“Thanks,” he said, as I bent to duck below the vine. When I stood inside the dark closet, he shone the light inside, spotlighting cleaning equipment, a spare custodian’s uniform hanging from a nail, and shelves full of brown bathroom paper towels and huge rolls of cheap, scratchy toilet paper, which no female custodian would ever have ordered.

“A pair of hedge clippers would be awesome,” he said, but I didn’t see any landscaping equipment at all.

“They don’t keep anything that could kill someone inside the school building. The Eastlake student body tends to go psycho about once a month.” I turned, my gaze following the light as he swept it across the shelves in a careful back-and-forth pattern. “But maybe we could use this to pull the vines down,” I said, taking a mop out of an empty, wheeled bucket. I tilted the mop handle and handed it to Luca beneath the vines crossing the doorway.

While I scanned more shelves, he stepped on the mop head and unscrewed the handle from it with one hand, still lighting the closet for me with the other.

“Left,” I said, and he adjusted his aim. On one of the higher shelves, blocked from his view by a rusty pail, I found a pair of thick black rubber gloves. I stared at them for a second, while the angel and devil on my shoulders debated.

If I gave him the gloves, he’d put his shirt back on. If I didn’t, he might get pricked if a thorn went through the material.

In the end, my conscience won, but only because letting Luca die in the Netherworld would be an unacceptable waste of a perfectly good six-pack.

And because guilt was not a good look on me.

“Here.” I tossed the gloves into the hall at his feet, and when he bent to pick them up, the light from my phone glinted off something on the floor, beneath the far right shelf. A box cutter, like the kind my dad kept in the garage. “And the grand prize.” I slid the cutter into the hall with my foot, and Luca grinned like I’d just found water in the desert.

I ducked beneath the vines again and turned off the flashlight app while Luca slid his right hand into one of the gloves, then picked up the box cutter. “Ready?”

“As ready as I’ve ever been to cut through flesh-eating vines and escape from a scary alternate version of my own school into a world that may be even more terrifying and dangerous.” I shrugged and slid my phone into my pocket. “Let’s do it.”

Luca pressed the tip of the box cutter against the vine wrapped around the teacher’s lounge doorknob. “Stand back, just in case.”

I glanced behind me to make sure there were no vines within reach of my foot, then stepped back. Luca closed his eyes, and I was suddenly sure he was praying. Or wishing. Or maybe hearing some kind of countdown in his head. Either way, the buildup was so quiet and intense, I almost expected the vine to start shrieking in pain when hefinally made the cut. The reality was kind of anticlimactic. The blade was dull, so the vine was squished before the cutter finally slid through it.

Both ends of the cut vine swung loose and spurted yellow fluid. Luca jumped back from the spray and I moved back with him. He pulled his shirt back on while we waited, and a few seconds later the end of the vine still connected to the wall curled around its end right in front of us, cutting off the leak of fluid.

“Did you see that?” I whispered, fascinated in spite of the steady current of fear still whooshing through my veins. “It’s like the vine made its own tourniquet.”

Luca nodded. “Survival is the name of the game.” He pocketed the box knife, then picked up the severed end of the vine between his gloved thumb and forefinger. The vine resisted as he tried to unwrap it from the door handle, but the severed section was dying, and its fight was short. Luca tossed the shriveling length of plant down the hall, and other vines moved in slowly to investigate, like curious, blind snakes.

I shivered in disgust and tried not to watch as I pulled the other glove onto my left hand.

Luca twisted the knob and the door swung into a teacher’s lounge that looked almost exactly like I remembered. Except that there were no tables or chairs here, and both of the old, grimy microwaves were gone, as were most of the cabinet doors.

“Why is this room empty?” I asked, as he lifted the vines so I could duck under them and into the lounge.

“Because there are fewer teachers than students, which means that this is one of the least populated rooms in the building. Things from our world bleed into this one all over, but the areas with the densest human population—thus the largest supply of human energy—bleed through the most thoroughly. So, a country back road there may show up here as a dirt or gravel path, but a busy interstate will look just like it does in our world, down to every broken yellow line and exit sign.”

I didn’t want to know what that said about the custodian’s closet full of supplies.

“It’s a popularity contest,” I said, glancing around at where the shelves should have been, and the vending machine. Even the wall-mounted telephone was missing, though the plug thing was in the wall, right next to the door. “Just like school.”

“Huh?” Luca ducked under the vines and into the room, then headed straight for the exterior door, gripping the mop handle like a bat now.

“You know, the most popular wins. Like the Snow Queen pageant. Only here, the popular highway gets paint and signs. The popular rooms get desks and chairs. It’s like this hell was tailor-made for me.”

“How so?” Luca pushed open the exterior door, but it only moved a couple of inches before snagging on vines draped over the outside.