AllFreeNovel
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Except… something isn’t right. The surface beneath me, while not exactly comfortable, is much softer than the couch I fell asleep on in the common room.
Where I am currently, decidedly not.
“It’s not a mistake. We underestimated our capacity this year, and we had to make a few last-minute changes. Most freshmen are in triples.”
“And you didn’t think it would be helpful for me to know that before moving in?”
I throw back the sheets—my sheets. My bed. My dorm room. I fumble on the desk next to the bed for my glasses and shove them on crookedly. “What the hell is going on?”
They whirl to look at me, Lucie Lamont and Paige the RA.
“I’m so sorry,” Paige says. “I hope we didn’t wake you. I was just about to tell Lucie that we should talk out in the hall.”
Lucie, who’s standing there in the tracksuit she wore yesterday, a hand on her suitcase, her duffel on the other unmade bed. “Apparently,” she says, her icy glare sending a shiver through me that has nothing to do with her, “we’re roommates.”
I’m too shocked to formulate a response. When they head out into the hall and Lucie slams the door, the whiteboard shudders before dropping to the floor. Again.
What the actual…
I blink blink blink and assess the room, not believing my eyes or my brain. There are the pasta bowls from the day before yesterday, the ones I wasn’t supposed to take from the dining hall, illuminated by the smallest sliver of light the window lets in. The shelf stuffed with issues of Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone. Could I have sleepwalked back into my room? Except—I’m in my UW T-shirt, not the Britney tee and perfect-imperfect jeans I wore yesterday, and it doesn’t smell like ashes and crushed dreams. When I grab my phone and pull up Instagram, there’s nothing. No posts, no tags, no warrants for my arrest.
And the date, staring back at me like a breaking-news alert: September 21, 7:02 a.m.
Yesterday.
A thread of unease works its way up my spine as I swipe through my trifecta of news apps, looking for signs of… what? A species of aliens that landed in the middle of the night and erased Lucie’s memory but not mine? A widespread news hack or Android glitch? Whatever it is I’m hoping to see, I don’t find it.
Maybe I’m still sleeping—that’s the only thing that makes any amount of sense. The other possibilities are almost too frightening to consider. Maybe I drank more than I thought, or maybe—oh god—someone spiked my drink. Or I slipped and fell when I was running, hit my head, and now I’m suspended in some kind of not-life, not-death scenario. I feel like that’s a thing.
Okay. Let me approach this logically. Mentally retrace my steps. I remember coming back to the dorm and Lucie dead-bolting the door. I remember sinking onto that shabby couch. I remember the abject misery that weighed me down as I fell asleep.
The door opens, and there’s Lucie and her September 21 scowl.
“I don’t understand how this is happening,” I say, pinching my wrists, trying to feel around my head for bumps or bruises. This right now feels real, which makes me wonder if yesterday was the dream. But it was so vivid, too vivid, and I’ve never been able to recall a dream in that great detail.
Maybe I’m simply losing my mind.
“That makes two of us.” Lucie’s gripping her suitcase, her ponytail looking as indignant as it did yesterday.
Paige grins, but now I can see the clear signs of too awkward, must escape. “Well. I’ll leave you two to get acquainted! Or—reacquainted.”
When she leaves, I just stare. At the door. At the fallen whiteboard. At my pasta bowls.
“You’re not blinking,” Lucie says, taking tentative steps toward her bed. “And what are you doing to your head?”
I drop my hands. “Nothing. I’m fine.”
“I’m as upset as you are,” she says. “I was supposed to have a single in Lamphere Hall. They totally sprung this on me. I’m going to talk to the RD later and try to sort this out.”
“But you were in St. Croix,” I say quietly. “There was a tropical storm.”
One of her eyebrows arches. “Creeping on my social media?”
“No, I…” You told me yesterday? “Yeah. I like to keep tabs on all my favorite Island people.”
She sets her purse down on her desk, nearly knocking over one of the bowls. From two days ago. When she looks at me, demanding an explanation I already gave her, I stammer out, “All-you-can-eat pasta bar. I, uh, partied a little too hard with it.”
“It smells like an—”
