"Jesse, you don't understand. This is my job. I have to – "
"It's Father Dominic's job, too, no? Let him take it from here. There's no reason why you have to be burdened with all the responsibility yourself."
"Well, yes, there is. I'm the one who screwed up."
"You put the gun to her head and pulled the trigger?"
"Of course not. But I'm the one who got her so mad. Father Dom didn't. I can't ask Father Dom to clean up my messes. That is totally unfair."
"What is totally unfair," Jesse explained – patiently, I guess, for him, "is for anyone to expect a young girl like yourself to do battle with a demon from hell like – "
"She isn't a demon from hell. She's just mad. She's mad because the one guy she thought she could trust turned out to be a – "
"Susannah." Jesse stopped walking suddenly. The only reason I didn't lurch forward and fall flat on my face was that he still kept hold of my shoulder.
For a minute – just a minute – I really thought … well, I thought he was going to kiss me. I'd never been kissed before, but it seemed as if all the necessities for a kiss to happen were there: you know, his arm was around me, there was moonlight, our hearts were racing – oh, yeah, and we'd both just narrowly escaped being killed by a really pissed off ghost.
Of course, I didn't know how I felt about my first kiss coming from one of the undead, but hey, beggars can't be choosers, and let me tell you something, Jesse was way cuter than any live guy I'd met lately. I'd never seen such a nice-looking ghost. He couldn't, I thought, have been more than twenty when he died. I wondered what had killed him. It's usually hard to tell with ghosts, since their spirits tend to take on the shape their body was in just before they stopped functioning. My dad, for instance, doesn't look any different when he appears to me now than he did the day before he went out for that fatal jog around Prospect Park ten years ago.
I could only assume Jesse had died at someone else's hands since he looked pretty damned healthy to me. Chances were he'd been a victim of one of those bullet holes downstairs. Nice of Andy to frame it for posterity's sake.
And now this extremely nice-looking ghost looked as if he were going to kiss me. Well, who was I to stop him?
So I sort of leaned my head back and looked out at him from underneath my eyelids, and sort of let my mouth get all relaxed, you know? And that's when I noticed his attention wasn't focused anywhere near my lips, but way below them. And not my chest, either, which would have been an okay second.
"You're bleeding," he said.
Well, that pretty much spoiled the moment. My eyes popped wide open at that remark.
"I am not," I said automatically since I didn't feel any pain. Then I looked down. There were smallish stains flowering on the pavement below my feet. You couldn't tell what color they were because it was so dark. In the moonlight, they looked black. There were similar dark stains, I saw with horror, on the front of Jesse's shirt.
But they were definitely coming from me. I checked myself out, and found that I'd managed to open what was probably one of the smaller, but still fairly important, veins in my wrist. I'd peeled off my gloves and stuffed them in my pockets while I'd been talking to Heather, and in my haste to escape during her fit of rage, I'd forgotten to put them back on. I'd probably sliced myself on the broken glass still littering the windowsill in Mr. Walden's classroom when I'd vaulted up onto it during my escape. Which just proved my theory that it's always on the way out that you get stuck.
"Oh," I said, watching the blood ooze out. I couldn't think of anything else to say but, "What a mess. I'm sorry about your shirt."
"It's nothing." Jesse reached into one of the pockets of his dark, narrow-fitting trousers and pulled out something white and soft that he wrapped around my wrist a few times, then tied into place like a tourniquet, only not as tight. He didn't say anything as he did this, concentrating on what he was doing. I have to say this was the first time a ghost had ever performed first aid on me. Not quite as interesting as a kiss would have been, but not entirely boring, either.
"There," he said when he was finished. "Does that hurt?"
"No," I said, since it didn't. It wouldn't start hurting, I knew from experience, for a few hours. I cleared my throat. "Thanks."
"It's nothing," he said.
"No," I said. Suddenly, ridiculously, I felt like crying. Really. And I never cry. "I mean it. Thanks. Thanks for coming out here to help me. You shouldn't have done it. I mean, I'm glad you did. And … well, thanks. That's all."
He looked embarrassed. Well, I suppose that was natural, me going all mushy on him the way I had just then. But I couldn't help it. I mean, I still couldn't really believe it. No ghost had ever been so nice to me. Oh, my dad tried, I guess. But he wasn't exactly what you'd call reliable about it. I could never really count on him, especially in a crisis.
But Jesse. Jesse had come through for me. And I hadn't even asked him to. In fact, I'd been pretty unpleasant to him, overall.
"Never mind," was all he said, though. And then he added, "Let's go home."