Abandon - Meg Cabot [72]
I shook my head, shocked. What was he even talking about?
“No,” I said, my heart beginning to thump more loudly than the thunder outside. “No, of course not. It was nothing like that —”
I thought of it the minute I saw you, John had said when he’d given the necklace to me. Only I never thought…well, I never thought you’d turn out to be you, or want to come here with me.
Is that how he’d gotten it? By causing that horrible hurricane that had killed so many people and sunk so many ships, then collecting their bounty from the bottom of the sea?
But that was impossible.
Then again…none of what I’d seen him do was possible.
“Whoever gave it to you,” Mr. Smith grumbled, picking up the necklace and examining it more closely in the light, “had it reset since Marie Antoinette’s time. And in a fashion I can only call — and that’s if I wanted to be charitable — whimsical.”
“I told you,” I said. “I don’t —”
“Oh, right,” he said, looking towards the ceiling. “You don’t know anything about it. Well, this setting is highly unique. Do you see how each prong forms a little curlicue design across the top of the diamond? Quite beautiful. And unusual. Do you know what these five prongs represent?” He didn’t even wait for my reply. “Rivers,” he said. “Five in all. Now, can you think of a place that has five rivers? Go on. Guess.”
“I don’t know. I’m terrible at geography.” And every subject, really, that didn’t have to do with avenging the death of Hannah Chang. “Look, I really have to —”
“It’s quite simple.” He picked up a pencil and pointed with it to the first prong. “Sorrow.” He pointed to the second. “Lamentation.” He pointed to the third. “Fire.” The fourth. “Oblivion.” The fifth. “And hate.”
Thunder cracked. Now the storm was so close, it seemed to be right above our heads.
“The five rivers of the Underworld,” Richard Smith said, sounding thrilled with himself. He ticked them off on his fingers. “Acheron, Cocytus, Phlegethon, Lethe, the river Styx. Good Lord, girl.” He leaned back in his chair and stared at me. “Do they teach children nothing useful in school these days? The Underworld. ”
I felt as if someone had run over me.
I shouldn’t have, of course. I should have known. It had been right there in front of me all along. Literally. It had been around my neck.
I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it. The psychiatrists had tried to tell me. My alleged dream had been full of things I’d seen on TV. Hadn’t I studied the Greek myths in school?
Of course I had.
But I had never paid attention to things that didn’t interest me, even before the accident. I had inherited that, too, from both my parents, though if I ever mentioned this, they would blame each other for it. Spoonbills, your fault. No, throwing stars, yours.
But who did pay attention to the myths, really? All those strange names and people being hit with arrows in the Achilles heel and girls being swept down into the Underworld. It was complicated and weird and had nothing to do with reality.
And yet at the same time…something didn’t make sense.
“But.” I blinked at him. “There weren’t any rivers when I was there. Just a lake.”
Now he was the one staring at me.
And no wonder, really. “When you were there?” Mr. Smith took his glasses off. “What do you mean, when you were there?”
Sometimes I just got so tired of all the pretending. It was exhausting, really, trying to fit in, trying to be “normal.” Even if that word wasn’t therapeutically beneficial.
“This necklace,” I said, putting my hand over it. The stone felt warm and comforting under my