Abandon by Meg Cabot Page A

where his company’s dispersant had been used, and dared him on air to eat it himself if it was so safe, Dad turned very red and said his doctor told him he wasn’t allowed to have shrimp on account of his cholesterol.
    Dad didn’t have high cholesterol.
    I just wondered who the
he
was that Dad had mentioned to Mom. I didn’t like to bug her about unnecessary stuff since she seemed to have enough on her mind, what with the spoonbills and the move and Uncle Chris and, of course, me.
    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