by Meg Cabot
“That’s a very good question,” they said.
After what happened, Mrs. Keeler gently “suggested” that my parents find an “alternative educational solution” for me, a school better able to handle a student with my “issues.”
I burst out laughing when she said that, right there in front of my parents.
Issues. Right.
“It’s one thing to protect yourself,” Dad yelled at me during our very next lunch. “That, I get. Have I ever told you not to defend yourself? No. But did you have to permanently maim him? I spent all that money on that fancy school for girls — not to mention all that money for shrinks — and what did it get me?”
I shrugged. “A seven-figure civil suit?”
“I even bought you that damned horse,” he yelled, ignoring me, “from the Changs, because you said you wanted it so much. And what did you do? You turned around and donated it to some home for mental cases!”
“It’s a school for autistic children, Dad,” I said calmly, playing with the straw in my soda. “Double Dare will be part of their equine therapy program. He’ll make a lot of kids really happy, and he’ll get ridden and petted and fawned over every day. It’s a tax write-off for you, and the Changs won’t have the financial burden of supporting a horse no one rides anymore.”
“Not to mention,” Dad roared, loud enough to make all the other businessmen in their three-piece suits turn around and stare, “what happened to all my shoes? All the ones with tassels on them are gone! What am I going to have to lock up next time I see you? If it’s not my Japanese throwing stars, it’s my shoes. Please tell me. I worry about you sometimes, Pierce, I really do. Do you even fully understand the consequences of your actions?”
“I don’t know, Dad,” I said to him. The truth was, for the first time in a long time, I felt good. Even being yelled at by my dad over Cobb salads in a fancy restaurant in midtown Manhattan.
Sure, I’d been kicked out of school. I couldn’t seem to go more than an hour without craving a caffeinated beverage. And a guy I’d met while I was dead had popped by unexpectedly and caused me to be slapped with a seven-figure civil suit.
But I was feeling positive about the future.
“You can’t say nothing good’s come out of this,” I told him.
“One thing,” Dad challenged me, holding up a stubby index finger, “name one good thing that’s come out of this.”
I shrugged. “At least,” I said, “I finally found an interest outside of academics in which to engage.”
Dad didn’t think that was so funny.
I guess he was right about one thing:
Sometimes I don’t fully understand the consequences of my actions.
Made up a tumult that goes whirling on
Forever in that air forever black,
Even as the sand doth, when the whirlwind breathes.
DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto III
There was no attempt at subtlety.
“Hey, everybody, this is Pierce Oliviera,” Farah announced meaningfully.
Some guy with a blond crew cut, a complexion the same color pink as an Isla Huesos sunset, and a neck that was as thick as a tractor tire said, looking impressed, “Oh, hey, I heard about you. Isn’t your dad that guy that runs that company that keeps the military armed or something? The one who’s always yelling on TV?”
“Bryce.” Farah rolled her eyes, then smiled at me apologetically. “Please excuse him. He doesn’t get off the island much.”
“What did I do?” Bryce looked indignant. “I just asked a question. What’s wrong with asking if her dad is the guy from TV? He is, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” I said, taking a seat beside him. “Zack Oliviera is my dad.”
That was it. I was in.
But not just because of who my father was. There were plenty of other reasons, it turned out.
“Where’d your friends take off to?” Farah asked curiously, looking around for Kayla and Alex.
“Oh, they had to leave,” I said airily, hoping if I kept it short and sweet, there’d be fewer questions.
I needn’t have bothered. No one cared enough to ask any more about either Kayla or Alex (although Bryce finished off both their Gut Busters, then let out an enormous belch, causing all the girls to squeal in protest and throw their wadded-up straw wrappers at him).
What they wanted to discuss was something else entirely.
“So I’ve got the four-by-eights,” Seth said, smoothing out a sheet of paper he’d pulled from the pocket of his shorts and on which the breeze kept tugging. I squinted down at what the drawing on it depicted, but from where I was sitting, it was impossible to tell what it was. Well, not impossible, exactly.
I just couldn’t believe it.
“Where’d you get it?” Bryce demanded. “I thought Alvarez put the hammer down on all wood sales —”
Seth sent him a very sarcastic look. “Dude. Please.”
“Oh,” Bryce said, burping again. “Right.”
“Bryce, really,” a girl whose name turned out to be Serena said irritably. “Must you?”
“I think I have irritable bowel syndrome,” Bryce complained. “Well, I’m not surprised,” she said. “Do you know how many calories are in one of those things? And you just had three.”
Serena. I made a mental note of the name. When I’d been in the girls’ room back at school, making my call to the cemetery sexton, I’d also checked on Kayla’s Facebook page. Just out of curiosity.
The person who’d posted the meanest comments on it had called herself SerenaSweetie.
Was this who Kayla was so afraid of, and why she hadn’t wanted to accept Farah’s invitation?
“I can get access to a circular saw,” Seth went on. “It’s the assemblage, painting, and storage that’s going to be rough. As you probably recall from last year —”
“Right,” Farah said, straightening up in her seat. “That’s how we caught them. Remember? It was so obvious. They were all congregating at Caleb Tarantino’s house.”
“Oh, right.” A girl named Nicole, sitting across from me, brightened. “All the headlights kept waking me up. That’s when I called you, remember, Cody? Because they were pulling in and out of his parents’ driveway at all hours, and I couldn’t sleep, and I was like, ‘What’s with all the parties at Cal’s? And how come we’re not invited?’ ”
“It was a thing of beauty.” Cody, another member of the football team — though nowhere near as large as Bryce, and seemingly a bit more cerebral — nodded his head with relish. “They never knew what hit them.”
“We were like ninjas,” Bryce said. “Ninjas in the night. They learned not to mess with the Rector Wreckers.”
Cody and Bryce stood up at the same time, then bumped chests, hard, across the table. Farah and Serena rolled their eyes.
“Yeah,” Nicole said, her straw noisily hitting the bottom of her Gut Buster. “Well, I would have appreciated it if you guys had wrecked a little less stuff. Because my house smelled like smoke for months. And construction on the Tarantinos’ new garage starts at eight on the dot every morning, and it’s still going on, and you know how I get if I don’t have my full ten hours of beauty sleep.”
“So that’s what happened to your face,” Cody said. “I was wondering.”
Everyone snickered as Nicole cried out in feigned outrage, then turned to mock slap him.
I continued to suck on my Coke float. Everyone else might have understood what was going on. But I certainly didn’t.
“Okay,” Seth said. “So even though we’ve already established without a modicum of doubt that we’re smarter than last year’s seniors, and that this year’s crop of juniors is nothing but a bunch of sad-ass wusses, we’re still going to need to find a secure location.”
“Well, guess the cemetery’s out,” Cody said with a smirk.
Everyone laughed. Everyone but me.
“Obviously,” Seth said. “Although don’t think I wasn’t thinking of that befo
re Santos made his little announcement. Who messed with the gate? Anybody know?”
I froze, the spoonful of what little of my ice cream hadn’t melted only halfway to my mouth.
“I heard it was gangs down from Miami,” Bryce said.
Everyone scoffed.
“I’m serious,” Bryce insisted. “My sister’s boyfriend’s got a cousin with the Feds, and he says they just made some arrests up in Myrtle Grove. The MGB…Murda Grove Boys? Maybe they’re using cemeteries as part of their initiation rites. I saw these guys with some major rims driving around over by the Wendy’s near Searstown Mall last week —”
“Getting back to reality,” Seth said, rolling his eyes, “what we need is a place that isn’t under twenty-four-seven lockdown, but that no one from school can just drive by.”
“Like a gated community, you mean,” Farah said, sighing wistfully. “If only we knew somebody who lived in Dolphin Key…”
I nearly choked on my soda. Was this really happening? Were they actually trying — not very subtly — to get me to let them use my house for something that sounded highly illegal and also dangerous?
It seemed likely. Apparently, they didn’t think I was very smart. This, I’d ascertained, was because I was in D-Wing. A-Wingers did not hold D-Wingers in high esteem. I’d picked this up through earlier snippets of conversation dropped here and there.
“Yeah, well, what else would you expect? She’s so D-Wing,” Serena had remarked about another girl, who, it was revealed, had given birth over the summer.
“Well, he obviously should have been put in D-Wing from the start,” I heard Cody say about a fellow football player who’d been secreted to “wilderness camp” by his parents due to his out-of-control behavior.
I noticed the warning looks Seth sent across the picnic table and the quickly closed mouths that followed, but it was too late. I got it:
Everyone enrolled in New Pathways was in D-Wing, but not everyone in D-Wing was enrolled in New Pathways. There were only fifty kids in New Pathways. But there were five hundred kids in D-Wing. D-Wing, it turned out, was where the administration sent all their “problem” students — all the gangbangers and burnouts, anyone with a drug or disciplinary problem — to keep their bad attitudes from infecting the “normal” kids in the rest of the school.
That was the only reason I could think of, anyway, for why we were all housed in a separate wing from the other students. Even if it seemed almost too weird to be true. Like the fact that these fresh-faced, athletic kids who barely knew me apparently seemed to be asking me to sacrifice my home for their bizarre ritual.
“What,” I said, lowering my cup, “are you guys talking about, exactly?”
Farah laughed like I was the most adorable thing she’d ever seen. “Coffin Night, silly!”
“But didn’t the chief of police say that Coffin Night was canceled this year?” I asked.
Now everyone at the table started laughing at my ridiculous naïveté.
“The administration cancels it every year,” Seth explained patiently, when the laughter died down. “But every year, it happens anyway. It has to. It’s Coffin Night. It’s tradition.”
“Oh,” I said, remembering the expression on my mom’s face as she’d asked about Coffin Night. It was obviously a big deal around Isla Huesos. “But what is the tradition, exactly?”
Cody cough-sneezed the word D-Wing, but Seth, after giving him a frown that clearly said Hey, give the new girl a break, explained, “Every year, the senior class at Isla Huesos High constructs their own coffin. Then we hide it somewhere on the island. And it’s up to the junior class to try to find it.”
I waited, expecting to hear more.
But more did not follow. Everyone just looked at me expectantly, as in the background, seagulls swooped around, looking for stray French fries anyone might have dropped. Over on the beach, some shirtless guy tossed a Frisbee to his dog, who missed and then dashed happily out into the water to retrieve it.
“Uh,” I said finally. “Okay. But…why?”
Seth glanced at everyone else for help. “Why what?” he asked finally.
“Why do they want to find it?” I wasn’t trying to be a pain. I honestly didn’t get it. “What’s inside it?”
Seth smiled as if I’d asked something cute. “What do you mean, what’s inside it? Nothing’s inside it.”
“Well, then why does it matter?” I asked, genuinely bewildered. “Who cares about finding some empty old coffin?”
Seth’s smile vanished, and there was some muttering from down at the other end of the picnic table. I distinctly heard the words Really? and God, she really is D-Wing.
“Hey,” Seth said sharply. But to everyone else, not to me. “Cool it.” To me, he said, his tone gentle and his perfect smile back in place, “First of all, it’s not an old coffin. It’s a brand-new coffin, like I said, one that we’ll be constructing and hand painting, with our class year and all our names on it. Yours, too. And if the juniors find it, they’re going to take it out to the middle of the football field during the first game of the season and set it on fire in front of everyone. And film themselves doing it, and then post it online everywhere. Then we’ll be totally humiliated. So we don’t want that.”
I had already put the fire part together, after the incredibly boring speech Principal Alvarez had given, with what Nicole had mentioned about her house smelling of smoke for months after the Rector Wreckers — which I assumed were Seth and his friends — had discovered last year’s senior class coffin in her neighbor’s garage and apparently had chosen to set it on fire on site.
What I still didn’t get was why any of them cared.
“That’s why,” Farah said, laying a hand on my shoulder, “we were thinking it would be so great if we could hide the coffin at your place this year. Just for a little while. Because you live in Dolphin Key. To drive in and out of your neighborhood, people have to have permission from the guard at the front gate, right? You’re the only student from IHHS who lives there this year. I know, because my mom’s on the booster committee and I checked the database. Dolphin Key’s mostly a retirement and snowbird community. It’s really exclusive. Most people here on Isla Huesos can’t afford to live there. What that means is that no one from IHHS should be able to get in but us, and only when you buzz us in at the gate. You — and the coffin — will be totally safe. What happened at Cal’s last year would never happen at your place.”
I just stared at her. This was such a joke. None of these people even knew what they were talking about. Safe? I was the least safe person in the world.
Especially right now, with my necklace gone.
Oh, yeah. And the guy who’d given it to me, whom I’d met while I was dead, didn’t like me anymore because we were having a huge fight. Or something. Which was fine, because I was making a new start. New Pathways. I needed another soda.
“It’s just until we get it painted anyway,” Seth added hastily.
“Then we’ll move it somewhere else. We can’t keep it too long in any one place, in order to avoid detection. After your house, we’ll probably move it to an airplane hangar over at the Isla Huesos airport — my dad’s got a plane, and those wipes will never make it past FAA security — and then maybe over to the Navy base —”
“My dad’s a colonel,” Nicole said, batting her eyelashes at me.
“— then maybe up island for a bit,” Seth said.
I could see them going on like this all night.
“What happens if they don’t find it?” I interrupted. “The juniors, I mean.”
“If they don’t find it,” Serena said, looking at me as if I had asked something extremely stupid, “we bring out the coffin as part of the halftime show during the game and parade it around in front of everyone, while the band and dance team, of which I am captain, perform MC Hammer’s 1990 signature hit song, ‘U Can’t Touch This.’ ”
“Which you can’t. Because the Wreckers rule!” Bryce and Cody did anothe
r chest bump.
I stared at them, unable to believe my mom had looked back on Coffin Night with so much sentimentality.
But I tried not to let my true feelings show. I still needed to find out why Alex hated Seth so much. Besides the fact that they all considered everyone in D-Wing such freaks.
Although the term freak was subjective. Kind of like normal and crazy. I, for instance, might consider a freak someone who ran around an island trying to hide a homemade coffin, then paraded it around to a twenty-year-old MC Hammer song during halftime at a sports event.
But that was just me. And it was well known that I was crazy.
And I suspected that when Alex found out Seth Rector wanted to keep the senior class coffin at my house — and he was bound to if I agreed to do it and he noticed so many A-Wingers hanging around my garage — he was probably going to tell me the reason pretty fast.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’d have to ask my mom first. You know how it is.…”
“Of course,” Seth said, his blue-eyed gaze steady. “Totally. We wouldn’t want to do anything to upset your mom.”
“I’m sure she’ll say it’s okay,” Farah said. “Didn’t your mom go to IHHS? I thought I saw her name in the trophy —”
“I have another question,” I interrupted. “Why a coffin?”
Farah and Nicole looked at me as if I’d just asked why the sky is blue. “What?”
“Why a coffin?” I asked. “Why build and hide a coffin?”
Now everyone was staring. But I didn’t see what was so odd about the question.
“Why not a boat?” I persisted. “Aren’t we the Isla Huesos High School Wreckers? Wreckers are people who used to pillage ships that sank offshore between here and the reef, right? And then they resold whatever they managed to plunder back to the ship’s owners, for a profit? So wouldn’t it make more sense for us to build and hide a boat? Since the school mascot is a pirate-looking guy, not a skeleton?”
In the silence that followed, I could hear the waves as they lapped at the beach behind us. Isla Huesos didn’t usually get the kind of big, rolling waves you would typically expect in Florida because the island sat inside a coral reef — the third largest in the world.