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behind me.
    My head ached with lack of sleep, and I couldn’t shake off a feeling of nagging anxiety. As I undressed, I noticed that the cut on my hand had healed into a dark red line—the cut that had apparently come from nowhere. It didn’t make any sense. If only there were someone I could talk to about it.
    I missed Dad and Frankie so much it hurt.
    Standing under the tepid shower, I tried to let the water wash everything away. Forget it , I told myself. I must have gotten it all wrong. The glass had never been broken in the first place. I must have grazed myself on a corner of the brass frame; that was all. Or maybe something sharp had fallen into the sweater when I was packing it at home. There was no mystery. And there was no one watching me. There couldn’t be.
    Impossible.
    I needed to concentrate on dealing with my new school, just ordinary stuff like finding my way around and doing my best in class and staying out of Celeste’s way. I needed to forget the whole thing. Most of all, I needed to forget about the boy with the dark hair and the haunting eyes.
    I got back to the dorm and put on my unfamiliar uniform: the dark gray skirt, the bloodred stockings, the old-fashioned tie. I looked in the mirror hanging on the wall and didn’t quite recognize the girl who looked back at me.
    Celeste, India, and Sophie came jostling back from the bathroom.
    “Hey, how sweet,” said Celeste. “She’s admiring her uniform. Isn’t it a shame that she won’t be wearing it for long?”
    I remembered my resolution to be tolerant and swallowed down the angry reply that I wanted to shoot back at her. It was a massive effort.
    “Come on, Evie,” said Helen. “Let’s go to breakfast.”
    I looked at her in surprise. I hadn’t expected Helen to show me any support. Gratefully I followed her out of the room, but she didn’t go down the marble staircase, where girls were starting to make their way to the main hall. Instead she pulled me into an alcove partly hidden from the corridor by a curtain. At the back of the alcove was a plain wooden door. Helen drew back a bolt and pushed the door open.
    I saw a dim, secret landing where some twisting wooden steps snaked down into total darkness. Helen groped behind the door, then picked up a flashlight and switched it on. “I keep this here. Come on,” she said. “It’s officially out-of-bounds, but I’ll show you the way. Then we don’t have to bump into Celeste and her crew.”
    “But…where are we going?”
    “We can go down here. It’s the old servants’ staircase.”
    Helen shut the door behind us and pointed her light at the spiraling steps. They were so narrow they seemed to have been squeezed into a gap between the walls, like a ladder going down into a dark pit.
    “You must be joking.” I didn’t really want to admit it to Helen, but I’d always been spooked by enclosed, dark spaces. “I’m not going down there.”
    “It’s perfectly safe. Or would you rather hang out with Celeste?”
    She set off, the light bobbing in front of her.
    “Helen! Wait!”
    I plunged down the crooked stairs after her, trying not to imagine that the walls were pressing in on me. After a few turns we came to another dark landing.
    “That’s the staff floor,” said Helen. “Keep going.”
    We finally reached the bottom and stepped into a dank, deserted passage. Helen swept the light over the cobwebbed walls.
    “So where are we now?” I asked, hoping that wherever it was, we’d get out of there as quickly as possible.
    “This used to be the servants’ quarters in the old days, when the Abbey was a private house. That door over there leads back into the main part of the school, near the marble steps, but if you go down this passage in the other direction you get to the old kitchens and out to the stables. I like it here. I’ll show you, if you want.”
    The last thing I wanted was to go exploring some crummy back rooms that no one had used for more than a hundred years,