Ninth Key by Meg Cabot Read Free Book Online Page B

hands — even though I’d been clenching it pretty tightly — and slammed down to the floor. As hard as a pillow can slam, anyway, which isn’t very hard.
    I lay where I was, blinking in the darkness. Jesse hadn’t moved an inch. That’s the thing about ghosts, see. They can move stuff — pretty much anything they want — without lifting a finger. They do it with their minds. It’s pretty creepy.
    “What?”
I demanded, my voice squeakier than ever.
    “I want to know why you told your father that there’s a man living in your bedroom.”
    Jesse looked mad. For a ghost, he’s actually pretty even-tempered, so when he gets mad, it’s really obvious. For one thing, things around him start shaking. For another, the scar in his right eyebrow turns white.
    Things weren’t shaking right then, but the scar was practically glowing in the dark.
    “Uh,” I said. “Actually, Jesse, there
is
a guy living in my bedroom, remember?”
    “Yes, but —” Jesse got up off the bed and started pacing around. “But I’m not really
living
here.”
    “Well,” I said. “Only because technically, Jesse, you’re dead.”
    “I
know
that.” Jesse ran a hand through his hair in a frustrated sort of way. Have I mentioned that Jesse has really nice hair? It’s black and short and looks sort of crisp, if you know what I mean. “What I don’t understand is why you told him about me. I didn’t know it bothered you that much, my being here.”
    The truth is, it doesn’t. Bother me, I mean. It used to, but that was before Jesse had saved my life a couple of times. After that, I sort of got over it.
    Except it does bother me when he borrows my CDs and doesn’t put them back in the right order when he’s done with them.
    “It doesn’t,” I said.
    “It doesn’t what?”
    “It doesn’t bother me that you live here.” I winced. Poor choice of words. “Well, not that you
live
here, since…I mean, it doesn’t bother me that you
stay
here. It’s just that —”
    “It’s just that what?”
    I said, all in a rush, before I could chicken out, “It’s just that I can’t help wondering
why
.”
    “Why what?”
    “Why you’ve stayed here so long.”
    He just looked at me. Jesse has never told me anything about his death. He’s never told me anything, really, about his life before his death, either. Jesse isn’t what you’d call really communicative, even for a guy. I mean, if you take into consideration that he was born a hundred and fifty years before
Oprah
, and doesn’t know squat about the advantages of sharing his feelings, how not keeping things bottled up inside is actually good for you, this sort of makes sense.
    On the other hand, I couldn’t help suspecting that Jesse was perfectly in touch with his emotions, and that he just didn’t feel like letting me in on them. What little I had found out about him — like his full name, for instance — had been from an old book Doc had scrounged up on the history of northern California. I had never really had the guts to ask Jesse about it. You know, about how he was supposed to marry his cousin, who it turned out loved someone else, and how Jesse had mysteriously disappeared on the way to their wedding ceremony….
    It’s just not the kind of thing you can really bring up.
    “Of course,” I said, after a short silence, during which it became clear that Jesse wasn’t going to tell me jack, “if you don’t want to discuss it, that’s okay. I would have hoped that we could have, you know, an open and honest relationship, but if that’s too much to ask —”
    “What about you, Susannah?” he fired back at me. “Have you been open and honest with me? I don’t think so. Otherwise, why would your father come after me like he did?”
    Shocked, I sat up a little straighter. “My dad came
after
you?”
    Jesse said, sounding irritated,
“Nombre de Dios
, Susannah, what did you expect him to do? What kind of father would he be if he didn’t try to get rid of