“This is the basement,” I said, looking up and down the darkened hallway. I knew there was a narrow staircase behind Bex, leading to the foyer above. To my left I saw the old Gallagher family tapestry. Behind it lay my favorite secret passage, and beyond that, the world.
“What am I doing here, Bex?” I asked, suddenly afraid. “What time is it? How did I get here?!”
But Bex didn’t answer. She just looked down at my bare feet and said, “If you’re running away again, you might want to remember your shoes.”
She was starting to walk away when I yelled, “I’m not leaving!”
And then she spun back to me. The cold indifference was gone, replaced by a terrible rage as she shouted, “Then what are you doing wandering the halls in the middle of the night? What are you doing down here? Why…You know what? Never mind.”
“I don’t know. I was asleep and—”
“Sleepwalking?” Bex asked, then gave a short laugh. “Likely bloody story.”
“I wouldn’t lie to you, Bex,” I heard myself shouting. “I have never lied to you.”
For a second, her expression changed. My friend was there, and she believed me. She missed me. She was as terrified as I was. But whatever she was going to say next was drowned out by the sound of pounding feet.
“Cammie!” Abby appeared at the end of the hallway. “Rachel, I have her,” my aunt yelled, but she didn’t stop moving until she held me.
“Don’t do that,” Abby said, grabbing my shoulders and shaking me. It was the first time anyone had dared to touch me since I’d tried to kill Dr. Steve. “Cammie, don’t leave your suite in the middle of the night again. Do. Not. Do. That.”
And then my mother was there, pushing past Bex, pulling me from my aunt’s arms and into her own. “Cammie, sweetheart, look at me. Are you okay?”
“Of course she’s okay,” Bex said.
“Bex,” Abby warned.
“She’s fine! She’s just a…” Bex started, but she stopped when she saw my mother’s eyes.
“Cam”—Mom gripped my arms so tightly it almost hurt—“what are you doing here?”
At the end of the hall, Professor Buckingham and Madame Dabney were rushing closer, both of them in housecoats, their hair in curlers. It might have been funny. I might have wondered if the two of them had been in the middle of a sleepover, complete with mani-pedis and facials, if Liz and Macey hadn’t arrived by then too. I saw Liz shaking, trembling in a way that probably had nothing to do with the drafty hall.
“I came here,” I said, and I instantly knew it was true. “I came here last spring.” I felt myself pointing to the tapestry and the passageway that lay behind it. “That was where I left.”
“Impossible.” Buckingham pulled her robe tighter. “That corridor was closed last December. I oversaw the work myself.”
“There’s a branch no one knew about. You missed it,” I said, but my gaze never left my mother. “I remember coming here.…I came here and then…”
“What happened next, Cammie?” Liz asked, inching forward.
“I don’t know.”
“Yes you do,” Liz said. “You know. You just have to—”
“Liz,” Aunt Abby warned. “It’s okay. She doesn’t have to remember.”
“Yes I do!” I yelled, but my voice faded, frustration replaced by fear as I faced my mother. “I know you don’t want me to remember. I know you think I can’t take knowing what happened to me. But don’t you see? There’s nothing worse than not knowing.”
“Cammie,” my mom started. “You’re home now. It doesn’t matter,” she said, but I pulled away.
“It matters to me!” The hallway was too quiet for so many people. “You say I don’t want to remember—that it’s best not to know. Well, this”—I held up the raw, bloody fingers that, moments before, I’d been using to try to claw through the walls—“this is what not knowing is doing to me.” My hand began to shake, and I couldn’t stop myself. I yelled, “Why didn’t you find me?”
There are so many things the Gallagher Academy trains us to do, but the most important, I think, is to watch. To listen. And when my mother looked at my aunt, I saw the faintest hint of something pass between them, a thread I had to follow and pull, even if it meant unraveling everything I’d ever known.
“What?” I asked, but Abby was shaking her head.
“It’s nothing, Squirt.”