Abandon by Cabot Meg

Author:Cabot, Meg [Cabot, Meg]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Speculative Fiction
ISBN: 9780545387699
Publisher: Point
Published: 2011-01-01T07:00:00+00:00

The land of tears gave forth a blast of wind,

And fulminated a vermilion light,

Which overmastered in me every sense.

DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto III

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.

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