So after that, I never showed it to anyone. Not even Grandma when she’d said that thing in her kitchen. Not that it would have made a bit of difference to her.
It wasn’t until I was standing there in front of the crypt where we’d met that I suddenly realized maybe I was the one who was making the bad things happen.
Because I’d come back. Not only come back from the dead, but come back to the place where it had all started.
What was I even doing there? Was I as crazy as everyone back in Connecticut kept saying I was? I was in a cemetery by myself after dark. I needed to get out of there. I needed to run. Every hair on my body was standing up, telling me to run.
But of course by then it was too late. Because someone was coming, crushing the dried-up flower petals on the path beneath his feet as he got closer.
Bones. That’s what it sounded like as those flowers got trampled. The breaking of tiny bones.
Oh, God. Why had Mom told me that story? Why couldn’t I have a normal mother who told normal stories about fairy godmothers and glass slippers, instead of stories about human skeletal remains scattered across beaches?
I didn’t even have to turn around to see who it was. I knew. Of course I knew.
The scream I let out when I actually spun around and saw his face was still loud enough to wake the dead.
He seemed as if against me he were coming
With head uplifted, and with ravenous hunger,
So that it seemed the air was afraid of him;
DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto I
He looked as shocked as I felt. “What are you doing here?”
His voice sounded like the thunder I could hear growing closer every time lightning flashed above the tops of the palm trees, where the towering gray storm clouds were crashing into each other.
I tried to say something, but all that came out was air.
Well, that shouldn’t have been too surprising, even if a part of me had known from the moment I’d heard Mom say the words Isla Huesos that this moment was coming. I guess I’d even been hoping to get it over with, in a weird way. Why else had my head kept telling my feet to pedal towards the cemetery?
Not my head. My heart. That four-inch cardiac needle they plunged into my chest? It may have gotten my heart started again.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not still broken.
I tried again, after clearing my throat. I hoped he couldn’t see how badly my knees were trembling beneath the skirt of my dress.
“I…I’m sorry,” I said. “About the screaming. You startled me. I wasn’t…I didn’t…My mom and I just moved here.” This last part came out in an incoherent rush. “To Isla Huesos. She wants to make a new start here, because of…well, you know.”
My voice trailed off. I didn’t like talking about what had happened back in my old school in Westport.
And what was the point in telling him? He’d been there.
He just stared at me. I was pretty sure from his expression that he wasn’t happy to see me. Of course, I’d just screamed in his face. That kind of thing doesn’t tend to endear you to people. Especially guys, I’d imagine.
“It’s not my fault,” I added. My heart was pounding so hard in my chest, I could barely hear the wind anymore, stirring the palm fronds overhead, or the crickets and cicadas between the crypts that rose from the shadows around us. “She wants to save the birds. What was I supposed to say?”
My voice sounded completely unlike my own. Well, no wonder. What girl would be able to speak normally with someone who looked like him glaring down at her? He was so tall — six foot four or five, nearly a foot taller than me — and his biceps and shoulders so wide, he’d easily have made tight end on any college football team in the country.…I’d suffered through enough games during “quality time” with my dad to be able to pick out the body type.
Except there wasn’t a coach alive who’d actually take him, due to his fairly obvious attitude problem. The black jeans, skintight black T-shirt, black tactical boots, and knuckles crisscrossed with scars — not just his knuckles, either — were dead giveaways he wasn’t going to play nicely with anyone. Even his hair, falling carelessly in thick, long brown waves around his face and his neck, seemed to scream dark.
Except his eyes. As gray as the clouds overhead, they’d always burned with a bright intensity I’d found difficult to forget…and believe me, I’d tried.
Not anymore, though. Now they looked dull, blank as twin bullet holes. You could almost say they were…well, dead eyes.
I wondered what had happened to him to cause the change. I certainly wasn’t to blame. I wasn’t that kind of girl.
His voice wasn’t dead. It was filled with sarcasm.
“I meant,” he said, “what are you doing here, now, tonight? In the cemetery. After hours.”
I swallowed hard.
Of course. Of course he knew what I was doing on Isla Huesos. He always seemed to know where I was and exactly what I was doing. He’d probably seen my plane touch down. He’d probably watched as I dragged my bags off the luggage carousel, and Mom helped me wheel them to the car. I wondered if he’d been watching when we’d had to struggle so hard to lift them into the back of her hybrid SUV because they were so heavy. Nice of him to come over and offer us some help.
I could practically feel the anger coming off his body in waves.
I knew I’d hurt him once (in my defense, he’d hurt me first. False imprisonment is a felony. I’d looked it up).