Twilight by Meg Cabot

spoken with any detectable rancor, but it seemed like a raw deal to me. I mean, what if he hadn’t wanted to be a rancher? “Well, what would you have liked to be? You know, if you’d had a choice?”
    Jesse had looked thoughtful. “I don’t know. It was different then, Susannah. I was different. I did think… sometimes… that I might have liked to have been a doctor.”
    A doctor. It made perfect sense—at least to me. All those times I’d staggered home with various parts of me throbbing in pain—whether from poison oak or blisters on my feet—Jesse had been there for me, his touch soft as cashmere. He’d have made a great doctor, actually.
    “Why didn’t you, then?” I’d wanted to know. “Become a doctor? Just because of your dad?”
    “Yes, mostly that,” he’d said. “I’d never even dared mention it to anyone. I could barely be spared from the ranch for a few days, let alone the years medical school would have taken. But I would have liked that, I think. Medical school. Though back when I was alive,” he’d added, “people didn’t know nearly as much about medicine as they do today. It would be more exciting to work in the sciences now, I think.”
    And he would know. He’d had 150 years to hang around and watch as inventions—electricity, automobiles, planes, computers… not to mention penicillin and vaccines for diseases that in the past had routinely killed millions— changed the world into something unrecognizable from the one in which he’d grown up.
    But rather than clinging stubbornly to the past, as some would have, Jesse had followed along excitedly, reading whatever he could get his hands on, from paperback novels to encyclopedias. He said he had a lot to catch up on. His favorite books seem to be the nonfiction tomes he borrows from Father Dom, everything from philosophy to explorations on emerging viruses—the kind of books I’d have given to my dad on Father’s Day, if my dad wasn’t, you know, dead. My stepdad, on the other hand, is more the cookbook type. But you get my drift. To Jesse, stuff that seems dry and uninteresting to me is vitally exciting. Maybe because he’d seen it all unfolding before his eyes.
    Sighing, I looked down at the hundreds of career options in front of me. Jesse was dead, but even he knew what he’d wanted to be… would have been, if he hadn’t died. Or not been, considering what he’d said about his father’s expectations for him.
    And here I was, with every advantage in the world, and all I could think that I wanted to be when I grew up was…
    Well, with Jesse.
    “Twenty more minutes.” Mr. Walden’s voice boomed out across the classroom, startling me from my thoughts. I found that my gaze had become fixed on the sea less than a mile from the Mission and viewable through most of the school’s classroom windows… to the detriment of students like me. I hadn’t grown up, like most of my classmates, around the sea. It was a constant source of wonder and interest to me.
    Kind of, I realized, like Jesse’s fascination with modern science.
    Only unlike Jesse, I actually had a chance to do something with my interest.
    “Ten more minutes,” Mr.Walden announced, startling me again.
    Ten more minutes. I looked down at my answer sheet, which was half empty. At the same time, I noticed CeeCee shooting me an anxious look from her desk beside mine. She nodded to the sheet. Get to work , her violet eyes urged me.
    I picked up my pencil and began to haphazardly fill in bubbles. I didn’t care what answers I chose. Because, truthfully, I didn’t care about my future. Without Jesse, I had no future. Of course, with him, I had no future, either. What was he going to do, anyway? Follow me to college? To my first job? My first apartment?
    Yeah. That’ll happen.
    Paul was right. I’m so stupid. Stupid to have fallen in love with a ghost. Stupid to think we had any kind of future together. Stupid.
    “Time’s up.” Mr. Walden pulled his feet