Dopey, in out of his depth, began to look desperate.
"Debbie Mancuso," he yelled, "and I are not having sex!"
I saw my mom and Andy exchange a quick, bewildered glance.
"I should certainly hope not," Doc, Dopey's little brother, said as he breezed past us. "But if you are, Brad, I hope you're using condoms. While a good-quality latex condom has a failure rate of about two percent when used as directed, typically the failure rate averages closer to twelve percent. That makes them only about eighty-five percent effective against preventing pregnancy. If used with a spermicide, the effectiveness improves dramatically. And condoms are our best defense - though not as good, of course, as abstention - against some STDs, including HIV."
Everyone in the kitchen - my mother, Andy, Dopey, Sleepy, and I - stared at Doc, who is, as I think I mentioned before, twelve.
"You," I finally said, "have way too much time on your hands."
Doc shrugged. "It helps to be informed. While I myself am not sexually active at the current time, I hope to become so in the near future." He nodded toward the stove. "Dad, your chimichangas, or whatever they are, are on fire."
While Andy jumped to put out his cheese fire, my mother stood there, apparently, for once in her life, at a loss for words.
"I - " she said. "I … Oh. My."
Dopey wasn't about to let Doc have the last word. "I am not," he said, again, "having sex with - "
"Aw, Brad," Sleepy said. "Put a sock in it, will ya?"
Dopey, of course, wasn't lying. I'd seen for myself that they'd only been playing tonsil hockey. Dopey and Debbie's fiery passion was the reason I had to keep slathering my hands with cortisone cream. But what was the fun of having stepbrothers if you couldn't torture them? Not that I was going to tell anyone what I'd seen, of course. I am many things, but not a snitch. But don't get me wrong: I would have liked Dopey to have gotten caught sneaking out while he was grounded. I mean, I don't think he'd exactly learned anything from his "punishment." He would still probably refer to my friend Adam as a fag the next time he saw him.
Only he wouldn't do it in my presence. Because, wrestler or not, I could kick Dopey's butt from here to Clinton Ave., my street back in Brooklyn.
But I wasn't going to be the one to turn him in. It just wasn't classy, you know?
"And did you," my mother asked me, with a smile, "feel that the student government meeting was as bitching as Brad seems to think it was, Suze?"
I sat down at my place at the dining table. As soon as I did so, Max, the Ackerman family dog, came snuffling along and put his head in my lap. I pushed it off my lap. He put it right back. Although I'd lived there less than a month, Max had already figured out that I am the person in the household most likely to have leftovers on my plate.
Mealtime was, of course, the only time Max paid attention to me. The rest of the time, he avoided me like the plague. He especially avoided my bedroom. Animals, unlike humans, are very perceptive toward paranormal phenomena, and Max sensed Jesse, and accordingly stayed far away from the parts of the house where he normally hung out.
"Sure," I said, taking a sip of ice water. "It was bitching."
"And what," my mother wanted to know, "was decided at this meeting?"
"I made a motion to cancel the spring dance," I said. "Sorry, Brad. I know how much you were counting on escorting Debbie to it."
Dopey shot me a dirty look from across the table.
"Why on earth," my mother said, "would you want to cancel the spring dance, Suzie?"
"Because it's a stupid waste of our very limited funds," I said.
"But a dance," my mother protested. "I always loved going to school dances when I was your age."
That, I wanted to say, is because you always had a date, Mom. Because you were pretty and nice and boys liked you. You weren't a pathological freak, like I am, with fungus hands and a secret ability to talk to the dead.
Instead, I said, "Well, you'd have been in the minority in our class. My motion was seconded and passed by twenty-seven votes."
"Well," my mother said. "What are you going to do with the money instead?"
"Kegger," I said, shooting a look at Dopey.
"Don't even joke about that," my mother said, sternly. "I'm very concerned about the amount of teen drinking that goes on around here." My mother is a television news reporter. She does the morning news on a local station out of Monterey. Her best thing is looking grave while reading off a Tele-Prompter about grisly auto accidents. "I don't like it. It isn't like back in New York. There, none of your friends drove, so it didn't matter so much. But here … well, everyone drives."
"Except Suze," Dopey said. He seemed to feel it was his duty to rub in the fact that although I am sixteen, I don't have a license yet. Or even, for that matter, a learner's permit. As if driving were the most important thing in the world. As if my time was not already fully occupied with school, my recent appointment as vice president of the Mission Academy's sophomore class, and saving the lost souls of the undead.
"What are you really going to do with the money?" my mother asked.
I shrugged. "We have to raise money to replace that statue of our founding father, Junipero Serra, before the Archbishop's visit next month."
"Oh," my mother said. "Of course. The statue that was vandalized."
Vandalized. Yeah, right. That's what everyone was going around saying, of course. But that statue hadn't been vandalized. What had happened to it was, this ghost who was trying to kill me severed the statue's head and tried to use it as a bowling ball.
And I was supposed to be the pin.
"Quesadillas," Andy said, coming over to the table with a bunch of them on a tray. "Get 'em while they're hot."
What ensued was such chaos that I could only sit, Max's head still on my lap, and watch in horror. When it was over every single quesadilla was gone, but my plate and my mom's plate were still empty. After a while, Andy noticed this, put his fork down and said, in an angry way, "Hey, guys! Did it ever occur to you to wait to take seconds until everyone at the table had had their first serving?"
Apparently, it had not. Sleepy, Dopey, and Doc looked sheepishly down at their plates.
"I'm sorry," Doc said, holding his plate, cheese and salsa dripping from it, toward my mother. "You can have some of mine."
My mother looked a little queasy. "No, thank you, David," she said. "I'll just stick with salad, I think."
"Suze," Andy said, putting his napkin on the table. "I'm gonna make you the cheesiest quesadilla you ever - "
I shoved Max's head out of the way and was up before Andy could get out of his seat. "You know what," I said. "Don't bother. I really think I'll just have some cereal, if that's okay."
Andy looked hurt. "Suze," he said, "it's no trouble - "
"No, really," I said. "I was gonna do my kick-boxing tape later, anyway, and a lot of cheese'll just weigh me down."
"But," Andy said, "I'm making more, anyway....
He looked so pathetic, I had no choice but to say, "Well, I'll try one. But for right now, finish what's on your plate, and I'll just go and get some cereal."
As I was talking, I'd been backing out of the room. Once I was safely in the kitchen, Max at my heels - he was no dummy, he knew he wasn't going to get a crumb out of those guys in there: I was Max's ticket to people food - I got out a box of cereal and a bowl, then opened the fridge to get some milk. That was when I heard a soft voice behind me whisper, "Suze."
I whipped around. I didn't need to see Max slinking from the kitchen with his tail between his legs to know that I was in the presence of another member of that exclusive club known as the Undead.
CHAPTER 4
I nearly jumped out of my skin.
"Jeez, Dad." I slammed the fridge door closed. "I told you not to do that."