, like guys do to girls in the movies, he just dumped me onto it, so I bounced around and would have fallen off if I hadn’t grabbed the edge of the mattress.

  “Thanks,” I said, not quite able to keep all of the sarcasm out of my voice.

  Jesse didn’t seem to notice.

  “Not a problem,” he said. “Would you like a book or something? Your homework, maybe? Or I could read to you—”

  He lifted Critical Theory Since Plato.

  “No,” I said hastily. “Homework is fine. Just hand me my book bag, thanks.”

  I was deeply absorbed in my essay on the Civil War—or at least, that’s what I was pretending to be doing. What I was really doing, of course, was trying not to think about Jesse, who was over on the window seat reading. I was wondering what it would be like if he laid a couple of kisses like Paul’s on me. I mean, if you thought about it, he had me in a really interesting position, considering that I couldn’t walk. How many guys would have loved to have a girl basically trapped in her bedroom? A lot of them. Except, of course, for Jesse. Finally Andy called me down to dinner.

  I wasn’t going anywhere, however. Not because I wanted to stick around and watch Jesse read some more, but because I really couldn’t stand. Finally David came upstairs to see what was taking me so long. As soon as he saw the Band-Aids, he went running back downstairs for my mom.

  May I just say that my mother was a good deal less sympathetic than Jesse? She said I deserved every blister for being so asinine as to wear new shoes to school without breaking them in first. Then she fussed around my room, straightening it up (although since acquiring a roommate of the hot Latino male persuasion, I have become quite conscientious about keeping my room in a fairly neat condition. I mean, I don’t exactly want Jesse seeing any of my stray bras lying around. And really, if anything, he was the one who was always messing things up, leaving these enormous piles of books and open CD cases everywhere. And then of course there was Spike).

  “Honestly, Susie,” my mom said, wrinkling her nose at the sight of the big orange tabby sprawled out on my windo
w seat. “That cat…”

  Jesse, who had politely dematerialized when my mom showed up, in order to afford me some modicum of privacy, would have been greatly disturbed to hear his pet disparaged so.

  “How’s the patient?” Andy wanted to know, appearing in my doorway with a dinner tray containing grilled salmon with dill and crème fraîche, cold cucumber soup, and a freshly baked sourdough dinner roll. You know, unhappy as I’d been at the prospect of my mom remarrying and forcing me to move all the way across the country and acquire three stepbrothers, I had to admit, the food made it all worth it.

  Well, the food and Jesse. At least up until recently.

  “She’s definitely not going to be able to go to school tomorrow,” my mom said, shaking her head despairingly at the sight of my feet. “I mean, look at them, Andy. Do you think we need to take her to…I don’t know…PromptCare, or something?”

  Andy bent down and looked at my feet. “I don’t know that they could do anything more,” he said, admiring Jesse’s excellent bandaging job. “Looks like she’s taken pretty good care of it herself.”

  “You know what I probably do need,” I said. “Some magazines and a six-pack of Diet Coke and one of those really big Crunch bars.”

  “Don’t push it, young lady,” my mom said severely. “You are not going to loll around in bed all day tomorrow like some kind of injured ballerina. I am going to call Mr. Walden tonight and make sure he gets you all of your homework. And I have to say, Susie, I am very disappointed in you. You are too old for this kind of nonsense. You could have called me at the station, you know. I would have come out to get you.”

  Uh, yeah. And then she would have found out that I was walking home not from school, like I’d told everyone, but from the home of a guy who had a dead Hell’s Angel working for him and who had, oh yeah, tried to put the moves on me with his drooling grandpa right in the next room. Moves I had, at least up to a point, reciprocated.

  No, thanks.

  I overheard Andy, as the two of them left my room, say softly to my mom, “Don’t you think you were a little hard on her? I think she learned her lesson.”