Disclaimer: The Mediator is a book by Meg Cabot. I am ss10009, not Meg Cabot. I don't own the Mediator, nor do I attempt to make money off of this fanfiction.

Chapter 4 –SAT . urday

There was no word of Kelly that night.

Or at least the night didn't start off with any conversation about her. Which was odd. Brad was more or less with Debbie, but I knew he had a thing for Kelly. I expected him to be somewhat of a wreck by dinnertime. But he was his usual Brad self: disgusting, inconsiderate, and irritating.

After all, he was being plenty irritating when it came to my current situation. You know, the whole, I skipped school and got grounded, situation.

"So, Suze," Brad began.

He was the first to break conversation at the table. It was an unprecedented move for him, but he had clearly prioritized tormenting me over his usual eating habits.

"How was your day? Here, at home?" Brad asked.

"Fine," I replied stiffly.

This question established a gateway for everyone else to question me about my day. "Did you get a lot of homework done?" from Andy made way for "Your teachers gave me some work to bring to you during your suspension" from Doc. And when the phone rang, Mom reminded me, before going to answer it in the kitchen, that I wasn't allowed to talk on the phone until my suspension was finished.

Dopey snickered loudly at that. I aimed a kick at his shins, but I wound up hitting the table leg with a loud thud.

"What was that?" Andy asked as he looked at the table in confusion.

I tried to keep myself from wincing, but, even as someone who'd been thrown off a roof before, stubbing my toe was far from fun.

"You OK, Suze?" Doc asked.

"Peachy keen," I said tersely as I tried to mask the discomfort in my voice.

"Just like your day here then, huh?" Dopey said, still snickering. "Some of us were busy being productive at school today."

"Don't you mean reproductive?" I hissed as Andy left the table to tend to an apple pie that was in the oven and Mom continued her phone conversation. "It's pretty much common knowledge that you and Debbie Mancuso were getting horizontal in a bathroom stall."

Dopey glared at me. "For the last time, Suze, I'm not screwing around with Debbie Mancuso. Give it a rest."

"And for the last time, Brad," I replied, "I can't deny the things that I see with my own two eyes."

Dopey looked momentarily taken aback. What I'd said was only half true. I hadn't seen what the two of them had been up to in the bathroom but heard it. And I don't think they went all the way either, but it didn't really matter. He was totally screwing around with Debbie Mancuso.

Andy returned from the kitchen alongside my mom. He was wearing oven mitts and carrying an apple pie that was emitting steam and a delectable aroma.

Brad had definitely picked up on the scent, too. He was holding his fork in hand and was poised to attack the dessert the moment it landed on the table.

"It's hot, Brad. You're going to want to wait a few minutes for it to cool down before you take any," Andy warned.

Brad took this into brief consideration before deciding that his mouth could handle hot. He removed a slab of pie from the tin and began to eat, albeit cautiously at first. I was disappointed when I didn't see him contort his face in pain from the heat of the pie. He was obviously skilled at handling hot foods in his mouth.

"What happened at the student council meeting today?" I asked as I put a slice of pie on my own plate.

I was reluctant to talk about school with Brad, but, as vice president of the eleventh grade, I kind of needed to know what was going on. I also needed to know what everyone else knew about Kelly.

"Nothing," Brad replied. "Kelly took your idea and ditched school today. There wasn't a meeting."

My breath hitched in my throat briefly. They didn't know she was dead yet, of course. It had been obvious from the way Brad hadn't said a word about her dying. This was, in a way, both good and bad. Good because it would make helping Kelly to move on much easier. Obviously, she was hanging around because she wanted people to know she was dead. Once everyone found out, Kelly would move on. On the other hand, when news of Kelly's death hit, it was going to hit hard. She was the most popular student at the Mission, after all. It would be like Heather all over again, without all the action and near-death scenarios.

"She ditched?" I asked. "Isn't that a little bit unlike her. I mean, doesn't she have perfect attendance or something?"

"Yeah, I guess it is a little weird for her, but she was probably tired after the night before."

Kelly had mentioned that she'd been out late the other night. It was why she'd slept through her alarm clock. It was probably a college party, owing to Thirsty Thursday, and it looked like Brad had been there, too.

"Night before?" Andy asked.

"Uh…," Brad said, clearly trying to think up a reasonable lie. He'd definitely been out party, and probably not soberly. "Big history test. Kelly probably was up cramming or something."

Andy seemed to accept this lie as Brad continued in a hasty attempt to gravitate away from the goings on of the night before.

"Weird thing is, she's not answering her phone or anything," he said.

"Probably because she sees your name on the caller ID," Doc supplied.

"Shut up! And the first time I called it wasn't even from my phone."

I wanted to interject that it had probably been from Debbie's cell phone, but I restrained myself. What I really wanted was to know if anyone had begun the process of looking for her. If someone else could find her body instead of me, then it might be an instant case closed on the Kelly Prescott file.

"No one's seen her since last night—uh, yesterday afternoon at school, I mean."

Mom looked alarmed.

"So no one has any idea where this seventeen year old girl is or what's happened to her in the past twenty-four hours?" she said.

Brad thought about that for a second.

"Basically, yeah, I guess," he said.

"Has someone notified the authorities?" Andy asked.

Brad shrugged and said, "I don't know. But I doubt it's that serious, Dad. She'll be back any time now."

Doc corroborated this by saying, "Brad may just be right. Current statistics indicate that Carmel has virtually no murder or manslaughter nor any forcible rape."

Neither Mom nor Andy looked pacified. They were wearing matching Worried Parent expressions, the kind of expressions that said they were imagining one of us being inexplicably missing for twenty-four hours.

As much as I wanted Dopey and Doc's beliefs to be correct and nothing with Kelly to be amiss, Mom and Andy's worries were justified in this case. Like it or not, Kelly Prescott was dead.

A few more moments passed in silence, as the worry from Mom and Andy refused to dissipate.

Eventually though, my mom dropped the Kelly subject and looked first at me and then at Dopey. "I'm assuming both of you know what tomorrow is," she said.

I looked at her, and then I looked at Dopey. Between the three of us, Mom seemed to be the only with a clue as to what she was talking about.

"Test prep for the SAT. From ten o'clock until two," Mom said, and her voice sounded slightly exasperated as she went on. "We signed both of you up for it weeks ago. We told you to make room for it on your calendars because it'll be every Saturday until the SAT."

"Every Saturday until the SAT?" Dopey and I asked simultaneously.

Andy swallowed a mouthful of pie and said, "You can't expect to just go once and get the full effect. It's supposed to raise your score by up to four hundred points."

I looked between my mom and Andy in hope that I'd heard them wrong, but neither of them seemed set on retracting their statements anytime soon.

Dopey unhappily finished his piece of apple pie and excused himself from the table, most likely so that he could go and sulk while listening to Marilyn Manson. I ate my first bite of pie of the evening. It was tasty, but it would've been better without knowing that my Saturdays had been commandeered by education.

Saturday arrived faster than I would have liked it to. I could've gone my whole life without knowing what the inside of Carmel Community College looked like. The walls of the SAT prep classroom were very white, and the lights were much too bright for my eyes to take in at a quarter to ten on a Saturday morning.

My mother had rushed us out the door early while saying, "The early bird catches the worm."

I was sure that the old adage was more or less true when it came to journalism, but trying to apply it to SAT prep was stretching it a little far. The only advantage to coming early to SAT prep was that Dopey and I had our pick of which of the forty or so seats in the room to sit in.

There were only two people in the room apart from me and Dopey. There was a man with graying blond hair standing at the front of the room. He was obviously the instructor. He was making conversation with a guy who was much younger than him and had crisp black hair and brown skin and was very obviously Jesse de Silva.

I dropped my bag in the seat next to him wordlessly when he was finished talking to the instructor.

The grin he gave me when his eyes met mine made my heart pound like I was doing a round of kickboxing. I couldn't help but smile back at him.

"I thought you were starting with the MCAT," I said.

"Unfortunately, no," he said, and then he lowered his voice before saying, "There's only so much paperwork the Father can produce."

"Well, I guess you're stuck here with me then."

"You know, I tried to call you yesterday, and I ended up speaking to your mother. She sounded upset with me."

"Did she?" I asked. Jesse was, most likely, the call that had been received during dinner yesterday then.

"She told me that I was interfering with your education, and you weren't allowed to see me until your semester at school was over," Jesse said. "This wouldn't have anything to do with your leaving school early the other day, would it?."

"It might," I said.

Jesse rolled his eyes. "You should have waited until school was finished, and then allowed either myself or Father Dominic to take care of the situation. Going through all that trouble only got you into more of it."

I was about to tell Jesse that I did not need another critic of my actions on Thursday and that, although I knew mediation was a thankless job, it should not also have a punishable offense. I didn't get around to saying any of this because that was when I heard Dopey's voice.

"I don't think Mom and Dad would really like this, Suze," he said. His loud voice received a rude look from the instructor, but Dopey, being Dopey, didn't notice. "You know you're not supposed to be seeing him at all."

Yes, I knew I wasn't supposed to see Jesse, but how did Dopey know about that? As far as I knew, all Dopey and Doc knew about my punishment was that I wasn't allowed to use the phone. Regardless, it didn't really matter how he knew. I had my own ammunition.

"Yeah, well, I don't think you're allowed to sneak out and go party on school nights. And, as far as I can recall, the night before last was definitely a school night," I responded coolly.

Dopey was about to say something, but Jesse spoke instead.

"I'm not going to disrespect your mother like that, Susannah," Jesse said simply. "We might not be able to change the fact that we're in the same classroom, but we can change the fact that we're sitting so closely to each other."

I knew what he meant, and I could tell by his tone that his decision was final. I picked up my things and, huffily, went back to the other side of the room.

Damn that man's morals.

Next Chapter: Back in the Saddle

Note: Since this chapter was called "SAT . urday" FFNet decided it was a link and censored it during last chapter's "Next Chapter" section. Sorry 'bout that. (The chapter title now has an awkward space between "Sat" and "Urday.")