Free Abandon by Meg Cabot

necklace. He’d said himself that the diamond protected its wearer from evil.
    It was already working.
    There was really only one question in my mind: Which staircase would lead me as far away as possible from here?
    I was just going to have to make that decision when the time came.
    “Well,” I said, realizing that if I didn’t distract him somehow, I was never going to get a chance to make my escape at all. “I guess you’re right. I’m…I’m just being silly.”
    He stared down at me, seeming a little shocked at my abrupt change in attitude. “Really?” he asked. “Do you…do you mean that?”
    “Of course,” I said. Somehow, I even managed a watery grin.
    Then I lifted the cup he’d given me as if I was actually going to drink from it.
    That’s when he did something he’d never done in my company before that moment. Something terrible. Something that showed that, despite what he’d said earlier about knowing my nature so well, he didn’t really know me at all.
    He smiled.
    And then I did something that still causes my heart to twist in my chest whenever I remember it. Something that still haunts mydreams. Something I can’t believe I did and, to this day, really wish I hadn’t.
    Except that I had to. The way that bed was sitting there, and the way
he
was sitting there, and…well, what other choice did I have?
    It’s just that whenever I remember that smile, my heart still breaks a little.
    But I was so young, and so scared. I didn’t know what else to do.
    So I did the first thing I thought of. The thing I’m sure my dad — and even my mom and the Westport Academy for Girls — would have wanted me to do.
    I threw that cup of hot tea in his face.
    And then I ran.

So did my soul, that still was fleeing onward,
Turn itself back to re-behold the pass
Which never yet a living person left.

DANTE ALIGHIERI ,
Inferno
, Canto I
    I took the staircase that twisted down, thinking it would lead me back to the lake. I remember — as clearly as if it were yesterday — that with every step, I’d felt as if my heart was going to explode.
    That, the psychiatrists assured me later, was the epinephrine.
    The next thing I knew, I was looking up at my mom’s face. I watched as her expression went from agonized, tormented grief to wild, joyous hope as I responded like a robot to the ER doctor’s questions.
    Yes, I knew who I was. Yes, I knew who my mother was, and what year it was, and how many fingers the doctor was holding up.
    I was alive. I had gotten away from there, wherever it was.
    Away from
him.
    Everything after that seemed to happen in a blur. The surgery for the hematoma. My recovery. The doctors. The psychiatrists.
    The divorce.
    Because of course Dad wasn’t the one who saved me, in the end. That was Mom. When she got home from the library and called for me, then looked around and finally found where I’d disappeared to, she was the one who dove to the bottom of the pool and pulled me out.
Her
lips were the ones that turned blue from trying to blow life back into my frozen corpse for the twelve minutes it took the EMTs to get there. It was
her
wet hair that froze, like icicles, to my face.
    Dad didn’t even realize what was going on until he heard the sirens from the ambulance she had called on her cell. He was still on his conference call.
    “But it’s a good thing,” Dad always says, “that the water in that pool was so cold! Otherwise, you wouldn’t be alive today. That’s the only way they were able to restart your heart, once they got you warmed up.”
    He’s actually right about that, though. Thanks to the near-freezing temperature of the water, my physical recovery was complete.
    It was my psychological “issues” that needed work. Especially when, as she was signing me out of the hospital after my recovery from the surgery, Mom said, “Oh, honey, I’ve been meaning to ask you. Where did this come from?”
    And she dropped a necklace into my lap.
    The
necklace. The one he’d