This made me feel really sad. I mean, I guess I couldn’t blame her, really. If I didn’t know any better, I’d probably have talked to that tankard, too.

But that, you see, was what all those people on my block had been wrong about. My dad was dead, yeah. But I did see him again.

In fact, I probably see him more now than I did when he was alive. When he was alive, he had to go to work most days. Now that he’s dead, he doesn’t have all that much to do. So I see him a lot. Almost too much, in fact. His favourite thing to do is suddenly materialize when I least expect it. It’s kind of annoying.

My dad was the one who finally explained it to me. So I guess, in a way, it’s a good thing he did die, since I might never have known, otherwise.

Actually, that isn’t true. There was a tarot-card reader who said something about it once. It was at a school carnival. I only went because Gina didn’t want to go alone. I pretty much thought it was a crock, but I went along because that’s what best friends do for one another. The woman – Madame Zara, Psychic Medium – read Gina’s cards, telling her exactly what she wanted to hear: Oh, you’re going to be very successful, you’ll be a brain surgeon, you’ll marry at thirty, and have three kids, blah, blah, blah. When she was done, I got up to go, but Gina insisted Madame Zara do a reading for me, too.

You can guess what happened. Madame Zara read the cards once, looked confused, and shuffled them up and read them again. Then she looked at me.

‘You,’ she said, ‘talk to the dead.’

This excited Gina. She went, ‘Oh my God! Oh my God! Really? Suze, did you hear that? You can talk to the dead! You’re a psychic medium, too!’

‘Not a medium,’ Madame Zara said. ‘A mediator.’

Gina looked crushed. ‘A what? What’s that?’

But I knew. I’d never known what it was called, but I knew what it was. My dad hadn’t put it quite that way when he’d explained things, but I got the gist of it, anyway: I am pretty much the contact person for just about anybody who croaks leaving things . . . well, untidy. Then, if I can, I clean up the mess.

That’s the only way I can think to explain it. I don’t know how I got so lucky – I mean, I am normal in every other respect. Well, almost, anyway. I just have this unfortunate ability to communicate with the dead.

Not any dead, either. Only the unhappy dead.

So you can see that my life has really been just a bowl of cherries these past sixteen years.

Imagine, being haunted – literally haunted – by the dead, every single minute of every single day of your life. It is not pleasant. You go down to the deli to get a soda – oops, dead guy on the corner. Somebody shot him. And if you could just make sure the cops get the guy who did it, he can finally rest in peace.