“Good God in heaven,” he cried, hurrying toward us. “Are you children all right? Susannah, are you hurt? Bryce?”
I sat up slowly. I frequently have to check for broken bones, and have found, over the years, that the slower you get up, the more chance you have at discovering what’s broken, and the less chance there is you’ll put weight on it.
But in this particular case, nothing seemed broken. I got to my feet.
“Good gracious,” Father Dom was saying. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said, brushing myself off. There were little pieces of wood all over me. And this was my best Donna Karan jacket. I looked around for Heather—really, if I’d have found her at that particular moment, I’d have killed her, I really would have…except, of course, that she’s already dead. But she was gone.
“God,” Bryce said, coming up to me. He didn’t look hurt, just shaken up a little. Actually, it would have been hard to hurt a guy as big as he was. He was six feet tall and broad shouldered, a genuine Baldwin.
And he was talking to me. Me!
“God, are you okay?” he wanted to know. “Thank you. God. I think you must have saved my life.”
“Oh,” I said. “It was nothing, really.” I couldn’t resist reaching out and plucking a splinter of wood from his sweater vest. Cashmere. Just as I’d suspected.
“What is going on here?” A tall guy in a lot of robes with a red beanie on his head came pushing through the crowd. When he saw the wood on the ground, then looked up to take in the gaping hole where it was supposed to be, he turned on Father Dom and said, “See? See, Dominic? This is what comes of you letting your precious birds nest wherever they want! Mr. Ackerman warned us this might happen, and look! He was right! Somebody might have been killed!”
So this, then, was Monsignor Constantine.
“I’m so sorry, Monsignor,” Father Dom said. “I can’t think how such a thing could have happened. Thank heavens no one was hurt.” He turned to Bryce and me. “You two are all right? You know, I think Miss Simon looks a little pale. I’ll just take her off to see the nurse, if that’s all right with you, Susannah. The rest of you children get on to class now. Everyone is all right. It was just an accident. Run along, now.”
Amazingly, people did as he said. Father Dominic had that kind of way about him. You just sort of had to do what he said. Thank God he used his powers for good instead of evil!
I wish the same could have been said of the monsignor. He stood in the suddenly empty corridor, staring down at the piece of wood. Anybody could tell just to look at it that it wasn’t the least bit rotten. The wood wasn’t new by any means, but it was perfectly dry.
“I’m having those bird nests removed, Dominic,” the monsignor said bitterly. “All of them. We simply can’t take these kinds of risks. Supposing one of the tourists had been standing here? Or, God forbid, the archbishop. He’s coming next month, you know. What if Archbishop Rivera had been standing here and this beam had fallen? What then, Dominic?”
The nuns who’d come out, hearing all the ruckus, cast looks of such reproof at poor Father Dominic that I nearly said something. I opened my mouth to do so, in fact, but Father Dom tightened his grip on my arm and started marching me away. “Of course,” he called. “You’re quite right. I’ll get the custodial staff right on it, Monsignor. We couldn’t have the archbishop injured. No, indeed.”
“God, what a pus-head!” I said, as soon as we were safely behind the closed door to the principal’s office. “Is he kidding, thinking a couple of birds could do that?”
Father Dominic had gone straight across the room to a small cabinet in which there were a number of trophies and plaques—teaching awards, I found out later. Before he’d been reassigned by the diocese to an administrative position, Father Dominic had been a popular and much-loved teacher of biology. He reached behind one of the awards and drew out a packet of cigarettes.
“I’m not sure it isn’t a bit sacrilegious, Susannah,” he said, looking down at the red-and-white pack, “to refer to a monsignor in the Catholic church as a pus-head.”
“Good thing I’m not Catholic, then,” I said. “And you can smoke one of those if you want to.” I nodded at the cigarettes in his hand. “I won’t tell.”
He looked down longingly at the pack for a minute more, then heaved this big sigh, and put them back where he’d found them. “No,” he said. “Thank you, but I’d better not.”
Jeez. Maybe it was a good thing I’d never really gotten the hang of the smoking thing.
I thought I’d better change the subject, so I stooped to examine some of the teaching awards. “1964,” I said. “You’ve been around a while.”
“I have.” Father Dom sat down behind his desk. “What, in heaven’s name, happened out there, Susannah?”
“Oh,” I shrugged. “That was just Heather. I guess we know now why she’s sticking around. She wants to kill Bryce Martinson.”
Father Dominic shook his head. “This is terrible. It really is. I’ve never seen such…such violence from a spirit. Never, not in all my years as a mediator.”
“Really?” I looked out the window. The principal’s office looked, not out to the sea, but toward the hills where I lived. “Hey,” I said. “You can see my house from here!”
“And she was always such a sweet girl, too. We never had a disciplinary problem from Heather Chambers, not in all her years at the Mission Academy. What could be causing her to feel so much hatred for a young man she professed to love?”
I glanced at him over my shoulder. “Are you kidding me?”
“Yes, well, I know they broke up, but such extreme emotions—this killing rage she’s in. Surely that’s quite unusual—”
I shook my head. “Excuse me, I know you took a vow of celibacy and all, but haven’t you ever been in love? Don’t you know what it’s like? That guy hosed her. She thought they were going to get married. I know, that was stupid, especially since she’s only what, sixteen? Still, he just hosed her. If that’s not enough to inspire a killing rage in a girl, I don’t know what is.”
He studied me thoughtfully. “You’re speaking from experience.”
“Who me? Not quite. I mean, I’ve had crushes on guys and stuff, but I can’t say any of them have ever returned the favor.” Much to my chagrin. “Still, I can imagine how Heather must have felt when he broke up with her.”
“Like killing herself, I suppose,” Father Dominic said.
“Exactly. But killing herself didn’t turn out to be enough. She won’t be satisfied until she takes him down with her.”
“This is dreadful,” Father Dominic said. “Really, really dreadful. I’ve talked with her until I was blue in the face, and she won’t listen. And now, the first day back, this happens. I’m going to have to advise that the young man stay home until we can get this resolved.”
I laughed. “How are you going to do that? Tell him his dead girlfriend’s trying to kill him? Oh, yeah, that’ll go over well with the monsignor.”
“Not at all.” Father Dom opened a drawer, and started rifling through it. “With a little ingenuity, I can see that Mr. Martinson is out for a solid week or two.”
“Oh, no way!” I felt myself go pale. “You’re going to poison him? I thought you were a priest! Isn’t there a rule against that sort of thing?”
“Poison? No, no, Susannah. I was thinking of giving him head lice. The nurse checks for them once a semester. I’ll just see that young Mr. Martinson comes down with a bad case of them—”
“Oh my God!” I shrieked. “That’s disgusting! You can’t put lice in that guy’s hair!”
Father Dominic looked up from his drawer. “Why ever not? It will serve our purposes exactly. Keep him out of harm’s way long enough for you and I to talk some sense into Miss Chambers, and—”
“You can’t put lice in that guy’s hair,” I said again, more vehemently than was, perhaps, necessary. I don’t know why I was so against the idea, except
that…well, he had such nice hair. I’d gotten a pretty close look at it when we’d been sprawled on the ground together. It was curly, soft-looking hair, the kind of hair I could picture myself running my fingers through. The thought of bugs crawling around in it turned my stomach. How did that kid’s rhyme go?
You gazed into my eyes
What could I do but linger?
I ran my hands all through your hair
And a cootie bit my finger.
“Aw, jeez,” I said, sitting down on top of the desk. “Hold the lice, will you? Let me deal with Heather. You say you’ve been talking to her for how long now? A week?”
“Since the New Year,” Father Dominic said. “Yes. That’s when she first showed up here. I can see now she’s just been waiting for Bryce.”
“Right. Well, let me take care of it. Maybe she just needs a little dose of girl talk.”
“I don’t know.” Father Dominic regarded me a little dubiously. “I really feel that you have a bit of a propensity toward…well, toward the physical. The role of a mediator is supposed to be a non-violent one, Susannah. You are supposed to be someone who helps troubled spirits, not hurts them.”
“Hello? Were you out there just now? You think I was just supposed to stand there and talk that beam into not crushing that guy’s skull?”
“Of course not. I’m just saying that if you tried a little compassion—”
“Hey. I have plenty of compassion, Father. My heart bleeds for this girl, it really does. But this is my school. Got it? Mine. Not hers, not anymore. She made her decision, and now she’s got to stick with it. And I’m not letting her take Bryce—or anyone else—down with her.”
“Well.” Father Dominic looked skeptical. “Well, if you’re sure…”
“Oh, I’m sure.” I hopped off his desk. “Just leave it to me, all right?”
Father Dominic said, “All right.” But he said it kind of faintly, I noticed. I had to get him to write me a hall pass so I could get back to class without getting busted by one of the nuns. I was waiting for one of them—a pinch-faced novice—to finish scrutinizing this pass before she’d let me go on down the corridor when a side door marked NURSE opened, and out stepped Bryce with a hall pass of his own.
“Hey,” I couldn’t help blurting out. “What happened? Did she—I mean, did something else happen? Are you hurt?”
He grinned a bit sheepishly. “No. Well, unless you count this wicked splinter I got under my thumbnail. I was trying to brush all those little pieces of wood off my pants, you know, and one of them got under there, and—” He held up his right hand. A large bandage had been wrapped around his thumb.
“Yikes,” I said.
“I know.” He looked mournful. “She used Mercurochrome, too. I hate that stuff.”
“Man,” I said. “You have had a rotten day.”
“Not really,” he said, putting his thumb down.
“At least, not as bad as it would have been if you hadn’t been here. If it weren’t for you, I’d be dead.” He noticed that I’d come through the door marked PRINCIPAL and asked, “Did you get in trouble or something?”
“No,” I said. “Father Dominic just wanted me to fill out some forms. I’m new, you know.”
“And as a new student,” the novice said severely, “you ought to be made aware that loitering in the halls is not allowed. Both of you had better get to your classes.”
I apologized and took back my pass. Bryce very chivalrously offered to show me where my next class was, and the novice went away, seemingly satisfied. As soon as she was out of earshot, Bryce said, “You’re Suze, right? Jake told me about you. You’re his new stepsister from New York.”
“That’s me,” I said. “And you’re Bryce Martinson.”
“Oh, Jake’s mentioned me?”
I almost laughed out loud at the idea of Sleepy mentioning much of anything. I said, “No, it wasn’t Jake.”
He said, “Oh,” in such a sad voice that I almost felt sorry for him. “I guess people must be talking about me, huh?”
“A little.” I took the plunge. “I’m sorry about what happened with your girlfriend.”
“So am I, believe me.” If he was mad that I’d brought the subject up, you couldn’t tell. “I didn’t even want to come back here after…you know. I tried to transfer to RLS, but they’re full. Even the public school didn’t want me. It’s tough to transfer with only one semester to go. I wouldn’t have come back at all except that…well, you know. Colleges generally want you to have graduated from high school before they’ll let you in.”
I laughed. “I’ve heard that.”
“Anyway.” Bryce noticed I was holding my coat—I’d been dragging it around all day since I couldn’t use my locker, the door having been dented permanently shut when I’d knocked Heather into it—and said, “Want me to carry that for you?”
I was so shocked by this civility that without even thinking, I said, “Sure,” and passed it over to him. He folded it over one arm, and said, “So, I guess everybody must be blaming me for what happened. To Heather, I mean.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “If anything, people are blaming Heather for what happened to Heather.”
“Yeah,” Bryce said, “but I mean, I drove her to it, you know? That’s the thing. If I just hadn’t broken up with her—”
“You have a pretty high opinion of yourself, don’t you?”
He looked taken aback. “What?”
“Well, your assumption that she killed herself because you broke up with her. I don’t think that’s why she killed herself at all. She killed herself because she was sick. You had nothing to do with making her that way. Your breaking up with her may have acted as a sort of catalyst for her final breakdown, but it could just have easily been some other crisis in her life—her parents getting divorced, her not making the cheerleader squad, her cat dying. Anything. So try not to be so hard on yourself.” We were at the door to my classroom—geometry, I think it was, with Sister Mary Catherine. I turned to him and took my coat back. “Well, this is my stop. Thanks for the lift.”
He held onto one sleeve of my coat. “Hey,” he said, looking down at me. It was hard to see his eyes—it was pretty dark beneath the breezeway, shadowed as it was from the sun. But I remembered from when we’d fallen down together that his eyes were blue. A really nice blue. “Hey, listen,” he said. “Let me take you out tonight. To thank you for saving my life and everything.”
“Thanks,” I said, giving my coat a tug. “But I already have plans.” I didn’t add that my plans involved him in a most intimate manner.
“Tomorrow night, then,” he said, still not relinquishing my coat.
“Look,” I said, “I’m not allowed to go out on school nights.”
This was patently untrue. Except for the fact that the police have brought me home a few times, my mother trusted me implicitly. If I wanted to go out with a boy on a school night, she’d have let me. The thing is, the subject had never really come up, no boy ever having offered to take me out on a school night, or any other for that matter.
Not that I’m a dog or anything. I mean, I’m no Cindy Crawford, but I’m not exactly busted, either. I guess the truth of the matter is, I was always considered something of a weirdo in my old school. Girls who spend a lot of time talking to themselves and getting in trouble with the police generally are.
Don’t get me wrong. Occasionally new guys would show up at school, and they’d express some interest in me…but only until someone who knew me filled them in. Then they’d avoid me like I had the plague or something.
East Coast boys. What did they know?
But now I had a chance to start all over, with a new population of boys who had no idea about my past—well, except for Sleepy and Dopey, and I doubted they would tell since neither of them are what you’d call…well, verbal.
Neither of them had evidently gotten to Bryce, anyway, since the next words out of his mouth were, “This weekend, then. What are you
doing Saturday night?”
I wasn’t sure it was such a good idea to get involved with a guy whose dead girlfriend was trying to kill him. I mean, what if she found out and resented me for it? I was sure Father Dominic wouldn’t think it was very cool, me going out with Bryce.
Then again, how often did a girl like me get asked out by a totally hot guy like Bryce Martinson?
“Okay,” I said. “Saturday it is. Pick me up at seven?”
He grinned. He had very nice teeth, white and even. “Seven,” he said, letting go of my coat. “See you then. If not before.”
“See you then.” I stood with my hand on the door to Sister Mary Catherine’s geometry class. “Oh, and Bryce.”
He had started down the breezeway, toward his own classroom. “Yeah?”
“Watch your back.”
I think he winked at me, but it was kind of hard to tell in the shade.
Chapter
Nine
When I climbed into the Rambler at the end of the day, Doc was all over me. “Everybody’s talking about it!” he cried, bouncing up and down on the seat. “Everybody saw it! You saved that guy’s life! You saved Bryce Martinson’s life!”
“I didn’t save his life,” I said, calmly twisting the rearview mirror so I could see how my hair looked. Perfect. Salt air definitely agrees with me.
“You did so. I saw that big chunk of wood. If that’d landed on his head, it’ve killed him! You saved him, Suze. You really did.”
“Well.” I rubbed a little gloss into my lips. “Maybe.”
“God, you’ve only been at the Mission one day, and already you’re the most popular girl in school!”
Doc was completely unable to contain himself. Sometimes I wondered whether Ritalin might have been the answer. Not that I didn’t like the kid. In fact, I liked him best out of all of Andy’s boys—which I realize is not saying much, but it’s all I’ve got. It had been Doc who, just the night before, had come to me while I’d been trying to decide what to wear my first day at school and asked me, his face very pale, if I was sure I didn’t want to trade bedrooms with him.