His repeated sentiment is for me only. He’s still not sure about Hazel, but that’s only because he doesn’t know who she really is.

“What do you do to get through it?”

“Talk to Kevin and Priya. Lucie doesn’t want to discuss any of it.”

“No, I mean, while you’re in there.”

“Oh.” He wrings his hands, and I know his head is back there, remembering some awful things that’ve happened to him.

“I put my mind somewhere else. Imagine I’m out of here. I think about what I would be doing, what college would be like.”

“You were going to college?”

“That was the plan, but I never even got to apply.”

“How old are you, Theo?”

Sighing, he replies, “Seventeen. You?”

“Sixteen.”

“You seem older.”

“I get that a lot. My sister died three years ago, it…aged me, I guess.”

Before Penny’s death, I couldn’t really do much for myself and I relied heavily on my parents and Hazel. Not anymore. I’m confident I can do whatever I need to survive. I just never thought I would have to put that to the test. Not in this way.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Thanks. So, where are these rooms?”

“You passed them on the way here. The long corridor off their playroom.” His words are overflowing with venom.

“They’re all the way back there?” We came through, like, four other rooms to get here since that corridor. That makes sense. There were six doors out there. None of them were numbered, though. How would you know which one is which?

“You don’t go back that way.”

“Right.” I take a breath. “Which way do we go then?”

“There is another door behind you.”

I twist my body and crane my neck to see it. How did I miss that? On the wall beside a small bookcase is yet another door. This one is a natural wood color like the bookcase, so that’s probably why it didn’t jump out at me.

“How does that lead back?”

“There’s a tiny room, and you come out in the room where you get the clothes, the one before the corridor of rooms.”

I slowly turn around and exhale. “This place is like a maze.”

He nods. “Yeah, and they seem to be able to get around pretty freely, so there are possibly more hallways than we’ve seen so far.”

“Did you know any of them before this?”

“I’d vaguely seen Matt around, but that’s only because my older cousin Tony went to high school with him. They weren’t friends, though. I came with Matt because he said Tony was here, playing in their game room.” Laughing without humor, he adds, “I thought those games would be of the arcade variety.”

“Well, they do have some of those.”

“Yeah,” he replies. “But they also have a whole lot more.”