And then he was there, dropping his stuff all over the place, spilling cold soda on Gina's back, and taking an inordinately long time to figure out how his beach chair worked. I bore it as well as I could, telling myself, You are all that is keeping him from becoming a geek pancake.

But I gotta tell you, it was sort of hard to believe, out there in the sun, that anything bad - like vengeance-minded ghosts - even existed. Everything was just so … right.

At least until Adam, claiming he needed a break - but really, I noticed, taking the opportunity to plunge down into the sand next to us and show off his four or five chest hairs - threw down his board. Then Michael looked up from his calculus book - he was taking senior math and science classes - and said, "Mind if I borrow that?"

Adam, the easiest going of men, shrugged and said, "Be my guest. Wave face is kinda flat, but you might be able to pick off some clean ones. Water's cold, though. Better take my suit."

Then, as Gina, Cee Cee, and I watched with mild interest, Adam unzipped his wetsuit, stepped out of it, and, dressed only in swim trunks, handed the black rubber thing to Michael, who promptly removed his glasses and stripped off his shirt.

One of Gina's hands whipped out and seized my wrist. Her fingernails bit into my skin.

"Oh, my God," she breathed.

Even Cee Cee, I noticed with a quick glance, was staring, completely transfixed, at Michael Meducci as he stepped into Adam's wetsuit and zipped it up.

"Would you," he asked, dropping to one knee in the sand beside me, "hang onto these?"

He slipped his glasses into my hands. I had a chance to look into his eyes, and noticed for the first time that they were a very deep, very bright blue.

"Sure thing," I heard myself murmur.

He smiled. Then he got back to his feet, picked up Adam's board, and, with a polite nod to us girls, trudged out into the waves.

"Oh, my God," Gina said again.

Adam, who'd collapsed into the sand beside Cee Cee, leaned up on an elbow and demanded, "What?"

When Michael had joined Sleepy, Dopey, and their other friends in the surf, Gina turned her face slowly toward mine. "Did you see that?" she asked.

I nodded dumbly.

"But that - that - " Cee Cee stammered. "That defies all logic."

Adam sat up. "What are you guys talking about?" he wanted to know.

But we could only shake our heads. Speech was impossible.

Because it turned out that Michael Meducci, underneath his pen protector, was totally and completely buff.

"He must," Cee Cee ventured, "work out like three hours a day."

"More like five," Gina murmured.

"He could bench press me," I said, and both Cee Cee and Gina nodded in agreement.

"Are you guys," Adam demanded, "talking about Michael Meducci?"

We ignored him. How could we not? For we had just seen a god - pasty skinned, it was true, but perfect in every other way.

"All he needs," Gina breathed, "is to come out from behind that computer once in a while and get a little color."

"No," I said. I couldn't bear the thought of that perfectly sculpted body marred by skin cancer. "He's fine the way he is."

"Just a little color," Gina said again. "I mean, SPF 15 and he'll still get a little brown. That's all he needs."

"No," I said again.

"Suze is right," Cee Cee said. "He's perfect the way he is."

"Oh, my God," Adam said, flopping back disgustedly into the sand. "Michael Meducci. I can't believe you guys are talking that way about Michael Meducci."

But how could we help it? He was perfection. Okay, so he wasn't the best surfer. That, we realized, while we watched him get tossed off Adam's board by a fairly small wave that Sleepy and Dopey rode with ease, would have been asking for too much.

But in every other way, he was one hundred percent genuine hottie.

At least until he was knocked over by a middling to large-size wave and did not resurface.

At first we were not alarmed. Surfing was not something I particularly wanted to try - while I love the beach, I have no affection at all for the ocean. In fact, quite the opposite: the water scares me because there's no telling what else is swimming around in all that murky darkness. But I had watched Sleepy and Dopey ride enough waves to know that surfers often disappear for long moments, only to come popping up yards away, usually flashing a big grin and an OK sign with their thumb and index finger.

But the wait for Michael to come popping up seemed longer than usual. We saw Adam's board shoot out of a particularly large wave, and head, riderless, toward the shore. Still no sign of Michael.

This was when the lifeguard - the same big blond one who'd attempted to rescue Dopey; we had stationed ourselves close to his chair, as had become our custom - sat up straight, and suddenly lifted his binoculars to his face.

I, however, did not need binoculars to see what I saw next. And that was Michael finally breaking the surface after having been down nearly a minute. Only no sooner had he come up than he was pulled down again, and not by any undertow or riptide.

No, this I saw quite clearly: Michael was pulled down by a rope of seaweed that had somehow twined itself around his neck....

And then I saw there was no "somehow" about it. The seaweed was being held there by a pair of hands.

A pair of hands belonging to someone in the water beneath him.

Someone who had no need to surface for air. Because that someone was already dead.

Now, I'm not going to tell you that I did what I did next with any sort of conscious thought. If I'd been thinking at all, I'd have stayed exactly where I was and hoped for the best. All I can say in defense of my actions is that, after years and years of dealing with the undead, I acted purely on instinct, without thinking anything through.

Which was why, as the lifeguard was charging through the surf toward Michael, his little orange flotation device in hand, I leaped up and followed.

Now, maybe I've seen the movie Jaws one too many times, but I have always made it a point never to wade farther than waist-deep into the ocean - any ocean. So when I found myself surging toward the spot where I'd last seen Michael, and felt the sand shelf I'd been running on give out beneath me, I tried to tell myself that the lurch my heart gave was one of adrenaline, not fear.

I tried to tell myself that, of course. But I didn't believe me. When I realized I was going to have to start swimming, I completely freaked. I swam, all right - I know how to do that, at least. But the whole time I was thinking, Oh, my God, please don't let anything gross, like an eel, touch me on any part of my body. Please don't let a jellyfish sting me. Please don't let a shark swim up from underneath me and bite me in half.

But as it turned out, I had way worse things to worry about than eels, jellyfish, or sharks.

Behind me, I could hear voices shouting dimly. Gina and Cee Cee and Adam, I figured, in the part of my brain that wasn't paralyzed with fear. Yelling at me to get out of the water. What did I think I was doing, anyway? The lifeguard had the situation well in hand.

But the lifeguard couldn't see - or fight - the hands that were pulling Michael down.

I saw the lifeguard - who had no idea, I'm sure, that some crazy girl had dove in after him - let the enormous wave approaching us gently lift his body and propel him that much closer to where Michael had disappeared. I tried his technique, only to end up sputtering, with a mouthful of saltwater. My eyes were stinging, and my teeth starting to chatter. It was really, really cold in the water without a wetsuit.

And then, a few yards away from me, Michael suddenly resurfaced, gasping for breath and clawing at the rope of seaweed around his neck. The lifeguard, in two easy strokes, was beside him, shoving the orange flotation device at him, and telling him to relax, that everything was going to be all right.

But everything was not going to be all right. Even as the lifeguard was speaking, I saw a head bob up beside Michael. Though his wet hair was plastered to his face, I still recognized Josh, the ringleader of the RLS Angels - a ghostly little group so hellbent on mischief making … and evidently worse.

I couldn't speak, of course - my lips, I was sure, were turning blue. But I could still punch. I pulled my arm back and let go of a good one, packed with all the panic I felt at finding myself with nothing but water beneath my feet.

Josh either didn't remember me from Jimmy's or the mall, or didn't recognize me with my hair all wet. In any case, he'd been paying no attention to me at all.

Until my fist connected solidly with his nasal cartilage, that is.

Bone crunched quite satisfyingly under my knuckles, and Josh let out a pain-filled shriek that only I could hear.

Or so I thought. I'd forgotten about the other angels.

At least until I was abruptly pulled under the waves by two sets of hands that had wrapped around my ankles.

Let me just mention something here. While to the rest of humanity, ghosts have no actual matter - most of you walk right through them all the time and don't even know it; maybe you feel a cold spot, or you get a strange chill, like Kelly and Debbie did at the convenience mart - to a mediator, they are most definitely made of flesh and bone. As illustrated by my slamming my fist into Josh's face.

But because they have no matter where humans are concerned, ghosts must resort to more creative methods of harming their intended victims than, say, wrapping their hands around their necks. It was for that reason that Josh was using seaweed instead. He could pick up the seaweed - with an effort, like the beer in the Quick Mart. And he could wrap that around Michael's neck. Mission accomplished.

I, on the other hand, being a mediator, was not subject to the laws governing human-ghost contact, and, accordingly, they quickly made use of their unexpected advantage.

Okay, I realized then that I had made a bad mistake. It is one thing to fight bad guys on land, where, I must admit, I am quite resourceful, and - I feel I can say without bragging - quite agile.

But it is quite another thing altogether to try to fight something underwater. Particularly something that does not need to breathe as often as I do. Ghosts do breathe - some habits are hard to break - but they don't need to, and sometimes, if they've been dead long enough, they realize it. The RLS Angels hadn't been dead very long, but they'd died underwater, so you might say they had a head start on their spectral peers.

Given those circumstances, I saw my situation progressing in one of either of two ways: either I was going to give up, let my lungs fill with water,. and drown, or I was going to completely freak out, strike at anything that came near me, and make those ghosts sorry they'd ever chosen not to go into the light.

I don't suppose it will come as any big surprise to anyone - with the exception of myself, maybe - that I chose the second option.

The hands that were wrapped around my ankles, I realized - though it took me a while; I was pretty disoriented - were connected to bodies, attached to which, presumably, were heads. There is nothing so unpleasant, I know from experience, as a foot to the face. And so I very promptly, and with all my strength, kicked in the direction that I supposed those faces might be, and was gratified to feel soft facial bones give way beneath my heels.

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.