Of course, I didn’t know how I felt about my first kiss coming from one of the undead, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers, and let me tell you something, Jesse was way cuter than any live guy I’d met lately. I’d never seen such a nice-looking ghost. He couldn’t, I thought, have been more than twenty when he died. I wondered what had killed him. It’s usually hard to tell with ghosts, since their spirits tend to take on the shape their body was in just before they stopped functioning. My dad, for instance, doesn’t look any different when he appears to me now than he did the day before he went out for that fatal jog around Prospect Park ten years ago.

I could only assume Jesse had died at someone else’s hands since he looked pretty damned healthy to me. Chances were he’d been a victim of one of those bullet holes downstairs. Nice of Andy to frame it for posterity’s sake.

And now this extremely nice-looking ghost looked as if he were going to kiss me. Well, who was I to stop him?

So I sort of leaned my head back and looked out at him from underneath my eyelids, and sort of let my mouth get all relaxed, you know? And that’s when I noticed his attention wasn’t focused anywhere near my lips, but way below them. And not my chest, either, which would have been an OK second.

‘You’re bleeding,’ he said.

Well, that pretty much spoiled the moment. My eyes popped wide open at that remark.

‘I am not,’ I said automatically since I didn’t feel any pain. Then I looked down. There were smallish stains flowering on the pavement below my feet. You couldn’t tell what colour they were because it was so dark. In the moonlight, they looked black. There were similar dark stains, I saw with horror, on the front of Jesse’s shirt.

But they were definitely coming from me. I checked myself out, and found that I’d managed to open what was probably one of the smaller, but still fairly important, veins in my wrist. I’d peeled off my gloves and stuffed them in my pockets while I’d been talking to Heather, and in my haste to escape during her fit of rage, I’d forgotten to put them back on. I’d probably sliced myself on the broken glass still littering the window sill in Mr Walden’s classroom when I’d vaulted up on to it during my escape. Which just proved my theory that it’s always on the way out that you get stuck.

‘Oh,’ I said, watching the blood ooze out. I couldn’t think of anything else to say but, ‘What a mess. I’m sorry about your shirt.’

‘It’s nothing.’ Jesse reached into one of the pockets of his dark, narrow-fitting trousers and pulled out something white and soft that he wrapped round my wrist a few times, then tied into place like a tourniquet, only not as tight. He didn’t say anything as he did this, concentrating on what he was doing. I have to say this was the first time a ghost had ever performed first aid on me. Not quite as interesting as a kiss would have been, but not entirely boring, either.