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.