Reunion (6 page)

I was still mulling over this in the bookstore as I stood in line for the cashier, the book for CeeCee’s mother in my hands. That was when something brushed my shoulder. I turned around and found myself staring at Michael Meducci.

“Um,” he said. He was holding a book on computer programming. He looked, in the fluorescent lights of the bookstore, pastier than ever. “Hi.” He touched his glasses nervously, as if to assure himself they were still there. “I thought that was you.”

I said, “Hi, Michael,” and moved up a space in the line.

Michael moved up with me. “Oh,” he said. “You know my name.” He sounded pleased.

I didn’t point out that up until that day, I hadn’t. I just said, “Yeah,” and smiled.

Maybe the smile was a mistake. Because Michael stepped a little closer, and gushed, “I just wanted to say thanks. You know. For what you did to your, um, stepbrother today. You know. To make him let me go.”

“Yeah,” I said again. “Well, don’t worry about it.”

“No, I mean it. Nobody has ever done anything like that for me — I mean, before you came to school at the Mission, no one ever stood up to Brad Ackerman. He got away with everything. With murder, practically.”

“Well,” I said. “Not anymore.”

“No,” Michael said with a nervous laugh. “No, not anymore.”

The person ahead of me stepped up to the cashier, and I moved into her place. Michael moved, too, only he went a little too far, and ended up colliding with me. He said, “Oh, I’m sorry,” and backed up.

“That’s okay,” I said. I began to wish, even if it had meant risking a brain hemorrhage, that I’d stayed with Gina.

“Your hair,” Michael said in a soft voice, “smells really good.”

Oh my God. I thought I was going to have an aneurysm right there in line.
Your hair smells really good? Your hair smells really good?
Who did he think he was? James Bond? You don’t tell someone their hair smells good. Not in a
mall.

Fortunately, the cashier yelled, “Next,” and I hurried up to pay for my purchase, thinking that by the time I turned around again, Michael would be gone.

Wrong. So wrong.

Not only was he still there, but it turned out he already owned the book on computer programming — he was just
carrying it around
— so he didn’t even have to make a stop at the cashier’s counter…which was where I’d planned on ditching him.

No. Oh, no. Instead, he followed me right out of the store.

Okay, I told myself. The guy’s sister is in a coma. She went to a pool party, and ended up on life support. That’s gotta screw a person up. And what about the car accident? The guy was just in a horrifying car accident. It’s entirely possible that he may have killed four people. Four people! Not on purpose, of course. But four people, dead, while you yourself escaped perfectly unscathed. That and the comatose sister…well, that’s gotta give a guy issues, right?

So cut him a little slack. Be a little nice to him.

The trouble was that I had already been a little nice to him, and look what had happened: he was practically stalking me.

Michael followed me right into Victoria’s Secret, where I’d instinctively headed, thinking no boy would follow a girl into a place where bras were on such prominent display. Boy, was I ever wrong.

“So, what’d you think,” Michael wanted to know as I stood there fingering a cheetah-print number in rayon, “about our group report? Do you agree with your, uh, friend that Kelly’s argument was fatuous?”

Fatuous?
What sort of word was
that
?

A saleslady came up to us before I had a chance to reply. “Hello,” she said, brightly. “Have you noticed our sale table? Buy three pairs of panties, get a fourth pair free.”

I couldn’t believe she’d said the word
panties
in front of Michael. And I couldn’t believe that Michael just kept standing there
smiling
! I couldn’t even say the word
panties
in front of my
mother
! I whirled around and headed out of the store.

“I don’t normally come to the mall,” Michael was saying. He was sticking to me like a leech. “But when I heard you were going to be here, well, I thought I’d come over and see what it’s all about. Do you come here a lot?”

I was trying to head in the general direction of the food court, in the vague hope that I might be able to ditch Michael in the throng in front of Chick-fil-A. It was tough going, though. For one thing, it looked as if just about every kid in the peninsula had decided to go to the mall after school. And for another, the mall had had one of those events, you know, that malls are always having. This one had been some kind of screwed-up mardi gras, with floats and gold masks and necklaces and all. I guess it had been a success, since they’d left a lot of the stuff up, like these big shiny purple and gold puppets. Bigger than life-size, the puppets were suspended from the mall’s glass atrium ceiling. Some of them were fifteen or twenty feet long. Their appendages dangled down in what I suppose was intended to be a whimsical manner, but in some cases made it hard to maneuver through the crowds.

“No,” I said in reply to Michael’s question. “I try never to come here. I hate it.”

Michael brightened. “Really?” he gushed, as a wave of middle schoolers poured around him. “Me, too! Wow, that’s really a coincidence. You know, there aren’t a whole lot of people our age who dislike places like this. Man is a social animal, you know, and as such is usually drawn toward areas of congregation. It’s really an indication of some biological dysfunction that you and I aren’t enjoying ourselves.”

It occurred to me that my youngest stepbrother, Doc, and Michael Meducci had a lot in common.

It also occurred to me that pointing out to a girl that she might be suffering from a biological dysfunction was not exactly the way to win her heart.

“Maybe,” Michael said, as we dodged a large puppet hand dangling down from an insanely grinning puppet head some fifteen feet above us, “you and I could go somewhere a bit quieter. I have my mom’s car. We could go get coffee or something, in town, if you want —”

That’s when I heard it. A familiar giggle.

Don’t ask me how I could have heard it over the chatter of the people all around us, and the piped-in mall Muzak, and the screaming of some kid whose mother wouldn’t let him have any ice cream. I just heard it, is all.

Laughter. The same laughter I’d heard the day before at Jimmy’s, right before I’d spotted the ghosts of those four dead kids.

And then the next thing I knew, there was a loud snap — the kind of sound a rubber band that’s been stretched too tightly makes when it breaks. I yelled, “Look out!” and tackled Michael Meducci, knocking him to the ground.

Good thing I did, too. Because a second later, exactly where we’d been standing, down crashed a giant grinning puppet head.

When the dust settled, I lifted my face from Michael Meducci’s shirt front and stared at the thing. It wasn’t made of papier-mâché, like I’d thought. It was made of plaster. Bits of plaster were everywhere; clouds of it were still floating around, making me cough. Chunks of it had been wrenched from the puppet’s face, so that, while it was still leering at me, it was doing so with only one eye and a toothless smile.

For half a beat, there was no sound whatsoever, except for my coughing and Michael’s unsteady breathing.

Then a woman screamed.

All hell broke loose after that. People fell over themselves in an effort to get out from under the puppets overhead, as if all of them were going to come crashing down at once.

I guess I couldn’t exactly blame them. The thing had to have weighed a couple hundred pounds, at least. If it had landed on Michael, it would have killed, or at least badly hurt, him. There was no doubt in my mind about that.

Just as there was no doubt, even before I spotted him, who owned the jeering voice that drawled a second later, “Well, look what we have here. Isn’t this
cozy
?”

I looked up and saw that Dopey — along with a breathless Gina, CeeCee, Adam, and Sleepy — had all hurried over.

I didn’t even realize I was still lying on top of Michael until Sleepy reached down and pulled me off.

“Why is it,” my stepbrother asked in a bored voice, “that you can’t be left alone for five minutes without something collapsing on top of you?”

I glared at him as I stumbled to my feet. I have to say, I really can’t wait until Sleepy goes away to college.

“Hey,” Sleepy said, reaching down to give Michael’s cheeks a couple of slaps, I suppose in some misguided attempt to bring him around, though I doubt this is a method espoused by EMS. Michael’s eyes were closed, and even though I could see he was breathing, he didn’t look good.

The slaps worked, though. Michael’s eyelids fluttered open.

“You okay?” I asked him worriedly.

He didn’t see the hand I stretched out toward him. He’d lost his glasses. He fumbled around for them in the plaster dust.

“M-my glasses,” he said.

CeeCee found them and picked them up, brushing them off as best she could before handing them back to him.

“Thanks.” Michael put the glasses on, and his eyes, behind the lenses, got very large as he took in the carnage around us. The puppet had missed him, but it had managed to take out a bench and a steel trash can without any problem whatsoever.

“Oh my God,” Michael said.

“I’ll say,” Adam said. “If it hadn’t been for Suze, you’d have been crushed to death by a giant plaster puppet head. Kind of a sucky way to die, huh?”

Michael continued to stare at the debris. “Oh my God,” he said again.

“Are you all right, Suze?” Gina asked, laying a hand on my arm.

I nodded. “Yeah, I think so. No broken bones, anyway. Michael? How about you? You still in one piece?”

“How would he be able to tell?” Dopey asked with a sneer, but I glared at him, and I guess he remembered how hard I can pull hair, since for once he shut up.

“I’m fine,” Michael said. He shoved away the hands Sleepy had stretched out to help him to his feet. “Leave me alone. I said I was fine.”

Sleepy backed up. “Whoa,” he said. “Excuse me. Just trying to help. Come on, G. Our shakes are melting.”

Wait a minute. I threw a startled glance in the direction of my best friend and eldest stepbrother.
G?
Who’s
G
?

CeeCee fished a bag out from underneath the waves of shiny purple and gold material. “Hey,” she said delightedly. “Is this the book you got for my mom?”

Sleepy, I saw, was walking back toward the food court, his arm around Gina.
Gina. My best friend!
My best friend appeared to be allowing my stepbrother to buy her shakes and put his arm around her! And call her G!

Michael had climbed to his feet. Some mall cops arrived just about then and went, “Hey, there, guy, take it easy. An ambulance is on its way.”

But Michael, with a violent motion, shrugged free of them, and, with a last, inscrutable look at the puppet head, stumbled away, the mall cops trailing after him, obviously concerned about the likelihood of a concussion…or a lawsuit.

“Wow,” CeeCee said, shaking her head. “That’s gratitude for you. You save the guy’s life, and he takes off without even a thank you.”

Adam said, “Yeah. How is it, Suze, that whenever something is about to come crashing down on some guy’s head, you always know it and tackle him? And how can I get something to crash down on my head so that you have to tackle me?”

CeeCee whacked him in the gut. Adam pretended it had hurt, and staggered around comically for a while before nearly tripping over the puppet, and then stopping to stare down at it.

“I wonder what caused it,” Adam said. Some mall employees were there now, wondering the same thing, with many nervous glances in my direction. If they’d known my mom was a television news journalist, they probably would have been falling all over themselves in an attempt to give me free gift certificates to Casual Corner and stuff.

“I mean, it’s kind of weird if you think about it,” Adam went on. “The thing was up there for weeks, and then all of a sudden Michael Meducci stands underneath it, and —”

“Bam,” CeeCee said. “Kind of like…I don’t know. Someone up there has got it out for him or something.”

Which reminded me. I looked around, thinking I might catch a glimpse of the owner of that giggle I’d heard, just before the puppet had come down on us.

I didn’t see anyone, but that didn’t matter. I knew who’d been behind it.

And it sure hadn’t been any angel.

“Well,” Jesse said when I told him about it later that night. “You know what you have to do, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said sullenly, my chin on my knees. “I have to tell her about that time I found that nudie magazine under the front seat of the Rambler. That oughta make her change her mind about him real quick.”

The scarred eyebrow went up. “Susannah,” he said. “What are you talking about?”

“Gina,” I said, surprised he didn’t know. “And Sleepy.”

“No,” Jesse said. “I meant about the boy, Susannah.”

“What boy?” Then I remembered. “Oh. You mean Michael?”

“Yes,” Jesse said. “If what you’re telling me is true, he is in a lot of danger, Susannah.”

“I know.” I leaned back on my elbows. The two of us were sitting out on the roof of the front porch, which happened to stick out beneath my bedroom windows. It was kind of nice out there, actually, under the stars. We were high enough up so that no one could see us — not that anyone but me and Father Dom could see Jesse, anyway — and it smelled good because of the giant pine tree to one side of the porch. It was the only place, these days, that we could sit and talk without fear of being interrupted by people. Well, just one person, actually: my houseguest, Gina.

“So, what are you going to do about it?” In the moonlight, Jesse’s white shirt looked blue. So did the highlights in his black hair.

“I have no idea,” I said.

“Don’t you?”

Jesse looked at me. I hate it when he does that. It makes me feel…I don’t know. Like he’s mentally comparing me with someone else. And the only someone else I could think of was Maria de Silva, the girl Jesse was on his way to marry when he died. I had seen a portrait of her once. She was one hot babe, for the 1850s. It’s no fun, let me tell you, being compared to a chick who died before you were even born.