Abandon - Meg Cabot [53]
“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.