Again, I shook my head.

Kim wrinkled up her nose. “He doesn’t go to CVHS, does he?”

I sighed. “He isn’t in high school, okay, Kim? I’d really rather—”

“Oh my God,” Kim said. “A college guy? You dog. My mom would kill me if she knew I was going with a college guy—”

“He’s not in college, either, okay?” I could feel my cheeks growing warm. “Look, the thing is, it’s complicated. And I don’t want to talk about it.”

Kim looked taken aback. “Well, all right. God. Sorry.”

But she couldn’t leave well enough alone.

“He’s older, right?” she asked, less than a minute later. “Like way older? That’s okay, you know. I went out with an older guy, like, when I was fourteen. He was eighteen. My mom didn’t know. So I can totally relate.”

“Somehow,” I said, “I really don’t think you can.”

She wrinkled her nose again. “God,” she said. “How old is he?”

I thought about telling her. I thought about going, Oh, I don’t know. About a century and a half.

But I didn’t. Instead I told Jack it was time to go inside, if he was going to have a bath before dinner.

“Jeez,” I heard Kim say as I got out. “That old, huh?”

Yeah. Unfortunately. That old.

chapter

three

I don’t even really know how it happened. I was being way careful, you know? Careful not to fall in love with Jesse, I mean.

And I’d been doing a really good job. I mean, I was getting out and meeting new people and doing new things, just like it says to do in Cosmo. I certainly wasn’t sitting around mooning over him or anything.

And yeah, okay, the majority of guys I have met since moving to California have turned out either to have psychopathic killers stalking them, or were actually psychopathic killers themselves. But that’s really not a very good excuse for falling in love with a ghost. It really isn’t.

But that’s what happened.

I can tell you the exact moment I knew it was all over, too. My battle to keep from falling in love with him, I mean. It was while I was in the hospital, recovering from that severe butt-kicking I mentioned before—the one I got courtesy of the ghosts of four RLS students who had been murdered a few weeks before school let out for the summer.

Anyway, Jesse showed up in my hospital room (Why not? He’s a ghost. He can materialize anywhere he wants.) to express his get-well wishes, which were extremely heartfelt and all, and while he was there, he happened, at one point, to reach out and touch my cheek.

That’s all. He just touched my cheek, which was, I believe, the only part of me that was not black and blue at the time.

Big deal, right? So he touched my cheek. That’s no reason to swoon.

But I did.

Oh, not literally. It wasn’t like anybody had to wave smelling salts under my nose or anything, for God’s sake. But after that, I was gone. Done for. Toast.

I flatter myself I’ve done a pretty good job of hiding it. He, I’m sure, has no idea. I still treat him as if he were…well, an ant that has fallen into my pool. You know, irritating, but not worth killing.

And I haven’t told anyone. How can I? No one—except for Father Dominic, back at the Academy, and my youngest stepbrother, Doc—has any idea Jesse even exists. I mean, come on, the ghost of a guy who died a hundred and fifty years ago, and lives in my bedroom? If I mentioned it to anyone, they’d cart me off to the loony bin faster than you can say Stir of Echoes.

But it’s there. Just because I haven’t told anyone doesn’t mean it isn’t there, all the time, lurking in the back of my mind, like one of those ’NSync songs you can’t get out of your head.

And I have to tell you, it makes the idea of going out with other guys seem like…well, a big waste of time.

So I didn’t jump at the chance to go out with Paul Slater (though if you ask me, having dinner with him and his parents and his little brother hardly qualifies as going out). Instead, I went home and had dinner with my own parents and brothers. Well, stepbrothers, anyway.

Dinner in the Ackerman household was always this very big deal…until Andy started working on installing the hot tub. Since then, he has slacked off considerably in the culinary department, let me tell you. And since my mom is hardly what you’d call a cook, we’ve been enjoying a lot of takeout lately. I thought we had hit rock bottom the night before, when we’d actually ordered from Peninsula Pizza, the place Sleepy works nights as a delivery guy.

But I didn’t know how bad it could get until I walked in that night and saw a red-and-white bucket sitting in the middle of the table.

“Don’t start,” my mother said when she noticed me.

I just shook my head. “I guess if you peel the skin off, it’s not that bad for you.”

“Give it to me,” Dopey said, glopping semi-congealed mashed potatoes onto his plate. “I’ll eat your skin.”

I could hardly control my gag reflex after that offer, but I managed, and I was reading the nutritional literature that came with our meal—“The Colonel has never forgotten the delicious aromas that used to float from his mother’s kitchen on the plantation back when he was a boy”—when I remembered the tin box, the contents of which had also been advertised as having a delicious aroma.

“Hey,” I said. “So what was in that box you guys dug up?”

Dopey made a face. “Nothing. Bunch of old letters.”

Andy looked sadly at his son. The truth is, I think even my stepfather has begun to realize what I have known since the day I met him: that his middle son is a bohunk.

“Not just a bunch of old letters, Brad,” Andy said. “They’re quite old, dated around the time this house was built—1850. They’re in extremely poor condition—falling apart, actually. I was thinking of taking them over to the historical society. They might want them, in spite of the condition. Or”—Andy looked at me—“I thought Father Dominic might be interested. You know what a history buff he is.”

Father Dom is a history buff, all right, but only because, like me, as a mediator he has a tendency to run into people who have actually lived through historical events like the Alamo and the Lewis and Clark expedition. You know, folks who take the phrase Been there, done that to a whole new level.