Abandon - Meg Cabot [64]
“My dad’s a colonel,” Nicole said, batting her eyelashes at me.
“— then maybe up island for a bit,” Seth said.
I could see them going on like this all night.
“What happens if they don’t find it?” I interrupted. “The juniors, I mean.”
“If they don’t find it,” Serena said, looking at me as if I had asked something extremely stupid, “we bring out the coffin as part of the halftime show during the game and parade it around in front of everyone, while the band and dance team, of which I am captain, perform MC Hammer’s 1990 signature hit song, ‘U Can’t Touch This.’ ”
“Which you can’t. Because the Wreckers rule!” Bryce and Cody did another chest bump.
I stared at them, unable to believe my mom had looked back on Coffin Night with so much sentimentality.
But I tried not to let my true feelings show. I still needed to find out why Alex hated Seth so much. Besides the fact that they all considered everyone in D-Wing such freaks.
Although the term freak was subjective. Kind of like normal and crazy. I, for instance, might consider a freak someone who ran around an island trying to hide a homemade coffin, then paraded it around to a twenty-year-old MC Hammer song during halftime at a sports event.
But that was just me. And it was well known that I was crazy.
And I suspected that when Alex found out Seth Rector wanted to keep the senior class coffin at my house — and he was bound to if I agreed to do it and he noticed so many A-Wingers hanging around my garage — he was probably going to tell me the reason pretty fast.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’d have to ask my mom first. You know how it is.…”
“Of course,” Seth said, his blue-eyed gaze steady. “Totally. We wouldn’t want to do anything to upset your mom.”
“I’m sure she’ll say it’s okay,” Farah said. “Didn’t your mom go to IHHS? I thought I saw her name in the trophy —”
“I have another question,” I interrupted. “Why a coffin?”
Farah and Nicole looked at me as if I’d just asked why the sky is blue. “What?”
“Why a coffin?” I asked. “Why build and hide a coffin?”
Now everyone was staring. But I didn’t see what was so odd about the question.
“Why not a boat?” I persisted. “Aren’t we the Isla Huesos High School Wreckers? Wreckers are people who used to pillage ships that sank offshore between here and the reef, right? And then they resold whatever they managed to plunder back to the ship’s owners, for a profit? So wouldn’t it make more sense for us to build and hide a boat? Since the school mascot is a pirate-looking guy, not a skeleton?”
In the silence that followed, I could hear the waves as they lapped at the beach behind us. Isla Huesos didn’t usually get the kind of big, rolling waves you would typically expect in Florida because the island sat inside a coral reef — the third largest in the world.
But for some reason, I noticed that today, the waves were larger than usual. Maybe they, like me, sensed the unease in the air.
“Hey,” Bryce said, raising his eyebrows. “She’s right. It would make more sense if it was a boat. Why is it a coffin?”
“You know what?” Seth lifted his backpack. “I don’t know. And I don’t care. All I know is that it’s always been a coffin.”
“It’s probably for the best,” Bryce said thoughtfully. “Because Boat Night doesn’t have the same ring to it as Coffin Night, you know?”
They all laughed.
I didn’t know then that I was about to find out why it was a coffin. And if any of them had known what Coffin Night was really about, they definitely wouldn’t have been laughing.
The infernal hurricane that never rests
Hurtles the spirits onward in its rapine;
Whirling them round, and smiting, it molests them.
DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto V
As I lowered myself out of Seth’s black F-150 — a birthday gift from his father, he’d explained casually as he drove me home — I spied Uncle Chris in the driveway, one of our wooden lawn chairs in his arms.
“Who’s that?” Farah asked curiously, as she crawled into the front