"Jesus, Simon," she'd said when I'd questioned her about it, "they're hotties. What do you expect me to do?"

Excuse me? My stepbrothers, hotties?

I think not.

Now, if it was hotties you wanted, you didn't have to look any further than the guy who manned the counter at Jimmy's, the little convenience store right across from the stairs to the beach. Dumb as an inflatable pool toy, Kurt – that was his name, I swear to God – was nevertheless stunning, and after I'd placed the sweating bottle of Diet Coke I'd secured from the refrigerated case on the counter in front of him, I gave him the old hairy eyeball. He was deeply absorbed in a copy of Surf Digest, so he didn't notice my leering gaze. I guess I was sun-drunk, or something, because I just kept standing there staring at Kurt, but what I was really doing was thinking about someone else.

Someone whom I really shouldn't have been thinking about at all.

I guess that's why when Kelly Prescott said hi to me, I didn't even notice. It was like she wasn't even there.

Until she waved a hand in my face and went, "Hello, earth to Suze. Come in, Suze."

I tore my eyes off Kurt and found myself looking at Kelly, sophomore class president, radiant blonde, and fashion plate. She was in one of her dad's dress shirts, unbuttoned to reveal what she wore beneath it, which was an olive-green bikini made out of yarn. There were skin-colored inserts so you couldn't see her bare skin through the holes in the crochet.

Standing next to Kelly was Debbie Mancuso, my stepbrother Dopey's sometime girlfriend.

"Oh, my God," Kelly said. "I had no idea you were at the beach today, Suze. Where'd you put your towel?"

"By the lifeguard tower," I said.

"Oh, God," Kelly said. "Good spot. We're way over by the stairs."

Debbie went, way too casually, "I noticed the Rambler in the parking lot. Is Brad out on his board?"

Brad is what everyone but me calls my stepbrother Dopey.

"Yeah," Kelly said. "And Jake?"

Jake is the stepbrother I call Sleepy. For reasons unfathomable to me, Sleepy, who is in his senior year at the Mission Academy, and Dopey, a sophomore like me, are considered to be these great catches. Obviously, these girls have never seen my stepbrothers eat. It is truly a revolting sight.

"Yeah," I said. And since I knew what they were after, I added, "Why don't you two join us?"

"Cool," Kelly said. "That'd be gr – "

Gina appeared, and Kelly broke off mid-sentence.

Well, Gina is the kind of girl people break off mid-sentence to admire. She's nearly six feet tall, and the fact that she'd recently had her hair done into a mop of prickly-looking copper-colored tendrils, forming a four- or five-inch aura all the way around her head, only made her look taller. She also happened to have on a black vinyl bikini, over which she'd tugged on shorts that appeared to be made from the pull-tabs off of a lot of soda cans.

Oh, and the fact that she'd been out in the sun all day had darkened her normally café au lait skin to the color of espresso, always startling when combined with a nose ring and orange hair.

"Score," Gina said excitedly, as she thumped a six-pack down onto the counter next to my Diet Coke. "Yoo Hoo, dude. The perfect chemical compound."

"Um, Gina," I said, hoping she wasn't going to expect me to join her in consuming any of those bottles. "These are some friends of mine from school, Kelly Prescott and Debbie Mancuso. Kelly, Debbie, this is Gina Augustin, a friend of mine from New York."

Gina's eyes widened behind her Ray Bans. I think she was astonished by the fact that I had, since moving out here, actually made some friends, something I had certainly not had many of, besides her, back in New York. Still, she managed to control her surprise and said, very politely, "How do you do?"

Debbie murmured, "Hi," but Kelly got straight to the point: "Where did you get those awesome shorts?"

It was while Gina was telling her that I first noticed the four kids in evening wear hanging out near the suntan lotion rack.

You might be wondering how I'd missed them before. Well, the truth of the matter is that, up until that particular moment, they hadn't been there.

And, then, suddenly, there they were.

Being from Brooklyn, I've seen far stranger things than four teenagers dressed in formal wear in a convenience mart on a Sunday afternoon at the beach. But since this wasn't New York, but California, the sight was a startling one. Even more startling was that these four were in the act of heisting a twelve-pack of beer.

I'm not kidding. A twelve-pack, right in broad daylight with them dressed to the nines, the girls with wrist corsages, even. Kurt's no rocket scientist, it's true, but surely they couldn't think he would simply let them walk out of there with this beer – particularly in prom wear.

Then I lifted up my Donna Karans in order to get a better look at them.

And that's when I realized it.

Kurt wasn't going to be carding these kids. No way.

Kurt couldn't see them.

Because they were dead.

C H A P T E R

2

Yeah, all right. So I can see and talk to the dead. That's my "special" talent. You know, that "gift" we're all supposedly born with, the one that makes us unique from everyone else on the planet, but which so few of us actually ever discover.

I discovered mine at around the age of two, which was approximately when I met my first ghost.

See, my special gift is that I'm a mediator. I help guide the tortured souls of the newly dead to their afterlife destinations – wherever that happens to be – generally by cleaning up whatever messes they left behind when they croaked.

Some people might think this is really cool – you know, having the ability to talk to the dead. Allow me to assure you that it so isn't. First of all, with a few exceptions, the dead generally don't have anything all that interesting to say. And secondly, it's not like I can go around bragging about this unusual talent to my friends. Who'd believe me?

So, anyway, there we were at Jimmy's Quick Mart: me, Kurt, Gina, Kelly, Debbie, and the ghosts.

Whoopee.

You might be wondering why Kurt, Gina, Debbie, and Kelly didn't run screaming out of the store at this point. You know, seeing as how, on second glance, these kids were obviously ghouls. They were giving off that special Look at me! I'm dead! glow that only spooks have.