by Meg Cabot
I didn’t want to say anything to make him angrier…like that the fence hadn’t really been all that hard to scale once I’d wheeled one of those giant green-lidded Isla Huesos trash cans, which were just sitting around everywhere, up against it.
And that it wasn’t my fault the family of Dolores Sanchez, Beloved Wife of Rodrigo, had chosen to place her crypt so close to the fence on the inside of the cemetery, providing me with such an excellent landing pad.
Should I risk setting him off again by pointing out that, even if the police had understood what they’d seen on the tape — which they hadn’t — there was obviously no way they could find him to question him? The Westport Police Department didn’t know where he lived. I wondered if anyone did, besides me.
I had a few questions for him, though. How had he known to show up that day with Mr. Mueller, right when I needed him most? Was it really because of the necklace, like he’d said, when he’d shaken it in my face? Was that how he’d known the time before, with the jeweler?
But why had he even bothered, since he evidently still hated my guts for what I’d done to him?
Now didn’t seem like the best time to bring that, or any of the rest of it, up.
“None of this is my fault, you know,” I said, as he pulled me along so fast I was afraid I was going to lose a flip-flop. Although this was hardly foremost among my fears.
“Oh, really?” he said, turning his head to glare at me. “How is none of this your fault?”
“All I did was die,” I said. “And then, when presented with an opportunity not to be dead anymore, I took it. It wasn’t personal. It had nothing to do with you.”
He turned to glare straight ahead. “Right,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I demanded, stung by his tone. “I told you, I was scared. I didn’t mean to hurt you. That’s why I came here tonight, to apologize. I want to be friends, to help you. I gave you the necklace back. I don’t know what more I can do.”
“I’ll tell you what you can do,” he said, stopping abruptly. Now he did reach out to grip both my shoulders. But still not to kiss me. Only so he could wheel me around to glare at me some more. “You can leave me alone.”
Tears sprang once more into my eyes. That’s what he wanted from me? For me to stay away from him?
This had turned into a greater disaster than when I’d died. And I was still breathing, so that was saying something.
“I’d like to,” I said. All I could hear besides the deep, disapproving timbre of his voice was the drum of my heartbeat in my ears. Stupid girl. Stupid girl. Stupid girl, my heart seemed to be saying. “Except every time I try, you show back up, and act like such a…such a…”
“Such a what?” he demanded. He seemed to be practically daring me to say it.
Don’t, the voice of my mother warned inside my head. Don’t say it.
“Jerk.”
I knew, when the word was coming out of my mouth, it would be neither an adroit nor a sensitive thing to say. Especially since I’d been trying to do the right thing. Because we were going to have to be living on the same island together. And he had saved my life, after all, at least that day with Mr. Mueller.
Well, maybe not my life. But he’d saved something, anyway.
But somehow, in apologizing, I’d just ended up making everything worse.
As if that weren’t awful enough, after hurling out the word, I lifted a hand to that fresh new scar I’d seen on the inside of his right arm.
I couldn’t help it. I’d never been able to stay away from hurt things.
So there it was: my final mistake of the evening.
His mouth twisted into a very unpretty grimace, proving I’d been right about one thing:
He’d never be anyone’s handsome prince.
“Well, you don’t have to worry about that anymore,” he shot out, jerking his arm away as if my touch were poisonous. “Because you won’t be seeing me again after tonight.”
I realized several things then. The first was that his eyes weren’t dead anymore. They were as alive as electric wires, and just as dangerous.
The second realization came to me more slowly, as I looked down at the fingers he’d wrapped around my arm, fingers against which dark drifts of my hair, loosened from my clip, had tumbled.
And that was that his weren’t the soft, smooth hands of other people our age, most of whom had known no other labor than texting or moving a video game stick.
John’s were hands that had seen work — real, arduous work. The hands of a fighter.
But not just a fighter, I realized, as they gripped me. His were hands that had killed.
A part of me must have known this all along. But it hadn’t really sunk in until tonight.
And by then, of course, it was far, far too late.
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto I
When I got home, Mom said, “Oh, hi, honey. I’m glad you made it back before the storm. It looks like it’s about to pour any minute. Did you have a nice ride?”
“Yeah,” I said. I turned around and locked the door. I used the dead bolt and the lock inside the doorknob.
Then I hit the STAY button on the alarm and entered our code. Our code is our initials, plus the years Mom’s alma mater won the NCAA championship. Mom’s handling the disappointment that I probably won’t be getting into any four-year colleges, let alone the one where she and Dad met, pretty well.
“Uh, honey,” Mom said, a funny look on her face. “What are you doing?”
“Safety,” I said. My heart was still ricocheting off the walls of my chest. As soon as I’d gotten back onto my bike, I’d ridden flat out for home. I hadn’t even stopped outside to lock up my bike or turn off its lights, I realized now as I lifted the curtain in one of the foyer windows to peek outside to see if he’d followed me. “Safety first.”
“Well, honey,” Mom said, pressing the off button on the alarm, then putting the code back in. “Some of our guests are still here. So how about we wait to put the alarm on until after they leave? Okay?”
I nodded, still peering out the foyer window. I was not going back out there to turn off my bike lights. They could blink on and off all night, for all I cared. I’d just buy new lights if they burned out. It would be worth it. If the bike got stolen, so what? I’d just make Dad buy me a new one. This whole thing was his fault, anyway. That’s what Mom thinks.
I was never going back outside again.
Not so long as he was out there.
“Honey?” Mom asked. “Are you all right?”
“Sure, Mom,” I said, letting the curtain drop. “I’m great. Having a nice time at your party?”
“It’s your party, honey,” she said, smiling. “And I’m having a great time. It’s so good to see everyone again. I think even your uncle Chris enjoyed himself—”
“Great, Mom,” I interrupted. “Look, I’m really tired. I’m going to go to bed.” I was going to pull the covers up over my head and never come out.
“Oh,” Mom said, looking disappointed. “Don’t you want to say good night to everyone? Your uncle Chris waited especially to see you before he and Grandma and Alex head for home. And I think Alex wants to make sure you don’t have any more questions about starting school tomorrow. I thought that was awfully sweet of him.”
Just the reminder that school was starting tomorrow made me want to bite off all my fingernails. But Mom had taken me for a special back-to-school mani-pedi yesterday, so I knew I had to keep them out of my mouth.
“You know what,” I said. “I’m really beat. Must be all the lastminute excitement with the party. Just tell Alex thanks, but I’ll see him tomorrow morning when he comes to pick me up for school. Good night, Mom.”
I rushed up the stairs before she could say anything more.
He’d destroyed the gates
to the cemetery.
He’d crushed the lock with a single vicious kick from one of those heavy black boots. Then, when the gates crashed violently open, he’d pushed me through them.
“Get out,” he’d warned in his devil-deep voice. “Do you hear me, Pierce? Get out and don’t ever come back. It’s not safe for you here. Not unless you really do want to end up dead. Forever this time.”
A huge bolt of lightning had lit up the clouds right after he said it, and then a crack of thunder, so loud that I thought the sky was splitting in two, had muffled the sound of the gates swinging back into place behind me.
Without looking back, I ran to where I’d left my bike chained, I was so grateful to have escaped.
Now standing in the shower, letting the water pour over me, so hot it was almost scalding, I had to wonder:
Had any of it really even happened? How could it? No one could kick apart a locked metal gate — and the black wrought-iron gates to the Isla Huesos Cemetery were huge, large enough for a hearse to fit through, and thick and strong as jail bars.
No one who lived in this world, anyway.
I didn’t want to think about it.
I couldn’t think about anything else.
Had I really seen him…spoken to him…touched him…been touched by him? I looked down at the skin on my bare arms where those killer fingers had been. Incredibly, they’d left no mark, though earlier I could have sworn they’d singed me to the bone.
I didn’t even have the necklace anymore to prove to myself that any of it had happened. Now it was lost — forever this time, just like he’d said — because I was certainly never setting foot in that cemetery again. Maybe some tourist would find it. It would probably end up for sale online or in a pawnshop somewhere.
Stepping from the shower and wrapping myself in one of the thick, white towels Mom’s interior decorator had picked out, I shook my head. It didn’t matter anymore. I knew what I’d seen, what I’d felt. I didn’t need a piece of jewelry to prove it. Not to myself or to anyone.
Seeing him tonight had only made things worse. My apology for what I’d done to him had obviously gone over like a big fat empty piñata at a five-year-old’s birthday party.
On the other hand, I hadn’t heard any apologies out of him. So why did I even care? Guys really could be jerks. At least from what I’d observed. Mom certainly thought so. Which was why she packed the two of us up and moved us to Isla Huesos. Because I wasn’t the only thing she loved that she felt Dad had allowed to die through neglect.
“Isla Huesos, Deb? Really?” I’d overheard Dad say to her after dropping me off from one of our last (court-mandated, of course, though I didn’t mind) lunches. Neither of them knew I was outside the door, listening. I knew eavesdropping was wrong. But how else was I supposed to figure out what was going on? “You think that’s what the counselor meant when she said a place better suited to her needs?”
“It can’t,” Mom said, “be any worse for her than Connecticut has turned out to be.”
“You can’t peg the teacher on me, Deb,” Dad said defensively. “That one was all you. I heard you pushing her to take him up on his tutoring offer —”
“Just drop it,” Mom said. Now she sounded defensive. “I’m taking her home. End of story.”
“Of course you are. Going to save the birds.”
“Someone has to,” she said tightly.
“It’s not going to make any difference, Deb,” Dad assured her. “It’s going to be a drop in the bucket. I think a more likely reason for your going is that he’s available again.”
Now Mom just sounded mad. “I would think you’d have better things to do right now than look up the marital status of my ex-boyfriends on the Internet.”
“I like to keep track of their mating habits,” Dad said, “the way you do the roseate spoonbills.”
“The spoonbills,” Mom snapped, “aren’t mating anymore. Most of them are dying. Thanks to you.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Deborah. You think I did that on purpose, too?”
“Like certain other things I could mention,” Mom said, “that oil leak wouldn’t have happened if you’d been paying attention.”
Ouch.
But Dad couldn’t deny it, much as I’m sure he would have liked to. It was one of the reasons he was always going on TV. Dad’s company was at least partly to blame for the decimation of the local economies of hundreds of communities on or around the Gulf, including Isla Huesos’s. Tourists didn’t want to vacation in a place where their rented Jet Skis might hit patches of oil. Brides didn’t want tar balls in their beachside wedding photos. Sportsmen would no longer charter boats to fish in areas where so much sea life had been deemed inedible owing to the dispersant Dad’s company had used with so much careless abandon.
“It’s perfectly safe,” Dad was always going on news shows to declare. “It’s been tested!”
But when one journalist served Dad a plate of shrimp cocktail he claimed had been caught in waters where his company’s dispersant had been used, and dared him on air to eat it himself if it was so safe, Dad turned very red and said his doctor told him he wasn’t allowed to have shrimp on account of his cholesterol.
Dad didn’t have high cholesterol.
I just wondered who the he was that Dad had mentioned to Mom. I didn’t like to bug her about unnecessary stuff since she seemed to have enough on her mind, what with the spoonbills and the move and Uncle Chris and, of course, me.
Which was why, when I lifted one of the curtains in my bedroom before I got into bed, and thought I saw a man standing by the pool, I didn’t say anything to her about it.
By then all the party guests had gone home, and Mom had long since gone to sleep. The storm, meanwhile, had arrived in full force. The power, as it often seemed to in Isla Huesos, so far from the mainland, had gone out.
So much for our crack security system.
Rain was streaming down in sheets. Our little kidney-shaped pool in the backyard was threatening to overflow, and the wind was tossing the palm fronds like pieces of newspaper.
But when a flash of lightning turned the yard from blackness to stark daylight — just for a second — I could have sworn I saw John standing there looking up at me.
That was the only person it could be. Who else could get in?
Dad had agreed to let me live out of state with the provision that Mom send me to a school with a program suited to my “special needs” and bought a house in a gated community — he’d known how much this would offend her liberal leanings.
Dolphin Key was the only such community on Isla Huesos. There was a security guard posted twenty-four hours at the entrance, the only way in and out of our street.
The Spanish walls that surrounded our new home were twelve feet high. There was no way anyone could climb them without a ladder.
Walls and security guards couldn’t stop someone like John, though.
But why would he bother standing in the rain outside my bedroom window when he’d told me to leave him alone? Not to mention the fact that I’d called him a jerk to his face.
Why had I even bothered apologizing to him for what I’d done? He’d done far worse to me. Why couldn’t I hate him, the way I ought to?
Maybe because John was like one of Mom’s birds: a wild thing. He couldn’t help how he was. I was never going to get through to him. Like Dad had said, what was the point of even trying?
Especially since I’d obviously broken “the rules” John had spoken of so mysteriously, by running away. Surely, I was going to have to be punished for this, most likely by him…or maybe those Furies he’d spoken of. You can’t escape death. I’d read all about this after my accident. Death will come for you, eventually.
When lightning flashed again a few seconds later, though, I saw that the figure was gone. Maybe it had never even been there at all. Maybe it had just been that overactive imagination everyone kept accusing me of having, playing tricks on me.
I let the curtai
n drop and turned back to bed. This was so stupid. I should have been feeling good. I’d given back the necklace I’d taken under false pretenses, and said all the things I felt like I was supposed to say. I’d literally gotten everything I needed to off my chest. I was making a new start here, just like Mom.
John had even accepted my apology! Maybe a little grouchily, but he had. He was moving on, too, as illustrated by his spiking the necklace a good hundred yards across the cemetery and telling me to stay away from him.
And later, when I went to check on my bike out the bathroom window, and saw that someone had chained it up and switched off the lights, I told myself firmly that it must have been my uncle Chris, or maybe Alex, as they’d left the party. No way had it been John. Why would he do something nice like that for me, when he’d made it only too clear he hated my guts and wanted me to stay away from him?
So why, as I climbed into bed, did I feel worse instead of better? I didn’t feel any sense of closure or any less a sense of — dread was the only word for it. Ever since I’d set foot on this island, that’s all I’d felt, this pressure on the back of my neck, like something was going to happen, something bad.
Something bad had already happened! I’d seen him. It was over!
So why was I up half the night, unable to sleep? Not because of the thunder, either. It almost seemed as if — but it couldn’t possibly be, because it was so stupid — but it was like I missed the familiar weight of that necklace around my neck.
What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I get with Mom’s “make a new start” program?
When I thanked Alex the next morning as I climbed into his car, he asked what for.
“My bike,” I said. “Didn’t you lock it up last night when you left my house? And switch off the lights?”
“Uh,” he said. “No. When I left — which I guess was right after you got home, because your mom said you’d gone upstairs. Thanks for saying good night, by the way. Oh, and for taking off like that and leaving me alone with Grandma. That was super sweet — your bike was already chained up and the lights switched off. I thought you’d done it.”