Through the doors along the hall, students sat in orderly rows, staring forward with their hands on their laps. Their shoulders didn’t seem shaped right—too soft and smooth. And Eleanor couldn’t read the teachers’ names on the doors or the posters on the walls. It wasn’t that they were blurry—it was more like trying to read in a dream, the words refusing to surrender their meaning no matter how hard you stared at them.

She swallowed. She tried to turn away only to find that she couldn’t; her right foot was in the hallway already. It was stuck. She gritted her teeth and hauled backward, but instead her body twitched forward. Her left foot lifted up, stepping out.

Katie grabbed her elbow and yanked her backward, and Eleanor yelped. She stumbled back into Katie, who stumbled back into a passing sixth-grader, who stumbled into the lockers, dropping his books.

“Oh my gosh, I’m sorry!” Katie said, and she and Eleanor hastily picked up the dropped books, straightened the dazed-looking sixth-grader’s jacket, and sent him on his way. By the time they were done, the strange hallway had vanished, and Mr. Ryland’s classroom was back where it belonged. Eleanor stared at it. She looked sideways at it—sometimes you could see Wrong Things better out of the corner of your eye. Mr. Ryland’s room remained.

Eleanor looked at Katie, whose cheeks were flushed but who did not look like someone who had just witnessed the impossible. “Did you see . . .” she started.

Katie’s eyes got a blank look that Eleanor knew well. It was the look of someone forgetting what they’d just seen. “You almost went into the wrong class,” she said, and giggled.

“Thanks for pulling me back,” Eleanor said with feeling. Katie gave her a confused look.

Eleanor didn’t want to know what would have happened if she’d kept walking down that hallway. The rest of the way to math class, she checked every turn carefully before she stepped around the corner. No more phantom hallways appeared, but when she sat down at her desk, she opened her journal to the page where she’d written Roads that shouldn’t be there and underlined it three times.

Five

Jenny and Ben were used to seeing Otto and Pip pile off the bus after Eleanor, and Ben already had snacks laid out for them.

“Hey, kids!” he said as they ran into the kitchen, dumping their backpacks and snatching up the tray of cheese and crackers. “Bye, kids!”

“Thanks, Uncle Ben,” Eleanor said over her shoulder, and bolted after Pip and Otto. They paused only long enough to make sure the coast was clear before heading up the fireplace steps and into the secret room.