Abandon - Meg Cabot [102]
In the meantime, I wanted to let him know how sorry I was…truly sorry for any pain I’d caused him and for the way I’d hurt him the last time I was in this room. I’d said I was sorry before, back in the cemetery.
But this time, when I reached up to stroke the face I’d burned with tea a year and a half earlier, and whispered “I’m sorry” to him, I really meant it.
He took my hand and pressed his lips to my palm.
“Why don’t you give it more of a chance this time?” he said with another one of those smiles that tugged on my heartstrings. “Who knows? You might even start to like it here.”
I smiled back at him…then glanced, involuntarily, at the bed looming behind him.
And I realized, with a sinking feeling, that he was right. There was a chance I might start to like it here.
And maybe that — not him — was what I’d always feared most of all.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
What really happens to us after we die? That’s a question every culture in the world has attempted to answer, from the ancient Aztecs to the Christians and Muslims of today. Each has developed their own mythology relating to an afterworld through which the souls of the newly dead must pass. It was while studying those afterworlds (when I was in high school) that I first became interested in death deities, in particular the myth of Hades and Persephone, and the roots of the story that would become Abandon began to dig in.
Although Abandon is fiction, many aspects of the story are based in fact. In general, of people who report a close encounter with death, 20 percent also report having had a near-death experience, which can encompass any of a number of sensations. Often merely having come so close to dying is reported as being much more distressing for people than the near-death experience itself. Obviously, this is not the case for the main character of Abandon, Pierce Oliviera.
During the French Revolution, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were stripped of possession of the crown jewels, which then became property of the nation, and were promptly stolen from the royal storehouse. Many of the jewels were recovered, but not all.
The setting of Abandon is partially based on the island of Key West, the original Spanish name for which was Cayo Hueso (cayo, in Spanish, means “small island” and hueso is “bone”). Key West is thought to be an English mispronunciation of the words Cayo Hueso.
The island was given this name by Ponce de Leon, who is rumored to have been searching for the Fountain of Youth when he discovered human bones littering Key West’s beaches while he and his crew were charting the area around 1515. Most likely, the bones belonged to the island’s original inhabitants, the Calusa Indians. It was a poisoned arrow shot by Calusa Indians that killed Ponce de Leon in 1521.
In 1846, a Category 5 hurricane known as the Great Havana Hurricane destroyed nearly every building on the island of Key West (which had by then grown to be the largest town in Florida, as it was ideally located for trade with the Bahamas, Cuba, and New Orleans), although reports of the exact number of deaths are still in dispute.
That the hurricane destroyed the Key West lighthouse and naval hospital, then washed most of the coffins from its cemetery out to sea, are known facts. It was because of this hurricane that the Key West cemetery was moved to its current location on Passover Lane, and why aboveground stone crypts are now mandatory there.
It is rumored that this is also how Coffin Week — during which the Key West High School’s senior class builds and hides a coffin somewhere on the island for the junior class to find — became a yearly (though much frowned-upon) ritual.
Each chapter of Abandon begins with a quote from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, or Dante’s Inferno (in which Dante describes his journey into the Underworld, guided by the Roman poet Virgil), because many of the characters in Abandon have been abandoned in some way. Some may have even abandoned