Ordinarily, this would have cheered me up considerably. I mean, I wasn't exactly looking forward to going out with the guy.

But I sort of had to. I mean, if I was to have any hope at all of keeping him from slipping into a nerd coffin.

"Why?" I carefully swallowed a mouthful of salmon. "It's not Michael's fault his sister's an alcoholic who can't swim. And what were her parents thinking, anyway, letting an eighth grader go to a party like that?"

"That," my mother said, her mouth tightening, "is not the issue here, and you know it. You're just going to have to call that young man and tell him that your mother absolutely forbids you to get into a vehicle with him. If he wants to come here and spend the evening with you watching videos or whatever, that's fine. But you are not getting into a car with him."

My eyes widened. Here? Spend the evening here? Under Jesse's watchful eye? Oh, God, just what I needed. The image these words conveyed filled me with such horror, the forkful of salmon I'd had poised before my lips fell into my lap, where it was instantly vacuumed up by a long canine tongue.

My mother touched my hand. "Suze," she said softly. "I really mean it. I don't want you getting into a car with that boy."

I looked at my mother curiously. It's true that in times past I have been forced to disobey her, largely due to circumstances beyond my control. But she didn't know that. That I had disobeyed her, I mean. For the most part, I'd managed to keep my transgressions to myself - except for the occasions I'd been brought home by the police, incidents so few they are hardly worth mentioning.

But since that had not been the case in this situation, I didn't quite understand why she felt it necessary to repeat her edict concerning Michael Meducci.

"Okay, Mom," I said. "I got it the first time."

"It's just something I feel very strongly about," she said.

I looked at her. It wasn't that she appeared … well, guilty. But she definitely knew something. Something she wasn't letting on.

This was not particularly surprising. A television journalist, my mother was often privy to information not necessarily meant for release to the public. She wasn't one of those reporters you hear about, either, who'd do anything to get the "big" story. If a cop told my mother something - and they often do; my mother, even though she's forty-something, is still pretty hot, and just about anybody would tell her anything she wanted to know if she licked her lips enough - he could depend on her not mentioning it on air if he asked her not to. That's just how she is.

I wondered what, exactly, she knew about Michael Meducci and the accident that had killed the four Angels.

Enough, apparently, to keep her from wanting me to hang around with him.

I didn't exactly think she was being particularly unfair to him, either. I couldn't help remembering what Michael had said in the car, right before pulling back out onto the highway: They were just taking up space.

Suddenly, I didn't blame those kids so much for trying to drown him.

"Okay Mom," I said. "I get it."

Apparently satisfied, my mother turned back to her salmon, which Andy had grilled to perfection and served with a delicate dill sauce.

"So how are you going to break it to him?" Gina asked a half hour later as she helped me load the dishwasher after dinner - having brushed aside my mother's insistence that, as a guest, she did not have to do this.

"I don't know," I said hesitantly. "You know, the whole Clark Kent thing aside - "

"Geeky on the outside, dreamy in the middle?"

"Yeah. In spite of that - which is hard to resist, believe me - he's still kind of got this quality that strikes me as…"

"Stalkery?" Gina said, rinsing the salad bowl before handing it to me to put in the dishwasher rack.

"Maybe that's it. I don't know."

"It was very stalkery how he showed up here last night," she said. "Without even calling first. Any guy ever tried to do that to me" - she waved her fingers in the air and then snapped them - "and he is so gone."

I shrugged. It was different back east, of course. In the city, you simply do not stop by someone's place without calling first. In California, I'd noticed, "drive-bys" were more socially acceptable.

"But don't even act," Gina went on, "like you care, Simon. You don't like that guy. I don't know what, exactly, you've got going on with him, but it definitely isn't anything gonadal."

I thought, fleetingly, of how pleasantly surprised we'd all been when Michael had taken his shirt off. "It might have been," I said with a sigh.

"Please." Gina handed me a fistful of silverware. "You and Supergeek? No. Now, tell me. What is going on with you and this guy?"

I looked down at the silverware I'd been shoving into the dishwasher. "I don't know," I said. I couldn't tell her the truth, of course. "There's just … I've got this feeling that there's more to this accident thing than he's letting on. My mom seems to know something about it. Did you notice?"

"I noticed," Gina said, not really grimly, but not happily, either.

"Well, so … I just can't help wondering what really happened. The night of the wreck. Because … well, that wasn't a jellyfish this afternoon, you know."

Gina just nodded. "I didn't think so. I suppose this all has something to do with that mediator thing, huh?"

"Sort of," I said uncomfortably.

"Right. Which might also explain that little mishap with the fingernail polish the other night?"

I couldn't say anything. I just kept thrusting the silverware into the plastic compartments in the dishwasher door. Forks, spoons, knives.

"All right." Gina turned off the water in the sink and dried her hands on a dishtowel. "What do you want me to do?"

I blinked at her. "Do? You? Nothing."

"Come on. I know you, Simon. You didn't miss homeroom seventy-nine times last year because you were enjoying a leisurely breakfast over at the Mickey D's. I know perfectly well you were out there fighting the undead, making this world a safer place for children, and all that. So what do you want me to do? Cover for you?"

I bit my lip. "Well," I said hesitantly.

"Look, don't worry about me. Jake said he'd take me on his delivery run - which holds a certain appeal, if you can stand getting down and dirty in a car full of pepperoni and pineapple pizzas. But if you want, I can stay here and hang with Brad. He's invited me to a video screening of his favorite movie of all time."

I sucked in my breath. "Not Hellraiser III …?"

"Indeed."

Gratitude washed over me like one of those waves that had knocked me senseless. "You would do that for me?"

"For you, Simon, anything. So what's it going to be?"

"Okay." I threw down the dishtowel I'd been holding. "If you would just stay here and pretend like I'm upstairs in my room with cramps, I will worship you forever. They don't ask questions about cramps. Say that I'm in the bathtub, and then maybe a little while later, say I went to bed early. If anyone calls, will you take it for me?"

"As you wish, Queen Midol."

"Oh, Gina." I grabbed her by the shoulders and gave her a little shake. "You are the best. You understand? The best. Don't throw yourself away on my stepbrothers: you could do so much better."

"You just don't see it," Gina said, shaking her head wonderingly. "Your stepbrothers are hot. Well, except for that little red-headed one. And hey - " This she added as I was headed to the phone to make a call to Father Dominic. " - I expect compensation, you know."

I blinked at her. "You know I only get twenty bucks a week allowance, but you can have it - "

Gina made a face. "I don't want your money. But a thorough explanation would be nice. You never would give me one. You always just dodged the question. But this time, you owe me." She narrowed her eyes. "I mean, I am going to sit through a screening of Hellraiser III for you. You owe me big time. And yes," she added, before I could open my mouth, "I won't tell anybody. I promise not to call the Enquirer or Ripley’s Believe It or Not."

I said, with what dignity I could muster, "I wouldn't have thought otherwise."

Then I picked up the phone and dialed.

CHAPTER 11

"So what is it, exactly," I said as I swung the flashlight back and forth across the sandy trail, "that I'm supposed to be looking for?"

"I'm not sure," Father Dominic, a few steps ahead of me, said. "You'll know, I expect, when you find it."

"Great," I muttered.

It was no joke trying to climb down a mountainside in the dark. If I had known this was what Father Dom was going to suggest when I called, I probably would have put off phoning him. I probably would have just stayed home and watched Hellraiser III instead. Or at least attempted to finish my geometry homework. I mean, really. I had already nearly died once that day. The Pythagorean theorem hardly seemed threatening in comparison.

"Don't worry," I heard a guy's voice behind me, laced with tolerant amusement, say. "There's no poison oak."

I turned my head and gave Jesse a very sarcastic look, even though I doubted he could see it. The moon - if there was one - was hidden behind a thick wall of clouds. Tendrils of fog crept along the cliffside we were climbing down, gathering thickly in the dips the trail made, swirling whenever I set my foot down in it, as if it were recoiling at the prospect of touching me. I tried not to think about movies I'd seen in which horrible things happened to people out in such heavy fog. You know the movies I'm talking about.

At the same time, I tried not to think about all the poison oak that might be brushing up against me. Jesse had been joking, of course, but in his usual way, he had read my mind: I have a real thing about disfiguring skin rashes.

And don't even get me started about snakes, which I had every reason to believe might be curled up all along this sorry excuse for a path, just waiting to take a chunk out of the soft fleshy part of my calf just above my Timberlands.

"Yes," I heard Father Dom say. The fog had rushed in and swallowed him up, and I could see only the faint pinprick of yellow his flashlight made in front of me. "Yes, I can see that the police have already been here. This must be where a section of the guardrail fell. You can see its imprint in the broken weeds."

I staggered blindly along, using the beam from my flashlight primarily to hunt for snakes, but also to make sure I didn't step off the trail and plunge the several hundred feet or so into the churning surf below. Jesse had already reached out twice to steer me gently away from the edge of the path when I'd strayed from it while eyeing a suspicious branch.

Now I nearly staggered off it after colliding hard with Father Dom, who'd stopped in the middle of the trail and crouched down. I hadn't seen him at all, and both he and Jesse had to reach out and grab various articles of my clothing in order to right me again. This was not a little embarrassing.

"Sorry," I muttered, mortified at my own clumsiness. "Um, what are you doing, Father D?"

Father Dominic smiled in that infuriatingly patient way of his, and said, "Examining some of the evidence from the accident. You mentioned that your mother seemed to know something about it, and I have a feeling that I know what."

I zipped my windbreaker up more fully, so that my neck was no longer exposed to the chilly night air. It may have been springtime in California, but it couldn't have been more than forty degrees out there on that cliff. Fortunately, I had brought along gloves - mainly as protection, it must be admitted, from potential contact with poison oak - but they were doing double duty now, keeping my fingers from freezing.

"What do you mean?" I hadn't thought to bring along a hat, and so my ears felt like icicles, and my hair kept whipping around in the cold wind off the sea and smacking me in the eyes.

"Look at this." Father Dominic shined his flashlight along a section of the earth, about six feet long, where the dirt was churned up, and the grass broken. "This, I think, is where the guardrail ended up. But do you notice anything odd about it?"

I pulled some hair out of my mouth and kept my eyes peeled for snakes. "No."

"That particular section of rail seems to have come down in one piece. A vehicle would have to be moving at considerable speed to break through such strong metal fencing, but the fact that the entire section seems to have given way suggests that the metal rivets holding it in place must have snapped."