"Besides the poison oak," Father Dominic said. "Is there anything else going on in your life you think I should know about?"

Anything else going on in my life that I thought he should know about. Let me see....

How about the fact that I'm sixteen, and so far, unlike my stepbrother Dopey, I still haven't been kissed, much less asked out?

Not a major big deal - especially to Father Dom, a guy who took a vow of chastity about thirty years before I was even born - but humiliating, just the same. There'd been a lot of kissing going on at Kelly Prescott's pool party - and some heavier stuff, even - but no one had tried to lock lips with me.

A boy I didn't know did ask me to slow dance at one point, though. And I said yes, but only because Kelly yelled at me after I turned him down the first time he asked. Apparently this boy was someone she'd had a crush on for a while. How my slow dancing with him was supposed to get him to like Kelly, I don't know, but after I turned him down the first time, she cornered me in her bedroom, where I'd gone to check my hair, and, with actual tears in her eyes, informed me that I had ruined her party.

"Ruined your party?" I was genuinely astonished. I'd lived in California for all of two weeks by then, so it amazed me that I had managed to make myself a social pariah in such a short period of time. Kelly was already mad at me, I knew, because I had invited my friends Cee Cee and Adam, whom she and just about everyone else in the sophomore class at the Mission Academy consider freaks, to her party. Now I had apparently added insult to injury by not agreeing to dance with some boy I didn't even know.

"Jesus," Kelly said, when she heard this. "He's a junior at Robert Louis Stevenson, okay? He's the star forward on their basketball team. He won last year's regatta at Pebble Beach, and he's the hottest guy in the Valley, after Bryce Martinsen. Suze, if you don't dance with him, I swear I'll never speak to you again."

I said, "All right already. What is your glitch, anyway?"

"I just," Kelly said, wiping her eyes with a manicured finger, "want everything to go really well. I've had my eye on this guy for a while now, and—"

"Oh, yeah, Kel," I said. "Getting me to dance with him is sure to make him like you."

When I pointed out this fallacy in her thought process, however, all she said was, "Just do it," only not the way they say it in Nike ads. She said it the way the Wicked Witch of the West said it to the winged monkeys when she sent them out to kill Dorothy and her little dog, too.

I'm not scared of Kelly, or anything, but really, who needs the grief?

So I went back outside and stood there in my Calvin Klein one-piece - with a sarong tied ever-so-casually around my waist - totally not knowing I had just stumbled into a bunch of poison oak, while Kelly went over to her dream date and asked him to ask me to dance again.

As I stood there, I tried not to think that the only reason he wanted to dance with me in the first place was that I was the only girl at the party in a swimsuit. Having never been invited to a pool party before in my life, I had erroneously believed people actually swam at them, and had dressed accordingly.

Not so, apparently. Aside from my stepbrother, who'd apparently become overwarm while in Debbie Mancuso's impassioned embrace and had stripped off his shirt, I was wearing the least clothes of anybody there.

Including Kelly's dream date. He sauntered up a few minutes later, wearing a serious expression, a pair of white chinos, and a black silk shirt. Very Jersey, but then, this was the West Coast, so how was he to know?

"Do you want to dance?" he asked me in this really soft voice. I could barely hear him above the strains of Sheryl Crow, booming out from the pool deck's speakers.

"Look," I said, putting down my Diet Coke. "I don't even know your name."

"It's Tad," he said.

And then without another word, he put his arms around my waist, pulled me up to him, and started swaying in time to the music.

With the exception of the time I threw myself at Bryce Martinsen in order to knock him out of the way when a ghost was trying to crush his skull with a large chunk of wood, this was as close to the body of a boy - a live boy, one who was still breathing - I had ever been.

And let me tell you, black silk shirt not withstanding, I liked it. This guy felt good. He was all warm - it was kind of chilly in my bathing suit; being January, of course, it was supposed to be too chilly for bathing suits, but this was California, after all - and smelled like some kind of really nice, expensive soap. Plus he was just taller enough than me for his breath to kind of brush against my cheek in this provocative, romance novel sort of way.

Let me tell you, I closed my eyes, put my arms around this guy's neck, and swayed with him for two of the longest, most blissful minutes of my life.

Then the song ended.

Tad said, "Thank you," in the same soft voice he'd used before, and let go of me.

And that was it. He turned around, and walked back over to this group of guys who were hanging out by the keg Kelly's dad had bought for her on the condition she didn't let anybody drive home drunk, a condition Kelly was sticking strictly to, by not drinking herself and by carrying around a cell phone with the number of Carmel Cab on redial.

And then for the rest of the party, Tad avoided me. He didn't dance with anybody else. But he didn't speak to me again.

Game over, as Dopey would say.

But I didn't think Father Dominic wanted to hear about my dating travails. So I said, "Nope. Nada. Nothing."

"Strange," Father Dominic said, looking thoughtful. "I would have thought there'd be some paranormal activity - "

"Oh," I said. "You mean has any ghost stuff been going on?"

Now he didn't look thoughtful. He looked kind of annoyed. "Well, yes, Susannah," he said, taking off his glasses, and pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger like he had a head-ache all of a sudden. "Of course, that's what I mean." He put his glasses back on. "Why? Has something happened? Have you encountered anyone? I mean, since that unfortunate incident that resulted in the destruction of the school?"

I said, slowly, "Well …"

CHAPTER 2

The first time she showed up, it was about an hour after I'd come home from the pool party. Around three in the morning, I guess. And what she did was, she stood by my bed and started screaming.

Really screaming. Really loud. She woke me out of a dead sleep. I'd been lying there dreaming about Bryce Martinsen. In my dream, he and I were cruising along Seventeen Mile Drive in this red convertible. I don't know whose convertible it was. His, I guess, since I don't even have my driver's license yet. Bryce's soft wheat-colored hair was blowing in the wind, and the sun was sinking into the sea, making the sky all red and orange and purple. We were going around these curves, you know, on the cliffs above the Pacific, and I wasn't even carsick, or anything. It was one really terrific dream.

And then this woman starts wailing, practically in my ear.

I ask you: who needs that?

Of course I sat up right away, completely wide awake. Having a walking dead woman show up in your bedroom screaming her head off can do that to you. Wake you up right away, I mean.

I sat there blinking because my room was really dark - well, it was nighttime. You know, nighttime, when normal people are asleep.

But not us mediators. Oh, no.

She was standing in this skinny patch of moonlight coming in from the bay windows on the far side of my room. She had on a gray hooded sweatshirt, hood down, a T-shirt, capri pants, and Keds. Her hair was short, sort of mousy brown. It was hard to tell if she was young or old, what with all the screaming and everything, but I kind of figured her for my mom's age.

Which was why I didn't get out of bed and punch her right then and there.

I probably should have. I mean, it wasn't like I could exactly yell back at her, not without waking the whole house. I was the only one in the house who could hear her.

Well, the only one who was alive, anyway.

After a while, I guess she noticed I was awake because she stopped screaming and reached up to wipe her eyes. She was crying pretty hard.

"I'm sorry," she said.

I said, "Yeah, well, you got my attention. Now what do you want?"

"I need you," she said. She was sniffling. "I need you to tell someone something."

I said, "Okay. What?"

"Tell him …" She wiped her face with her hands. "Tell him it wasn't his fault. He didn't kill me."

This was sort of a new one. I raised my eyebrows. "Tell him he didn't kill you?" I asked, just to be sure I'd heard her right.

She nodded. She was kind of pretty, I guess, in a waifish sort of way. Although it probably wouldn't have hurt if she'd eaten a muffin or two back when she'd been alive.

"You'll tell him?" she asked me, eagerly. "Promise?"

"Sure," I said. "I'll tell him. Only who am I telling?"

She looked at me funny. "Red, of course."

Red? Was she kidding?

But it was too late. She was gone.

Just like that.

Red. I turned around and beat on my pillow to get it fluffy again. Red.

Why me? I mean, really. To be interrupted while having a dream about Bryce Martinsen just because some woman wants a guy named Red to know he didn't kill her.... I swear, sometimes I am convinced my life is just a series of sketches for America's Funniest Home Videos, minus all that pants-dropping business.

Except my life really isn't all that funny if you think about it.

I especially wasn't laughing when, the minute I finally found a comfy spot on my pillow and was just about to close my eyes and go back to sleep, somebody else showed up in the sliver of moonlight in the middle of my room.

This time there wasn't any screaming. That was about the only thing I had to be grateful for.

"What?" I asked in a pretty rude voice.

He said, shaking his head, "You didn't even ask her name."

I leaned up on both elbows. It was because of this guy that I'd taken to wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts to bed. Not that I had been going around in floaty negligees before he'd come along, but I sure wasn't going to take them up now that I had a male roommate.

Yeah, you read that right.

"Like she gave me the chance," I said.

"You could have asked." Jesse folded his arms across his chest. "But you didn't bother."

"Excuse me," I said, sitting up. "This is my bedroom. I will treat spectral visitors to it any way I want to, thank you."

He said, "Susannah."

He had the softest voice imaginable. Softer, even, than that guy Tad's. It was like silk, or something, his voice. It was really hard to be mean to a guy with a voice like that.

But the thing was, I had to be mean. Because even in the moonlight, I could make out the breadth of his strong shoulders, the vee where his old-fashioned white shirt fell open, revealing dark, olive complected skin, some chest hair, and just about the best defined abs you've ever seen. I could also see the strong planes of his face, the tiny scar in one of his ink-black eyebrows, where something - or someone - had cut him once.

Kelly Prescott was wrong. Bryce Martinsen was not the cutest guy in Carmel.

Jesse was.

And if I wasn't mean to him, I knew I'd find myself falling in love with him.

And the problem with that, you see, is that he's dead.

"If you're going to do this, Susannah," he said, in that silky voice, "don't do it halfway."

"Look, Jesse," I said. My voice wasn't a bit silky. It was hard as rock. Or that's what I told myself, anyway. "I've been doing this a long time without any help from you, okay?"

He said, "She was obviously in great emotional need, and you - "

"What about you?" I demanded. "You two live on the same astral plane, if I'm not mistaken. Why didn't you get her rank and serial number?"

He looked confused. On him, let me tell you, confused looks good. Everything looks good on Jesse.

"Rank and what?" he asked.

Sometimes I forget that Jesse died a hundred and fifty or so years ago. He's not exactly up on the lingo of the twenty-first century, if you know what I mean.