He smiled at me again. His teeth, in the glow of the speedometer, looked green. "It must be fate," he said.

"Okay," I said. Why me? "Not those kind of things. I mean bad kind of things. Like at the mall. And at the beach just now...."

"Oh," he said. Then he shrugged those incredibly strong shoulders. "No."

"Okay," I said yet again. "But if you were to think about it, don't you think one sort of logical explanation might be … angry spirits?"

His smile faded a little. "What do you mean?"

I heaved a sigh. "Look, that wasn't a jellyfish back there, and you know it. You were being pulled under, Michael. By something."

He nodded. "I know. I haven't quite … I'm used to undertows, of course, but that was – "

"It wasn't an undertow. And it wasn't jellyfish. And I just … well, I think you should be careful."

"What are you saying?" Michael asked. He peered at me curiously. "It almost sounds like you're suggesting that I've been the victim of some kind of … demonic force." He laughed. In the quiet of the car, his laugh was loud. "Brought on by the deaths of those kids who almost ran me off of the road? Is that it?"

I looked out my window. I couldn't see anything except the huge purple shadows of the steep cliffs around us, but I kept looking anyway. "Yes," I said. "That's exactly it."

"Suze." Michael reached for my hand again, and this time, he squeezed it. "Are you trying to tell me that you believe in ghosts?"

I looked at him. I looked him straight in the eye. And I said, "Yes, Michael. Yes, I am."

He laughed again. "Oh, come on," he said. "Do you honestly think that Josh Saunders and his friends are capable of communicating from beyond the grave?"

Something in the way he said Josh's name caused me to … I don't know. But I didn't like it. I didn't like it at all.

"I mean – " Michael let go of my hand, then leaned forward and switched on the ignition. "Face facts. The guy was a dumb jock. The most impressive thing he ever did was plunge off of a cliff with another dumb jock, and their equally low-wattage girlfriends. It's not necessarily such a bad thing they're gone, you know? They were just taking up space."

My jaw sagged. I felt it. And yet there didn't seem to be anything I could do about it.

"And as for any of them being able to summon up any sort of powers of darkness," Michael said, putting vocal quotes around the words powers of darkness, "to avenge their pitifully stupid deaths, well, thanks for the warning, but I think that whole I Know What You Did Last Summer thing has pretty much been played out, don't you?"

I stared at him. Really stared at him. I couldn't believe it. So much for Mr. Sensitive. I guess he only stammered and blushed when his own life was being threatened. He didn't seem to care very much about anybody else's.

Unless maybe he was going out with them on Friday night, as was illustrated by his comment as we were about to pull out onto the highway again:

"Hey," he said with a wink. "Buckle up."

C H A P T E R

10

I flung myself into my seat just as everybody else was picking up their forks.

Ha! Not late! Not technically, since no one had actually started eating yet.

"And where have you been, Suze?" my mother asked, lifting a basket of rolls and passing it directly to Gina. Good thing, too. Otherwise, given the way my brothers ate, that thing would be empty before it ever reached her.

"I went," I said as Max, my stepbrothers' extremely large, extremely slobbery dog, dropped his head down upon my lap, his traditional station at mealtimes, and rolled his soft brown eyes up at me, "on a drive."

"With whom?" my mother asked in that same mild tone, the one that indicated that if I didn't answer carefully, I could potentially be in serious trouble.

Before I could say anything, Dopey went, "Michael Meducci," and made some gagging noises.

Andy raised his eyebrows. "That boy who was here last night?"

"That'd be the one," I said, shooting Dopey a dirty look that he ignored. Gina and Sleepy, I noticed, had taken care to sit beside each other and were strangely quiet. I wondered, if I dropped my napkin and leaned down to pick it up, what I'd see going on underneath the table. Probably, I thought to myself, something I did not particularly care to see. I kept my napkin tightly in my lap.

"Meducci," my mother murmured. "Why is that name familiar to me?"

"Doubtlessly," Doc said, "you are thinking of the Medicis, an Italian noble family that produced three popes and two queens of France. Cosimo the Elder was the first to rule Florence, while Lorenzo the Magnificent was a patron of the arts, with clients that included Michelangelo and Botticelli."

My mother looked at him curiously. "Actually," she said, "that's not what I was thinking."

I knew what was coming. My mom has a memory like a steel trap. She needs it, of course, in her line of work. But I knew it was only a matter of time before she figured out where she'd heard Michael's name before.

"He was the one who was in that accident this weekend," I said, to hasten the inevitable. "The one where those four RLS students were killed."

Dopey dropped his fork. It made quite a clatter as it landed on his plate.

"Michael Meducci?" He shook his head. "No way. That was Michael Meducci? You are shitting me."

Andy said, sharply, "Brad. Language, please."

Dopey said, "Sorry," but his eyes, I noticed, were very bright. "Michael Meducci," he said again. "Michael Meducci killed Mark Pulsford?"

"He didn't kill anybody," I snapped. I could see I should have kept my mouth shut. Now it was going to be all over school. "It was an accident."

"Really, Brad," Andy said. "I'm sure the poor boy didn't mean to kill anyone."

"Well, I'm sorry," Dopey said. "But Mark Pulsford was like one of the best quarterbacks in the state. Seriously. He had a scholarship to UCLA, the whole thing. That guy was really cool."

"Oh, yeah? Then what was he doing hanging around you?" Sleepy, in a rare moment of wit, grinned at his brother.