Meg Cabot: Awaken

“My son,

Here may indeed be torment, but not death.”

DANTE ALIGHIERI, Purgatorio , Canto XXVII

In school they told us to follow the rules.

Don’t talk to strangers. Safety first , they said. Walk, don’t run — unless it’s from a stranger, of course . We were supposed to run from strangers as fast as we could, the way Persephone, the girl from that old Greek myth, tried to when Hades, the lord of the dead, came after her.

Funny thing about the rules, though. Sometimes they were wrong. According to the rules, no one in our own families was ever supposed to hurt us.

Not running from my own flesh and blood was my first mistake.

My second was running from John Hayden. He was exactly the kind of stranger they were always warning us about in school. No, he didn’t offer me candy or drugs. But one look into those storm-filled gray eyes, and even as a naïve fifteen-year-old, I could tell what he had to offer was something way more addictive than chocolate or crystal meth.

How was I to know the reason his gaze was so storm-filled was because he, too, knew the pain of being betrayed by someone who, according to the rules, was supposed to care about him?

Maybe that’s what kept thrusting the two of us back together, no matter how far we tried to run. Why else would we both have ended up on an island named for the human bones that had been found there? It turns out we have more than a few skeletons in our closets.

By now the bones that have earned this place its infamous name — Isla Huesos, Spanish for Island of Bones — are supposed to have been removed. But the tendency for cruel acts of deception to be committed on Isla Huesos’s tempest-tossed shores hasn’t waned.

Now it’s not my family or John that’s coming for me, but a storm. I know from the weather alerts I keep receiving on my cell phone. A large tropical cyclone, “producing extreme winds and dangerously high flood conditions,” is expected to reach landfall soon on the island where my mom was hoping she and I could make a “new start.” According to the latest warning, I should proceed with caution ( walk, don’t run ) to the nearest emergency shelter.

The problem is, I’m eighteen hundred miles below the earth’s crust and the storm’s projected path.

Still, every time my phone vibrates and I look down to see one of the alerts, my pulse speeds up a little. Not because I’m in imminent danger, but because I know people who are.

It’s especially upsetting because, in a lot of ways, my family has turned out to be like the seawall Isla Huesos’s community leaders built in order to protect its low-lying areas from flooding: They’re not very reliable. Some of them, in fact, have turned out to be made from inferior material. They crumbled and broke apart instead of doing what they were supposed to do: keep their loved ones from drowning.

But maybe that’s what I deserve for being trusting enough to believe the rules would keep me safe.

All that’s changed now. This time, the only rules I’m following are my own.

And this time, when the storm comes, instead of running from it, I’m going to face it head-on.

I hope it’s ready for me.

Always before him many of them stand;

They go by turns each one unto the judgment;

They speak, and hear, and then are downward hurled.

DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno , Canto V

He Is First.

That’s what it said in flowing white script on the T-shirt the girl was wearing.

“Who is he ?” I asked her. If I hadn’t been so tired, I’d have figured it out right away. Instead, I thought the shirt was referring to a new band or the title of a movie or something … not that I was going to get to see it anytime soon.

“Oh,” the girl said, smiling, clearly happy to be asked. This was evidently why she wore the shirt, to generate questions like mine. I could tell by the cheerful, rehearsed way in which she replied, “My personal Lord and Savior. He always comes first.”

Don’t do it. Do not engage. This isn’t the time to have a theological conversation — or any conversation at all — beyond what’s necessary. Remember what John said , I reminded myself: There are hundreds of people here, maybe even a thousand. You can’t help them all, only the ones who seem the worst off, or might be about to cause trouble ….

“Don’t you think there might be some circumstances in which He’d want you to put yourself first?” I heard myself saying. “What if there was a fire? Wouldn’t He want you to run first and pray later?”

“Yes, of course,” the girl said with a laugh. “But I’d still be putting Him first in my heart, the way He puts me first in His heart. He’s always with us, you know, keeping us safe from harm.”

I shouldn’t have asked. Even the person in line behind her — a young guy who’d probably died in a Jet Ski accident, judging by his tropical swim shorts and lack of a shirt — gaped at her in disbelief.

“Have you taken a look at yourself in the mirror lately?” he asked her.

She dropped the smile, appearing startled. “No. Why? Do I have something in my teeth?”

She reached to open the backpack she had slung over one shoulder, but I put out a hand to stop her. If I hadn’t, I suspect she’d have found her compact mirror, then seen what the rest of us could: the crystalline shards of windshield embedded into her blond hair like diamonds from a tiara, the angry red imprint the steering wheel had left behind on her forehead when the airbag in her car had failed to go off.

No one had kept her safe. But what would be the point in telling her so? She’d probably only start to cry, and then I’d have to waste even more time comforting her, time John had warned we couldn’t afford.

“Your teeth are fine,” I said to her hastily. “You look great. Here, drink this.” I passed her a water glass from my tray. “You’ll feel better.”

For the first time ever, it was hot in the Underworld. That’s why I was holding a tray of glasses, each one filled with ice water. It was a ridiculous gesture — like handing out life preservers on the Titanic . I couldn’t change what had happened to these people. All I could do was make the journey to their final destinations a little more comfortable … and try to hurry them along.

The Underworld was currently suffering from overcrowding as well as overheating, to the point where conditions had grown dangerously untenable.

“Thanks,” the girl said, taking the water and sipping it gratefully. This time when she smiled, there was nothing rehearsed about the gesture. “I’m so thirsty.” She said the latter in a voice of wonder, like out of all the things that had happened to her in the past twenty-four hours, her thirst was the most amazing.

Well, dying can be dehydrating.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry about the heat. We’re working on it.”

“Working on it?” the guy in the tropical shorts echoed. “We’ve been waiting here for hours. How about some answers instead of water?”

“I know,” I said to Tropical Shorts. “Sorry. The boat’s on its way, I swear. We’re trying to accommodate as many of you as we can as quickly as we can, but we’re a little backed up at the mo —”

“Why should we believe you ?” Tropical Shorts interrupted. “I want to talk to whoever’s in charge.”

I felt a spurt of red-hot anger shoot through me, but I fought to remain calm.