Abandon - Meg Cabot [36]
Jade gave me a funny look, halfway between a smile and a frown.
“Hey,” she said, reaching out to touch my hand. “I mean it. None of what happened at your old school was your fault, you know.”
I froze when she touched me. And not just because the librarian was shooting us a disapproving look from across the room, either…though I’m pretty sure she didn’t appreciate our having a conversation in the quiet zone of her library, let alone my using it as a lunchroom.
“Right,” I said. “I know.”
Was she kidding?
Jade nodded. “Good,” she said. “Just remember that. In the meantime, try to enjoy yourself, okay? I know you’ve been through a lot, but give yourself a break. It’s just high school.”
I pasted a smile onto my face. “Sure,” I said. Maybe Jade was the one who was crazy, not me. Although she and her fellow New Pathways staff members had taken great pains to remind us all that there’s no such thing as “crazy” or “normal.” These words aren’t therapeutically beneficial. “I’ll try.”
“Okay, well, great talk.” Jade got up. “Five minutes till the bell rings. Be sure to stop by to check in with me after school. I got some more of that licorice you like. The red kind. Oh, and there’s an assembly in the auditorium at two. Don’t miss it. It’s gonna be epic.”
She winked and left. Epic, unlike crazy or normal, is a word the New Pathways staff members love. Especially Jade. Check yourself before you wreck yourself.
It was clear that my experience at IHHS was going to be sink or swim.
I already knew what it was like to sink.
I decided I might as well swim.
When I arrived at the auditorium for the assembly, the din was deafening. The two-thousand-seat room was filled with people greeting each other after a long summer apart: girls with long, white-tipped nails — this look was considered totally over up north…at least according to gossip I’d overheard back at the Westport Academy for Girls, before I was thrown out — screaming and hugging, and tattooed guys in head scarves fist-bumping and high-fiving one another, and some actually greeting one another a bit more aggressively than that. So many students talking at a volume so loud in a room so large, I was tempted to slip my earbuds back in just to keep myself from going crazy. Or whatever the therapeutically beneficial word for crazy is.
But I knew I couldn’t. I had promised myself that I would stay engaged this year. If I didn’t stay engaged, how would I keep the next girl from dying on my watch?
And okay, I had failed miserably to help the last one.
But you never knew. I had a lot of advantages here on Isla Huesos that I hadn’t had back in Connecticut. At least here I wasn’t invisible, the way I’d unfortunately made myself for too long back at my old school. I could already tell, because some guy in a white shirt had noticed me and held the auditorium door open for me.
I hadn’t quite been able to believe it myself, actually.
“After you,” he’d said politely.
I wasn’t sure which had startled me more: the fact that he was the first person to have spoken to me all day — besides Jade — or the fact that he was so nonthreateningly gorgeous in a boy-band kind of way: tall, blue eyed, friendly smile at the ready, revealing a set of perfectly straight white teeth, a tan you could tell had come from healthy outdoor living and not from a salon, as had the blond highlights in his sandy-brown hair.
All of this was capped off with a pair of khaki shorts and a white polo that showed off his biceps.
Unbelievable.
Kite sailing, if I had to guess. You didn’t get biceps — but also a tan — from regular sailing.
“Thanks,” I said, not smiling.
It was right then that the ocean breeze swept my pink class schedule out from the top of my bag.
“Oh, here,” he said, letting go of the door. “Let me get that.”
“It’s okay,” I said. I just wanted him to go away. He was like the concept of an outdoor cafeteria: I did not understand.
It was too late, though. He’d already peeled my schedule from where it had plastered itself against a trash can with a sticker on it that said THIS IS FOR CANS