Abandon - Meg Cabot [57]
Then I picked up my heavy bag and started the long hot walk across the beach, towards the picnic tables.
And after he had laid his hand on mine
With joyful mien, whence I was comforted,
He led me in among the secret things.
DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto III
Why don’t you love me anymore?
That’s what I finally remembered Hannah had written in the note she’d left Mr. Mueller on the day she died — the note that no longer existed, thanks to Mr. Mueller having destroyed it.
Why don’t you love me anymore?
Hannah may have swallowed the pills that killed her.
And I had failed to be there for her, still too confused and traumatized from everything that had happened to me to remember my promise to protect her from it.
But Mr. Mueller?
He was the one who was truly responsible for Hannah’s death. I’d known it in my bones, with the same certainty that I’d known Hannah’s mom was keeping her daughter’s room preserved as a sort of shrine to her, exactly as it had been the day she died, down to the dirty clothes that had been in Hannah’s laundry basket, so her parents could lift the lid of the basket and smell their daughter’s scent from time to time, and pretend she was still alive.
For weeks after Hannah’s death, I thought of nothing else.
How could I have let it happen?
I’m the one who’d told Hannah evil isn’t just in our graveyards.
Evil can be anywhere. In our churches. In our own homes.
In our schools.
And though I’d promised her otherwise, I’d done nothing to protect her from it.
When I overheard my dad say the Changs had no chance of winning their lawsuit against the school and getting Mr. Mueller removed from his position because it was just their word against his — all they had by way of evidence were a few of Hannah’s diary entries — I knew what I had to do.
And this time, it wasn’t to run like a scared little girl the way I had from John — twice.
Of course things went wrong from the start, though. I didn’t expect Mr. Mueller to turn out the overhead lights during the private tutoring session I’d finally agreed to. Because he had a headache, he said, from all the anxiety.
Not, of course, that anyone at the Westport Academy for Girls believed he’d been romantically involved with a student who’d killed herself over him. Anyone but me. The Changs’ lawsuit had actually made Mr. Mueller more popular. Frantic about his health as the stress from the trial caused him to grow pale beneath his goatee, many of the moms and daughters started leaving him even more baked goods. Some of the girls made up a new cheer to show their support of him. The Mueller Shout-Out, they called it. They performed it at every game and school event.
This was not as bad as the names a lot of them started calling Hannah online: Slut. Liar. Skank.
So it wasn’t bad enough Hannah had to die. They had to kill her memory, too.
The school didn’t even put Mr. Mueller on any kind of administrative leave, either. I guess they couldn’t or it would be like they were taking sides or something.
It made me see red. Literally. Every day, I walked down the halls of the Westport Academy for Girls, and most of the time all I saw, everywhere I looked: red. Red as those poinciana blossoms. Red as those tassels on my scarf.
Which might be how I realized I was in way over my head even before the lights in Mr. Mueller’s classroom went out that afternoon. My heart was pounding so hard in my chest, I could barely speak, and he hadn’t laid a finger on me yet. How was the camera I’d hidden in my backpack — the one with the lens pointing out through a hole I’d cut in the front pocket, the way I’d read online to do — supposed to pick up anything in what was basically semidarkness, thanks to the spring thunderstorm that was rolling in outside?
I hadn’t even really thought through what was supposed to happen after I filmed him behaving inappropriately with me. I guess I was going to have to say, Oh, sorry, I just remembered I have another appointment,