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have been way better at building up their military —” Kelly pointed to a bunch of little red bombs on her chart. “And they could totally annihilate us if they wanted to.”
    “Except,” Adam pointed out, “that there are more privately owned handguns in America than there are in the whole of the Chinese army, so —”
    “So what?” Kelly demanded. I could sense that there was some division amongst the ranks of this particular group. “What good are handguns against tanks? I am so sure we are all going to stand around and shoot off our handguns at the tanks the Chinese are running us over with.”
    Adam rolled his eyes. He hadn’t exactly been thrilled to be assigned to a group with Kelly.
    “Yeah,” Rob said.
    The grade for the group projects was split, with thirty percent counting toward participation. I guess that “Yeah” had been Rob’s contribution.
    The kid whose name I didn’t know didn’t say anything. He was a tall, skinny kid with glasses. He had the kind of pasty white skin that made it obvious he didn’t get to the beach much. The Palm Pilot in his shirt pocket revealed why.
    Gina, who was sitting behind me, leaned forward and presented me with a note, written on a page of the spiral notebook in which she’d been doodling.
    Where the hell have you been?
she wanted to know.
    I picked up a pen and wrote back,
I told you. Principal wanted to see me.
    About what?
Gina asked.
Have you been up to your old tricks again???
    I didn’t blame her for asking. Let’s just say that at our old school, back in Brooklyn, I’d been forced to skip class a lot. Well, what do you expect? I’d been the only mediator for all five boroughs of New York. That’s a lot of ghosts! Here at least I had Father D. to help out once in a while.
    I wrote back,
Nothing like that. Father Dom is our student council advisor. I had to check with him about some of our recent expenditures.
    I thought this would be such a boring topic that Gina would drop it, but she totally didn’t.
    So? What were they?
Gina demanded.
Your expenditures, I mean.
    Suddenly, the notebook was snatched from my hands. I looked up, and saw CeeCee, who sat in front of me in homeroom and this class, and who had become my best friend since I’d moved to California, scribbling in it furiously. A few seconds later, she passed it back.
    Did you hear?
CeeCee had written in her sprawling cursive.
About Michael Meducci, I mean?
    I wrote back,
I guess not. Who’s Michael Meducci?
    CeeCee, when she’d read what I’d written, made a face, and pointed at the kid standing in the front of the room, the pasty-looking one with the Palm Pilot.
    Oh,
I mouthed. Hey, I’d only started attending the Mission Academy two months earlier, in January. So sue me already if I didn’t know everybody by name yet.
    CeeCee bent over the notebook, writing what seemed to be a novel. Gina and I exchanged glances. Gina looked amused. She seemed to find my entire West Coast existence highly entertaining.
    Finally CeeCee surrendered the notebook. In it she had scrawled,
Mike was the one driving the other car in that accident on the Pacific Coast Highway Saturday night. You know, the one where those four RLS students died.
    Whoa
, I thought. It totally pays to be friends with the editor of the school paper. Somehow, CeeCee always manages to ferret out everything about everyone.
    I heard he was coming back from a friend’s house,
she wrote.
There was this fog, and I guess they didn’t see each other until the last minute, when everybody swerved. His car went up an embankment, but theirs crashed through the guardrail and plunged 200 feet into the sea. Everyone in the other car died, but Michael escaped with just a couple of sprained ribs from when the air bag deployed.
    I looked up and stared at Mike Meducci. He didn’t look like a kid who had, only just that weekend, been involved in an accident that had killed four people. He looked like a kid who’d maybe stayed up too late