"By the lifeguard tower," I said.
"Oh, God," Kelly said. "Good spot. We're way over by the stairs."
Debbie went, way too casually, "I noticed the Rambler in the parking lot. Is Brad out on his board?"
Brad is what everyone but me calls my stepbrother Dopey.
"Yeah," Kelly said. "And Jake?"
Jake is the stepbrother I call Sleepy. For reasons unfathomable to me, Sleepy, who is in his senior year at the Mission Academy, and Dopey, a sophomore like me, are considered to be these great catches. Obviously, these girls have never seen my stepbrothers eat. It is truly a revolting sight.
"Yeah," I said. And since I knew what they were after, I added, "Why don't you two join us?"
"Cool," Kelly said. "That'd be gr - "
Gina appeared, and Kelly broke off mid-sentence.
Well, Gina is the kind of girl people break off mid-sentence to admire. She's nearly six feet tall, and the fact that she'd recently had her hair done into a mop of prickly-looking copper-colored tendrils, forming a four- or five-inch aura all the way around her head, only made her look taller. She also happened to have on a black vinyl bikini, over which she'd tugged on shorts that appeared to be made from the pull-tabs off of a lot of soda cans.
Oh, and the fact that she'd been out in the sun all day had darkened her normally café au lait skin to the color of espresso, always startling when combined with a nose ring and orange hair.
"Score," Gina said excitedly, as she thumped a six-pack down onto the counter next to my Diet Coke. "Yoo Hoo, dude. The perfect chemical compound."
"Um, Gina," I said, hoping she wasn't going to expect me to join her in consuming any of those bottles. "These are some friends of mine from school, Kelly Prescott and Debbie Mancuso. Kelly, Debbie, this is Gina Augustin, a friend of mine from New York."
Gina's eyes widened behind her Ray Bans. I think she was astonished by the fact that I had, since moving out here, actually made some friends, something I had certainly not had many of, besides her, back in New York. Still, she managed to control her surprise and said, very politely, "How do you do?"
Debbie murmured, "Hi," but Kelly got straight to the point: "Where did you get those awesome shorts?"
It was while Gina was telling her that I first noticed the four kids in evening wear hanging out near the suntan lotion rack.
You might be wondering how I'd missed them before. Well, the truth of the matter is that, up until that particular moment, they hadn't been there.
And, then, suddenly, there they were.
Being from Brooklyn, I've seen far stranger things than four teenagers dressed in formal wear in a convenience mart on a Sunday afternoon at the beach. But since this wasn't New York, but California, the sight was a startling one. Even more startling was that these four were in the act of heisting a twelve-pack of beer.
I'm not kidding. A twelve-pack, right in broad daylight with them dressed to the nines, the girls with wrist corsages, even. Kurt's no rocket scientist, it's true, but surely they couldn't think he would simply let them walk out of there with this beer - particularly in prom wear.
Then I lifted up my Donna Karans in order to get a better look at them.
And that's when I realized it.
Kurt wasn't going to be carding these kids. No way.
Kurt couldn't see them.
Because they were dead.
CHAPTER 2
Yeah, all right. So I can see and talk to the dead. That's my "special" talent. You know, that "gift" we're all supposedly born with, the one that makes us unique from everyone else on the planet, but which so few of us actually ever discover.
I discovered mine at around the age of two, which was approximately when I met my first ghost.
See, my special gift is that I'm a mediator. I help guide the tortured souls of the newly dead to their afterlife destinations - wherever that happens to be - generally by cleaning up whatever messes they left behind when they croaked.
Some people might think this is really cool - you know, having the ability to talk to the dead. Allow me to assure you that it so isn't. First of all, with a few exceptions, the dead generally don't have anything all that interesting to say. And secondly, it's not like I can go around bragging about this unusual talent to my friends. Who'd believe me?
So, anyway, there we were at Jimmy's Quick Mart: me, Kurt, Gina, Kelly, Debbie, and the ghosts.
Whoopee.
You might be wondering why Kurt, Gina, Debbie, and Kelly didn't run screaming out of the store at this point. You know, seeing as how, on second glance, these kids were obviously ghouls. They were giving off that special Look at me! I'm dead! glow that only spooks have.
But of course Kurt, Gina, Debbie, and Kelly couldn't see these ghosts. Only I could.
Because I'm the mediator.
It's a crummy job, but somebody has to do it.
Only I have to tell you, at that particular moment, I wasn't too keen to.
This was because the ghosts were behaving in a particularly reprehensible manner. They were trying, as near as I could tell, to steal beer. Not a noble pursuit at any time, and, if you think about it, an especially stupid one if you happen to be dead. Don't get me wrong - ghosts do drink. In Jamaica, people traditionally leave glasses of coconut rum for Change Macho, the espiritu de la buena suerte. And in Japan, fishermen leave sake out for the ghosts of their drowned brethren. And you can take my word for it, it isn't just evaporation that makes the level of liquid in those containers go down. Most ghosts enjoy a good drink, when they can get one.
No, what was stupid about what these ghosts were doing was the fact that they were obviously quite new at the whole being dead thing, and so they weren't real coordinated yet. It isn't easy for ghosts to lift things, even relatively light things. It takes a lot of practice. I've known ghosts who got really good at rattling chains and chucking books and even heavier stuff - usually at my head, but that's another story.
But for the most part, a twelve-pack of beer is way beyond your average new ghost's abilities, and these clowns were not about to pull it off. I would have told them so, but since I was the only one who could see them - and the twelve-pack, which was hovering behind the lotion rack, just out of range of everybody else's vision but mine - it might have looked a little strange.
But they got the message without my saying anything. One of the girls - a blonde in an ice-blue sheath dress - hissed, "That one in the black is looking at us!"
One of the boys - they were both in tuxedos, both blond, both muscular; your basic interchangeable jock-type - went, "She is not. She's looking at the Bain de Soleil."
I pushed my DKs all the way to the top of my head so they could see that I really was glaring at them.
"Shit," the boys said at the same time. They dropped the pack of beer as if it had suddenly caught on fire. The sudden explosion of glass and beer caused everyone in the store - well, except for me, of course - to jump.
Kurt, behind the counter, looked up from his copy of Surf Digest and asked, "What the hell?"
Then Kurt did a very surprising thing. He reached under the counter and pulled out a baseball bat.
Gina observed this with great interest.
"You go, homey," she said to Kurt.
Kurt didn't seem to hear these words of encouragement. He ignored us, and strode over to where the pack of beer lay behind the lotion rack. He looked down at the roaming mess of broken glass and cardboard and asked, again, plaintively, "What the hell?"
Only this time, he didn't say hell, if you get my meaning.
Gina wandered over to look at the wreckage.
"Now, that's just a shame," she said, toeing one of the bigger shards with her platform sandal. "What do you think caused it? Earthquake?"