Twilight by Meg Cabot Page A

from the top of his desk. “Lay your pencils down, please. Then pass your answer sheets to the front.”
    I wasn’t all that surprised when Paul came up to me after Mr. Walden had dismissed us for lunch. “That was pointless,” he said in a low voice, as we made our way toward our lockers. “I mean, we have our career paths cut out for us, don’t we?”
    “Well, you can’t really make a living doing what we do,” I said, then remembered, too late, that Paul certainly seemed to have managed to.
    “An honest living,” I amended.
    But instead of feeling ashamed of himself, as I’d meant him to, Paul just grinned.
    “That’s why I’ve decided on a career in the legal profession,” he said. “Your dad was a lawyer, right?”
    I nodded. I don’t like talking about my dad with Paul. Because my dad was everything that was good. And Paul is everything that… isn’t.
    “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Paul went on. “Nothing’s black and white with the law. It’s all sort of gray. So long as you can find a precedent.”
    I didn’t say anything. I could easily see Paul as a lawyer. Not a lawyer like my dad had been, a public defender, but the kind of lawyer who’d defend rich celebrities, people who thought they were above the law… and because they had limitless funds to pay for their defense, they were above it, in a way.
    “You, on the other hand,” Paul said. “I think you’re destined for a career in the social services. You’re a natural-born do-gooder.”
    “Yeah,” I said, as I stopped beside my locker. “Maybe I’ll follow in Father D.’s footsteps, and become a nun.”
    “Now that,” Paul said, leaning against the locker next to mine, “would just be a waste. I was thinking more along the lines of a social worker. Or a therapist. You’re very good, you know, at taking on other people’s problems.”
    Wasn’t that the truth? It was the reason I was so bleary-eyed and tired today. Because after I’d left Jesse the night before, I’d driven home and gone up to bed… only not to sleep. Instead, I’d lain awake, blinking at the ceiling and mulling over what Jesse had told me. Not about Paul, but about what Paul had made me read aloud earlier that day: The shifter’s abilities didn’t merely include communication with the dead and teleportation between their world and our own, but the ability to travel at will throughout the fourth dimension as well.
    The fourth dimension. Time.
    The very word caused the hairs on my arms to stand up, even though it was another typically beautiful autumn day in Carmel and not cold at all. Could it really be true? Was such a thing even possible? Could mediators—or shifters, as Paul and his grandfather insisted on calling us—travel through time as well as between the realms of the living and the dead?
    And if—a big if—it were true, what on earth did it mean ?
    More important, why had Paul been so intent on making sure I knew about it?
    “You look strung out,” Paul observed as I stowed my books away and reached for the paper bag containing the lunch my stepfather had made me: tandoori chicken salad. “What’s the matter? Trouble sleeping?”
    “You should know,” I said, glaring at him.
    “What’d I do?” he asked, sounding genuinely surprised.
    I don’t know if it was my exhaustion, or the fact that that the career aptitude test had got me thinking about my future… my future and Jesse’s. Suddenly, I was just very tired of Paul and his games. And I decided to call him on the latest one.
    “The fourth dimension,” I reminded him. “Time travel?”
    He just grinned, however. “Oh, good, you figured it out. Took you long enough.”
    “You really think shifters are capable of time travel?” I asked.
    “I don’t think so,” Paul said. “I know so.”
    Again, I felt a chill when I shouldn’t have. We were standing in the shade of the breezeway, it was true, but just a few feet away in the Mission courtyard, the sun was blazing