Meg Cabot: Twilight

But how could I help it? Here I was, my future laid out in front of me . . . graduation, college, career. Well, you know, pseudo-career, since we all know what my real career was going to be.

But what about Jesse? What future did he have?

"What's wrong with you?" CeeCee hissed.

I reached up and dabbed at my eyes with the sleeve of my Miu Miu shirt. "Nothing," I whispered back. "Allergies."

CeeCee looked skeptical, but turned back to her test booklet.

I'd asked him once what he'd wanted to be. Jesse, I mean. You know, before he'd died. I'd meant what he'd wanted to be as a far as a career went, but he hadn't understood. When I'd finally explained, he'd smiled but in a sad way.

"Things were different when I was alive, Susannah," he'd said. "I was my father's only son. It was expected that I would inherit our family's ranch and work it to support my mother and sisters after my father died."

He didn't add that part of the plan had also included his marrying the girl whose dad owned the farm next door, so that their land would be united into one supersized ranchero. Nor did he mention the fact that she was the one who'd had him killed, because she'd liked another fella better, a fella her dad hadn't exactly approved of. Because I already knew all of that.

Things were tough, I guess, even way back in the 1850s.

"Oh," was what I'd said in response. Jesse hadn't spoken with any detectable rancor, but it seemed like a raw deal to me. I mean, what if he hadn't wanted to be a rancher? "Well, what would you have liked to be? You know, if you'd had a choice?"

Jesse had looked thoughtful. "I don't know. It was different then, Susannah. I was different. I did think . . . sometimes . . . that I might have liked to have been a doctor."

A doctor. It made perfect sense - at least to me. All those times I'd staggered home with various parts of me throbbing in pain - whether from poison oak or blisters on my feet - Jesse had been there for me, his touch soft as cashmere. He'd have made a great doctor, actually.

"Why didn't you, then?" I'd wanted to know. "Become a doctor? Just because of your dad?"

"Yes, mostly that," he'd said. "I'd never even dared mention it to anyone. I could barely be spared from the ranch for a few days, let alone the years medical school would have taken. But I would have liked that, I think. Medical school. Though back when I was alive," he'd added, "people didn't know nearly as much about medicine as they do today. It would be more exciting to work in the sciences now, I think."

And he would know. He'd had 150 years to hang around and watch as inventions - electricity, automobiles, planes, computers . . . not to mention penicillin and vaccines for diseases that in the past had routinely killed millions - changed the world into something unrecognizable from the one in which he'd grown up.

But rather than clinging stubbornly to the past, as some would have, Jesse had followed along excitedly, reading whatever he could get his hands on, from paperback novels to encyclopedias. He said he had a lot to catch up on. His favorite books seem to be the nonfiction tomes he borrows from Father Dom, everything from philosophy to explorations on emerging viruses - the kind of books I'd have given to my dad on Father's Day, if my dad wasn't, you know, dead. My stepdad, on the other hand, is more the cookbook type. But you get my drift. To Jesse, stuff that seems dry and uninteresting to me is vitally exciting. Maybe because he'd seen it all unfolding before his eyes.

Sighing, I looked down at the hundreds of career options in front of me. Jesse was dead, but even he knew what he'd wanted to be . . . would have been, if he hadn't died. Or not been, considering what he'd said about his father's expectations for him.

And here I was, with every advantage in the world, and all I could think that I wanted to be when I grew up was . . .

Well, with Jesse.

"Twenty more minutes." Mr. Walden's voice boomed out across the classroom, startling me from my thoughts. I found that my gaze had become fixed on the sea less than a mile from the Mission and viewable through most of the school's classroom windows . . . to the detriment of students like me. I hadn't grown up, like most of my classmates, around the sea. It was a constant source of wonder and interest to me.

Kind of, I realized, like Jesse's fascination with modern science.

Only unlike Jesse, I actually had a chance to do something with my interest.

"Ten more minutes," Mr.Walden announced, startling me again.

Ten more minutes. I looked down at my answer sheet, which was half empty. At the same time, I noticed CeeCee shooting me an anxious look from her desk beside mine. She nodded to the sheet. Get to work , her violet eyes urged me.

I picked up my pencil and began to haphazardly fill in bubbles. I didn't care what answers I chose. Because, truthfully, I didn't care about my future. Without Jesse, I had no future. Of course, with him, I had no future, either. What was he going to do, anyway? Follow me to college? To my first job? My first apartment?

Yeah. That'll happen.

Paul was right. I'm so stupid. Stupid to have fallen in love with a ghost. Stupid to think we had any kind of future together. Stupid.

"Time's up." Mr. Walden pulled his feet from the top of his desk. "Lay your pencils down, please. Then pass your answer sheets to the front."

I wasn't all that surprised when Paul came up to me after Mr. Walden had dismissed us for lunch. "That was pointless," he said in a low voice, as we made our way toward our lockers. "I mean, we have our career paths cut out for us, don't we?"

"Well, you can't really make a living doing what we do," I said, then remembered, too late, that Paul certainly seemed to have managed to.

"An honest living," I amended.

But instead of feeling ashamed of himself, as I'd meant him to, Paul just grinned.

"That's why I've decided on a career in the legal profession," he said. "Your dad was a lawyer, right?"

I nodded. I don't like talking about my dad with Paul. Because my dad was everything that was good. And Paul is everything that . . . isn't.

"Yeah, that's what I thought," Paul went on. "Nothing's black and white with the law. It's all sort of gray. So long as you can find a precedent."

I didn't say anything. I could easily see Paul as a lawyer. Not a lawyer like my dad had been, a public defender, but the kind of lawyer who'd defend rich celebrities, people who thought they were above the law . . . and because they had limitless funds to pay for their defense, they were above it, in a way.

"You, on the other hand," Paul said. "I think you're destined for a career in the social services. You're a natural-born do-gooder."

"Yeah," I said, as I stopped beside my locker. "Maybe I'll follow in Father D's footsteps, and become a nun."

"Now that," Paul said, leaning against the locker next to mine, "would just be a waste. I was thinking more along the lines of a social worker. Or a therapist. You're very good, you know, at taking on other people's problems."

Wasn't that the truth? It was the reason I was so bleary-eyed and tired today. Because after I'd left Jesse the night before, I'd driven home and gone up to bed . . . only not to sleep. Instead, I'd lain awake, blinking at the ceiling and mulling over what Jesse had told me. Not about Paul, but about what Paul had made me read aloud earlier that day: The shifter's abilities didn't merely include communication with the dead and teleportation between their world and our own, but the ability to travel at will throughout the fourth dimension as well .

The fourth dimension. Time.

The very word caused the hairs on my arms to stand up, even though it was another typically beautiful autumn day in Carmel and not cold at all. Could it really be true? Was such a thing even possible? Could mediators - or shifters, as Paul and his grandfather insisted on calling us - travel through time as well as between the realms of the living and the dead?