Never. I repeat, never agree to organise a cook-out. Seriously. It's a bad idea. Not only do you have to spend hours with the cops – all voluntarily, I might add – making sure that the brain-dead clones that populate the Junior class at the Mission Academy aren't going to smuggle in alcohol and go swimming in the dark and get eaten by a shark (a la Jaws), but it also means that you can't hang out with your super-hot boyfriend, who is no longer dead, and can now be seen by everyone, not just you!
But no. No, the only guy I get to hang around with is a fifty-year old cop with greying hair and the biggest beer-belly you ever did see.
It's just fantastic.
But by the early hours of tomorrow morning it'll all be over (in theory) and I'll get to spend the entire weekend with the man of my dreams. Or should I say, the man of my waking hours, seeing as how we've been dating for nearly five months now.
Hmm.
'The man of my waking hours' doesn't exactly have the same ring to it as 'the man of my dreams', does it?
Oh, who cares!
The point is, Jesse is mine mine mine, and nobody is gonna get in our way this time.
I mean, hello, the two of us have had a pretty rough ride, what with all the psychopathic ghosts, psychopathic shifters (change that to shifter – I don't think I could deal with more than one Paul Slater), and that rather awkward moment when I thought I'd managed to simultaneously kill the love of my life and remove his spirit from this world. I really think it was time that the powers-that-be cut us some slack.
And I mean, during the past sixteen years of my life, I have done a lot of good in this world! Albeit with the aide of fisticuffs at certain points, but everything worked out alright in the end, didn't it?
Nah, I reckon the time was definitely right – even a bit overdue, if we're being honest here – for Jesse and I to become 'Jesse and Suze'.
Ah, it's got a nice ring to it, doesn't it?
I'm so loved up, it's disgusting.
But I don't care.
Because I've finally got Jesse, and, really, that's all that matters.
However, Brad and Jake (or Dopey and Sleepy as I sometimes like to call them) don't quite seem to find my current state of love-sickness quite as cute as, say, Cee Cee does.
Something of which they like to remind me of every time I get off the phone with Jesse, which, unfortunately, tends to coincide with breakfast (Jesse doesn't finish his college classes until around 6pm, by which time, at the moment at least, I'm busy organising the cook-out and rarely get back until around 9pm, by which time Jesse is off volunteering at the hospital, so 7am is really the only time we get to talk – hey, I never said things were perfect, ok?).
As ever, Brad made the first lame comment of the day.
'Bye Jesse, mwah, I loooovveee you!" he mimicked, in a superbly poor impression of me. "I want to have your babies, Jesse, cause I lurve you! You're so sexy Jesse, you-OW!"
Massaging my fist as I withdrew it from Brad's shoulder, I went over to the fridge and pulled out a carton of juice, checking it carefully for any signs of bugs (hey, if you'd had to witness the gag-inducing sight that was Brad ingesting a mouthful of bugs, you'd be careful too).
Satisfied that there were none, I began pouring it into a glass, just as Brad whined, "Jesus, Simon! Can't even take a joke!"
"Oh, what, Brad," I said, turning round to face him, glass in one hand, carton in the other, eyebrows raised, "Just like you can, you mean? Debbie Mancuso, anyone?"
Jake guffawed heartily next to him at this, causing Brad to scowl and look like a two year old who'd just had his sweets taken away from him.
Which, incidentally, is pretty much the mental-age at which Brad currently resides.
It's no wonder girls like Debbie Mancuso dig him – she'd run away in fright at the sight of the letters IQ. Especially if they were followed by a number that exceeded more than two digits.
"Shut up, Jake," growled Brad, glaring at him. "Don't think I didn't see you doing the dirty with Imogen Sykes last night in the Rover."
If Brad thought this would cause Jake to get pissed off, he was sadly mistaken.
Jake merely shrugged, and said, "Whatever. She's damn hot. Way hotter than Kelly Prescott, by a mile. And she's funny, too."
I blinked in surprise at Jake.
Was he finally beginning to see further than the size of a girl's cleavage and how well she kept her hair?
Wow.
The day that ever happens to Brad is the day hell freezes over.
Apparently as I'd been thinking this stuff, I'd forgotten to look away from Jake, who was now staring at me.
"What?" he grunted looking annoyed.
"Nothing," I said quickly, filling the rest of the glass up with juice and then placing the carton back in the fridge. "Just wondering if you'd give me a ride this morning on your way to college. Brad's got that thing with the RLS soccer team, so I can't bum a ride with him."
"Your own car not good enough for you, Simon?" asked Jake, looking at me as though I was nuts.
Damn. I'd hoped he'd over-look that teensy little detail.
"Uh, I forgot to fill it up, and the gas-station in the Valley is closed for maintenance, and there's no way I can make it to the next town before the gas runs out completely."
A complete lie of course.
My car's gas-tank has never been fuller, due to the nice little bonus I got from working at the Golden Sands resort when the Mission got closed down for the week after a suspected gas-leak (it was actually the work of a whacked-out ghost who thought it'd be cool to see how long it'd take for the curtains, doused in petrol, to catch alight when he threw a match at it. Suffice it to say, not very long. If that guy wasn't already dead, he sure would've been then. However, the cops could find no evidence that petrol had, in fact, been used, due to stoner-ghost having used his own can – think Maria De Silva's ghost-hanky, which Jesse used to routinely clean me up with, and you're half way there).
No, the reason I couldn't use my own car was, as per usual, due to supernatural activity.
But, this time, it wasn't my fault.