Free Haunted by Meg Cabot

boyfriend. I did not need to have to worry about political mudslinging on top of all that.
    It hadn’t been a good morning. The nominations had been bad enough; Mr. Walden’s essay put a nice cap on it.
    And then, of course, there was Paul. He’d winked suggestively to me in homeroom, as if to say hello.
    As if all of that hadn’t been enough, I had foolishly chosen to wear a brand-new pair of Jimmy Choo mules to school, purchased at a fraction of their normal retail cost at an outlet over the summer. They were gorgeous, and they went perfectly with the Calvin Klein black denim skirt I had paired with a hot pink scoop-neck top.
    But of course they were killing me. I already had raw, painful blisters around the bases of all my toes, and the Band-Aids the nurse had given me to cover them so that I could at least hobble between classes were not exactly doing the job. My feet felt like they were about to fall off. If I’d known where Jimmy Choo lived, I would have hobbled right up to his front door and popped him one in the eye.
    So I was sitting there in the computer lab, my mules kicked off and my toes throbbing painfully, working on my trig homework when I should have been working on my essay, when a voice I had come to know as well as my own startled me by saying, close to my ear, “Miss me, Suze?”

chapter

seven
     
     

    “Leave me alone,” I said more calmly than I felt.
    “Aw, come on, Simon,” Paul said, reaching for a nearby chair, swinging it around, and then straddling it. “Admit it. You don’t hate me half as much as you pretend to.”
    “I wouldn’t bet on it,” I said. I tapped my pencil against my notebook with what I hoped he would take to be irritation but which was, in fact, nervous tension. “Listen, Paul, I have a lot of work to do—”
    He plucked the notebook out from beneath my hands. “Who’s Craig Jankow?”
    Startled, I realized I had doodled the name in the margin of my worksheet.
    “Nobody,” I said.
    “Oh, that’s good,” Paul said. “I thought maybe he’d gone and replaced me in your affections. Does Jesse know? About this Craig guy, I mean?”
    I glared at him, hoping he’d mistake my fear for anger and go away. He didn’t seem to be getting the message, though. I hoped he couldn’t see how rapidly my pulse was beating in my throat…or that if he did, he didn’t mistake it for something it was not. Paul was not unaware of his good looks, unfortunately. He had on black jeans that fit him in all the right places and an olive-green short-sleeved Polo shirt. It brought out the deepness of his golf-and-tennis tan. I could see the other girls in the computer lab—Debbie Mancuso, for one—peeking at Paul speculatively, then looking quickly back at their computer monitors, trying to act as if they hadn’t been trying to scope him out a minute before.
    They were probably seething with jealousy that he was talking to me, of all people—the only girl in their class who didn’t let Kelly Prescott tell her what to do and who didn’t consider Brad Ackerman a hottie.
    Little did they know how much I would have appreciated it if Paul Slater hadn’t chosen to grace me with his company.
    “Craig,” I whispered, just in case anyone was listening, “happens to be dead.”
    “So?” Paul grinned at me. “I thought that was how you liked ’em.”
    “You”—I tried to snatch the notebook back from him, but he held it out of my reach—“are insufferable.”
    He looked meditative as he studied the problems on my worksheet. “There’s something to be said for having a dead boyfriend, I suppose,” he mused. “I mean, you don’t have to worry about introducing him to your parents, since they can’t see him, anyway….”
    “Craig’s not my boyfriend,” I hissed at him, angry at finding myself in a situation where I was explaining anything to Paul Slater. “I’m trying to help him. He showed up at my house yesterday—”
    “Oh, God.” Paul rolled his expressive