Reunion by Meg Cabot Page A

a mouthful of saltwater. My eyes were stinging, and my teeth were starting to chatter. It was really, really cold in the water without a wetsuit.
    And then, a few yards away from me, Michael suddenly resurfaced, gasping for breath and clawing at the rope of seaweed around his neck. The lifeguard, in two easy strokes, was beside him, shoving the orange flotation device at him, and telling him to relax, that everything was going to be all right.
    But everything was not going to be all right. Even as the lifeguard was speaking, I saw a head bob up beside Michael. Though his wet hair wasplastered to his face, I still recognized Josh, the ringleader of the RLS Angels—a ghostly little group hell-bent on mischief making…and evidently worse.
    I couldn’t speak, of course—my lips, I was sure, were turning blue. But I could still punch. I pulled my arm back and let go of a good one, packed with all the panic I felt at finding myself with nothing but water beneath my feet.
    Josh either didn’t remember me from Jimmy’s or the mall, or didn’t recognize me with my hair all wet. In any case, he’d been paying no attention to me at all.
    Until my fist connected solidly with his nasal cartilage, that is.
    Bone crunched quite satisfyingly under my knuckles, and Josh let out a pain-filled shriek that only I could hear.
    Or so I thought. I’d forgotten about the other Angels.
    At least until I was abruptly pulled under the waves by two sets of hands that had wrapped around my ankles.
    Let me just mention something here. While to the rest of humanity, ghosts have no actual matter—most of you walk right through them all the time and don’t even know it; maybe you feel acold spot, or you get a strange chill, like Kelly and Debbie did at the convenience mart—to a mediator, they are most definitely made of flesh and bone. As illustrated by my slamming my fist into Josh’s face.
    But because they have no matter where humans are concerned, ghosts must resort to more creative methods of harming their intended victims than, say, wrapping their hands around their necks. It was for that reason that Josh was using seaweed instead. He could pick up the seaweed—with an effort, like the beer in the Quick Mart. And he could wrap that around Michael’s neck. Mission accomplished.
    I, on the other hand, being a mediator, was not subject to the laws governing human-ghost contact, and, accordingly, they quickly made use of their unexpected advantage.
    Okay, I realized then that I had made a bad mistake. It is one thing to fight bad guys on land, where, I must admit, I am quite resourceful and—I feel I can say without bragging—quite agile.
    But it is quite another thing altogether to try to fight something underwater. Particularly something that does not need to breathe as often as I do. Ghosts do breathe—some habits are hard tobreak—but they don’t need to, and sometimes, if they’ve been dead long enough, they realize it. The RLS Angels hadn’t been dead very long, but they’d died underwater, so you might say they had a head start on their spectral peers.
    Given those circumstances, I saw my situation progressing in one of two ways: either I was going to give up, let my lungs fill with water, and drown, or I was going to completely freak out, strike at anything that came near me, and make those ghosts sorry they’d ever chosen not to go into the light.
    I don’t suppose it will come as any big surprise to anyone—with the exception of me, maybe—that I chose the second option.
    The hands that were wrapped around my ankles, I realized—though it took me a while; I was pretty disoriented—were connected to bodies, attached to which, presumably, were heads. There is nothing so unpleasant, I know from experience, as a foot to the face. And so I very promptly, and with all my strength, kicked in the direction that I supposed those faces might