Gallagher Girls 5 - Out of Sight, Out of Time by Ally Carter Page A

as much as I hated the Circle. Distrusted her more than I distrusted Zach’s mom. Enemies are nothing compared to traitors, after all. It’s the people you hold closest who have the most power to make you bleed. And that girl…she was as close as anyone could possibly be.
    I didn’t mean to do it, but in the next second, a hair dryer was flying through the air. It hit the mirror, and I watched the girl shatter; but she was still there. I could see her. So I grabbed Macey’s curling iron and hurled it at the image, and another piece of mirror cracked and crashed; but the noise was nothing compared to the banging on the bathroom door.
    “Cammie, open this door!” Macey yelled. “Open this—”
    “Cam!” Bex yelled, and a split second later the doorjamb splintered and Bex was rushing toward me, yelling, “Cammie!” She took one look at the shattered glass and the look on my face and said, “Cam, are you okay?”
    But I didn’t answer. I was pulling open drawers and scavenging inside, saying, “I hate her. I hate her.”
    I looked crazy. I was acting crazy. But I knew exactly what I was doing when I picked up the scissors.
    “Cam!” Liz yelled.
    But I just reached for the black hair that didn’t feel like my own, grabbed a handful, and…
    “Cammie, no!” Bex snapped, like you might yell at a dog for chasing cars. It was a warning that I didn’t want to hurt myself. “No,” she said again, and with one motion, she twisted the scissors from my hand.
    “I killed a man, Bex.”
    “He would have killed me,” she said slowly, swagger gone. Ever since I’d known her, Bex had seemed practically bulletproof; but standing there, with blood on her sleeve, she trembled. “I would have died.”
    “I don’t even remember picking up the gun,” I said, realizing that that was the most terrifying thing of all.
    “ I’m alive because you picked it up,” Bex told me.
    I turned to the mirror and gently pulled the scissors from Bex’s grasp. “ She did that.” I reached for a piece of hair and was just about to cut when Bex caught my hand again.
    “Don’t do that,” she said, and for the first time in months, I saw Bex smile. “I seem to remember a bangs incident in the eighth grade that taught us you are not the person who should do that.”
    And then the strangest thing happened: my roommates laughed. I looked in the mirror and realized I was laughing too.
    Macey turned to Liz. “Dr. Fibs has hydrogen peroxide in the lab, right?”
    Liz sounded almost offended. “Of course he does.”
    “Get it,” Macey said, turning back to me. “We have work to do.”
    It wasn’t like we talked a lot. But then again, it’s not like there was all that much left to say. We’d seen things. We’d done things. And I wasn’t the only one who was still waiting for me to come home from my summer vacation.
    I leaned over the sink and let Bex wash and bleach my hair. Then Macey took the scissors and trimmed away my dead, uneven ends. I sat, letting my best friends work around me, watching as the person I had been last summer washed away down the drain.

 
    T hat night I couldn’t sleep.
    It might have been the adrenaline or the new scratches on my body. I told myself it had something to do with the smell of hydrogen peroxide which lingered in the air, but if that was it, then I was the only one it bothered. My friends were around me, snoring softly. Bex had an ice pack on her shoulder. Macey slept with a self-satisfied smirk across her face. And Liz was listening to headphones, memorizing the audio version of some ancient textbook while she dreamed.
    But not me.
    I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling, and every time I closed my eyes, I saw the blood on Dr. Steve’s sleeve. Every time I almost drifted off to sleep, I heard the music, soft and lingering in the corners of my mind.
    Finally, I threw the covers aside, crept into the bathroom with its busted mirror, and pulled on my uniform as quietly as I