Well, that much was true, anyway. Michael's arrest, while anticlimactic, had nevertheless satisfied the Angels. They probably would have preferred to see him dead, but once Father Dominic convinced them of how miserable a sensitive boy like Michael was going to find the California penal system, they snapped right out of their murderous rage. They even asked Father Dominic to tell Jesse and me that they were sorry about the whole beating us into a bloody pulp thing.

I, for one, was not exactly ready to forgive them, even after Father D had assured me that the Angels had moved on to their afterlife destinations – whatever those might be – and would be troubling me no more.

Jesse's opinion on the matter I did not know. He had not deigned to grace either Father Dom or me with his presence since the night the Angels had attacked us. He was, I feared, extremely upset with me. Seeing as how the whole thing had been my fault, I didn't exactly blame him. Still, I wished he'd stop by, if only to yell at me some more. I missed him. More, I knew, than was probably healthy.

Damn that Madame Zara, anyway, for being right.

"You should hear what everyone at school is saying about you," Gina said. She was perched on the end of my hospital bed, already clad in her bikini, over which she'd thrown a leopard print baby doll dress. She wanted to waste as little time as possible when we finally got to the beach.

"Oh, yeah?" I tried to drag my thoughts from Jesse. It wasn't easy. "What are they saying?"

"Well, your friend Cee Cee's writing this story about you in the school paper … you know, the whole amateur sleuth angle of it all, how you caught on that it was Michael who'd committed all these heinous crimes and set out to trap him – "

"Something," I said drily, "that I'm sure she heard from you."

Gina looked innocent. "I don't know what you're talking about. Adam sent you those" – Gina pointed at an enormous bouquet of pink roses on the window sill – "and Mr. Walden, according to Jake, is taking up a collection to get you a complete set of Nancy Drew books. He apparently thinks you have a crime-solving fixation."

Mr. Walden was right about that. But my fixation wasn't on solving crimes.

"Oh, and your stepdad's thinking about buying a Mustang to replace the Rambler," Gina informed me.

I made a face, then regretted it. It was hard to make expressions of any kind with my sore lip, not to mention the stitches in my scalp.

"A Mustang?" I shook my head. "How are we all supposed to fit into a Mustang?"

"Not for you guys. For himself. He's giving you guys the Land Rover."

Well, that, at least, made sense.

"What about …" I wanted to ask her about Jesse. After all, she was sharing a room with him – alone, thanks to my being held overnight in the hospital for observation. The thing is, she didn't know it. About Jesse, I mean. I still hadn't told her about him.

And now, well, there didn't seem to be any reason to. Not now that he wasn't speaking to me anymore.

"What about Michael?" I asked instead. None of my other visitors – my mother and stepfather; Sleepy, Dopey, and Doc; Cee Cee and Adam; even Father Dom – would tell me anything about him. The doctors had advised them that the topic might be "too painful" for me to discuss.

As if. You want to know what's painful? I'll tell you what's painful. Having two broken ribs, and knowing that for weeks, you're going to have wear a one-piece to the beach in order to hide the black and blue marks.

"Michael?" Gina shrugged. "Well, you were right. What you said about him keeping stuff on his computer. The police got a warrant and confiscated his PC, and it was all there – journals, emails, the schematics of the Rambler's brake system. Plus they found the wrench he used. You know, on the bolts that held the guardrail in place? They matched the metal tracings. And the clippers he used to snip the Rambler's brake line. They got brake fluid off the blades. The boy didn't do such a good job cleaning up after himself, it appears."

I'll say.

He was arrested on four counts of first-degree murder – the RLS Angels – and six counts of attempted murder: five for those of us who'd been in the Rambler the afternoon the brakes had given out, and one for what the police were convinced Michael had done to me out at the Point.

I didn't correct them. I mean, it wasn't like I was about to sit there and go, "Uh, yeah, about my injuries? Yeah, Michael didn't inflict them. No, the ghosts of his victims did that because I wouldn't let them kill him."

I figured it was just as well to let them go on thinking it was Michael who was responsible for my broken ribs and the fourteen stitches in my scalp … not to mention the two in my lip. I mean, after all, he'd been going to kill me. The Angels had just interrupted him. If you thought about it, they'd actually saved my life.

Yeah. So they could kill me themselves.

"So listen," Gina was saying. "Your grounding – you know, for sneaking out and getting into a car with Michael when your mother had told you expressly not to – isn't supposed to start until after I leave. I say we spend the next four days at the beach. I mean, there's no way you're going to school. Not with broken ribs. You wouldn't be able to sit down. But you can certainly lie down, you know, on a towel. I should be able to talk your mom into letting you do that, at least."

"Sounds good to me," I said.

"Ex," Gina said. She apparently meant excellent, only she'd shortened it – much in the way Sleepy often shortened words because he was too lazy to say all the syllables. Thus pizza became " 'za," Gina became "G." She had, I realized, more in common with Sleepy than I'd ever guessed.

"I'm going to get a Diet Coke," she said, climbing down from my bed – careful not to jostle the mattress since the nurse had already come in twice and warned her not to. Like I hadn't consumed enough Tylenol with codeine to block out the pain. Somebody could have dropped a safe on my head and I probably wouldn't have felt it.

"You want?" Gina asked, pausing by the door.

"Sure," I said. "Just make sure – "

"Yeah, yeah," she said over her shoulder as the door swung slowly shut behind her. "I'll find a straw somewhere."

Alone in my room, I adjusted the pillows behind me carefully, and then sat there, staring at nothing. People who are on as many painkillers as I was tend to do that a lot.