Free Abandon by Meg Cabot Page A

given me.
    “Where did you get this?” I asked, clutching it, hoping the horror I felt didn’t show on my face.
    “They brought it out with your other things while you were being prepped for surgery,” she said. “After they revived you. Apparently, you were wearing it under your coat. I almost told them they’d made a mistake and it wasn’t yours, because I’ve never seen it before.
Is
it yours? Did you borrow it from Hannah or something?”
    “Uh, no. It…was a gift,” I said. How was this possible? How could it have crossed over with me? Especially when every single doctor I’d told about what I’d seen while I was dead — my neurologist, the trauma surgeon, even the doctors who had strolled in to check on me over the weekend — had assured me that it had all been just a horrible, terrible dream —
    But this meant it hadn’t been a dream. This meant that…
    “Gift?” Mom was distracted by all the forms. Dad usually filled out the forms. But Mom had banished Dad from the hospital. The sight of him upset her so much that, though I didn’t know it then, she’d already kicked him out of the house.
    “Gift from whom?” Mom had asked, absently flipping the forms in front of her. I’m not sure if it was because I was holding the necklace that I had the wisdom to answer the way I did or if I just knew better than to tell her the truth.
    “Just a friend” was all I said at the time as I stared down into the blue-gray depths of that stone. I was too upset to say more than that.
    This meant it was real. It was all real.
He
was real.
    Thank God I didn’t tell Mom the truth. Thank God she was so distracted by the divorce, she never mentioned the necklace again. Thank God I always wore the diamond tucked inside my shirt after that, too confused by what its existence in this world implied about my so-called “lucid dream” to share it with anyone.…
    Well, except for what I mentioned to Hannah about it when I got back to school. And even that had quickly shown itself to be enough of a mistake that I learned to keep my mouth shut.
    But not as bad as the mistake I made a week or two later, when Mom was “unavoidably detained” by Dad’s lawyers from picking me up after an outpatient appointment, and I found myself wandering into a jewelry store I’d spied on the same block as my doctor’s office while I waited for her. Gazing absently at all the “gray quartz” they happened to have for sale, I must have unconsciously pulled out the diamond and started playing with it, since the man behind the counter noticed it and commented on its beauty.
    Blushing furiously, I’d tried to tuck it away, but it was too late. He asked to look at it more closely, saying that he’d never seen such an unusual stone.
    What could I do? I let him look but kept the chain around my neck, as always. I’d never removed it since Mom had given it back to me. I don’t know why. The stone fascinated me. It never seemed to be any one color or another but was constantly changing. Even as the man behind the counter held it, it was turning from a pale silver to a deep, rain-cloud purple.
    The next thing I knew, the guy behind the counter said he just
had
to show it to his boss, who was in the back, having his lunch. He was going to
love
it.
    I don’t know what I thought was going to happen…or why I had such a strong urge to run away.
    I should have listened to my instincts. I should have seen what the stone was trying to tell me.
    But I didn’t.
    After the assistant disappeared, the head jeweler came out, wiping his mouth on a napkin. By that time, I could see that my mom had pulled up in her car across the street.
    “Actually,” I said, a surge of relief rushing through me. Now I had an excuse to leave. “My ride is here. I need to go. Sorry —”
    The older jeweler had already seized the end of my pendant by then, though, so I was trapped…held suspended across the glass counter by the gold chain.
    That’s when several