Ninth Key by Meg Cabot Page A

strength? I usually forget to mention that. That’s how come, in my line of work, I frequently get the you-know-what knocked out of me. That’s also why it kind of freaks me out when one of them — like Jesse was doing just then — touches me, even in a nonaggressive way.
    And I mean, seriously, just because, to me, ghosts are as real as, say, Tad Beaumont, that doesn’t mean I want to go around slow dancing with them or anything.
    Well, okay, in Jesse’s case, I would, except how weird would that be to slow dance with a ghost? Come on. Nobody but me’d ever be able to see him. I’d be like, “Oh, let me introduce you to my boyfriend,” and there wouldn’t be anybody there. How embarrassing. Everyone would think I was making him up like that lady on that movie I saw once on the Lifetime channel who made up an extra kid.
    Besides, I’m pretty sure Jesse doesn’t like me that way. You know, in the slow dancing way.
    Which he unfortunately proved by flipping my hands over and holding them up to the moonlight.
    “What’s wrong with your fingers?” he wanted to know.
    I looked up at them. The rash was worse than ever. In the moonlight I looked deformed, like I had monster hands.
    “Poison oak,” I said, bitterly. “You’re lucky you’re dead and can’t get it. It bites. Nobody warned me about it, you know. About poison oak, I mean. Palm trees, sure, everybody said there’d be palm trees, but —”
    “You should try putting a poultice of gum flower leaves on them,” he interrupted.
    “Oh, okay,” I said, managing not to sound too sarcastic.
    He frowned at me. “Little yellow flowers,” he said. “They grow wild. They have healing properties, you know. There are some growing on that hill out behind the house.”
    “Oh,” I said. “You mean that hill where all the poison oak is?”
    “They say gunpowder works, too.”
    “Oh,” I said. “You know, Jesse, you might be surprised to learn that medicine has advanced beyond flower poultices and gunpowder in the past century and a half.”
    “Fine,” he said, dropping my hands. “It was only a suggestion.”
    “Well,” I said. “Thanks. But I’ll put my faith in hydrocortisone.”
    He looked at me for a little while. I guess he was probably thinking what a freak I am.
I
was thinking how weird it was, the fact that this guy had held my scaly, poison-oaky hands. Nobody else would touch them, not even my mother. But Jesse hadn’t minded.
    Then again, it wasn’t as if he could catch it from me.
    “Susannah,” he said, finally.
    “What?”
    “Go carefully,” he said, “with this woman. The woman who was here.”
    I shrugged. “Okay.”
    “I mean it,” Jesse said. “She isn’t — she isn’t who you think she is.”
    “I know who she is,” I said.
    He looked surprised. So surprised it was kind of insulting, actually. “You
know?
She
told
you?”
    “Well, not exactly,” I said. “But you don’t have to worry. I’ve got things under control.”
    “No,” he said. He got up off the bed. “You don’t, Susannah. You should be careful. You should listen to your father this time.”
    “Oh, okay,” I said, very sarcastically. “Thanks. Do you think maybe you could be creepier about it? Like, could you drool blood, or something, too?”
    I guess maybe I’d been a little
too
sarcastic, though, because instead of replying he just disappeared.
    Ghosts. They just can’t take a joke.

Chapter
Six
     
     
    “You want me to
what
?”
    “Just drop me off,” I said. “On your way to work. It’s not out of your way.”
    Sleepy eyed me as if I’d suggested he eat glass or something. “I don’t know,” he said slowly as he stood in the doorway, the keys to the Rambler in his hand. “How are you going to get home?”
    “A friend is coming to pick me up,” I said, brightly.
    A total lie, of course. I had no way of getting home.
    But I figured in a pinch, I could always call Adam. He’d just gotten his license as well as a new VW Bug.