I LOVED reading your comments last weeks, folks. I tried to keep a tally of the Team Kieren vs Team Adam posts (and even one Team Brady!) but I lost count. :)

***

I didn't really know where I was heading the next morning when I hopped on my old bike and started pedaling. I told Dad I was going to the store to replace the entire bag of coffee Robbie and I had downed since we'd been home. But my feet ended up choosing their own path, revisiting landmarks that had once meant so much to me—the Kids' Science Center where I'd taught coding last year, the strip mall where I'd bought my first bra, and, of course, the train tracks where Robbie had been hit—the very same spot where Adam and I had stood in 1943 watching the dripping uranium canister create the train portal.

Before I knew it, I had arrived at the parking lot of East Township High.

I got lucky with the timing. It was the last Friday before their winter break ended, and while the kids weren't back yet, the teachers were there, setting up their classrooms for the second semester. So the front door was unlocked.

I had no plans to sneak down to the boiler room. I hadn't been there since the day I had promised Adam I'd go to Boston and start over—the day he'd told me he was going to find a life he could be proud of as well. I'd spent a year imagining where that life might be for him, who he was spending it with, where he was sleeping at night.

But every time I tried to picture it, all I could see was his green eyes, floating in front of me and then blinking into oblivion.

Once inside, I walked the length of the hard tile floor, thinking of the day I said goodbye to him, indulging myself in the memories I usually tried to keep at bay. I made it all the way to the end of the corridor before it clicked in my mind that something was wrong.

Was it possible I was in the wrong hallway?

I retraced the steps again. There was the multipurpose room; the handicapped bathroom; the utility closet. Then brick wall. Then nothing. More brick wall.

I spun in circles, making myself dizzy. This wasn't possible. My fingers traced the bricks, feeling for an odd break, an obvious line. But there wasn't one.

The boiler room was gone.

I collected my breath, panicking for a moment that we'd somehow ended up in the wrong portal when we came back a year ago. That we'd been living in the wrong dimension for a year now. But that couldn't be.

"I covered it up," came a voice behind me.

I spun in my tracks, my eyes landing on the diminutive figure of Principal Farghasian standing before me. In my three years at East Township, I couldn't remember one time when I'd actually spoken to her face to face.

Even when she'd handed me my diploma last spring, she had turned to smile for the official photo rather than look at me. I wasn't even sure if she knew my name.

"I'm sorry?" I asked, because I needed her to repeat it. But she clearly interpreted it in a different way.

"No, you're not," she said, walking a step closer as though trying to cage me in somehow. It was an unnecessary gesture; we were the only ones in the hall, and I clearly wasn't going to make a run for it.

I stammered, trying to figure out what I was supposed to say next.

"Did you think I didn't know?" she whispered fiercely.

"How?" I asked.

But she only sighed and shook her head. "I've been at this school since before you were born. You're not the only one with secrets."

I could feel my eyes growing wider. I opened my mouth to speak, but my brain thought better of it. Better to let her talk, I realized, in case she was bluffing.

"I wanted to cover the door three years ago, when Piper McMahon went missing. But the superintendent said no. That it would only draw more curious eyes if a door suddenly disappeared. But then last year, he finally agreed to let me do it.'

"Why?" I asked. "What changed last year?"

"Oh, I think you know the answer to that... Marina."

So she did know my name after all.

"Adam Martel disappeared last year." She took a step even closer, so close now that her musky perfume filled my nose. "And so did you."

I stumbled away from her, my eyes flitting for only a moment to that ruthlessly blank wall where the door to the portals was supposed to be, before landing back on Principal Farghasian.

"Don't come back to my school," she warned, turning to walk away before I could respond.

*

The drive to the airport was mostly silent. We had debated taking the train to New York, spending a day exploring the city, and traveling on from there up to Boston, but in the end we had wanted to spend as much time as possible with Dad and Laura, so flying made more sense.

I was in the backseat, wedged against the window so Robbie and Piper could sit together. And though I tried to stop myself, I couldn't help but peer into the windows of the ARCO gas station as we passed. I had no idea if Brady still worked there, but I liked to think that he didn't. That somehow he had left town, was backpacking through Europe, or living in Colorado like he and Piper had once planned, or even going to school, though it had never really been his thing.

And yet, when I tried to imagine his face—his glinting brown eyes and his warm smile—it always ended up being the same picture that defaulted in my brain: Brady standing behind the counter at the gas station, chewing on a glob of Nicorette to avoid falling back into old habits.

"Baby, did you remember the phone chargers?" Piper was whispering.

"In your bag," he answered.

"Should we get Thai when we get home?"

"Let's just cook something."

I closed my eyes. They were always doing this: lobbing uncompleted thoughts back and forth between them for the other to finish. Like two halves of the same brain solving an interminable, and often numbingly boring, puzzle.

The door to the portals is gone, my brain reminded me.

It was a good thing. I couldn't deny that. Maybe it meant that no future kids would ever find it. That the cycle of addiction and despair it had engendered would truly end with me. Could it really be that simple? A few extra bricks, and the past is buried forever.

But if it were that easy, wouldn't the town have done it years ago?

"Watcha thinkin' about over there?" Piper leaned her head on my shoulder and asked.

"School," I lied. "Need to review some things before it starts again next week."

She smiled, popping one of her earbuds into my left ear. "Listen to this song," she instructed. "It reminds me of you."

The song was slow and sad, and it made me think of something I had heard once, long ago, but I couldn't remember exactly what it was.

I suppose it wasn't a complete shock that Principal Farghasian knew more than she was letting on about the door. It wasn't possible that so many kids had discovered the basement over the years, but not the adults. But did she really know about the portals, or just that there was something sinister down there?

Kieren said that the kids "thought it was party." So what was Farghasian accusing me of? Using the doors in the abandoned military fort for time travel? Or just having an affair with a teacher?—an affair that caused him to leave town less than two weeks into the teaching gig that she hadn't wanted to offer him in the first place.

Adam himself admitted that he was too young for the job, too unqualified. He should really have had a masters degree to be teaching high school history, but in their desperation to fill the post, they had taken a chance on him.

I wasn't immune to the rumors that had followed me through the hallways for the last six months of school. I knew it would be suspicious. Adam and I had disappeared at the same time; then four days later, only I had come back. I'd insisted it was a coincidence, of course, but not everyone believed me. One day in the spring I wore a baggy sweatshirt to school and Angela Piernot cornered me in the bathroom and asked if I was carrying his baby.

If she was thinking it—and Angela had a big mouth that was constantly gossiping—then she couldn't have been the only one.

I glared at Angela like she was crazy, daring myself not to let any emotion flicker over my face. Finally she just laughed and walked away, leaving me alone in the bathroom. I didn't realize until she was gone that I had been clutching the edge of the cold, hard sink. No, I wasn't carrying his baby. I had made sure of that when I'd asked Christy to get me the morning-after pill.

"Some traffic today," my dad said from the front seat of Laura's Toyota. She sat next to him, stroking her hand over his upper arm.

"We're not in a hurry," she said, glancing back at us with a smile. "Plenty of time till their flight."

"Should have taken the toll roads, though," my dad countered.

"No, we're fine."

Piper's head still rested on my shoulder, and I suddenly felt like the car was too small for all of us. Like there wasn't enough oxygen to keep all our bodies functioning. My panic attacks had been less frequent lately, but when they came on, they came on hard.

I focused on my breath, like I had learned to do, moving one hand and then the other.

My arms are free. My feet are free. I can breathe. I am okay.

I said it over and over again, Piper's sad song still drumming in my ears, as I tried to breathe my way out of the problem. And I didn't stop repeating it until we were at the airport and I was hugging my dad goodbye.

****

I'd like to thank Taylor Swift for releasing the soundtrack for this book just as I sat down to write it. That was very considerate of her. The song for this chapter is below. (You really need to imagine her listening to it as she bikes around.) XO

https://youtu.be/osdoLjUNFnA