Proposal: A Mediator Novella (Volume 6.5)

Cuatro

When I got back to my dorm that night, it was bedlam, and not just because of the sudden "super cell" that had swept into the tri-county area, soaking me to the bone and causing flash flooding on roads throughout Monterey Bay.

It was also because there was a man in my room.

Did I mention that I live in an all-girl dorm? Probably not, because it's too embarrassing. It wasn't my idea, believe me. It was my stepdad's.

I guess I lucked out in some ways despite my alleged "gift," since even though my birth dad died when I was little, the guy my mom married back when I was in high school (and for whom she moved across the country, dragging me from Brooklyn, NY, to Carmel, CA, when I was sixteen), turned out to be pretty decent.

Upside: Andy adores my mom, has his own home improvement show (which recently went into syndication, so he and my mom are currently swimming in payola), and is an amazing cook.

Downside: He has three sons—none of whom I have ever even remotely considered boning, sexy-erotic-novel style—and, being almost as Catholic as my boyfriend, is way, way too overprotective.

So I guess shouldn't have been surprised when I was applying for campus housing and overheard Andy telling my mother that the only way I was going to be safe from all the sexual assaults he'd heard about on National Public Radio was if I lived in an all-girl dorm.

Never mind that I have been kicking the butts of the undead since I was in elementary school, and that almost the entire time I resided under Andy's roof, I had a hot undead guy living in my bedroom. These are two of those secrets I was telling you about. Andy doesn't know about them, and neither does my mother. They think Jesse is what Father Dominic told them he is: a "young Jesuit student who transferred to the Carmel Mission from Mexico, then lost his yearning to go into the priesthood" after meeting me.

That one slays me every time.

So I didn't protest the decision. I didn't do so well on the SATs (the things people like me are good at, you can't measure with a multiple-choice test, let alone an essay), much to the everlasting mortification of my high-achieving, feminist mother. It didn't help that my best friends CeeCee, Adam, and Gina got into extremely good schools, boosting my mom's dream that I was going to Harvard and live in Kirkland House, like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Instead the only place I got into was the local community college, where I live in a suite in what's not-so-jokingly referred to as the Virgin Vault, with a practicing witch, a klepto, and a girl whose family's religion doesn't allow her speak to men outside of their faith.

I keep assuring Mom it's cool. Another one of our suite mates came out last semester as a lesbian (to the surprise of none of us but herself), and a fifth is sleeping with a guy who's in an actual motorcycle gang.

"See, Mom?" I'd told her. "Way better than Harvard. There's so much more diversity!"

Like most of my jokes, she didn't find that one funny.

But, seriously, these are my girls, each and every one of them. I'm secretly doing case studies on each of them for my biological psych class.

Except that tonight I didn't have time to stop and chat, let alone have a friendly cocktail. I needed to change out of my sopping wet clothes, find out where this Zack guy lived, and then get back out there and stop Mark Rodgers from making the biggest mistake of his life.

Well, of his death, if you wanted to get technical about it.

But the girls were all in an uproar, as I discovered as soon as I keyed in with my ID card.