But instead of kissing me like I'd hoped, for one wild heart-pounding moment, he would, he said, enunciating distinctly, "You're a mediator, Susannah. Go mediate."

I opened my mouth to inform him that I highly doubted Michael was at my house because he wanted help with his poltergeist problem, considering he couldn't know I was in the ghostbusting business. It was much more likely that he was here to ask me out. On a date. Something that I was sure had never occurred to Jesse, since they probably didn't have dates back when he'd been alive, but which happened to girls in the twenty-first century with alarming regularity. Well, not to me, necessarily, but to most girls, anyway.

I was about to point out that this was going to ruin our wonderful opportunity to be alone together when the doorbell rang, and deep inside the house, I heard Doc yell, "I'll get it!"

"Oh, God," I said, and dropped my head down into my hands.

"Susannah," Jesse said. There was concern in his voice. "Are you all right?"

I shook myself. What was I thinking? Michael Meducci was not at my house to ask me out. If he'd wanted to ask me out, he would have called like a normal person. No, he was here for some other reason. I had nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.

"I'm fine," I said, and got slowly to my feet.

"You don't sound fine," Jesse said.

"I'm fine," I said. I started crawling back into my room, through the open window Spike used.

I had wiggled most of the way in when the inevitable thump on my door occurred. "Enter," I said from where I lay, collapsed against the window seat, and Doc opened the door and stuck his head into my room.

"Hey, Suze," he whispered. "There's a guy here to see you. I think it's that guy you all were talking about at dinner. You know, the guy from the mall."

"I know," I said to the ceiling.

"Well," Doc said, fidgeting a little. "What should I do? I mean, your mom sent me up here to tell you. Should I say you're in the shower, or something?" Doc's voice became a little dry. "That's what girls always have their brothers say when my friends and I try calling them."

I turned my head and looked at Doc. If I'd had to choose one Ackerman brother to be stuck with on a desert island, Doc would definitely have been my pick. Red haired and freckle faced, he hadn't quite grown into his enormous ears yet, but at only twelve he was by far the smartest of my stepbrothers.

The thought of any girl making up an excuse to avoid talking to him made my blood boil.

His statement tweaked my conscience. Of course I wasn't going to make up an excuse. Michael Meducci may be a geek. And he may not have acted with any real class earlier that day at the mall. But he was still a human being.

I guess.

I said, "Tell him I'll be right down."

Doc look visibly relieved. He grinned, revealing a mouthful of sparkling braces. "Okay," he said, and disappeared.

I climbed slowly to my feet, and sauntered over to the mirror above my dressing table. California had greatly improved both my complexion and my hair. My skin – only slightly tanned thanks to SPF 15 sunblock – looked fine without any makeup, and I'd given up trying to straighten my long brown hair, and simply let it curl. A single hit of lip gloss, and I was on my way. I didn't bother changing out of my cargo pants and T-shirt. I didn't want to overwhelm the guy, after all.

Michael was waiting for me in the living room, his hands shoved in his pants pockets, looking at the many school portraits of me and my stepbrothers that hung upon the wall. My stepfather was sitting in a chair he never sat in, talking to Michael. When I walked in he dried up, then climbed to his feet.

"Well," Andy said after a few seconds of silence. "I'll just leave the two of you alone, then." Then he left the room, even though I could tell he didn't want to. Which was kind of strange, since Andy usually takes only the most perfunctory interest in my affairs, except when they happen to involve the police.

"Suze," Michael said when Andy was gone. I smiled at him encouragingly since he looked like he was about to expire from nervousness.

"Hey, Mike," I said easily. "You okay? No permanent injury?"

He said with a smile that I suppose he meant to match mine, but which was actually pretty wan, "No permanent injury. Except to my pride."

In an effort to diffuse some of the nervous energy in the room, I flopped down onto one of my mom's armchairs – the one with the Pottery Barn slipcover she was always yelling at the dog for sleeping on – and said, "Hey, it wasn't your fault the mall authority did a shoddy job of hanging up their mardi gras decorations."

I watched him carefully to see how he replied. Did he know? I wondered.

Michael sank into the armchair across from mine. "That's not what I meant," he said. "I meant that I'm ashamed of the way I acted today. Instead of thanking you, I – well, I behaved ungraciously, and I just came by to apologize. I hope you'll forgive me."

He didn't know. He didn't know why that puppet had come down on him, or he was the best damned actor I'd ever seen.

"Um," I said. "Sure. I forgive you. No problem."

Oh, but it was a problem. To Michael, it was apparently a great big problem.

"It's just that – " Michael got up out of the chair and started pacing around the living room. Our house is the oldest one in the neighborhood – there's even a bullet hole in one of the walls, left over from when Jesse had been alive, when our house was a haven for gamblers and gold rushers and fiances on their way to meet their brides. Andy had rebuilt it almost from scratch – except for the bullet hole, which he'd framed – but the floorboards still creaked a little under Michael's feet as he paced.

"It's just that something happened to me this weekend," Michael said to the fireplace, "and ever since then … well, strange things have been happening."

So he did know. He knew something, anyway. This was a relief. It meant I didn't have to tell him.

"Things like that puppet falling down on you?" I asked, even though I already knew the answer.

"Yeah," Michael said. "And other things, too." He shook his head. "But I don't want to burden you with my problems. I feel badly enough about what happened."