by Meg Cabot
He turned away to lean down towards his briefcase, on which my necklace was carefully balanced.
Oh, no. He knew. I don’t know how, but he knew. He knew it had been me in the cemetery last night, with the gate. Even though it hadn’t. Well, not completely.
He lifted the now purple-gray stone.
I heard my mom catch her breath. She’d recognized it. Of course she had. She’d seen me wearing it a thousand times, throughout the mess following my accident and the divorce, and every day afterwards, though she never asked again where it came from. She seemed to think it was just a piece of costume jewelry to which I’d formed some kind of eccentric attachment.
Now, seeing it in someone else’s hands, her gaze flew to meet mine, clearly puzzled.
My blood pumping in my ears, I silently willed her not to say anything. The walls of the New Pathways office had suddenly turned so red, it was as if poinciana blossoms were sprouting from them.
Don’t say it, I thought. I wasn’t sure if I was saying it to myself or to Mom or to Richard Smith. Please don’t say it. Something terrible is going to happen if you say anything.…
Then the cemetery sexton laid my necklace aside, opened his briefcase, and lifted a stack of papers from inside it.
“I was hoping you all might help me distribute these flyers.” He turned around, walked over to us, and handed each of us a pile. “They explain the cemetery’s new visitation policy, and I’m quite eager to get them handed out as soon as possible.”
Tim, standing next to me, looked down at the pages the cemetery sexton had thrust into his hands. He seemed confused.
He wasn’t the only one.
“You could have just given these to the main office,” he said. “They usually handle these kinds of things, you know, Richard.”
“Oh, yes,” Cemetery Sexton Smith said as he bustled around, officiously passing out his piles. “I know. But I’ve found the staff in D-Wing so much more accommodating.”
I stood there staring down at the sheets of paper in my hands. The red that had been oozing down the walls of the New Pathways office was beginning to disappear, my heartbeat — and breathing — to return to normal.
But then I noticed that my flyers were different from everyone else’s. On the top page of mine, a note had been scrawled in what appeared to be fountain pen, in flowing cursive.
Make an appointment to see me, the cemetery sexton had written. You will do this if you don’t want trouble.
Underneath the message, there was a phone number.
Trouble was the last thing I wanted.
The problem was, as John had pointed out last night, trouble seemed to follow me no matter where I went.
I stared down at the message, trying to make sense of it — How had he known? How had Richard Smith known it was me? — until I heard a click. When I looked up, the cemetery sexton was just closing his briefcase.
With my necklace locked up inside it.
“Well, good-bye, all,” Mr. Smith said, lifting the briefcase and giving us a cheerful wave. “Have a pleasant afternoon.”
Then he left the office, whistling a little tune as he walked out — looking me right in the eye as I stared after him through the office’s wide glass windows.
It wasn’t until later that I realized the song he’d been whistling was “Ring Around the Rosie.”
Which doesn’t mean anything, really.
Unless you’re someone who died once and then came back from the dead. So you’ve spent a lot of time on the Internet, looking up weird facts about death. Like that some people believe the nursery rhyme “Ring Around the Rosie” is really about the Black Plague, which killed a hundred million people or so during the Middle Ages.
“Huh,” Jade said after he was gone. “That is one weird dude.” She tilted her candy jar at me. “Licorice?”
I looked down at the red whips. “Uh,” I said. “That’s okay, but thanks anyway.” I’d lost my appetite.
I think Mom must have been feeling the same way. She smiled at me — too brightly — as if to show that everything was fine.
But I could see that she was holding on to the strap of her purse so tightly, her knuckles had gone white. She knew everything was far from fine just as well as I did.
“So!” She looked from Alex to Kayla to me and then back again. “Island Queen! Won’t that be fun?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “It’ll be epic.”
The land of tears gave forth a blast of wind,
And fulminated a vermilion light,
Which overmastered in me every sense.
DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto III
I could think of a lot of things I’d rather have been doing than standing in a twenty-person line outside Island Queen — Isla Huesos’s down-market version of Dairy Queen — in the burning-hot late afternoon sun.
Sleeping, for one thing. I hadn’t gotten a lot of it the night before. And okay, that had been mostly my own fault. But still.
Getting my meeting with Richard Smith over with, for another.
But he hadn’t picked up when I’d called him from the girls’ room before meeting Alex and Kayla down at the student parking lot — probably because he hadn’t gotten home yet. The number he’d left me might not have been a cell. He didn’t look like the type who owned a cell phone. Maybe he didn’t know what one was.
“Um, hi, uh, Mister Smith,” I’d stammered. “This is Pierce Oliviera. We just met in the New Pathways office. You gave me a note asking me to call you?” My palms were still sweating from my encounter with him, even though the school kept the air-conditioning set at what felt like subzero temperatures. “So I’m calling to schedule that appointment you requested,” I said.
This was probably the lamest message anyone had ever left in the history of the world. But what was I going to say, I want the necklace back that I left in the cemetery last night when a crime was committed there? I wasn’t going to leave anything on a recording that might incriminate me. I’d learned that much from what happened back in Westport.
“If you could just call me back,” I said, “at your earliest convenience, I’d really appreciate it. The sooner the better, because I’d like to get this resolved today if possible.” I left the number, in case he didn’t have caller ID, and hung up.
Now there was nothing I could do but kill time until he called back. I’d just have preferred not to have done it standing in a thousand-person line in the broiling-hot sun, waiting to order something called a Gut Burner.
“Buster,” Kayla corrected me, when I asked why we couldn’t just go someplace else to get them. “Gut Busters. And they only make them here. They’re like Blizzards, the ones you can get at Dairy Queen, only better, because they put more stuff in them.”
“What kind of stuff?” I asked. I felt testy, and it didn’t really have anything to do with the line. What if Mr. Smith asked me straight out where I’d gotten the necklace?
What if? He was going to ask me.
“You know,” Kayla was saying. “Stuff. I like chocolate chocolate-chip cookie dough. Alex likes Butterfinger bits with M&Ms. What’s your stuff of choice, chickie?”
But there was something even worse the cemetery sexton could ask me. And I dreaded having to answer that even more. The memory of how that gate had gotten destroyed — and why — was still too fresh. I wasn’t sure I could lie about it yet without giving myself away.
“I’ll tell you what you can do,” John had said when I asked what more I could do to help him. “You can leave me alone.”
He’d gone on to say, “I can assure you that you won’t have to worry about me showing up and acting like such a jerk anymore,” just before sending his foot crashing into the Isla Huesos Cemetery gate. The noise had sounded like a sonic boom.
“Chickie. Chickie. Pierce.”
I glanced at her. “I’m sorry,” I said, blinking. “What?”
Kayla rolled her eyes. “What is wrong with your cousin, Alex?”
�
�She’s on medication,” Alex muttered. “But she supplements it with high doses of caffeine, even though she’s not supposed to.”
I glared at him. “Wow,” I said. “I can see someone’s been listening to Grandma.”
He didn’t even bother answering. He was looking around at everyone in the line ahead of and behind us, almost as if he were trying to find someone or dreading seeing them.…
Only, who?
This wasn’t exactly what I’d been expecting when I agreed to come with them to get ice cream after school. I’d just wanted to look like I was normal — like I had friends, like I was one of the crowd — in front of my mother, since that seemed to be the only part of her visit to the New Pathways office that had made her happy, after that whole exchange with the cemetery sexton about Uncle Chris.
What had that been about, anyway? I’d never been too clear about what Uncle Chris had gone to prison for. Something about drugs…possession with intent to distribute. Nothing violent, anyway. I knew that. I was the only one in the family with that kind of thing on my record. Or at least I would be if Dad’s lawyers didn’t do what he was paying them to do.
“Have fun,” Mom had kept on saying, as she waved good-bye to me back in the New Pathways office.
Please, her eyes seemed to be pleading. Please, don’t mess this up for us, like you did back in Westport.
So I was trying not to mess this up, like I had back in Westport.
But so far the only fun thing about going to Island Queen was watching my cousin and Kayla fight.
“Well,” Kayla was saying to Alex, “it’s not like she’s Little Miss Innocent.”
“Kayla,” Alex said, an edge to his voice.
“What?” she demanded. “It’s true, isn’t it? Everyone’s talking about it. It’s on Google if you put her name in there.”
“Kayla,” Alex said. “Drop it.”
She shot him another indignant look. “It’s all going to come out in group this week anyway, Alex, so she might as well just admit it now.”
“Uh,” I said. “What are we talking about?”
“You,” Kayla said. “Did you, or did you not, kill a teacher at your last school?” Alex buried his face in his hands.
“Wow,” I said. “Really? Not.”
Kayla looked disappointed. “Oh. Everyone says you killed him.”
“Well,” I said, “I didn’t.”
“But you hurt him real bad,” Kayla said. “Right?”
Before I could reply, one of the girls who’d been giving me dirty looks in the auditorium — I recognized her by her incredibly straight hair — walked by.
“Oh, my God,” she said, stopping and coming over to me. “Wait. You’re Pierce Oliviera, right?”
I had never seen this girl before in my life except when she’d snubbed me, then had an apparent change of heart, back in the auditorium.
But she came over with a smile as big as if we were long-lost BFFs.
“Uh,” I said. “Yes?”
“Oh, my God,” she cried again. She actually gave a little jump into the air. “I’ve been wanting to meet you! I’m Farah. Farah Endicott? Seth Rector’s girlfriend. Seth told me he met you today and that you were so cool.”
At first I had no idea what she was talking about. Then I remembered the guy who’d helped rescue my runaway class schedule and who’d later calmed everyone down at the assembly. Seth Rector, of Rector Realty. And probably the Rector mausoleum in the cemetery.
Well, one day. He obviously wasn’t of it now.
“Oh,” I said, not really sure how else to respond. “Hi.”
“What are you doing, standing way back here?” Farah asked, looking appalled. Her voice was so loud, everyone in line had stopped looking at me — the girl who’d allegedly killed a teacher at her last school, at least according to Kayla — and was staring at her instead. “This is, like, insane.”
“Uh,” I said, glancing at Alex and Kayla, whom I couldn’t help noticing Farah had completely ignored.
But that seemed to be okay, because they were ignoring her back. Alex was staring stonily out at the water. The beach was only about a hundred yards away, across the parking lot and beyond the three-foot seawall. And Kayla had gotten her cell phone out and was checking her text messages.
“I guess we just got here a little late,” I said. “We had to make a stop after school, on our way here.”
I didn’t mention that the stop had been to the New Pathways office to pick up my cell phone, which I was not allowed to carry in school, due in part to my neurobehavioral developmental disorder.
“Well, come sit with us,” Farah said with a great big smile, reaching out and grabbing not my arm but Kayla’s…a gesture that seemed to surprise not only me but Kayla as well. I saw her tense up and then exchange a quick, astonished glance with my cousin Alex. “We’ve got tables over on the beach — with umbrellas, so they’re in the shade. And Seth is almost to the front of the line. Just tell me what you want, and I’ll go add it to our order.
Then we can all go sit out by the water. It’s sooooo much nicer over there, you can’t even believe it.”
“No,” Kayla said quickly. “That’s okay, Farah. But thanks.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “Thanks, but we’re good.”
I looked from Alex to Kayla and then back again. Something weird was going on.
True, the only thing in the world I wanted to do at that moment was get my stupid Stomach Buster or whatever it was, eat it, then go home and wait for Mr. Smith to call so I could find out what he wanted.
I wasn’t exactly looking forward to being accused of yet another crime I did not, in fact, commit.
But since it was going to happen anyway, I wanted to get as much of my waiting over with in air-conditioning, or at least shade.
Even if Kayla and Alex didn’t have the exact same problems as mine, it still seemed a bit strange that they preferred standing there sweating for another hour to accepting Farah’s invitation.
“But we have a great table,” Farah said, looking downcast. Her lips — glossed to a cherry red sheen — puckered. She pointed at an assortment of bright blue metal picnic tables out by the beach, all shaded by huge yellow umbrellas. There were only a few seats left at any of them, and apparently these were reserved for us. “You can’t feel it here, but there’s a totally nice breeze over there. And I swear, if you tell me what you want, I’ll make sure Seth orders it for you. What have you got to lose?”
I glanced at Kayla and my cousin. What did they have to lose?
Fear. I could see it in Kayla’s exotically made-up eyes. For some reason, she was afraid of Farah.
Or at least of someone who might be at Farah’s table.
And Alex? Well, from Alex’s dark eyes, I could tell nothing.
I knew Alex had an issue with Seth Rector. I knew the diamond from my necklace had turned a stormy gray when I’d stood in front of the Rector mausoleum that day with Mom in the cemetery, just like I knew it had turned purple when I first saw Kayla in the New Pathways offices.
I didn’t know why these things were happening.
And the truth was, I was keeping a few secrets of my own. So who was I to judge Alex or Kayla?
But I also knew, standing in the parking lot of Island Queen after the night I’d had — after the day I’d had — I just couldn’t do it anymore. The whole point was that I was making a new start: I wasn’t going to be the girl who just watched while the people around me got hurt.
So whatever issues Alex and Kayla had with Seth and Farah — or whoever was sitting at her table out there on the beach — I was going to get to the bottom of them. This time, I was going to protect my friends from the evil.
And the only way I knew how to do that was to find out what that evil was.
“I’ll have a Coke float,” I turned and said to Farah. “That’s a large Coke with a scoop of vanilla ice cream in it. And use this” — I thrust a twenty-dollar bill into her white-nail-tipped hand, th
en jerked my head back towards Alex and Kayla — “to get them one chocolate chocolate-chip cookie dough Gut Buster and one vanilla Butterfinger bits and M&Ms Gut Buster.”
Farah’s glossy, puckered mouth broke out into a wide smile, revealing a set of perfectly straight white teeth. They were amazing, just like her boyfriend’s.
“Fantastic,” she said. “I’ll meet you guys over at the table.”
I noticed that most of the guys around us in line seemed to enjoy the way Farah sashayed — not walked — away, the pleats of her dark green plaid mini swaying behind her (they were definitely more than four inches above her knees).
Most of the guys except my cousin Alex, that is.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he spun around to say to me.
“It’s okay,” I said, shouldering my bag. It was heavy because I’d filled it with all the books I’d need if I were going to do my homework. I don’t know why I hadn’t left it in the car. I never think things through. Obviously. There was no way I was going to be doing any homework. “You can pay me back la —”
“You think by buying me a Gut Buster,” Alex said, his anger hurtling down on me like one of John’s thunderclaps, “I’m going to go over and sit with those A-Wingers, and we’re all going to learn, despite our apparent outward differences like that they all wear designer labels and drive brand-new cars their daddies bought them for their birthdays, and I wear clothes from the Salvation Army and drive a rusted old junk heap, that we have something in common? Like maybe we can all sing and dance, and then we’re each going to get parts starring in Isla Huesos High School’s musical, like this is some kind of damned Disney movie? Well, I’ve got news for you, Pierce. That’s not going to happen. And no matter what Grandma says, you’re nothing like your dad. You can’t just throw money at the problem to make it go away. In fact, you know what you can do with your money, Pierce? You can stick it up your —”
“Whoa,” Kayla interrupted, trying to keep the peace. “What is this? I thought we were just here to get ice cream.”
“Thank you,” I said to her gratefully. I’d never seen Alex so mad.