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thick wrestler’s neck sprouted like a tree trunk from between a couple of boulders. “So I guess Suze’s reign as VP is finito .”
    My mother glanced at me, concernedly. “You didn’t know about this, Susie?”
    It was my turn to shrug. “No,” I said. “But it’s cool. I never really thought of myself as the student government type.”
    This reply did not have the desired effect, however. My mother pressed her lips together, then said, “Well, I don’t like it. Some new boy coming in and taking Susie’s place. It isn’t fair.”
    “It may not be fair,” David pointed out, “but it’s the natural order of things. Darwin proved that the strongest and fittest of the species tend to be the most successful, and Paul Slater is a superb physical specimen. Every female who comes in contact with him, I’ve noticed, has a distinct propensity to exhibit preening behavior.”
    My mother heard this last comment with some amusement. “My goodness,” she said mildly. “And you, Susie? Does Paul Slater cause you to exhibit preening behavior?”
    “Hardly,” I said.
    Brad burped again. This time when he did it, he said, “ Liar .”
    I glared at him. “Brad,” I said. “I do not like Paul Slater.”
    “That’s not what it looked like to me,” Brad said, “when I saw the two of you in the breezeway this morning.”
    “Wrong,” I said hotly. “You could not be more wrong.”
    “Oh,” Brad said. “Give it up, Suze. There was definite preenage going on. Unless you just had so much mousse in your hair that your fingers got stuck in there.”
    “Enough,” my mother said, as I drew breath to deny this, too. “Both of you.”
    “I do not like Paul Slater,” I said again, just in case Brad hadn’t heard me the first time. “Okay? In fact, I hate him.”
    My mother looked aggrieved. “Susie,” she said, “I’m surprised at you. It’s wrong to say you hate anyone. And how could you hate the poor boy already? You only just met him today.”
    “She knows him from before,” Brad volunteered. “From over the summer at Pebble Beach.”
    I glared at him some more. “How do you know that ?”
    “Paul told me,” Brad said with a shrug.
    Feeling a sense of dread—it would be just like Paul to spill the whole mediator thing to my family just to mess with me—I asked, trying to sound casual, “Oh, yeah? What else did he tell you?”
    “Just that,” Brad said. Then his tone grew sarcastic. “Much as it might come as a surprise to you, Suze, people do have other stuff to talk about besides you.”
    “Brad,” Andy said in a warning tone as he came out of the kitchen carrying a tray of sizzling strips of beef and another of soft, steaming tortillas. “Watch it.” Then, lowering the twin trays, his gaze fastened on the empty chair beside me. “Where’s Jake?”
    We all glanced blankly at one another. It hadn’t even registered that my eldest stepbrother was missing. None of us knew where Jake was. But all of us knew from Andy’s tone that when Jake got home, he was a dead man.
    “Maybe,” my mother ventured, “he got held up in a class. You know it is only his first week of college, Andy. His schedule may not be the most regular for a while.”
    “I asked him this morning,” Andy said in an aggrieved tone, “if he was going to be home in time for supper, and he said he was. If he was going to be late, the least he could have done was call.”
    “Maybe he’s stuck in some line at registration,” my mom said soothingly. “Come on, Andy. You’ve made a lovely meal. It would be a shame not to sit down and eat it before it gets cold.”
    Andy sat down, but he didn’t look at all eager to eat. “It’s just,” he said, in a speech we’d all heard approximately four hundred times before, “when someone goes to the trouble to prepare a nice meal, it’s only polite that everybody shows up for it on time—”
    It was as he was saying this that the front door slammed, and Jake’s voice