Abandon (11 page)

Which was why, when I lifted one of the curtains in my bedroom before I got into bed, and thought I saw a man standing by the pool, I didn’t say anything to her about it.

By then all the party guests had gone home, and Mom had long since gone to sleep. The storm, meanwhile, had arrived in full force. The power, as it often seemed to in Isla Huesos, so far from the mainland, had gone out.

So much for our crack security system.

Rain was streaming down in sheets. Our little kidney-shaped pool in the backyard was threatening to overflow, and the wind was tossing the palm fronds like pieces of newspaper.

But when a flash of lightning turned the yard from blackness to stark daylight — just for a second — I could have sworn I saw John standing there looking up at me.

That was the only person it could be. Who else could get in?

Dad had agreed to let me live out of state with the provision that Mom send me to a school with a program suited to my “special needs”
and
bought a house in a gated community — he’d known how much this would offend her liberal leanings.

Dolphin Key was the only such community on Isla Huesos. There was a security guard posted twenty-four hours at the entrance, the only way in and out of our street.

The Spanish walls that surrounded our new home were twelve feet high. There was no way anyone could climb them without a ladder.

Walls and security guards couldn’t stop someone like John, though.

But why would he bother standing in the rain outside my bedroom window when he’d told me to leave him alone? Not to mention the fact that I’d called him a jerk to his face.

Why had I even bothered apologizing to him for what I’d done? He’d done far worse to me. Why couldn’t I hate him, the way I ought to?

Maybe because John was like one of Mom’s birds: a wild thing. He couldn’t help how he was. I was never going to get through to him. Like Dad had said, what was the point of even trying?

Especially since I’d obviously broken “the rules” John had spoken of so mysteriously, by running away. Surely, I was going to have to be punished for this, most likely by him…or maybe those Furies he’d spoken of. You can’t escape death. I’d read all about this after my accident. Death
will
come for you, eventually.

When lightning flashed again a few seconds later, though, I saw that the figure was gone. Maybe it had never even been there at all. Maybe it had just been that overactive imagination everyone kept accusing me of having, playing tricks on me.

I let the curtain drop and turned back to bed. This was so stupid. I should have been feeling good. I’d given back the necklace I’d taken under false pretenses, and said all the things I felt like I was supposed to say. I’d literally gotten everything I needed to off my chest. I was making a new start here, just like Mom.

John had even accepted my apology! Maybe a little grouchily, but he had. He was moving on, too, as illustrated by his spiking the necklace a good hundred yards across the cemetery and telling me to stay away from him.

And later, when I went to check on my bike out the bathroom window, and saw that someone had chained it up and switched off the lights, I told myself firmly that it must have been my uncle Chris, or maybe Alex, as they’d left the party. No way had it been John. Why would he do something nice like that for me, when he’d made it only too clear he hated my guts and wanted me to stay away from him?

So why, as I climbed into bed, did I feel
worse
instead of better? I didn’t feel any sense of closure or any less a sense of —
dread
was the only word for it. Ever since I’d set foot on this island, that’s all I’d felt, this pressure on the back of my neck, like something was going to happen, something bad.

Something bad had already happened! I’d seen
him.
It was over!

So why was I up half the night, unable to sleep? Not because of the thunder, either. It almost seemed as if — but it couldn’t possibly be, because it was so stupid — but it was like I missed the familiar weight of that necklace around my neck.

What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I get with Mom’s “make a new start” program?

When I thanked Alex the next morning as I climbed into his car, he asked what for.

“My bike,” I said. “Didn’t you lock it up last night when you left my house? And switch off the lights?”

“Uh,” he said. “No. When I left — which I guess was right after you got home, because your mom said you’d gone upstairs. Thanks for saying good night, by the way. Oh, and for taking off like that and leaving me alone with Grandma. That was super
sweet — your bike was already chained up and the lights switched off. I thought you’d done it.”

“No,” I said, feeling cold all of a sudden. Except that the AC in the car Grandma referred to as Alex’s junk heap was broken, so we had to drive with the windows down, and it was already over eighty degrees outside. “I didn’t.”

“Huh,” he said. “Well, that’s weird. But not the weirdest part.” He honked at some tourists who’d wandered out into the middle of the street to take photos of a large banyan tree. “Hello, what do these people think, it’s Main Street at Disney? Some of us actually live here, you know.” He honked some more.

“What’s the weirdest part?” I asked, after the tourists had hurried out of the way and Alex had floored it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear this.

I wasn’t sure I didn’t want to hear it, either, though.

“Oh. Only that there were all these dead poinciana petals up and down your front walk. Just lying there. And this was
before
that storm. So they couldn’t have been blown there by the wind. I thought that was kind of strange, because there are no poincianas on your street. So how did they get there?…Oh, well.” He turned up the radio. “Ready for school?”

I swallowed. “No.”

M
om signed me
up for a nationally recognized (which was the only reason Dad approved. Otherwise, he said, it was boarding school in Switzerland for me) program at Isla Huesos High called New Pathways.

New Pathways was for “troubled” students: boys like Alex, whose dad had just been paroled from jail and whose mom had been pretty much MIA since he was born, and so he’d been forced to live all his life with Grandma, who ran the island’s only knitting store, Knuts for Knitting. And yes, it was as bad as it sounded.

New Pathways was also for girls like me, who’d died and then come back with a bit of an attitude.

Really. New Pathways: Whatever you have, it’ll cure you (not its official slogan).

“It comes highly recommended,” Mom kept telling me all summer. “You’ll still go to regular mainstream classes, like everyone else. You’ll just get extra supervision during the year by social workers with cognitive behavioral and counseling experience. They
really
know what they’re doing, Pierce. I wouldn’t have enrolled you if I didn’t think they could help.”

Uh, I thought, but didn’t add, also Isla Huesos High School wouldn’t have taken me if I hadn’t been enrolled in New Pathways, because of what happened to Mr. Mueller.

But whatever. With boarding school for rich kids with social problems in Switzerland being my only other choice, what was I going to say? Yes to New Pathways!

At least the New Pathways counselors — especially Jade, the one I’d been assigned — had been really nice about making me feel welcome, despite knowing what I’d done (or allegedly done, anyway) to a teacher at my last school. Jade had never seemed scared when she talked to me during our orientation meetings, always making full eye contact and smiling a lot and even offering me strips of red licorice from the jar she kept on her desk. My necklace, I’d noticed, had never turned any color when I’d been in Jade’s office. It just stayed a steady, soothing gray…the same color as the coat of a retired greyhound.

But when I arrived on my first day at what was the only high school on Isla Huesos, to which hundreds of students were bused from neighboring islands — there are over 1,700 off the coast of Florida, Mom not so helpfully informed me one day while listing the various ways in which Dad’s company was slowly destroying their ecosystem — I did not feel soothed. I did not need to glance
down at the color of my necklace (which I no longer had anyway) to tell me so, either.

I felt overwhelmed, despite Jade’s careful instructions about what to expect. I’d never seen so many kids, particularly so many
guys,
crowded into so many buildings…four enormous wings in all, all connected by a central, paved courtyard — the Quad, Jade said it was called — at the center of which were all these shaded picnic tables.

This, Jade had explained, was where we were supposed to have lunch every day. The cafeteria was
outside.

This made absolutely no sense to me, no matter how many times Jade said it.

Only seniors were allowed to leave campus for lunch. I was a senior, but how was I going to leave campus? I had no driver’s license. The State of Connecticut had apparently agreed with my neurologist that it was not a good idea for me to drive.

I’d looked at the written test for the State of Florida online because Jade had encouraged me to, and there were even
more
questions on it than on the one for the State of Connecticut. It was hopeless.

Alex had said on the way to school, “I’ll meet you in the Quad for lunch. We’ll go grab a burger.”

But when lunchtime came, of course I couldn’t find him. He hadn’t told me where to meet him. This was typical Alex. Also, typical me, unfortunately, to forget to ask.

I selected two caffeinated sodas, a bag of nuts, a bag of chips, and a bag of cookies from the vending machines. Then I hid out in the library to eat them. This seemed like the safest thing to do.

The library was where Jade found me.

“Pierce,” she said, pulling out the chair from the study carrel next to me and lowering herself into it. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“I’m here,” I said stupidly. Obviously I was there. I took out my earbuds. “How’s it going?”

“Good,” Jade said. “How’s it going with you? Didn’t make it to the cafeteria for lunch, I see.”

“Not today,” I said. “Maybe tomorrow.”

What was I supposed to say? I didn’t have my necklace to protect me anymore? Not that I believed I needed its protective powers, necessarily.

I just wasn’t sure I didn’t need them.

“Hey, listen, I get it. It’s cool,” Jade said. Jade had very dark hair and many black leather cords that she wore around her neck and wrists. A tattoo on her wrist said
Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself
in fancy script. “But if you want to talk, maybe about that thing that happened with that teacher at your old school, or about that friend of yours who died…anything. You know where to find me.”

I did know where to find her. The New Pathways offices were located in D-Wing, which was also where all of my classes happened to be located. Convenient.

And really…
anything,
Jade? What about the guy I ran into last night in the cemetery? Can we talk about him? Because I’ve run into him before, actually during “that thing that happened with that teacher” at my old school. When “that friend” of mine died.

Or at least when I tried to make her death right.

And he put a teacher in the hospital.

“Thanks,” I said, not mentioning any of that. “Will do.”

Jade gave me a funny look, halfway between a smile and a frown.

“Hey,” she said, reaching out to touch my hand. “I mean it. None of what happened at your old school was your fault, you know.”

I froze when she touched me. And not just because the librarian was shooting us a disapproving look from across the room, either…though I’m pretty sure she didn’t appreciate our having a conversation in the quiet zone of her library, let alone my using it as a lunchroom.

“Right,” I said. “I know.”

Was she kidding?

Jade nodded. “Good,” she said. “Just remember that. In the meantime, try to enjoy yourself, okay? I know you’ve been through a lot, but give yourself a break. It’s just high school.”

I pasted a smile onto my face. “Sure,” I said. Maybe Jade was the one who was crazy, not me. Although she and her fellow New Pathways staff members had taken great pains to remind us all that there’s no such thing as “crazy” or “normal.” These words aren’t
therapeutically beneficial.
“I’ll try.”

“Okay, well, great talk.” Jade got up. “Five minutes till the bell rings. Be sure to stop by to check in with me after school. I got some more of that licorice you like. The red kind. Oh, and there’s an assembly in the auditorium at two. Don’t miss it. It’s gonna be
epic.”

She winked and left.
Epic,
unlike
crazy
or
normal,
is a word the New Pathways staff members love. Especially Jade.
Check yourself before you wreck yourself.

It was clear that my experience at IHHS was going to be sink or swim.

I already knew what it was like to sink.

I decided I might as well swim.

When I arrived at the auditorium for the assembly, the din was deafening. The two-thousand-seat room was filled with people greeting each other after a long summer apart: girls with long, white-tipped nails — this look was considered totally
over
up north…at least according to gossip I’d overheard back at the Westport Academy for Girls, before I was thrown out — screaming and hugging, and tattooed guys in head scarves fist-bumping and high-fiving one another, and some actually greeting one another a bit more aggressively than that. So many students talking at a volume so loud in a room so large, I was tempted to slip my earbuds back in just to keep myself from going crazy. Or whatever the therapeutically beneficial word for crazy is.

But I knew I couldn’t. I had promised myself that I would stay engaged this year. If I didn’t stay engaged, how would I keep the next girl from dying on my watch?