I blinked at CeeCee as astonishedly as Jesse was doing. He had dropped my hand as if it were on fire.

“Well, hi, CeeCee,” I said. “Hi, Adam. Nice of you two to drop by. Ever heard of knocking?”

“Oh, please,” CeeCee said. “Why? Because we might interrupt you and your precious Jesse?”

Jesse, upon hearing this, raised his eyebrows. Way up.

Blushing furiously—I mean, I didn’t want him to know I’d been talking about him to my friends—I said, “CeeCee, shut up.”

But CeeCee, who had dropped the poster board on the floor and was now scattering Magic Markers everywhere, went, “We knew he wasn’t here. There’s no car in the driveway. Besides, Brad said to go on up.”

Of course he had.

Adam, spying the roses, whistled. “Those from him?” he wanted to know. “Jesse, I mean? Guy’s got class, whoever he is.”

I have no idea how Jesse reacted upon hearing this, since I didn’t dare glance in his direction.

“Yes,” I said, just to skip the complicated explanations. “Listen, you guys, this really isn’t a very good—”

“Ew!” CeeCee, on the floor by the poster board, was finally in a position to get a good look at my feet for the first time. “That is disgusting! Your feet look just like the feet of those people they pulled down off Mount Everest….”

“That was frostbite,” Adam said, bending to scrutinize my soles. “Their feet were black. Suze’s got the opposite problem, I think. Those are burn blisters.”

“Yeah, they are,” I agreed. “And they really hurt. So if you don’t mind—”

“Oh, no,” CeeCee said. “You are not getting rid of us that easily, Simon. We need to come up with a campaign slogan. If I’m going to abuse my photocopying privileges in my capacity as editor of the school paper by running off hand flyers—don’t worry, I already got a bunch of my sister’s fifth grade classmates to agree to pass them out for us at lunch—I want to make sure they at least say something good. So. What should they say?”

I sat there like a lump, my mind completely filled with one thing and one thing only: Jesse.

“I’m telling you,” Adam said, uncapping a Sharpie and taking a deep, long sniff of its tip. “Our slogan should be Vote Suze: She Doesn’t Suck.”

“Kelly,” CeeCee said with some disdain, “would have a field day with that one. We’d be slapped with a defamation of character suit in no time for implying that Kelly sucks. Her dad’s a lawyer, you know.”

Adam, done sniffing the Sharpie, said, “How about Suze Rules?”

“That doesn’t exactly rhyme,” CeeCee pointed out. “Besides, then the implication is that the student government is a monarchy, which of course it is not.”

I risked a glance at Jesse, just to see how he was taking all of this. He did not appear, however, to be paying much attention. He was staring at Paul’s roses.

God, I thought. When I got back to school, I was so going to kill that guy.

“How about,” I said, hoping to hurry CeeCee and Adam along so that I could have some privacy with my would-be boyfriend again, “Simon Says Vote for Suze.”

CeeCee, kneeling beside the poster board, cocked her head at me, the sun, slanting into my west-facing windows, making her white-blond hair look bright yellow.

“‘Simon Says Vote for Suze,’ ” she repeated, slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, I like that. Good one, Simon.”

And then she bent down to start writing the slogan on the pieces of poster board scattered across my floor. It was clear that neither she nor Adam was going to be leaving anytime soon.

I glanced in Jesse’s direction again, hoping to signal to him, as subtly as I could, how sorry I was for the interruption.

But Jesse, I saw, much to my dismay, had disappeared.

Wasn’t that just like a guy? I mean, you finally get him to a point where he’s apparently ready to make the big confession—whatever it was going to be—and then, bam. He disappears on you.

It’s even worse when the guy happens to be dead. Because it wasn’t even like I could have his license plate traced or whatever.

Not that I could blame him for leaving, I guess. I mean, I probably wouldn’t have wanted to hang around in a room—that now smelled distinctly of Magic Marker—with a bunch of people who couldn’t see me.

Still, I couldn’t help wondering where he’d gone. I hoped to trail along after Neil Jankow, and keep me from having yet another ghost—Neil’s brother Craig—to deal with. And when he’d be back.

It wasn’t until I glanced at Paul’s roses again that the really horrible part of it all occurred to me. And that was that the question wasn’t when Jesse would be back. It was really if. Because of course, if you thought about it, why would the guy bother coming back at all?

I told CeeCee and Adam that I wasn’t crying. I told them my eyes were watering from all the marker fumes. And they seemed to believe me.

Too bad the only person I didn’t seem able to fool anymore was myself.

chapter

thirteen

It didn’t take me long to figure out where Jesse had disappeared to.

I mean, in the vast spectrum of things. Actually, it took me another day and a half. That’s how long it was before the swelling in my feet went down, and I was able to squeeze my feet into a pair of Steve Madden slides and go back to school.

Where I was promptly called to the principal’s office.

Seriously. It was part of Father Dom’s morning announcements. He went, into the PA, “And let’s all remember to remind our parents about the feast of Father Serra, which will take place here at the mission tomorrow starting at ten o’clock. There will be food and games and music and fun. Susannah Simon, after assembly, would you please come to the principal’s office?”

Just like that.

I assumed Father Dom wanted to see how I was doing. You know, I had been out of school for two whole days, thanks to my feet. A nice person would naturally wonder if I was all right. A nice person would be concerned about my well-being.

And it turned out, Father D. was totally concerned about my well-being. But more spiritually than physically.

“Susannah,” he said, when I walked through his office door—well, walk might be too strong a word for how I was getting around. I was still sort of hobbling. Fortunately, my slides were super cushioned, and the wide black band that held them to my feet completely covered most of the unsightly Band-Aids.