Lying to my dad does not feel very good, and I almost tell him three times during dinner that I am planning to go to the Crescent tonight.

But every time, I stop myself because I know he'll put me on lockdown, and I can't disappoint Julian that way.

That I'm bothered by the thought of disappointing Julian is worrisome. I've tried telling him I can do this on my own, that I don't need him to go through it with me, but every time, he convinces me with that intense gaze of his. Something about him just makes me want to let him in.

But I push that to the recesses of my mind. After Levi, there's no way I can be interested in someone else. He is still so angry with me, and I so badly want him to forgive me. I don't want to get back together with him or anything, but I just can't stand knowing that he believes I'd do that to him. I know that going out with someone else so soon after our breakup would not be a good first step in that direction.

Not that I would ever go out with Julian. Or that he'd ever want to go out with me. We are two completely different people who have barely anything in common.

Except he knows my deepest secrets.

"Cam?"

My dad's voice breaks through my reverie. "Yeah?"

"I asked where you were going tonight."

"Oh, just to spend the night with Rose." The lie turns my stomach; that's another reason I have to go through with this trip to the Crescent—figure out what's going on so I can clear my name with my friend.

"Well, have a good time, okay ladybug?" he says, getting up to put the dishes in the sink, kissing the top of my head. "I think I'll turn in early tonight; it was a long day for me."

"Get some rest, Dad. See you in the morning."

My phone buzzes in my pocket as I'm sliding on my black Vans.

Are you ready yet?

I smirk as I reply: Chill out, Sherlock.

I wanna be Watson.

Whatever. I'll be out in a minute.

I smile as I slide my phone in my back pocket and jog down the sidewalk to the stop sign where Julian said he would be waiting. Placing my hands on my hips, I look around the empty street, a little annoyed that he rushed me when he's not here yet.

The passenger side door of the brand-new, cherry red Mustang next to me pops open, and I jump back. "Holy shit."

Julian leans across the seat, grinning up at me.

My racing heart calms, only to start thumping erratically at his brilliant smile, and I trail my fingertips along the top of the door. "When did you get this?"

"It's my aunt's. She told me I could take it out tonight, and who am I to refuse?"

I sink into the leather seat and close the door. "To the Crescent then...so much for staying under the radar," I say with a laugh.

He peals out, blowing my hair back away from my face. "Don't forget; I know how to be sneaky."

And he does; five minutes later, we manage to slide in the side door of the Crescent right behind a maintenance worker, and no one seems to acknowledge our existence at all.

"You said you know where he keeps his keys?" Julian asks as we huff and puff up the back stairs to the 4th floor, where my dad's office is. 

I nod and pull a single key from my pocket. "This is the key to his office. It's the only one he brings home; the rest are inside. I took this one off his keyring when he was cooking dinner." 

He raises his eyebrows in approval as he leans over, his hands on his knees. "All right, I see you, History Project Cam. You've got tricks."

I turn the key in the lock and roll my eyes, but in all honesty, I am enjoying our banter. Hanging out with Julian is easy; I don't feel the need to impress him, and while he is admittedly a bit strange, different from anyone I usually hang out with, we really seem to click.

"You know what we should do tomorrow?" he asks as he finally stands straight and is breathing normally again.

"What's that?" I ask as I push open the door and lead the way inside.

"Go to the gym." 

I burst out laughing and nod. "After that sad journey up the stairs, I'm inclined to agree with you."

After we slip into the office, Julian asks, "Do you know exactly where the keys are, or do we have to search?"

I open the top drawer of my dad's desk and pull out a large ring with a myriad of keys, in all sizes, colors, and styles. "Right here," I say triumphantly, sliding it into my hoodie pocket. "Where to first?"

"Well, we need to find anything with actual information...papers, labeled photos, maybe yearbooks from when this was a school? Anything we can connect to you or maybe even your dad," he says, looking at all the photos and documents hanging on the wall. "You think there's a map of the hotel around here?"

"I'm sure there is," I say, sitting in my dad's rolling wingback chair and rustling through the desk drawers. I find nothing there or in the filing cabinet, but then across the room I hear Julian's celebratory Eureka!

"I found it," he says, rushing over to me, unfolding what looks like a piece of parchment paper. "It's ancient, but it's a guide at least."

"Here, spread it out," I say, kneeling in front of the long table against the wall.

Julian drops to his knees next to me and we pore over the map for a few quiet moments until we both spot the same thing at the same time.

Our index fingers fly to the bottom of the page, brushing against one another as they land on the words written in tiny swirling script: Records Room.

"Let's go."

The journey from the 4th floor to the records room is a long and winding one, down labyrinthine hallways and spiral staircases that are off limits to the general public. Julian is wide-eyed, awestruck as we move further into the belly of the hotel. I can't help but smile at his boyish grin; it's actually sort of adorable. 

"This is amazing," he murmurs, running his fingers along the carved molding on the walls. 

I look around with my eyebrows raised. Amazing probably isn't the word I'd have used to describe the part of the hotel we're in at the moment.

The cobwebs against the ceiling are thick, and the dust that has settled on every surface makes my nose twitch and my eyes water. I know employees have to come down here on a semi-regular basis, but it looks like no one has traveled these halls in years. 

"Yo, I need you to bring a rollaway bed to the 3rd floor!" a male voice calls out from down the hall.

"Um, the elevator isn't working right now; how do you expect me to do that?" another voice responds, and as they carry on their conversation, it's clear they're coming this way.

"Shit," Julian mutters, grasping my hand and pulling me to the side, into a narrow alcove that barely fits both of us, and I find myself pressed against him, my back to his front. His arm has nowhere else to go but around my waist, and his fingers brush against my waistband, sending a cluster of butterflies to my belly. 

"Sorry," he whispers, and his lips are right next to my ear; I can feel his cool, minty breath on my skin. "I panicked."

I draw my bottom lip between my teeth and swallow hard before murmuring, "No need to apolo—"

I stop short when the men speak again, their voices close now, coming from what I assume is a supply closet next to us.

"Are they ever gonna fix that damn elevator?" the younger of the two men asks as they bang around the room. 

Their conversation continues but the words fade out as my eyes settle on a gigantic spider right in front of us on the wall. Julian shifts behind me, and I can tell he has just noticed it too. I part my lips, a scream on the tip of my tongue, when Julian's hand flies up to cover my mouth. 

"Shh," he murmurs in my ear. "It's not going to hurt you, but if you scream, we are screwed."

I inhale sharply, shocked by how soft his skin is. I relax my muscles and close my eyes, nodding against his palm. He slips his hand back down around my waist, and my heart goes back to its erratic beating.

After what feels like forever, the men's voices echo down the hall in the opposite direction, and we both sigh in relief, scrambling to get out of the alcove, away from the arachnid whose home we invaded.

I shiver as we step back into the dim light of the hallway, brushing dust off my hoodie. "That spider was a monster."

He chuckles as he straightens his black t-shirt. "It was just a grandaddy longlegs," he says with a sidelong glance at me.

"It was not!" I exclaim, but as I think back to the spider's spindly legs and tiny body, I realize he's right. "Well, uh, I heard they're the most poisonous spider in the world but they're too small to bite humans, so..."

Throwing his head back with a real laugh this time, Julian starts walking in the direction we'd been going. "That is so not true."

We debate back and forth in good-natured banter, no mention of the...closeness we'd just experienced in the alcove, and for that, I am grateful.

When we finally reach the room indicated on the map, we are both sneezing and wiping our eyes. "This place is haunted all right," I say after my fifth sneeze in a row. "Haunted by the dust of Christmas Past."

Julian laughs out loud again, and the sound of it warms me—it's deep and gravelly, filling the entire space around us.

"You're pretty funny, History Project Cam."

"I have my moments," I say, pulling the ring out of my pocket and inspecting the keys. "It looks like they're all labeled." I shuffle through them—dining room, kitchen, 3rd floor janitor's closet, master key for all suites, boiler room—but no records room or anything of the sort.

"Do you not see it?"

I shake my head and hand him the ring. "See if you have any luck, but there's no records room key on there that I can see."

As he looks through the labels, I inspect the doorhandle, and something my dad had said to me the other day passes through my head: broken locks, that sort of thing.

On a whim, I turn the handle, and while at first, it seems to be locked, all it takes is one hard shove and the door flies open.

Julian looks up. "Did you do that with your powers?"

I shoot him a warning glare. "No. The lock is broken, that's all."

He looks disappointed. "Next time, try to use your powers, okay?"

"Stop calling them 'my powers.'"

"Well, hopefully tonight is going to point us toward figuring out exactly what they are," he says as we creep into the room.

There's a long, tattered string hanging from a light bulb in the center of the room. I pull it and am surprised when it crackles to life.

When the light fills the space around us, we both gasp.

It's full to the brim with overflowing boxes, dust hanging in the air like smog.

"Where do we start?" I breathe, turning in circles, taking it all in.

"Just grab a box, I guess," he says, pulling one off the top of a pile and handing it to me before taking one for himself.

We sit on the ground across from each other, our legs crossed, knees barely touching. "Just tell me if you see anything," I say as I settle in.

He nods and we spend the next hour rustling through parchment paper with countless names of guests, bound leather books filled with notes about students and teachers, even a few advertisements from the time of Norman G. Baker.

"The amount of shit in this room is ridiculous," Julian says as we're both going through our fifth box. "No wonder the world went digital."

"Right, and I have seen nothing yet that connects to me or my dad."

"Me either, but—" He stops short, his gaze frozen to whatever he is looking at inside the box.

"What? What did you find?" I ask, shifting to my knees to see better.

He blinks twice and shakes his head, his mouth opening and closing like a fish.

"Julian! What is it?" I ask again, reaching toward him.

With shaking hands, he lifts what looks like a flat piece of cardboard, but as he shifts to sit next to me, I realize it is a matted black-and-white photograph.

And when he turns it toward me so we can look at it together, the breath leaves my throat and I feel like someone has punched me in the stomach.

There are two nearly identical girls in the photo, one with dark hair pulled into a tight bun and the other with loose curls, and even in the black-and-white photo, the warm brown of their skin is clear, and although there is no color, the eyes that stare back at me are hauntingly familiar. The year on the bottom of the photo reads 1918.

I cannot make my lips move, and all I can do is nod when Julian says, "Holy shit, Cam...that's you."