Abandon (16 page)

Or at least I would have been if I hadn’t been kicked out for assault.

“Speaking of old habits dying hard,” Tim said. “Congratulations, Pierce. One day down, no ISSes or OSSes. Keep up the good work.” He opened a drawer and pulled out my cell phone, presenting it to me with a flourish.

“Thanks,” I said, taking it from his outstretched hand. Director of the New Pathways program, Tim was closer to my mom’s age than to Jade’s, which meant he didn’t tend to use words like
epic
or have any noticeable tattoos. Instead, he said things like ISS — In-School Suspension — and OSS — Out-of-School Suspension — and wore a tie.

“So can we go now?” Alex asked so impatiently that Jade, who’d been leaning against her office door with her jar of red licorice whips cradled in her arms, burst out laughing.

“What’s the rush, dude?” she asked, tilting the licorice jar in his direction. “Can’t wait to get started on all that homework?”

“We’re going to the Queen,” Kayla explained, digging her hand into the jar after Jade passed it to her, Alex having shaken his head. “And we want to get there before the teeming hordes.”

“Oh,” Mom said, with a look I recognized. It was the same look she’d worn when Jade had mentioned Coffin Night, whatever that was…Mom’s look of dewy-eyed nostalgia for happier days gone by. “Do kids still go to that place across from Higgins Beach after school to get ice cream?”

“Yes,” Alex said shortly. “Which is why we have to hurry. I need more than just fat-free licorice to satisfy my three-fifteen sugar fix.”

Everyone laughed…except Cemetery Sexton Smith, who laid down his magazine, then climbed to his feet.

“I wouldn’t joke about fixes if I were you, young man,” he said to Alex gravely. “Especially considering how much time your father served in jail, and for what.”

The laughter stopped as abruptly as if it had just been swept away by one of last night’s forty-mile-an-hour winds.

“I beg your pardon,” Mom said tensely, turning towards Cemetery Sexton Smith. “I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Deborah Cabrero, and this is my daughter, Pierce. Alex is my nephew. Christopher Cabrero — his father — is my brother.”

“I know,” Cemetery Sexton Smith said. He didn’t look uncomfortable at all. He looked like standing around in the New Pathways offices in his linen jacket and bow tie, making trouble, was all he had on his agenda for the day.

Which, considering he worked in a cemetery that now kept its (broken) gate locked 24/7, probably
was
all he had on his agenda for the day.

“It’s a shame what happened to your brother. Unnecessary, too. I’d hate to see this one go down the same path.” Mr. Smith’s dark-eyed gaze settled on Alex, who flushed angrily all the way to his jet-black hairline.

But before Alex had time to respond, Mr. Smith turned to look at my mom over the tops of his gold-rimmed spectacles and said, “Things turned out very differently for you than they did for your brother, didn’t they, Deborah? I used to play bocce with your father before he passed. He was very proud of you. What a shame you couldn’t seem to visit more often while he was still alive.” I didn’t miss the reproach in his tone and didn’t see how Mom could, either…but you never knew with her. A lot of times, her head was off with the spoonbills. “But you’re back in Isla Huesos for the time being, I see. I hope you’ll be able to show a little more support for Christopher now than you did back then.”

Mom’s eyes were as wide as quarters. I was pretty sure this time, her head wasn’t off with the spoonbills. She’d registered the rebuke about failing to visit Grandpa before he died.
And
the one about failing to support Uncle Chris…whatever it had meant.

Even before I looked down, the back of my neck had already begun to throb.

But once I glanced at the cemetery sexton’s shoes, I knew it was all over.

Tassels.

“I’m not sure I really understand what you’re referring to, Mr. Smith,” Mom was saying in a tightly restrained voice. “But thank you for the concern. My brother has been doing very well since his release —”

“Has he?” Cemetery Sexton Smith asked, sounding genuinely pleased to hear it. “Well, that’s good. He was quite a popular boy, if I remember, back in high school. He must have nonstop visitors —”

What?
That couldn’t be right. No one at all had stopped by to see Uncle Chris, at least the times I’d been over at Grandma’s for dinner or to hang out with Alex or just to sit on the couch and watch the Weather Channel in silence with his dad. That channel wasn’t bad, actually. It had a lot of shows about people almost getting sucked up into tornadoes.

“You two,” Grandma would always declare when she’d come in after a long day from Knuts for Knitting. “Like peas in a pod! How can you drink that stuff? It rots your brain, you know. Pierce, does your doctor know how many sodas you drink a day? I don’t care if it’s diet. I thought you weren’t supposed to be having caffeine. That’s what your mom says. You get more like your father every day. Christopher, would you kindly stop encouraging her?”

Check yourself before you wreck yourself.

But what the cemetery sexton was saying was undoubtedly true. Uncle Chris, like my mom,
had
apparently been quite popular in high school. When we’d walked into the main building of IHHS — what was now called A-Wing — to deliver my transcripts from Westport Academy and sign me up for my classes
this year, Alex had pointed out the trophy case. Uncle Chris’s name had been all over it. Mom’s, too, for stuff like tennis and swimming. Grandpa had been there for track, and Grandma for being homecoming queen.

The Cabrero family had been all over A-Wing.

All except Alex. And me, of course.

My mom was standing in the New Pathways office in D-Wing, biting her lower lip while staring at the floor…though not in the direction of the tassels on Mr. Smith’s shoes. Which I couldn’t understand. How could she not see them? How could anyone look at anything else? They were
so ugly.

I glanced at the necklace. I wasn’t even wearing it, and it was starting to turn the color of a bruise.

I needed to get out of there, I realized, before something terrible happened.

“Well,” Tim was saying in an aggressively cheerful voice, breaking the sudden silence. “Alexander is enrolled in our New Pathways program, and he’s doing great. He’s a super kid.”

“I’m so very pleased to hear that.” Richard Smith eyed Alex over the lenses of his gold-rimmed glasses. But while his mouth might have been saying the word
pleased,
his gaze didn’t seem it. “I stopped by because I had something of a great deal of importance I wanted to discuss.”

He turned away to lean down towards his briefcase, on which my necklace was carefully balanced.

Oh, no. He knew. I don’t know how, but he knew. He knew it had been me in the cemetery last night, with the gate. Even though it hadn’t. Well, not completely.

He lifted the now purple-gray stone.

I heard my mom catch her breath. She’d recognized it. Of course she had. She’d seen me wearing it a thousand times, throughout the mess following my accident and the divorce, and every day afterwards, though she never asked again where it came from. She seemed to think it was just a piece of costume jewelry to which I’d formed some kind of eccentric attachment.

Now, seeing it in someone else’s hands, her gaze flew to meet mine, clearly puzzled.

My blood pumping in my ears, I silently willed her not to say anything. The walls of the New Pathways office had suddenly turned so red, it was as if poinciana blossoms were sprouting from them.

Don’t say it
, I thought. I wasn’t sure if I was saying it to myself or to Mom or to Richard Smith.
Please don’t say it. Something terrible is going to happen if you say anything.…

Then the cemetery sexton laid my necklace aside, opened his briefcase, and lifted a stack of papers from inside it.

“I was hoping you all might help me distribute these flyers.” He turned around, walked over to us, and handed each of us a pile. “They explain the cemetery’s new visitation policy, and I’m quite eager to get them handed out as soon as possible.”

Tim, standing next to me, looked down at the pages the cemetery sexton had thrust into his hands. He seemed confused.

He wasn’t the only one.

“You could have just given these to the main office,” he said. “They usually handle these kinds of things, you know, Richard.”

“Oh, yes,” Cemetery Sexton Smith said as he bustled around, officiously passing out his piles. “I know. But I’ve found the staff in D-Wing so much more accommodating.”

I stood there staring down at the sheets of paper in my hands. The red that had been oozing down the walls of the New Pathways office was beginning to disappear, my heartbeat — and breathing — to return to normal.

But then I noticed that my flyers were different from everyone else’s. On the top page of mine, a note had been scrawled in what appeared to be fountain pen, in flowing cursive.

Make an appointment to see me
, the cemetery sexton had written.
You will do this if you don’t want trouble.

Underneath the message, there was a phone number.

Trouble was the
last
thing I wanted.

The problem was, as John had pointed out last night, trouble seemed to follow me no matter where I went.

I stared down at the message, trying to make sense of it — How had he known? How had Richard Smith known it was me? — until I heard a click. When I looked up, the cemetery sexton was just closing his briefcase.

With my necklace locked up inside it.

“Well, good-bye, all,” Mr. Smith said, lifting the briefcase and giving us a cheerful wave. “Have a pleasant afternoon.”

Then he left the office, whistling a little tune as he walked out — looking me right in the eye as I stared after him through the office’s wide glass windows.

It wasn’t until later that I realized the song he’d been whistling was “Ring Around the Rosie.”

Which doesn’t mean anything, really.

Unless you’re someone who died once and then came back from the dead. So you’ve spent a lot of time on the Internet, looking up weird facts about death. Like that some people believe the nursery rhyme “Ring Around the Rosie” is really about the Black Plague, which killed a hundred million people or so during the Middle Ages.

“Huh,” Jade said after he was gone. “That is one weird dude.” She tilted her candy jar at me. “Licorice?”

I looked down at the red whips. “Uh,” I said. “That’s okay, but thanks anyway.” I’d lost my appetite.

I think Mom must have been feeling the same way. She smiled at me — too brightly — as if to show that everything was fine.

But I could see that she was holding on to the strap of her purse so tightly, her knuckles had gone white. She knew everything was far from fine just as well as I did.

“So!” She looked from Alex to Kayla to me and then back again. “Island Queen! Won’t that be fun?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “It’ll be epic.”

I
could think
of a lot of things I’d rather have been doing than standing in a twenty-person line outside Island Queen — Isla Huesos’s down-market version of Dairy Queen — in the burning-hot late afternoon sun.

Sleeping, for one thing. I hadn’t gotten a lot of it the night before. And okay, that had been mostly my own fault. But still.

Getting my meeting with Richard Smith over with, for another.

But he hadn’t picked up when I’d called him from the girls’ room before meeting Alex and Kayla down at the student parking lot — probably because he hadn’t gotten home yet. The number he’d left me might not have been a cell. He didn’t look like the type who owned a cell phone. Maybe he didn’t know what one was.

“Um, hi, uh, Mister Smith,” I’d stammered. “This is Pierce Oliviera. We just met in the New Pathways office. You gave me a note asking me to call you?” My palms were still sweating from my encounter with him, even though the school kept the air-conditioning set at what felt like subzero temperatures. “So I’m calling to schedule that appointment you requested,” I said.

This was probably the lamest message anyone had ever left in the history of the world. But what was I going to say,
I want the necklace back that I left in the cemetery last night when a crime was committed there?
I wasn’t going to leave anything on a recording that might incriminate me. I’d learned that much from what happened back in Westport.

“If you could just call me back,” I said, “at your earliest convenience, I’d really appreciate it. The sooner the better, because I’d like to get this resolved today if possible.” I left the number, in case he didn’t have caller ID, and hung up.

Now there was nothing I could do but kill time until he called back. I’d just have preferred not to have done it standing in a thousand-person line in the broiling-hot sun, waiting to order something called a Gut Burner.

“Buster,” Kayla corrected me, when I asked why we couldn’t just go someplace else to get them. “Gut Busters. And they only make them here. They’re like Blizzards, the ones you can get at Dairy Queen, only better, because they put more stuff in them.”

“What kind of stuff?” I asked. I felt testy, and it didn’t really have anything to do with the line. What if Mr. Smith asked me straight out where I’d gotten the necklace?

What if
? He was
going to
ask me.

“You know,” Kayla was saying. “Stuff. I like chocolate chocolate-chip cookie dough. Alex likes Butterfinger bits with M&Ms. What’s your stuff of choice, chickie?”

But there was something even worse the cemetery sexton could ask me. And I dreaded having to answer that even more. The memory of how that gate had gotten destroyed — and why — was still too fresh. I wasn’t sure I could lie about it yet without giving myself away.

“I’ll tell you what you can do,”
John had said when I asked what more I could do to help him.
“You can leave me alone.”