Abandon - Meg Cabot [49]
My necklace.
“This way there never passeth a good soul;
And hence if Charon does complain of thee,
Well mayst thou know now what his speech imports.”
DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto III
My heart did a double flip inside my chest as soon as I laid eyes on it. I hadn’t realized how much I’d been longing for it until I saw it in someone else’s possession.
But it wasn’t in just anyone else’s possession. My necklace was in the hands of the cemetery sexton. What did that even mean?
I was guessing nothing good.
“Oh, hi, honey!” Mom cried. She managed to restrain herself from flinging her arms around me and giving me a big hug in front of everyone.
But you could tell that’s what she wanted to do.
“I hope you don’t mind my stopping by,” she said. “I know you were supposed to give her a lift home, Alex, but I just couldn’t wait. I wanted to see for myself how everything went. I swear, I had worse first-day jitters than you kids!”
No. I don’t think you did, Mom. See, you don’t know what happened to me last night in the cemetery. You slept right through the storm.
And you don’t have any idea what that old man sitting in that vinyl chair over there is about to do. Neither do I, actually.
But he can’t prove anything. Anyone could have a necklace like that. Well, maybe not anyone. And maybe not quite like that…
But it doesn’t matter. So long as he doesn’t do anything to make me mad.
“Don’t worry, Mom,” I said to her, going over and giving her a little half hug. I hoped she wouldn’t be able to feel how hard I was trembling. “Things went great today.”
Lie. And they were clearly about to get much, much worse.
“Oh,” Mom said, squeezing me back, “I’m so glad. Not that I expected things to go any other way,” she added in a low voice, “but I couldn’t help feeling a little worried when I drove up and saw all those police cars outside.…”
“Oh, that was nothing,” I said, careful to keep my gaze averted from the cemetery sexton.
“Oh, right,” Kayla said with a sarcastic laugh. “Nothing. Just trying to keep the student body from rising up and killing Principal Alvarez because he canceled Coffin Night. Again. The usual.”
“Coffin Night?” Mom let out a happy bubble of laughter. If someone had walked in who didn’t know better, they might have mistaken her for a member of the New Pathways staff, not a mom. She didn’t look all that much different from them, except for not having any tattoos. The main difference was that Mom was wearing a navy blue polo with the white Isla Huesos Marine Institute insignia on it. The IHMI is where she’d gotten a job down here. By getting a job, I mean it’s where she’d donated a big chunk of the money she got from Dad in the divorce settlement.
Given her credentials, I’m sure the IHMI would have hired Mom anyway. But they wouldn’t have been able to pay her a salary, since they were so low on funding. Now — thanks to Mom — they had tons. And the spoonbills — whose population really had been decimated, owing in large part to Dad’s company — had a fighting chance…not just the spoonbills, either, but a lot of other local marine life.
Sometimes it was kind of a relief to know that not all of my parents’ marital problems stemmed from my accident alone.
“Don’t tell me Isla Huesos High still has a Coffin Night,” Mom was saying, excited as a kid, shaking hands with Kayla, who’d introduced herself. Kayla apparently loved introducing herself to people. I wasn’t sure why she was in New Pathways, but shyness was not one of her issues.
“Well, let’s just say the administration is doing everything in its power to see to it that it doesn’t,” Tim said. “But old habits die hard.”
I was having a difficult time following the conversation while also keeping an eye on Cemetery Sexton Smith. Did he recognize me from all those times he’d asked me to get off my bike and show some respect for the deceased? Surely not.
And even if he did, so what? He didn’t know that was my necklace or that I’d been in the graveyard last night or that I had anything to do with what had happened to the gate.
Except, of