Abandon - Meg Cabot [62]
“So that’s what happened to your face,” Cody said. “I was wondering.”
Everyone snickered as Nicole cried out in feigned outrage, then turned to mock slap him.
I continued to suck on my Coke float. Everyone else might have understood what was going on. But I certainly didn’t.
“Okay,” Seth said. “So even though we’ve already established without a modicum of doubt that we’re smarter than last year’s seniors, and that this year’s crop of juniors is nothing but a bunch of sad-ass wusses, we’re still going to need to find a secure location.”
“Well, guess the cemetery’s out,” Cody said with a smirk.
Everyone laughed. Everyone but me.
“Obviously,” Seth said. “Although don’t think I wasn’t thinking of that before Santos made his little announcement. Who messed with the gate? Anybody know?”
I froze, the spoonful of what little of my ice cream hadn’t melted only halfway to my mouth.
“I heard it was gangs down from Miami,” Bryce said.
Everyone scoffed.
“I’m serious,” Bryce insisted. “My sister’s boyfriend’s got a cousin with the Feds, and he says they just made some arrests up in Myrtle Grove. The MGB…Murda Grove Boys? Maybe they’re using cemeteries as part of their initiation rites. I saw these guys with some major rims driving around over by the Wendy’s near Searstown Mall last week —”
“Getting back to reality,” Seth said, rolling his eyes, “what we need is a place that isn’t under twenty-four-seven lockdown, but that no one from school can just drive by.”
“Like a gated community, you mean,” Farah said, sighing wistfully. “If only we knew somebody who lived in Dolphin Key…”
I nearly choked on my soda. Was this really happening? Were they actually trying — not very subtly — to get me to let them use my house for something that sounded highly illegal and also dangerous?
It seemed likely. Apparently, they didn’t think I was very smart. This, I’d ascertained, was because I was in D-Wing. A-Wingers did not hold D-Wingers in high esteem. I’d picked this up through earlier snippets of conversation dropped here and there.
“Yeah, well, what else would you expect? She’s so D-Wing,” Serena had remarked about another girl, who, it was revealed, had given birth over the summer.
“Well, he obviously should have been put in D-Wing from the start,” I heard Cody say about a fellow football player who’d been secreted to “wilderness camp” by his parents due to his out-of-control behavior.
I noticed the warning looks Seth sent across the picnic table and the quickly closed mouths that followed, but it was too late. I got it:
Everyone enrolled in New Pathways was in D-Wing, but not everyone in D-Wing was enrolled in New Pathways. There were only fifty kids in New Pathways. But there were five hundred kids in D-Wing. D-Wing, it turned out, was where the administration sent all their “problem” students — all the gangbangers and burnouts, anyone with a drug or disciplinary problem — to keep their bad attitudes from infecting the “normal” kids in the rest of the school.
That was the only reason I could think of, anyway, for why we were all housed in a separate wing from the other students. Even if it seemed almost too weird to be true. Like the fact that these fresh-faced, athletic kids who barely knew me apparently seemed to be asking me to sacrifice my home for their bizarre ritual.
“What,” I said, lowering my cup, “are you guys talking about, exactly?”
Farah laughed like I was the most adorable thing she’d ever seen. “Coffin Night, silly!”
“But didn’t the chief of police say that Coffin Night was canceled this year?” I asked.
Now everyone at the table started laughing at my ridiculous naïveté.
“The administration cancels it every year,” Seth explained patiently, when the laughter