Gallagher Girls 5 - Out of Sight, Out of Time Read Online Free PDF

the nearly abandoned classroom, listening as Zach told her, “You’re going to have to talk to her eventually.”
    “I can’t do it,” Bex said.
    Zach laughed. “I find that hard to believe. I’m the guy who was with you and your parents all summer, remember? I was in Budapest. I saw you in action in Greece. So don’t pull that on me. I know exactly what you’re capable of.”
    “Budapest was an exception,” she told him, but then she laughed too. She was sitting next to him on top of a desk, her bare leg pressing against his khakis, and I thought I might be sick.
    “What about Macey and Liz?” Zach asked.
    “They think we have to act like nothing’s wrong—that we have to pretend so maybe she’ll get her memory back or whatever.”
    My breath was coming so hard I feared it might betray me as I stood there realizing that Liz and Macey had been pretending. Pretending what , I didn’t know. Not to hate me? To be happy I was home? That my mother was right and it was over? Whatever it was, they were good at it. Bex, evidently, wasn’t even going to bother.
    “She looks so different,” Zach said, and Bex leaned against his shoulder, closed her eyes.
    “She is different,” Bex said.
    And then, despite everything I’d been through, I wanted to forget what I was hearing. What I was seeing. Amnesia seemed like a welcome release, so I turned as quickly and quietly as I could and rushed back the way I’d come.
    Halfway down the hall, I heard a door slam. Zach and Bex were in the hall behind me, talking and coming close. So I pushed down a narrow corridor, groping for a light fixture I’d first discovered in the seventh grade, praying it would still work, just as the bookshelf in front of me slid aside and I darted through the opening, disappearing into the dark.
     
    Here’s the thing you need to know about secret passageways: they’re…well…secret, so that means they don’t exactly get cleaned. Ever. At the Gallagher Academy, I was the only one who used them, and I’d been gone for months. The bookcase closed behind me, blocking Bex and Zach away; but I had to keep moving, so I pushed farther and farther down the dusty corridor until I realized…Wait.
    It wasn’t dusty.
    Usually in the first weeks of school, my uniforms were covered with grime, my hair full of cobwebs. But that narrow passage was totally free of all the things that were supposed to be there—no dust or spiders, just a well-worn path that led to a door that I had never seen before.
    For a second, I wondered if my memory of the mansion was as broken as my memory of the summer, and I stood listening for a long time. There were only the faintest sounds of humming and beeping, so I took a deep breath and opened the door, steadied my nerves, and stepped inside.
    There was a couch and a cushy chair, some flowers in a vase. Curtains hung from the ceiling in the center of the room. I eased forward, pulled them aside, and looked down at Joe Solomon, who lay perfectly still on a bed.
    His bruises had faded, and the stitches were gone. The burns he’d sustained in the explosion at the Blackthorne Institute last spring were almost entirely mended—nothing but a few almost unnoticeable scars. My favorite teacher looked like he was just sleeping and might wake up at any moment, tell me that my vacation was over, and I was going to need my strength for whatever he had planned for CoveOps the next morning.
    “I’m home, Mr. Solomon,” I said, easing forward. “I’m back.”
    But the only reply was the sound of the machines that buzzed and beeped. The room was an eerie kind of quiet. I leaned down and kissed the top of his head, enjoying the company of the one person who wasn’t mad that I’d left and even madder that I’d been so late in coming back.
    Standing there holding Joe Solomon’s hand, I heard the music in my mind again, louder. Clearer. And all of a sudden I couldn’t think of anything else—not Bex or Zach, not the Circle or