Rolling his eyes, Brad slid out from his place at the table and trudged back into the kitchen.
"Hi, Susie," my mother said, coming up and ruffling my hair affectionately. "How was your first day back?"
Only my mother, out of all the human beings on the planet, is allowed to call me Susie. Fortunately I had already made this abundantly clear to my stepbrothers, so that they did not even snicker when she did it anymore.
I didn't feel it would have been appropriate to have answered my mother's question truthfully. After all, she is unaware of the fact that her only child is a liaison between the living and the dead. She is not acquainted with Paul, or with the fact that he once tried to kill me, nor is she aware of the existence of Jesse. My mother thinks merely that I am a late bloomer, a wallflower who will come into her own soon enough, and then have boyfriends to spare. Which is surprisingly naive for a woman who works as a television news journalist, even if it is only for a local affiliate.
Sometimes I envy my mom. It must be nice to live on her planet.
"My day was all right," was how I responded to my mother's question.
"'S not going to be so good tomorrow," Brad pointed out, as he came back with the sour cream.
My mother had taken her seat at one end of the table and was flipping out her napkin. We use only cloth napkins. Another Andy-ism. It is more ecologically responsible and makes the presentation of the meal way more Martha Stewart.
"Really?" Mom said, her eyebrows, dark as mine, rose. "How so?"
"Tomorrows when we give the nominations for student body government," Brad said, sliding back into his place. "And Suze is going down as VP."
Flipping out my own napkin and laying it delicately across my lap - along with the giant head of Max, the Ackermans' dog, who spent every meal with his muzzle resting on my thigh, waiting for whatever might fall from my fork and into my lap, a practice I was now so used to, I hardly even noticed anymore - I said, in response to my mother's questioning gaze, "I have no idea what he's talking about."
Brad looked innocent. "Kelly didn't catch you after school?"
Not exactly, given that I'd been in detention after school, something Brad knew perfectly well.
He intended to torture me about it for a while though, you could tell.
"No," I said. "Why?"
"Well, Kel's already asked someone else to be her running mate this year. That new guy, Paul Whatsit." Brad shrugged his shoulders, from which his thick wrestlers neck sprouted like a tree trunk from between a couple of boulders. "So I guess Suze's reign as VP is finite."
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 Jakes voice sounded from the foyer: "Keep your shirt on, I'm here." Jake knew his father well.
My mom shot Andy a look over the bowls of shredded lettuce and cheese we were passing around. The look said, See. Told you so.
"Hey," Jake said, coming into the dining room at his usual far-less-than-brisk pace. "Sorry I'm late. Got held up at the bookstore. The lines to buy books were unbelievable."
My mom's told-you-so look deepened.
All Andy did was growl, "You're lucky. This time. Sit down and eat." Then, to Brad, he said, "Pass the salsa."
Except that Jake didn't sit down and eat. Instead, he stood there, one hand in the front pocket of his jeans, the other still dangling his car keys.
"Uh," he said. "Listen . . ."
We all looked up at him, expecting something interesting to happen, like for Jake to say that the pizza place had messed up his schedule again, and that he couldn't stay for dinner. This generally resulted in some major fireworks from Andy.
But instead, Jake said, "I brought a friend with me. Hope that's okay."
Since my stepfather would rather have a thousand people crowded around our dinner table than a single one of us missing from it, he said equably, "Fine, fine. Plenty for everyone. Take another place setting from the counter."
So Jake went to the counter to grab a plate and knife and fork, while his "friend" came slouching into view, having apparently dawdled in the living room, no doubt taken aback by the plethora of family photos my mother had plastered all over the walls there.
Sadly, Jake's friend was not of the feminine variety, so we could not look forward to teasing him about it later. Neil Jankow, as he was introduced, was nevertheless, as David would put it, an interesting specimen. He was well-groomed, which set him apart from most of Jake's surf buddies. His jeans did not sag somewhere midway down his thighs but were actually belted properly around his waist, a fact that also put him a cut above most young men his age.