I so did not want to explain to Jesse about what Adeline had wanted, but nevertheless, he didn't stop insisting that I tell him until I finally spilled it out. He has the most uncanny ability to do that to me. He just looks at me a certain way, and everything just comes spilling out.
Usually, the silky, persuasive voice he uses on me plays a pretty sizeable part in the whole information-spilling thing, but not this time. He was all-business.
As if the flat tone of voice and piercing look in his eye didn't convey that message.
I had a feeling that there would be no making out today. Unfortunately.
Damn. It's all Adeline's fault.
So, I just sat there, fruitlessly attempting to make up some kind of lie, as usual.
"Um, Jesse. You know how you're going to dissect a dead body in your class?" I said. Lying, I knew, would only serve to make him even more frustrated with me.
"Eventually, I will, yes," he said boredly. He just wanted me to get on with what I was going to say.
"She died, and her parents donated her body to the study of medical science. She didn't like that idea so much. And…well, she came to me and told me to tell some dude not to dissect her body…"
"And…?"
"I didn't tell him."
"Why?"
"Um, because," I started to say really, really fast. I wanted to get it over with quickly before I regretted it. "I thought she was talking about you, and if you went ahead and dissected her body, she'd get mad, and if you listened to her, you'd fail your class, and I couldn't let that happen, but it turns out she was talking about someone else, and so now she's really, really mad at me." My voice got really high-pitched at the end of the sentence. Great. I can't make my voice smooth and sexy when I talk to Jesse. Fine. I can deal. But now I can't even sound the least bit normal while talking to him. Jeez. What is wrong with me?
I don't know how I expected him to react. It would have been nice if he'd murmured a sympathetic apology into my hear in that sexily smooth voice of his.
But no. He started laughing harder than I'd ever seen him laugh before. This inevitably pissed me off. God, how could he think that was funny? I'd just been yelled at because of him. And now he was laughing at me because of it. Why? Nothing I said was funny, at least not to me. I didn't exactly expect him to grab me and start kissing me, thanking me for trying to keep him from failing his class. It would have been nice, though.
I got up and locked myself in his bathroom. Mature, Suze, I said to myself. Way for a nineteen-year-old girl to act in front of her boyfriend.
Not to mention the fact that bathrooms are never the nicest places to hang out. Jesse keeps his clean and all, but still, it's a bathroom.
"Susannah," he said in his silkiest voice. "Come out of there. Don't be like this. I didn't mean to laugh. But it was a little funny."
"Go away. It's not funny at all!" I said. How old am I anyway? Nine?
"Susannah…come out of the bathroom, please. I promise I won't laugh anymore," he said.
"No."
"Fine, I'm coming in there," he said.
I locked the door just as his hand touched the doorknob.
"Susannah, really now. Come out," Jesse said.
"Fine," I said, unlocking the door. "But it's not funny."
"Oh, Susannah. I didn't mean to laugh like that. It's just funny, is all. It's funny because the other day, she came to me and said the same thing. There's a young man in the class after mine. His name is Jesse also," he said. I could tell he was trying not to laugh. "I told him. Apparently, she didn't know it."
"Then why did you ask me who she was?"
"I just wanted to see what you'd say."
"Ha-ha," I said sarcastically.
"Let's go get some lunch," Jesse said.
Since the whole time-travel thing (and I really, really try not to think about it often. I have bad dreams and chills just thinking about that night. Also, I don't like to think about having nearly lost the love of my life. Three times, if you want to be technical. Let's see, there's the thing where Paul had Jesse exorcised, thing with Jesse thinking I didn't love him, and then there's the time-travel fiasco, where I nearly killed Jesse's body and caused his soul to move on to the Other Side), Jesse's favorite foods are pizza, hamburgers, and everything Andy cooks.
Since Andy probably didn't have dinner ready, we were either going to eat pizza or hamburgers. This was not a problem.
"Hamburgers all right with you?" he asked.
"Of course." I didn't really care. I was with Jesse. I would have gone with him anywhere.
We got to the In-N-Out Burger, and I saw that we'd have a new ghost-busting project.
This one, I saw, wouldn't be fun. It wouldn't be fun at all. Because the people I saw were kids. The kind of kids who would become ghosts just so they could put cherry bombs in toilets and never get in trouble, the kind of kids who would paint each other's fingernails just so living people who weren't mediators could get freaked out by seeing floating finger nails in the air. Poltergeists.
"Jesse," I said pointing. "Look."
He looked. Right then, a boy who looked to be about fifteen picked up a fork and waved it around. His gaze drifted to a woman who was looking at the floating fork like she couldn't believe what she was seeing. Well, I didn't blame her - she couldn't see what was holding the fork in the air.
"Nombre de Dios," Jesse said. "I read a newspaper article about a group of children in an automobile accident the other week. I think we've found them."
I was very thankful for the evening Jesse and I had shared the night before. I had a feeling we wouldn't have another night so wonderful again for sometime, what with college and all. Not to mention our latest case of ghost-busting.