Above her head, the hole had widened. I could see lightning flashing in it. It didn’t look like the most pleasant place to go. I’m not saying I’d opened a gate to hell or anything—at least, I hope not—but it was definitely a dimension other than our own, and frankly, it didn’t look like a nice place to visit, let alone live in for all eternity.
“Just one more minute,” I said, as more and more snaky red limbs wrapped around her slender cheerleader’s body. “And you’ll be there.”
Heather tossed her long hair. “Oh, God,” she said. “I can’t wait. First thing I’m going to do, I’m going to go down to the hospital and apologize to Bryce. Don’t you think that’s a good idea, Susie?”
I said, “Sure.” The thunder was getting louder, the lightning more frequent. “That’s a great idea.”
“I hope my mom hasn’t gotten rid of my clothes,” Heather said. “Just because I was dead. You don’t think my mom would have gotten rid of my clothes, do you, Susie?” She opened her eyes. “Do you?”
I shouted, “Keep your eyes closed!”
But it was too late. She had seen. Oh, boy, had she seen. She took one look at the red wisps wrapped around her and started shrieking.
And not with fear, either. Oh, no. Heather wasn’t scared. She was mad. Really mad.
“You bitch!” she shrieked. “You aren’t sending me back! You aren’t sending me back at all! You’re sending me away!”
And then, just when the thunder was getting loudest, Heather stepped out of the circle.
Just like that. She just stepped out of it. Like it was no big deal. Like it was a hopscotch square. Those red wisps of smoke that had been wrapped all around her just fell away. Fell away like nothing. And the hole above Heather’s head closed up.
Okay. I admit it. I got mad. Hey, I’d put a lot of work into this thing.
“Oh, no you don’t,” I growled. I strode up to Heather and grabbed her. Around the neck, I’m afraid.
“Get back in there,” I said, from between gritted teeth. “Get back in there right now.”
Heather only laughed. I had the girl by the throat, and she only laughed.
Behind her, though, the locker doors started humming again. More loudly than ever.
“You,” she said, “are so dead. You are so dead, Simon. And you know what? I’m going to make sure that the rest of them go with you. All of your little freaky friends. And that stepbrother of yours, too.”
I tightened my grip on her throat. “I don’t think so. I think you’re going to get back where you were and go away like a good little ghost.”
She laughed again. “Make me,” she said, her blue eyes glittering like crazy.
Well. If you put it that way.
I hit her hard with my right fist. Then, before she had a chance to recover, I hit her the other way with my left. If she felt the blows, she made no sign. No, that’s not true. I know she felt the blows because the locker doors suddenly started opening and closing. Not closing, exactly. Slamming. Hard. Hard enough to shake the whole breezeway.
I mean it. The whole breezeway was pitching back and forth, as if the ground beneath it was really ocean waves. The thick wooden support pillars that held up the arched roof shook in ground that had held them steady for close to three hundred years. Three hundred years of earthquakes, fires, and floods, and the ghost of a cheerleader sends them tumbling down.
I tell you, this mediation stuff is no damned fun.
And then her fingers were around my throat. I don’t know how. I guess I got distracted by all the shaking. This was no good. I grabbed her by the arms, and started trying to push her back toward the circle of candles. As I did so, I muttered the Portuguese incantation under my breath, staring at the swaying rafters overhead, hoping that the hole to that shadowy land would open up again.
“Shut up,” Heather said, when she heard what I was saying. “Shut your mouth! You are not sending me away. I belong here! A lot more than you!”
I kept saying the words. I kept pushing.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” Heather’s face was red with rage. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a planter packed with geraniums levitate a few inches off the stone balustrade on which it had been resting. “You’re no one. You’ve only been at this school two days. Two days! You think you can just come in here and change everything? You think you can just take my place? Who do you think you are?”
I kicked out a leg and, pulling on the arms I held at the same time as I swept her feet out from under her, sent us both crashing to the hard stone floor. The planter followed, not because we’d knocked it over, but because Heather sent it hurling through the air at me. I ducked at the last minute, and the heavy clay pot smashed against the locker doors in an explosion of mulch and geranium and pottery shards. I grabbed fistfuls of Heather’s long, glossy, blonde hair. This was not very sporting of me, but hey, throwing the geraniums hadn’t been very sporting of her.
She shrieked, kicking and writhing like an eel while I half dragged, half shoved her toward the circle of candles. She’d started levitating other objects. The combination locks spun out of their cores in the locker doors, and careened through the air at me like tiny little flying saucers. Then a tornado rolled in, sucking the contents of those lockers out into the breezeway, so that textbooks and three-ring binders were flying at me from four directions. I kept my head down, but didn’t lose my hold on her even when somebody’s trig book hit me hard in the shoulder. I kept saying the words I knew would open the hole again.
“Why are you doing this?” Heather shrieked. “Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
“Because.” I was bruised, I was out of breath, I was dripping with sweat, and all I wanted to do was let go of her, turn around and go home, crawl into my bed, and sleep for a million years.
But I couldn’t.
So instead, I kicked her in the center of the chest and sent her staggering back to the center of the circle of candles. And the minute she stumbled over that photograph of herself she’d given to Bryce, the hole that had opened up above her head reappeared. And this time, the red smoke closed around her as suffocatingly as a thick wool blanket. She wasn’t breaking out again. Not that easily.
The red fog had encased her so thickly, I couldn’t see her anymore, but I could sure hear her. Her shrieks ought to have waked the dead—except, of course, she was the only dead around. Thunder clapped over her head. Inside the black hole that had opened above her, I thought I saw stars twinkling.
“Why?” Heather screamed. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“Because,” I said. “I’m the mediator.”
And then two things happened almost simultaneously.
The red smoke surrounding Heather began to be sucked back up into the spinning hole, taking Heather with it.
And the sturdy pillars that supported the breezeway over my head suddenly snapped in two as cleanly as if they’d been two inches, and not two feet, thick.
And then the breezeway collapsed on top of me.
Chapter
Eighteen
I have no idea how long I lay beneath the planks of wood and heavy clay tiles of the crumpled breezeway. Looking back, I realize I must have lost consciousness, if only for a few minutes.
All I can remember is something sharp hitting me on the head, and the next thing I knew, I’d opened my eyes to consummate blackness, and a feeling that I was being smothered.
A favorite trick of some poltergeists is to sit on their victim’s chest while he or she is just waking, so that the poor soul feels he or she is being smothered, but can’t see why. I couldn’t see why, and for a second or two I thought I’d failed and that Heather was still in this world, sitting on my chest, torturing me, getting her revenge for what I’d tried to do.
Then I thought, Maybe I’m dead.
I don’t know why. But it occurred to me. Maybe this was how being dead felt. At first, anyway. This must have been how it was for Heather when she woke up in her coffin. She must hav
e felt the same way I did: trapped, suffocated, frightened witless. God, no wonder she’d been in such a bad mood all the time. No wonder she’d wanted so desperately to get back to the world she’d known pre-death. This was horrible. It was worse than horrible. It was hell.
But then I moved my hand—the only part of me I could move—and felt something rough and cool resting over me. That’s when I knew what had happened. The breezeway had collapsed. Heather had used her last little bit of kinetic power to hurt me for sending her away. And she’d done a splendid job because here I was unable to move, trapped underneath who knew how many pounds of wood and Spanish tile.
Thanks, Heather. Thanks a lot.
I should have been scared. I mean, there I was pinned down, completely unable to move, in utter darkness. But before I had time to start panicking, I heard someone call my name. I thought at first I might be going crazy. Nobody knew, after all, that I’d gone down to the school except for Jesse, of course, and I’d told him what would happen if he showed up. He wasn’t stupid. He knew I was performing an exorcism. Could he have decided to come down, anyway? Was it safe yet? I didn’t know. If he happened to step into the circle of candles and chicken blood, would he be sucked into that same dark shadowland that took Heather?
Now I started to panic.
“Jesse!” I yelled, pounding on the wood above my head, causing dirt and bits of wood to fall down onto my face. “Don’t!” I shrieked. All the dust was making me choke, but I didn’t care. “Go back! It isn’t safe!”
Then a great weight was lifted off my chest, and suddenly I could see. Above me stretched the night sky, velvet blue and spotted with a dusting of stars. And framed by those stars hung a face hovering over me worriedly.
“Here she is,” Doc called, his voice wobbling in both pitch and volume. “Jake, I found her!”
A second face joined the first one, this one framed by a curtain of over-long blond hair. “Jesus Christ,” Sleepy drawled, when he got a look at me. “Are you all right, Suze?”
I nodded dazedly. “Help me up,” I said.
The two of them managed to get most of the bigger pieces of timber off me. Then Sleepy instructed me to wrap my arms around his neck, which I did, while David grabbed my waist. And with the two of them pulling, and me pushing with my feet, I finally managed to get clear of the rubble.
We sat for a minute in the darkness of the courtyard, leaning against the edge of the dais on which the headless statue of Junipero Serra stood. We just sat there, panting and staring at the ruin which had once been our school. Well, that’s a bit dramatic, I guess. Most of the school was still standing. Even most of the breezeway was still up. Just the section in front of Heather’s locker and Mr. Walden’s classroom had come down. The twisted pile of wood neatly hid the evidence of my evening’s activities, including the candles, which had evidently gone out. There was no sign of Heather. The night was perfectly quiet except for the sound of our breathing. And the crickets. That’s how I knew Heather was really gone. The crickets had started up again.
“Jesus,” Sleepy said again, still panting pretty heavily, “are you sure you’re all right, Suze?”
I turned to look at him. All he had on was a pair of jeans and an Army jacket, thrown hastily over a bare chest. Sleepy, I noticed, had almost as defined a six-pack as Jesse.
How is it that I’d nearly been smothered to death, and yet I could sit there and notice things like my stepbrother’s abdominal muscles a few minutes later?
“Yeah,” I said, pushing some hair out of my eyes. “I’m fine. A little banged up, maybe. But nothing broken.”
“She should probably go to the hospital and get checked out.” David’s voice was still pretty wobbly. “Don’t you think she should go to the hospital and get checked out, Jake?”
“No,” I said. “No hospitals.”
“You could have a concussion,” David said. “Or a fractured skull. You might slip into a coma in your sleep and never wake up. You should at least get an X ray. Or an MRI, maybe. A CAT scan wouldn’t hurt, either—”
“No.” I brushed my hands off on my leggings and stood up. My body felt pretty creaky, but whole. “Come on. Let’s get out of here before somebody comes. They were bound to have heard all that.” I nodded toward the part of the building where the priests and nuns lived. Lights had come on in some of the windows. “I don’t want to get you guys in trouble.”
“Yeah,” Sleepy said, getting up. “Well, you might have thought of that before you snuck out, huh?”
We left the way we’d come in. Like me, David had wriggled in beneath the front gate, then unlocked it from the inside and let Sleepy in. We slipped out as quietly as we could, and hurried to the Rambler, which Sleepy had parked in some shadows, out of sight of the police car. The black-and-white was still sitting there, its occupant perfectly oblivious to what had gone on just a few dozen yards away. Still, I didn’t want to risk anything by trying to sneak past him, and retrieve my bike. We just left it there, and hoped no one would notice it.
The whole way home, my new big brother Jake lectured me. Apparently, he thought I’d been at the school in the middle of the night as part of some sort of gang initiation. I kid you not. He was really very indignant about the whole thing. He wanted to know what kind of friends I thought these people were, leaving me to die under a pile of roofing tiles. He suggested that if I were bored or in need of a thrill, I should take up surfing because, and I quote, “If you’re gonna have your head split open, it might as well be while you’re riding a wave, dude.”
I took his lecture as gracefully as I could. After all, I couldn’t very well tell him the real reason I’d been down at the school after hours. I only interrupted Jake once during his little antigang speech, and that was to ask him just how he and David had known to come after me.
“I don’t know,” Jake said, as we pulled up the driveway. “All I know is, I was catching some pretty heavy-duty Z’s, when all of a sudden Dave is all over me, telling me we have to go down to the school and find you. How’d you know she was down there, anyway, Dave?”
David’s face was unnaturally white even in the moonlight. “I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I just had a feeling.”
I turned to look at him, hard. But he wouldn’t meet my eye.
That kid, I thought. That kid knows.
But I was too tired to talk about it just then. We snuck into the house, relieved that the only occupant who woke upon our entrance was Max, who wagged his tail and tried to lick us as we made our way to our rooms. Before I slipped into mine, I looked over at David just once, to see if he wanted—or needed—to say anything to me. But he didn’t. He just went into his room and shut his door, a scared little boy. My heart swelled for him.
But only for a second. I was too tired to think of anything much but bed—not even Jesse. In the morning, I told myself, as I peeled off my dusty clothes. I’ll talk to him in the morning.
I didn’t, though. When I woke up, the light outside my windows looked funny. When I lifted my head and saw the clock, I realized why. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. All the morning fog had burned away, and the sun was beating down as hard as if it were July and not January.
“Well, hey there, sleepyhead.”
I squinted in the direction of my bedroom door. Andy stood there, leaning against the door-frame with his arms folded across his chest. He was grinning, which meant I probably wasn’t in trouble. What was I doing in bed at two o’clock in the afternoon on a school day, then?
“Feeling better?” Andy wanted to know.
I pushed the bedcovers down a little. Was I supposed to be sick? Well, that wouldn’t be hard to fake. I felt as if someone had dropped a ton of bricks on my head.
Which, in a way, I suppose they had.
“Uh,” I said. “Not really.”
“I’ll get you some aspirin. I guess it all caught up with you, huh? The jet lag, I mean. When we couldn’t wake you up this morning, we decided just to let you sleep
. Your mom said to tell you she’s sorry, but she had to go to work. She put me in charge. Hope you don’t mind.”
I tried to sit up. It was really hard. Every muscle in my body felt as if it had been pounded on. I pushed some hair out of my eyes and blinked at him. “You didn’t have to,” I said. “Stay home on my account, I mean.”
Andy shrugged. “It’s no big deal. I’ve barely had a chance to talk to you since you got here, so I thought we could catch up. You want some lunch?”
The minute he said it, my stomach growled. I was starving.
He heard it and grinned. “No problem. Get dressed and come on downstairs. We’ll have lunch on the deck. It’s really beautiful out today.”
I dragged myself out of bed with an effort. I had my pj’s on. I didn’t feel very much like getting dressed. So I just pulled on some socks and a bathrobe, brushed my teeth, and stood for a minute by the bay windows, looking out as I tried to work the snarls out of my hair. The red dome of the Mission church glowed in the sunlight. I could see the ocean winking behind it. You couldn’t tell from up here that it had been the scene last night of so much destruction.
It wasn’t long before an extremely appetizing aroma rose up from the kitchen and lured me down the stairs. Andy was making Reuben sandwiches. He waved me out of the kitchen, though, toward the huge deck he’d built onto the back of the house. The sun was pouring down there, and I stretched out on one of the padded chaise longues, and pretended like I was a movie star for a while. Then Andy came out with the sandwiches and a pitcher of lemonade, and I moved to the table with the big green umbrella over it, and dug in. For a non–New Yorker, Andy grilled a mean Reuben.
And that wasn’t all he grilled. He spent a half hour grilling me pretty thoroughly…but not about what had happened the night before. To my astonishment, Sleepy and Doc had kept their mouths shut. Andy was perfectly in the dark about what had happened. All he wanted to know was whether I liked my new school, if I was happy, blah, blah, blah….
Except for one thing. He did say to me, as he was asking me how I liked California, and was it really so very different from New York—uh, duh—“So, I guess you slept straight through your first earthquake.”