“I think Bex and Zach are…together.”
Okay, just to summarize, I had amnesia, a concussion, a knot on my head the size of a golf ball, half a semester’s worth of work to make up, senior pictures to take, and an international terrorist organization that may or may not have still been after me at that moment. And yet, all I could say was, “He spent the summer with her family because…well…I guess he probably didn’t have any place to go. He spent the summer with her,” I said again, more for my benefit than Dr. Steve’s.
“I know,” Dr. Steve said. “I was a part of that decision.”
“You were?”
“Do you think that was a mistake?” Dr. Steve asked.
“No.” I shook my head and remembered that I had been the one to run away from home. But Zach…Zach didn’t have a home to run to. Or from. “I’m glad he had someplace to go. It’s just…he spent all summer with her family.” Outside, Bex was sitting on Zach’s ankles while he did sit-ups. With his shirt off. I felt my heart sink.
“I think I lost him,” I said, and just then I realized that wasn’t the half of it. “And her. I think I’ve lost them.” Then I felt exhausted and turned from the window. I sank down into the chair and admitted, “But I guess they lost me first.”
“And how do you feel about that?” Dr. Steve asked.
“Like maybe I had it coming.”
“Do you think your friends are punishing you?”
“I ran away. I did something…stupid.”
“Was it stupid?” Dr. Steve asked. It was the first time anyone—especially an adult—had said anything of the sort. “You must not have thought so at the time.”
“No,” I said, tugging at the memory. “It wasn’t stupid. I was just…desperate. He said it first, you know—about leaving. About going away to try to find answers. Zach said it first.”
“But you didn’t take him with you,” Dr. Steve said, and I shook my head.
“I didn’t want anyone to get hurt.”
“And yet you got hurt.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that. I leaned back in my chair. I wanted to close my eyes and curl up into a ball, sleep until my memory returned, but I knew that wasn’t an option.
“That’s a pretty tune,” Dr. Steve told me, and I bolted upright.
“What?” I asked.
“That song you were humming. I like it.”
“I wasn’t humming,” I said, but Dr. Steve looked at me as if I were crazy (a fact made far scarier because it might very well have been his professional opinion).
Then he shook his head and said, “I guess not. That must have been my mistake.” He closed a notebook I didn’t even realize he’d picked up, screwed the cap on to a really nice pen, and placed it in his pocket, then rose from the leather couch. “Very well. I think that’s enough for today. It’s getting late.”
“No, it’s not,” I said, turning to the window, but the bright sky was dimmer. Dusk had come and I hadn’t even known it.
“This time of year the days start getting much shorter, Cammie. I imagine—like the trees—that’s something that would sneak up on you. And you slept for a long time.”
“Oh,” I said, standing. “Right.”
“It will get better, Cammie,” Dr. Steve said, stopping me in the door. “You’ll get some rest and some space, and eventually it will get better.”
Chapter Eleven
I don’t know if it was all that talking, or the studying, or maybe the crash course that Courtney Bauer agreed to put me through in the P&E barn, but that night, going to sleep totally wasn’t a problem. I mean, I’m fairly sure I managed to put on pajamas and brush my teeth, but I don’t even remember my head hitting the pillow before I was one hundred percent out of it.
And dreaming.
There are a lot of kinds of dreams. Liz and her books about the brain have told me that much is true. There are “it’s finals week and I just remembered a class I haven’t been to all semester” dreams. Then there are “my friends and I are the stars of a popular sitcom” dreams. And, of course, there are the perfect day, perfect moment, perfect life dreams that come sometimes and make a person hit the snooze button for hours, trying to go back to sleep and make the perfect moments last.
This wasn’t like that.
At first, it felt like the school must have been on fire, because the smell of smoke was so thick and real. I was too hot, smothered. Everything was crashing down around me, pushing in from all sides, and yet my arms couldn’t move. I struggled against the bonds, heard talking and laughter, and fought harder.
I had to escape—outrun whatever it was that was chasing me—before the fire of the tombs caught up to me, before the smoke became too strong.
And then the fire was over. I was suddenly cold, and my feet were bare. My blood felt warm as it ran over my skin, but I kept running anyway.
I had to keep running.
There was something rough against my hands, and yet I kept clawing, fighting, trying to find my way out.
“I should have known you’d be here.”
The words were new. They didn’t belong there. And because of them I had to stop. To think.
“The least you can do is look at me when I’m talking to you.”
And that was when I knew the dream was over. I turned to see Bex twenty feet away, arms crossed, staring daggers.
“Where am I?” I asked, but Bex just rolled her eyes.
“Yeah, you’re lost. You know every inch of this mansion, Cam. If you expect me to believe that you of all people are lost—”
“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.”