“Wow. I guess I lost track of time. I was in the library.”
Bex looked at Liz. “I thought you looked in the library.”
Liz’s eyes were wide. “I did.”
The three of them turned as if they’d just caught me in an elaborate lie—like I’d run away again that afternoon but hadn’t bothered to tell them.
“I was in the stacks doing that makeup exam for Mr. Mosckowitz,” I said, but they were still staring at me. “I swear.”
I held up a hand, Scout’s-honor style, and Bex eased forward, slowly shaking her head. “Now’s not the time for disappearing acts, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, meaning it. All over the floor there were papers and charts and note cards. It was exactly what I’d always imagined the inside of Liz’s head to look like. “What’s all this?”
“Rome,” Liz said, as if that single word were an all-encompassing answer to my question.
I pointed to the line on a flip chart that just read MACEY in capital letters.
Macey shrugged. “I have a jet,” she said, because, I guess, “free jet” is an asset that should never be undervalued.
“Guys, that’s awesome, but I can’t go to Rome. You know that, right?”
“But…” Macey started, then trailed off, pointed at her name. “Jet.”
I wanted to tell them that no number of flash cards could change the fact that the Gallagher Academy was the one place where I was safe. I didn’t dare say that I was terrified that if I left our walls, the trustees might never agree to let me back in. Even then, in the quiet stillness of our room, I couldn’t bring myself to relive the words I’d heard the trustees utter, so I just shook my head.
“I’m never leaving again.”
“Fine. So you can’t go. But we can.” Bex pointed from herself to Liz and Macey.
“What exactly are you guys going to do? Wander around the streets of Rome with my picture, asking if anybody saw me bump my head?”
“We have a lead, Cam,” Liz said. “This is a good thing.” She picked up the bracelet that spelled out her name. “This is—”
“A trinket. A souvenir. It’s nothing.”
“Oh, not nothing,” Macey said. She held her thin wrist out so that her bracelet caught the light. “I saw something just like it in the September Vogue.”
Amazingly, that made me feel better. “Well, at least I’m a crazy person with good taste.”
“We’ll figure it out, Cam,” Liz said, hugging me, then climbing into her bed. “I hacked into the security feeds of all the airports and train stations in southern Italy. And I’ve got a worm working its way through the customs office database, running facial recognition software and…I promise we’ll figure it out.”
Even in the twin-size bed, Liz looked tiny, lying there with her covers pulled up to her chin. I wanted to keep her safe, protect them all. And for the first time since I got back, I wondered if they would have been better off if I had just kept running.
“Cam…” Macey’s voice brought me back. “You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Singing that song.”
“I’m sorry,” I said with a shake of my head. Liz’s eyes were closed, and Bex was in the bathroom. Macey and I were utterly alone when she looked at me.
“Where did you go?”
“That’s a good question,” I told her, and then I tried to go to sleep.
That night, when my dreams came, they came in Italian. There were dark alleys and faceless people lurking in the shadows of my mind. I grabbed for the bracelets, but my wrists were bare.
The necklace around my neck seemed to burn. And when I jolted awake, my hand grappled with it, half expecting to feel a scar.