I hated being back at school, which would have been true even without having Grace in my clubhouse, but somehow her being there made it worse. The day passed at glacial speed and all day I sat, chewing on my pencil while my thoughts revolved around Grace.

Spanish was my last class of the day and for some reason I kept looking back to the corner of the room where Grace usually sat. I felt strangely important being the only one who knew where she was. Mrs. Waller was going down the roll when she suddenly looked up. “Has anyone seen Madeline Webb?”

I looked straight ahead.

“Anyone?”

“I think she’s sick,” a voice said from the back of the room. “I heard she had pneumonia.”

“Oh.” She made a mark on the attendance sheet, put it back in her desk, and started the class.

As soon as the bell rang I set out for Grace’s locker. It wasn’t easy to find. It was one of a dozen lockers on an obscure row placed in no man’s land. It was like the builders of the school had realized they had some extra lockers sitting around and someone said, “Hey, let’s put them there.” I probably wouldn’t have found it if I hadn’t taken a break from my search to look for a water fountain and stumbled across it.

I took the folded paper with the locker combination out of my pocket and began turning the dial. It felt a little like I was breaking into a safe. It took me a couple tries to get the door open.

Inside Grace’s locker there was a mirror taped to the inside of the door and several pictures of cheerleaders cut from magazines taped to the sidewalls. I saw a stack of folded clothes sitting on the bottom of the locker and it occurred to me that she had been planning her escape for some time. Underneath the clothes was the red cloth pouch. It was nearly as thick as a brick but flexible. I wanted to look inside but didn’t. I figured if it was that important it was best I didn’t know.

I collected everything inside and was stowing it all in my knapsack when someone said, “What do you think you’re doing?”

I turned to see a broad girl with short brown hair. She was at least three inches taller than me and had a look on her face like she wanted to pound me into the ground and she probably could have. “That’s not your locker.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“No, it’s not. I know that girl.”

I didn’t know if she really was a friend of Grace’s or, more likely, if the unlucky recipients of these out-of-the-way lockers all just came to know each other by circumstance, like people stranded on a deserted island.

“I’m just getting some things for her.”