Episode 1: The Recurring Dream
The east dorm of Crescent Valley University looks like a fattened brick slug, squatting across the green expanse of the quad and refusing to blend in with the Gothic buildings flanking either side. Three hours ago, I was standing in my parents’ gravel driveway, trying to measure the exact weight of two overstuffed duffels and one ancient rolling suitcase in my hands. Now I’m wrestling all of it up three flights of stairs, each step echoing a little louder than seems strictly necessary, as if the building itself is cataloguing my arrival.
My dad gave up on accompanying me somewhere around the second flight, feigning a muscle twinge. Mom tried to hide her relief as she offered to park the car. Neither of them is built for abrupt transitions; I’m the only one in the family who craves them, so it’s fitting that I’m the first to be cut loose.
Room 316. The hallway is an olfactory horror: sweat, burnt microwave popcorn, the chemical sweetness of disinfectant. My new home. I balance the duffel on my hip, flick the keycard, and take in the scene with the wariness of an archaeologist at a newly unearthed tomb.
Crescent Valley isn’t fancy. The room is a cinderblock cell with a window overlooking the parking lot. Two beds, two desks, two dressers. Nothing else, unless you count the tangle of cable wires left behind by my predecessor and a crumpled orientation packet wedged under the radiator. I set my suitcase on the bed furthest from the door, my side, and start methodically arranging my things: hangers exactly two fingers apart in the narrow closet, books spined in descending height order on the shelf, chargers coiled and stowed. There’s a logic to making a foreign space tolerable, and it starts with mapping every inch of territory.
The mattress squeaks when I sit. Springs, not foam. My weight barely dents the surface. The walls are painted the color of boiled potatoes, and the only decoration is a single, crooked thumbtack embedded above the window. It’s not home, but it’s something.
An hour in, I’m debating whether to risk unpacking my last box of breakables before my roommate arrives. She’s late. I’m not sure whether to hope she’s a no-show or just someone else’s problem. When the door finally bursts open, it’s less an entrance and more a detonation. A girl, tall, athletic, and sun-flushed, propels herself through the doorway, two plastic storage bins balanced in her arms, and a campus-branded duffel swinging from her shoulder. Her eyes scan the room, land on me, and she grins like we’re already old friends.
“Hey! You must be Lainy.” Her voice has the faint rasp of someone who laughs a lot. “Chloe. Sorry, my dad can’t take directions, and Google Maps is a liar.” She deposits the bins, whips her braid over her shoulder, and extends a hand.
I hesitate, then shake. Her grip is quick and warm, and I can’t tell if she’s trying to establish dominance or just genuinely enthusiastic. Probably both. She releases, immediately begins popping open her bins, narrating as she goes. “Okay, so I brought a mini fridge, but I heard the dorm ones suck? And I have, like, three sets of sheets, so we can totally mix and match if you want. I’m not weird about sharing. You’re from...” She squints at the sticky note on her phone. “Edgewater?”
I nod. “Tiny town. It’s ninety percent antique stores and gossip. How about you?”
“Portland. The Oregon one, not Maine.” She’s already kneeling by her assigned dresser, stacking athletic shorts in rainbow order. “So, uh, are you nervous? I’m nervous. I mean, not about the classes, but the social stuff. Everyone acts like making friends is automatic. My mom says it’ll be just like summer camp but with worse food and better Wi-Fi.”
Chloe talks with her hands, which means she periodically flings a sock across the room for emphasis. I retrieve one from my side and toss it back.
“Did you go to a lot of camps?” I ask, and realize too late it sounds like an interrogation.
She shrugs. “My parents work a ton. Camp was their guilt offering, I guess. Sometimes I liked it. Sometimes I just wanted to go home.” She pauses, catching the question behind my question. “What about you?”
“I spent summers helping at my mom’s clinic.” I pause, not sure how much to explain. “Mostly running the front desk and fetching coffee.”
Chloe’s mouth quirks. “That sounds, um… fulfilling?”
“Mostly it was good material for a future memoir,” I say. “People have no filter when they think you’re invisible.”
She laughs, and the sound fills up the cinderblock room in a way nothing else could. Already, the place feels less temporary.
Once she’s satisfied with her setup, Chloe perches on her desk chair, spins it once, and locks eyes with me. “So, do you have any siblings? Pets? Star-crossed lovers you left behind?”
“Only child,” I say. “And I had a goldfish, once, but it committed a very dramatic suicide in fifth grade. As for lovers...” I make a noise halfway between a snort and a sigh. “Not really my thing. At least, not so far.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Not your thing, or haven’t found the right audition?”
I like her. Even when the questions sting a little, she asks them openly, never in a way that feels like a trap. “Maybe the casting pool was just too shallow in Edgewater.”
Chloe grins. “It’s much deeper here. I promise.”
We sink into a rhythm, alternating between nervous chatter and companionable silence, the way strangers sometimes do when they both want to get things right. Outside, a group of upperclassmen hoot and holler, carrying a battered couch toward the fire pit by the quad. The light through our window shifts from lemon to orange, then fades entirely. I don’t realize how tired I am until I open my last box and realize I’ve already forgotten what I packed.
Chloe finishes pinning up a string of fairy lights and surveys our domain. “All right,” she says. “Should we hit the dining hall, or do you want to order pizza and pretend we have a kitchen?”
I don’t really want to leave the room, but I also don’t want to seem like a hermit. “Dining hall, I guess. Might as well rip off the Band-Aid.”
She nods, grabs a hoodie from her closet, and holds out a spare to me. “It gets cold when the sun drops. Like, instant icebox. The locals warned me.”
Her hoodie smells like vanilla and something I can’t name. I slip it on, and for a moment, it’s like wearing someone else’s skin, a borrowed confidence. My hand brushes the silver bracelet on my left wrist. A thin, braided chain my grandmother insisted I wear for “luck”. The metal feels unusually cold against my skin. I tuck it under the sleeve and follow Chloe down the hall.
The campus transforms at dusk. The stately quad, so orderly and safe in the daylight, becomes a strange patchwork of shadow and amber light. The branches of the old oak trees reach toward each other like arthritic fingers. A chill slips between my shoulder blades, but I keep walking. Chloe matches my pace, and her presence is enough to hold the world at bay.
In the dining hall, the food is exactly as bad as promised, but the people-watching more than makes up for it. I catalog every detail: the boy with the pink buzzcut and three cellphones, the girl eating ramen with surgical precision, the table of seniors who already look bored of being in charge. Chloe narrates a running commentary about everyone she recognizes from orientation, which is apparently everyone. By the end of the meal, I’ve already constructed a social web in my head, mapping the intersecting circles I’ll have to navigate for the next four years.
When we return to our room, my bed is waiting, rumpled sheets, a pillow that smells faintly of the plastic wrap it came in, and a slant of moonlight from the window. I change into pajamas, set my phone to vibrate, and sink into the mattress. The fairy lights make the walls look almost warm.
Chloe climbs into her own bed, immediately starting a podcast at low volume. “Hope you don’t mind,” she says. “It helps me sleep.”
“Go for it,” I say, though I’m already drifting. My mind is a jumble of newness, names, faces, the echo of distant laughter. I close my eyes, and almost instantly, I’m gone.
***
I’m walking, but the ground is wrong. Too soft, too loud. My shoes make no sound, but every step is a sensation: the give of pine needles, the scratch of brambles against bare skin, the faint, sour tang of moss crushed underfoot. I don’t remember leaving the dorm, but I know these woods in the way you know places from dreams, already mapped, already dangerous.
The trees are old, older than memory. Their trunks rise in columns, wide enough that three people couldn’t wrap arms around one. The moonlight is harsh and silver, carving out impossible shadows. I’m moving fast, heart hammering, not sure if I’m chasing or being chased.
Somewhere ahead, something waits. The certainty of it is a wire pulled taut in my chest. I try to turn back, but the path behind me has vanished, the air thick with mist. My breath plumes white. I hear, no, feel, a rhythm under the silence. A low, animal sound. The woods are watching me.
I try to call out, but my voice evaporates before it leaves my throat. The only sound is my own pulse, a drumbeat in my ears. My feet carry me faster, branches lashing my arms, the cold biting deep. I pass a clearing, and for a split second, I see a shadow of a man, half-hidden behind a deadfall. His eyes catch the moonlight, gray and wild, gone before I can focus.
The dream logic says: I know him. But there’s no name, no face, just the unmistakable pressure of attention.
I run. Faster now, crashing through the underbrush, until the woods open up and I’m standing at the edge of a black lake. The surface is perfectly still, reflecting the sky in flawless negative. Something moves beneath, a ripple distorting the stars. I want to scream, but the sound stays locked in my chest.
A large callused hand closes around my wrist. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s unbreakable. I feel the heat of his palm against the cool silver of my bracelet, a strange friction that seems to pull the dream into focus. The shadow-man steps into the light, and I see:
Nothing. The dream skips, rewinds, and I’m alone on the shore again, my breath ragged. Above me, the moon is too close, and bright. I reach up to block the glare, but my fingers pass through the light as if it isn’t there at all.
***
I wake to my own heartbeat, slamming the inside of my ribcage like it wants out. I’m tangled in sheets, mouth dry, arms aching as if I’d actually run for miles. The air in the room is thick with the scent of pine and something raw, almost animal. I blink, trying to reorient, concrete walls, fairy lights, Chloe’s soft breathing from across the room. My palms sting, and I realize I’m clutching the edge of my pillow so hard my knuckles have gone white.
I exhale, forcing myself to catalog the present: No woods, no moon, just the faint hiss of the building’s ancient radiator and the soft blue of dawn edging the window. It’s over.
But I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve brought something back with me. That, somewhere in the dense black woods beyond campus, something remembers my name.
