I don’t know. Maybe that’s why Rick and Nancy don’t want to hang around him. Jack’s a little creepy looking, and apparently has frequent dialogues with the dead. God knows it never made me Miss Popularity.

The talking to the dead thing, I mean. I am not creepy looking. In fact, when I am not wearing my uniform shorts, I am frequently complimented on my appearance by the occasional construction worker.

“Didn’t you hear what I said?” Jack was depressed, you could tell. I was probably the first person he’d ever told about his unique problem who’d been completely unimpressed.

Poor kid. He had no idea who he was dealing with.

“I see dead people,” he said, rubbing his eyes with his fists. “They come up and start talking to me. And they’re dead.”

I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees.

“Jack,” I said.

“You don’t believe me.” His chin started trembling. “No one believes me. But it’s true!”

Jack buried his face in his towel again. I glanced in Sleepy’s direction. Still no sign that he was aware of either of us, much less that he found Jack’s behavior at all odd. The kid was murmuring about all the people who hadn’t believed him over the years, a list that seemed to include not only his parents, but a whole stream of medical specialists Rick and Nancy had dragged him to, hoping to cure their youngest child of this delusion he has—that he can speak to the dead.

Poor little guy. He hadn’t realized, as I had from a very early age, that what he and I can do…well, you just don’t talk about it.

I sighed. Really, it would have been too much to ask, apparently, for me to have a normal summer. I mean, a summer without any paranormal incidents.

But then, I’d never had one of those before in my life. Why should my sixteenth summer be any different?

I reached out and laid a hand on one of Jack’s thin, quivering shoulders.

“Jack,” I said. “You saw that gardener just now, didn’t you? The one with the hedge clippers?”

Jack lifted an astonished, tear-stained face from the terry cloth. He stared up at me in wonder.

“You…you saw him, too?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That was Jorge. He used to work here. He died a couple days ago of a heart attack.”

“But how could you—” Jack shook his head slowly back and forth. “I mean, he’s…he’s a ghost.”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “He probably has something he needs us to do for him. He kicked off kind of suddenly, and there may be stuff, you know, he left unfinished. He came up to us because he wants our help.”

“That’s…” Jack stared at me. “That’s why they come up to me? Because they want help?”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “What else would they want?”

“I don’t know.” Jack’s lower lip started to tremble again. “To kill me.”

I couldn’t help smiling a little at that one. “No, Jack,” I said. “That’s not why ghosts come up to you. Not because they want to kill you.” Not yet, anyway. The kid was too young to have made the kind of homicidal enemies I had. “They come up to you because you’re a mediator, like me.”

Tears trembled on the edges of Jack’s long eyelashes as he gazed up at me. “A…a what?”

Oh, for God’s sake, I thought. Why me? I mean, really. Like my life’s not complicated enough. Now I have to play Obi Wan Kenobi to this kid’s Anakin Skywalker? It so isn’t fair. When was I ever going to get the chance to be a normal teenage girl, to do the things normal teenage girls like to do, like go to parties and hang out at the beach, and, um, what else?

Oh, yeah, date. A date, with the boy I actually like, would be nice.

But do I get dates? Oh, no. What do I get instead?

Ghosts. Mainly ghosts looking for help cleaning up the messes they made when they were alive, but sometimes ghosts whose sole amusement appears to be making even bigger messes in the lives of the people they left behind. And this frequently includes mine.

I ask you, do I have a big sign on my forehead that says Maid Service? Why am I always the one who has to tidy up other people’s messes?

Because I had the misfortune to be born a mediator.

I must say, I think I’m way better suited for the job than poor Jack. I mean, I saw my first ghost when I was two years old, and I can assure you, my initial reaction was not fear. Not that, at the age of two, I’d been able to help the poor suffering soul who approached me. But I hadn’t shrieked and run away in terror, either.

It wasn’t until later, after my dad—who passed away when I was six—came back and explained it that I began to fully understand what I was, and why I could see the dead, but others—like my mom, for instance—could not.

One thing I did know, though, from a very tender age: mentioning to anyone that I could see folks they couldn’t? Yeah, not such a hot idea. Not if I didn’t want to end up on the ninth floor of Bellevue, which is where they stick all the whackos in New York City.

Only Jack didn’t seem to have quite the same instinctive sense of self-preservation I’d apparently been born with. He’d been opening up his trap about the whole ghost thing to anyone who would listen, with the inevitable result that his poor parents didn’t want to have anything to do with him. I’d be willing to bet that kids his own age, figuring he was lying to get attention, felt the same way. In a sense, the little guy had brought all his current misfortunes down upon himself.

On the other hand, if you ask me, whoever is up there handing out the mediator badges needs to make a better effort to see that the folks who get awarded the job are mentally up to the challenge. I complain a lot about it because it has put a significant cramp in my social life, but there is nothing about this whole mediator thing I do not feel perfectly capable of handling….

Well, except for one thing.

But I’ve been making a concerted effort not to think about that.

Or rather, him.

“A mediator,” I explained to Jack, “is someone who helps people who have died to move on, into their next life.” Or wherever people go when they kick the bucket. But I didn’t want to get into a whole metaphysical discussion with this kid. I mean, he is, after all, only eight.

“You mean like I’m supposed to help them go to heaven?” Jack asked.