"Hang on!" Helen protested as Jake was about to read, "It's my turn to read not Jake's!"
"Oh yes!" Andy said surprised he had forgotten, "I am sorry honey."
Jake passed the book to his stepmother who was rolling her eyes and muttering how Andy was obviously reaching old age much to his chagrin. "Honestly Andy," she mumbled fondly as she found her place and began to read.
I flung myself into my seat just as everybody else was picking up their forks.
"Which," Andy said sternly, "is not on time despite what you all believe."
The boys all grumbled at that.
Ha! Not late! Not technically, since no one had actually started eating yet.
"Technicalities aside it is just plain rude," Andy grumbled.
"Yes dear," Helen said absentmindedly as she patted his hand. She was so used to this mantra that she tended to switch off just a little bit.
"And where have you been, Suze?" my mother asked, lifting a basket of rolls and passing it directly to Gina. Good thing, too. Otherwise, given the way my brothers ate, that thing would be empty before it ever reached her.
"Not true!" David protested.
"Did you not read the second diary when you helped us eat all the quesadillas?" Jake raised an eyebrow.
David glowered at him but didn't' say a word.
"I went," I said as Max, my stepbrothers' extremely large, extremely slobbery dog, dropped his head down upon my lap, his traditional station at mealtimes, and rolled his soft brown eyes up at me, "on a drive."
"With whom?" my mother asked in that same mild tone, the one that indicated that if I didn't answer carefully, I could potentially be in serious trouble.
"What would have been the wrong answer?" David asked interestedly.
"Well, if it's a boy that I or your father knows to have a bad reputation that would be a potentially wrong answer if she refuses us the right to question him. If it was an older man then that is definitely the wrong answer and I wouldn't let her out of her bedroom until she's thirty -"
"And I would fully back her up," Andy agreed.
"And if she didn't answer at all then she would have been grounded until the summer holidays," Helen concluded.
"Jesse is an older man," David said pointing out the most obvious flaw in Helen's logic.
"True," Helen agreed, "but in all fairness I didn't know how much older Jesse was. For me an older man would have to be at least seven years, four is barely noticeable especially since Jesse had come with not only reassurances from Father Dominic but polite manners and a wiliness to answer all of our questions."
"Though he didn't answer them truthfully," Andy groused.
"Would you have believed him if he did?" Jake asked.
"No I would have had him thrown out of the house for mocking me," Andy admitted sheepishly.
Before I could say anything, Dopey went, "Michael Meducci," and made some gagging noises.
Brad repeated the gagging noise only this time he was joined with Jake and David.
Andy raised his eyebrows. "That boy who was here last night?"
"I wasn't quite sure how to feel about it. He didn't strike me as Suze's type," Andy admitted sheepishly.
"He isn't Suze's type," Jake pointed out.
"That'd be the one," I said, shooting Dopey a dirty look that he ignored.
"She gives me so many glares that I have to ignore them if I want to enjoy my life," Brad muttered.
Gina and Sleepy, I noticed, had taken care to sit beside each other and were strangely quiet.
"Gina didn't want me to grass on Suze," Jake said sheepishly as well as embarrassed. "And I didn't want to say something about Meducci in case I would accidentally say something that would put Suze in it with you guys and me in it with Gina."
Andy pinched the bridge of his nose. "Why did I have teenage boys? Girls would be so much easier..."
"You wish honey, you wish," Helen muttered.
I wondered, if I dropped my napkin and leaned down to pick it up, what I'd see going on underneath the table. Probably, I thought to myself, something I did not particularly care to see.
"Only Gina pinching my thigh to make certain I'll keep my mouth shut," Jake grumbled at Brad's leer.
I kept my napkin tightly in my lap.
"Meducci," my mother murmured. "Why is that name familiar to me?"
"Doubtlessly," Doc said, "you are thinking of the Medicis, an Italian noble family that produced three popes and two queens of France. Cosimo the Elder was the first to rule Florence, while Lorenzo the Magnificent was a patron of the arts, with clients that included Michelangelo and Botticelli."
"Honestly how do you know all of this junk?" Brad cried out. He wouldn't know where to look to find out about an Italian noble family that produced popes and queens.
"I read," David replied dryly.
My mother looked at him curiously. "Actually," she said, "That's not what I was thinking."
"I was working on a report about the RLS Angels," Helen explained, "but a few other stories were being broadcasted and I had them all jumbled in my head so I knew the name but I didn't know where from. I don't know European history well so I was curious as to how you'd come to the conclusion that was what I was thinking."
"I think one of my flaws is I look too much at the bigger picture rather than the small details," David blushed, "I think of all the grand notable names when you mentioned Meducci that I didn't think of my fellow schoolmates."
"Nonetheless I am proud to know you can admit your flaws," Helen beamed at him proudly. "That takes a great maturity."
David merely blushed a brighter red.
I knew what was coming. My mom has a memory like a steel trap. She needs it, of course, in her line of work. But I knew it was only a matter of time before she figured out where she'd heard Michael's name before.
Helen joined in the blushing at the complement her daughter had given to her mind.
"He was the one who was in that accident this weekend," I said, to hasten the inevitable. "The one where those four RLS students were killed."
Dopey dropped his fork. It made quite a clatter as it landed on his plate.
"I couldn't believe that a geek like him could have been in something that big," Brad grumbled.
"Michael Meducci ?" He shook his head. "No way. That was Michael Meducci ? You are shitting me."
Andy opened his mouth to reprimand Brad for his use of language when Helen quickly read ahead.
Andy said, sharply, "Brad. Language, please."
Dopey said, "Sorry," but his eyes, I noticed, were very bright.
"I was a bit pissed off at the time and was thinking of some sort of revenge, I mean Mark Pulsford had been killed by Michael Meducci," Brad said sheepishly.
"Language Bradley," Andy groaned, "how many times..."
"Michael Meducci," he said again. "Michael Meducci killed Mark Pulsford?"
"He didn't kill anybody," I snapped. I could see I should have kept my mouth shut. Now it was going to be all over school. "It was an accident."
"No it was murder," Brad growled.
"Really, Brad," Andy said. "I'm sure the poor boy didn't mean to kill anyone."
"I stand corrected," Andy mumbled.
"Well, I'm sorry," Dopey said. "But Mark Pulsford was like one of the best quarterbacks in the state. Seriously. He had a scholarship to UCLA, the whole thing. That guy was really cool."
"Oh, yeah? Then what was he doing hanging around you?" Sleepy, in a rare moment of wit, grinned at his brother.
"It's not rare!" Jake said indignantly. "I am often a very witty person!"
"Since when?" Brad snickered, he quickly ducked a cushion, "oh yeah, very witty, Jake," he said sarcastically.
"Boys," Andy said warningly.
"Shut up," Dopey said. "We happen to have partied together."
"Right," Sleepy said with a sneer.
"We did," Dopey insisted. "Last month, in the Valley. Mark was the bomb." He grabbed a roll, stuffed most of it into his mouth, then said around the doughy mass,
"Don't talk with your mouths full!" Andy chided her middle son. "Honestly, how many times do I have to tell you this?"
"Until Michael Meducci came along and murdered him, that is."
I noticed that Gina was observing me with one eyebrow, one only, raised. I ignored her.
"The accident wasn't Michael's fault," I said. "At least, he hasn't been charged with anything."
"Yet," Brad muttered.
My mother laid down her own fork. "The investigation into the accident," she said, "is still ongoing."
"You knew something," David observed.
"There were a few things that didn't settle right with the police. One of the officers let it slip to me when I was questioning him," Helen admitted.
"As many accidents as they've had," my stepfather said as he rolled a few spears of asparagus onto my mother's plate, then passed the platter of them to Gina, "on that section of highway, you would think somebody would do something to improve the road conditions."
"The narrow stretch of highway," Doc said conversationally, "along the one-hundred-mile stretch of seacoast known as Big Sur has traditionally been considered treacherous, even highly dangerous. Frequently enshrouded with coastal fog, this winding and narrow mountainous road is, thanks to historical preservationists, unlikely to be expanded. The very isolation of the area is what has held such appeal for the many poets and artists who have made their homes there, including Robinson Jeffers, who found the splendour of the bleak wilderness highly appealing."
"I don't know how anyone could find bleak wilderness appealing," Jake said shaking his head.
"Poetic people do," David said, "just because you're uncultured doesn't mean the rest of the world isn't."
"I'm cultured!"
I blinked at my youngest stepbrother. His photographic memory could, at times, be annoying,
David looked rather hurt at that. He never thought Suze would find him so annoying.
But for the most part it was highly useful, particularly when term paper time came rolling around.
"Thanks," I said, "for that."
Doc smiled, revealing a mouthful of food-encrusted braces.
David grimaced at that while his insensitive brothers sniggered. He hated his braces for this very reason; he couldn't wait to get rid of them when he was sixteen.
"Don't mention it."
"The worst part of it," Andy said, continuing his rant on the safety conditions on Highway 1, "is that young drivers seem irresistibly drawn to that particular stretch of road."
Dopey, shovelling wild rice into his mouth as if it were the first food he'd seen in weeks, snickered and said, "Well, duh, Dad."
Andy just released a long suffering sigh at his middle son's table manners. Perhaps etiquette school?
Andy looked at his middle-born son. "You know, Brad," he said mildly. "In America, and, I'm told, much of Europe, it is considered socially acceptable to occasionally lay down our fork between bites, and spend some time actually chewing."
"That's where the action is," Dopey said, laying down his fork as his father had suggested, but compensating by speaking with his mouth full.
Bashing his head against a wall seemed a really tempting idea to Andy at this moment of time.
"What action?" my stepfather asked curiously.
"Really Andy, really?" Helen raised an eyebrow.
Andy blushed. "I was a good catholic boy unlike my sons apparently."
Sleepy, who generally didn't speak unless absolutely forced to, had grown almost garrulous since Gina's arrival. "He means the Point," Sleepy said.
My mother looked confused. "The point?"
"The Point," Sleepy corrected her. "The observation point. It's where everybody goes to make out on Saturday night. At least", Sleepy chuckled to himself, "Brad and his friends."
Dopey, far from taking offense at this slanderous remark, waved an asparagus spear as if it were a cigar while he explained, "The Point is the bomb."
Jake and David rolled their eyes. Sometimes they swear Brad was adopted.
"Is that," Doc asked interestedly, "Where you take Debbie Mancuso?" and then he winced in pain as one of his shins was brutally assaulted beneath the table. "Ow!"
Andy glared at both Brad and David.
"Debbie Mancuso and I are not going out!" Dopey bellowed.
"Brad," Andy said. "Do not kick your brother. David, do not invoke Miss Mancuso's name at the dinner table. We've talked about this. And Suze?"
I looked up with raised eyebrows.
"I don't like the idea of you getting into a car with a boy who was involved in a fatal accident, whether it was his fault or not."
"And now I wish I just banned her from getting into any boy's car apart from Adam's," Andy grumbled.
Andy looked at my mother. "Do you agree?"
"Definitely," Helen muttered darkly.
"I'm afraid I'm going to have to," my mother said. "I feel bad about it. The Meduccis have certainly been through some trying times lately," When my stepfather looked at her questioningly, my mother said, "Their little girl was the one who almost drowned a few weeks ago. You remember."
"Oh." Andy nodded. "At that pool party. There was no parental supervision-"
"Probably no parental permission," Andy added darkly.
"And plenty of alcohol," my mother said. "Poor thing apparently drank too much and fell in. Nobody noticed, or if they did, nobody did anything about it. Not until it was too late. She's been in a coma ever since. If she lives, it will be with severe brain damage. Suze." My mother laid down her fork. "I don't think it's a good idea for you to be seeing this boy."
"I should have forbidden it outright," Helen said bleakly.
Ordinarily, this would have cheered me up considerably. I mean, I wasn't exactly looking forward to going out with the guy.
Helen and Andy exchanged weak smiles. It amused them somewhat that Suze actually agreed with them and yet they knew she wasn't going to obey and now they understood it had to do with her supernatural calling.
But I sort of had to. I mean, if I was to have any hope at all of keeping him from slipping into a nerd coffin.
"Should have," Brad grumbled.
"Why?" I carefully swallowed a mouthful of salmon. "It's not Michael's fault his sister's an alcoholic who can't swim. And what were her parents thinking, anyway, letting an eighth grader go to a party like that?"
"I don't think her parents even knew about the party," Helen scowled.
"And calling that poor child an alcoholic who can't swim is insensitive and rather cruel," Andy frowned.
"That," my mother said, her mouth tightening, "is not the issue here, and you know it. You're just going to have to call that young man and tell him that your mother absolutely forbids you to get into a vehicle with him. If he wants to come here and spend the evening with you watching videos or whatever, that's fine. But you are not getting into a car with him."
"It wasn't just some unsettled officers was it, Mom?" David asked worriedly.
"There was no concrete evidence," Helen replied grimily.
My eyes widened. Here ? Spend the evening here ? Under Jesse's watchful eye?
"Oh dear," Andy said a little amused. That was an awkward moment.
Oh, God, just what I needed. The image these words conveyed filled me with such horror, the forkful of salmon I'd had poised before my lips fell into my lap, where it was instantly vacuumed up by a long canine tongue.
"Max," David said affectionately.
My mother touched my hand. "Suze," she said softly. "I really mean it. I don't want you getting into a car with that boy."
"Did she listen though?" Helen grumbled.
I looked at my mother curiously. It's true that in times past I have been forced to disobey her, largely due to circumstances beyond my control.
Helen grudgingly had to give that to Suze. The circumstances were generally out of Suze's control she can see that now.
But she didn't know that. That I had disobeyed her, I mean. For the most part, I'd managed to keep my transgressions to myself, except for the occasions I'd been brought home by the police, incidents so few they are hardly worth mentioning.
"Not that few," Helen snorted.
But since that had not been the case in this situation, I didn't quite understand why she felt it necessary to repeat her edict concerning Michael Meducci.
"Okay, Mom," I said. "I got it the first time."
"It's just something I feel very strongly about," she said.
"I should have just been honest with her," Helen moaned.
Andy rubbed her arm, "It wouldn't have changed a thing, and Suze would have simply just gotten herself into more trouble trying to find the evidence for you."
I looked at her. It wasn't that she appeared ... well, guilty. But she definitely knew something. Something she wasn't letting on.
This was not particularly surprising. A television journalist, my mother was often privy to information not necessarily meant for release to the public. She wasn't one of those reporters you hear about, either, who'd do anything to get the "big" story. If a cop told my mother something, and they often do; my mother, even though she's forty-something, is still pretty hot, and just about anybody would tell her anything she wanted to know if she licked her lips enough,
Helen blushed as the boys groaned in disgust and Andy mockingly glowered at her. She didn't like using her womanly wiles but if it got her a lead...well Andy understood he was the only one for her.
He could depend on her not mentioning it on air if he asked her not to. That's just how she is.
The boys couldn't help but agree at this they all confided in Helen at some point and she had never spoken a word about it to their father.
I wondered what, exactly, she knew about Michael Meducci and the accident that had killed the four Angels.
Enough, apparently, to keep her from wanting me to hang around with him.
I didn't exactly think she was being particularly unfair to him, either. I couldn't help remembering what Michael had said in the car, right before pulling back out onto the highway: They were just taking up space.
"Git," Jake muttered.
Suddenly, I didn't blame those kids so much for trying to drown him.
"Neither can I," Brad growled.
"Okay Mom," I said. "I get it."
Apparently satisfied, my mother turned back to her salmon, which Andy had grilled to perfection and served with a delicate dill sauce.
Andy beamed at the compliment.
"So how are you going to break it to him?" Gina asked a half hour later as she helped me load the dishwasher after dinner, having brushed aside my mother's insistence that, as a guest, she did not have to do this.
"I don't know," I said hesitantly. "You know, the whole Clark Kent thing aside-"
"Geeky on the outside, dreamy in the middle?"
"Urgh!"
"Oh c'mon!"
"Yeah. In spite of that, which is hard to resist, believe me, he's still kind of got this quality that strikes me as..."
"As a stalker," Jake spat out.
"Stalkery?" Gina said, rinsing the salad bowl before handing it to me to put in the dishwasher rack.
"Thank God Gina gets it," Jake muttered.
"Maybe that's it. I don't know."
"It was very stalkery how he showed up here last night," she said. "Without even calling first. Any guy ever tried to do that to me", she waved her fingers in the air and then snapped them, "and he is so gone."
"Well neither of you two would last with your Western Coast manners," Helen teased her two eldest stepsons.
"MOM!" they both shouted as they matched one another with their red cheeks.
I shrugged. It was different back east, of course. In the city, you simply do not stop by someone's place without calling first. In California, I'd noticed, "drive-bys" were more socially acceptable.
"But don't even act," Gina went on, "like you care, Simon. You don't like that guy. I don't know what, exactly, you've got going on with him, but it definitely isn't anything gonadal."
"Gina knows Suze far too well," Helen said with a warm smile.
I thought, fleetingly, of how pleasantly surprised we'd all been when Michael had taken his shirt off. "It might have been," I said with a sigh.
"Ewwwwwwwwwwwww!" Brad whined.
"Please." Gina handed me a fistful of silverware. "You and Supergeek? No. Now, tell me. What is going on with you and this guy?"
I looked down at the silverware I'd been shoving into the dishwasher. "I don't know," I said. I couldn't tell her the truth, of course. "There's just ... I've got this feeling that there's more to this accident thing than he's letting on. My mom seems to know something about it. Did you notice?"
"I noticed," Gina said, not really grimly, but not happily, either.
"She would be a wonderful reporter," Helen said proudly.
"Well, so ... I just can't help wondering what really happened. The night of the wreck. Because ... well, that wasn't a jellyfish this afternoon, you know."
Gina just nodded. "I didn't think so. I suppose this all has something to do with that mediator thing, huh?"
"She's good," David said impressed.
"Sort of," I said uncomfortably.
"Right. Which might also explain that little mishap with the fingernail polish the other night?"
Helen smirked at Gina's deductive thinking. She can't help but brag to herself that she helped that thought process grow in that bright girl's mind. She used to watch detective dramas on a Sunday afternoon with Suze and Gina half moaning, half questioning everything as they ate their sweets.
I couldn't say anything. I just kept thrusting the silverware into the plastic compartments in the dishwasher door. Forks, spoons, knives.
"All right." Gina turned off the water in the sink and dried her hands on a dishtowel. "What do you want me to do?"
"Huh?"
I blinked at her. "Do? You? Nothing."
"Come on. I know you, Simon. You didn't miss homeroom seventy-nine times last year because you were enjoying a leisurely breakfast over at the Mickey D's. I know perfectly well you were out there fighting the undead, making this world a safer place for children, and all that. So what do you want me to do? Cover for you?"
"Oh she didn't..." Jake muttered darkly.
I bit my lip. "Well," I said hesitantly.
"Look, don't worry about me. Jake said he'd take me on his delivery run, which holds a certain appeal, if you can stand getting down and dirty in a car full of pepperoni and pineapple pizzas.
"Romantic," Brad snorted.
"Jake! You could have gotten fired for that!" Andy scolded.
But if you want, I can stay here and hang with Brad. He's invited me to a video screening of his favourite movie of all time."
I sucked in my breath. "Not Hellraiser III ...?"
"Indeed."
Gratitude washed over me like one of those waves that had knocked me senseless. "You would do that for me?"
"Hey!" Brad shouted. "There's nothing wrong with Hellraiser III!"
"Oh there's loads wrong with it," Jake said with a grin.
"It's a good film Brad," Andy said diplomatically while glaring at his eldest, "it's just we're fed up of watching it every week."
"At least it has gone down to once a week," Helen muttered shuddering as she thought of the time when Hellraiser was on three times a week.
"For you, Simon, anything. So what's it going to be?"
"Okay." I threw down the dishtowel I'd been holding. "If you would just stay here and pretend like I'm upstairs in my room with cramps, I will worship you forever. They don't ask questions about cramps. Say that I'm in the bathtub, and then maybe a little while later, say I went to bed early. If anyone calls, will you take it for me?"
"That's it! I'm going to start questioning her every time I hear the cramps excuse!" Andy snapped as he wrote it down on his list of things to do.
"You might not like the answer when it really is cramps," Helen warned him.
"She can't have her period every week of the month," he pointed out to his wife as his sons moaned in disgust.
Jake, however, was rather pissed off. Gina had whispered a story that Suze needed to lie down to recover from earlier that day but asked her to lie about the cramps. He had honestly thought Suze was looking after herself properly and that was part of the reason why he didn't snitch on her to their parents later that night.
"As you wish, Queen Midol."
"Oh, Gina." I grabbed her by the shoulders and gave her a little shake. "You are the best. You understand? The best . Don't throw yourself away on my stepbrothers: you could do so much better."
"Hey!"
"You just don't see it," Gina said, shaking her head wonderingly. "Your stepbrothers are hot . Well, except for that little red-headed one.
David looked a little miffed but he wasn't overly upset about it. He knew he wasn't physically attractive but it didn't matter when he could find a truly beautiful soul who would recognise his intelligence and personality to be his true beauty.
And hey," This she added as I was headed to the phone to make a call to Father Dominic. " I expect compensation, you know."
I blinked at her. "You know I only get twenty bucks a week allowance, but you can have it-"
"I doubt Gina meant money," Jake said.
Gina made a face. "I don't want your money. But a thorough explanation would be nice. You never would give me one. You always just dodged the question. But this time, you owe me." She narrowed her eyes. "I mean, I am going to sit through a screening of Hellraiser III for you. You owe me big time. And yes," she added, before I could open my mouth, "I won't tell anybody. I promise not to call the Enquirer or Ripley's Believe It or Not."
Everyone but Brad, who was still upset that Gina doesn't like his favourite movie, grinned at that.
I said, with what dignity I could muster, "I wouldn't have thought otherwise."
"Yeah right," Brad snorted.
Then I picked up the phone and dialled.
"And that's the end of the entry," Helen said