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Academy to myself. I mean, things were weird between Jesse and me, it was true. But that didn’t mean I was at all anxious to lose him.
    “So how was school?” Jesse wanted to know.
    “Fine,” I said. I was afraid to say anything more. For one thing, I was worried I might start blabbing about Paul. And for another, well, I’d found that the less said between Jesse and me, overall, the better. Otherwise, I had a tendency to prattle nervously. While I’d found that generally, prattling kept Jesse from dematerializing—as he tended to do more often now, with a hasty apology, whenever any awkward silences ensued between us—it did not seem to engender a similar desire to gab from him. Jesse had been almost unbearably quiet since…
    Well, since the day we’d kissed.
    I don’t know what it is about guys that makes them French you one day, then act like you don’t exist the next. But that was the treatment I had been getting from Jesse lately. I mean, not three weeks ago he had pulled me into his arms and laid a kiss on me that I had felt all the way down to the base of my spine. I had melted in his embrace, thinking that at last, at long last, I could reveal to him my true feelings, the secret love I had borne him since the minute—well, almost, anyway—I had first walked into my new bedroom and found it already occupied. Never mind that that occupant had breathed his last over a century and a half ago.
    I should, I suppose, have known better than to fall in love with a ghost. But that’s the thing about us mediators. To us, ghosts have as much matter as anyone living. Except for the whole immortal thing, there was no reason in the world why Jesse and I, if we wanted to, couldn’t have the torrid affair I’d been dreaming of since he’d first resolutely refused to call me anything but my full name, Susannah, the name no one else but Father Dom ever used.
    Except that no torrid affair followed. After that first kiss—which had been interrupted by my youngest stepbrother—there’d been no other. Jesse had, in fact, apologized profusely for it, then seemed purposefully to avoid me—though I had made it a point to let him know that the whole thing had been all right…more than all right…by me.
    Now I couldn’t help wondering if maybe I’d been too accommodating. Jesse probably thought I was easy or something. I mean, back when he’d been alive, ladies slapped men who’d been as forward as he had been. Even men who looked like Jesse, with flashing dark eyes, thick black hair, washboard abs, and irresistibly sexy smiles.
    I still find it hard to believe anybody could have hated a guy like that enough to off him, but that’s exactly how Jesse ended up haunting my bedroom, the room he was strangled to death in a hundred and fifty years ago.
    Given the circumstances, I really didn’t think there was much point in telling Jesse the details about my day. I just handed him Critical Theory Since Plato and said, “Father Dominic says hello.”
    Jesse seemed pleased by the book. Just my luck to be in love with a guy who gets more jazzed by critical theory than he seems to by the idea of my tongue in his mouth.
    Jesse thumbed through the book while I poured the contents of my backpack on my bed. I was weighted down with homework already, and it was only the first day back. I could tell that eleventh grade was going to be just jam-packed with fun and adventure. I mean, between Paul Slater and trig, what could be more exciting?
    I should have said something to Jesse about Paul then. I should have just been like, “Hey, guess what? Remember that Paul guy whose nose you tried to break? Yeah, he goes to my school now.”
    Because if I’d just been all casual about it, maybe it wouldn’t have been a big deal. I mean, yeah, Jesse hated the guy—and with good reason. But I could have downplayed the whole fact that Paul might possibly be Satan’s spawn. I mean, the guy does sport a Fossil watch. How malevolent could he