Two

The moment I step inside my dorm room, I wish I'd gone to the library instead to study before my janitorial shift. My roommate, Helena, is here. She looks up from her laptop and blinks at me for a few seconds before turning back to her work. Helena is a business major from Connecticut whose pale blond hair lives in a permanently sleek ponytail, whose skin has the poreless sheen of porcelain, whose words are clipped and precise. Her side of the room looks like an interior designer put it together. She decided after one conversation with me on move-in day that I wasn't worth her time and has barely said another word to me since. I hardly mind since she did little more than grill me about my career plans and call my accent "sweet." When she does bother to talk to me, she's polite in a waspish way, but I overheard her on the phone with her mom once saying she expected a "higher caliber" student body. It was pretty clear she meant me.

So I do my best to ignore her right back. I toss my things onto my bed and then collapse there too. I lie still, staring at the ceiling, the horrible reading running over and over again in my head. I listen to Helena's fingers tap-tap-tapping on the keys and feel hot tears forming at the corners of my eyes.

Is every year at Corbin going to be this hard, this grueling, this lonely? I think I made a mistake coming here. I think I overshot. I should have gone to community college or at least a state school. I don't know why I thought I could do this. Why I thought my life could be different, could be more. When I got waitlisted, my mom told me a college like this wasn't for people like us, that I should set my sights closer to home. If she were still talking to me, I might call her up and tell her she was right.

But I was so sure of myself back then, so convinced I was going to get everything I dreamed of. High school had been easy. The teachers didn't expect much from a bunch of kids whose parents mined potash, waited tables, drew unemployment. There was nothing for me there, so I took as many online dual-enrollment courses as I could and graduated a year early, a month before my seventeenth birthday. I just wanted to get out of there, be someone else. Start my life. My real life.

I shouldn't have been in such a rush. Because back home, I might have been the weird, nearly friendless smart girl who read at pep rallies and always knew the answers in class. But here—here I'm not even that.

Instead, I am... no one. Nothing. Unremarkable. Another face in the crowd. A girl who writes half-finished stories that no one will ever like or remember.

The loneliness washes over me so powerfully that I almost can't stand it. I pull out my phone and scroll through Instagram to distract myself. I pause on a photo of Robin, my best friend from home. She smiles at the camera with her face pressed against her boyfriend Charlie's. They're both in band uniforms. She looks happy.

I click on her profile and scroll through all her recent photos. It's mostly her and Charlie, or her and other kids from band. There aren't any recent ones of me, which was more or less my own doing. After I started taking online classes, Robin and I drifted. She got busy with band, and I was always at work, trying to save up for a car to get me to college.

I have to scroll a long way to get to a photo of her and me. We're at the river, both in bathing suits, and I'm holding her up out of the water like she's a giant baby. We're both laughing. Right after the photo was taken, she dunked me under the water. I smile at the memory and wipe a few tears off my face.

I comment "Miss you" on the photo, then click the button to send her a private message. But my thumbs hover over the screen. Why should I break into her happiness with my problems? I've barely talked to her since I got here—we barely spoke before I left. And it's not like she can help me anyway.

I sigh and turn my phone over onto my chest. I need to stop this pity fest and get my essay that's due tomorrow done before I head to work.

I consider staying and writing my paper in bed, but the silence coming from Helena's side of the room feels so heavy I'm afraid I might collapse under it, sink through the floor and into the earth.

I hardly make a sound as I slip out of the room to find another place to haunt.

Back outside, on the foggy sidewalks of nighttime Corbin, I walk slowly and tiredly to the library, my one refuge on campus. Like Denfeld Hall and the chapel, the library is a pre-1900s building, one of the few that Corbin hasn't had to tear down or renovate into modern oblivion. Tonight it looks deliciously Gothic, hulking in the shadows like a gargoyle.

I push open the nearest of the two sets of heavy oak doors and walk beneath the arching stone doorway, my angry, dejected mood already starting to give way to the romance of the place. It's as silent as a tomb tonight, and Foster, the senior philosophy major who works the circulation desk at night, doesn't even look up when I pass by, earbuds in and his glazed eyes locked on a copy of Derrida's Of Grammatology.

Just as I reach the bank of carrels at the back of the first floor, my phone rings, startling me. I thought I'd silenced it before the reading. I yank it out of my back pocket and quickly reject the call, not even bothering to see who it is. I flick on the silent setting. Immediately, another call starts coming in again, mutely lighting up the screen. My phone never rings, so I can't help but wonder if it might be something important. But there's no number listed. It reads "Unknown Caller." My mind starts to spin through scenarios. Maybe there's a problem with my financial aid. Maybe Mom was in an accident. Maybe—

I shake my head. It will probably be a scam about my nonexistent car warranty. Still, I feel compelled to answer. I swipe the green phone icon.

"Hello?" I whisper.

The woman on the other end says something unintelligible.

"I'm sorry?" I whisper, a little louder. "This is Tara Boone. Who is this?"

A student working on a laptop at the nearest carrel turns her head sharply and scowls at me. I make an apologetic face and turn away from her.

"Hello?" I try again.

Sounds come from the other end, barely discernable: the rasp of cicadas, nails scraping on wood. I glance at the screen as if it can explain what's happening. The call duration reads 3:01. Three minutes. Has this gone on for three minutes already, or is my crappy refurbished iPhone on the fritz? It must be.

"Hello?" I try one last time. More weird noises, and then the call disconnects. My skin has broken out in goose bumps, the hair at the nape of my neck prickling unpleasantly, as if charged with static electricity. I drop the phone into my backpack and shake out my hands, and the strange feeling passes.

I reach the stairs and start up the three narrow, claustrophobic flights to the reading room on the fourth floor. The ancient stairs creak, and the fluorescent lights overhead flicker and shiver, casting strange patterns on the walls. When I finally make it up to the top, I breathe a sigh of relief. The reading room is the best spot in the library, especially during daytime, when light streams in through the huge, soaring windows and sparkles over the green and gold vines painted on the ceiling. It's what I always imagined when I thought of college.

But tonight, after Meredith's eerie story and the creepy phone call, even this comforting space feels weirdly unsettling. The windows are dark, reflecting the room back at itself, everything vaguely warped and distorted. Shadows lurk in the corners, filling my imagination with unseen figures. The long rows of battered oak tables are mostly empty, only a few students typing tiredly on their laptops beneath the ghostly glow of green-shaded lamps, their faces shadowed and haggard.

Ignoring the shiver that runs up my spine, I settle into my favorite spot by the wall, nearest the long row of windows, and take a deep breath. I close my eyes, blocking out all the unnerving visuals my mind won't stop conjuring. Instead, I let the ever-present smells of the library fill my senses: must, dust, old paper, stale coffee. Familiar, comforting, speaking of long years of thought, research, art, creation. The tightness in my chest eases. This is why I'm here, I remind myself. This is what I imagined college would be. A place to dream, write, become.

With that thought, I try to banish the events of the night—the disastrous reading, Helena, and the weird, creepy phone call—and take out my laptop to get to work.

I'm two pages into an essay for Literature of the Ancient Near East about the goddess Inanna's descent to the underworld when someone lets out an ear-piercing scream that rips me from my work. I shoot to my feet.

The handful of other students in the reading room look around, their eyes wide. Everyone is frozen, unsure what to do. My first thought is that there is a shooter in the building, but then I realize I've heard no gunshots.

"Should we...?" a white guy in an argyle sweater, sitting a few tables away from me, asks the room, his arms crossed protectively over his chest.

But no one answers and no one moves.

The scream comes again—weaker this time, laced with horror. My body moves toward the sound, as if of its own accord. Across the long room and down the stairs, my heart pounding in rhythm with my boots as I thunder down the steps. I never have been able to resist answering someone's cry for help, I think wryly. I almost didn't make it out of my hometown because of it.

I vaguely sense people following behind me as I break onto the third floor and hear a woman's voice, muffled by the rows of books. She's weeping, moaning, whispering frantic words. I hurry toward her as quietly as I can down the long aisle, peeking around each row.

On the very last one, a white woman with messy, shoulder-length gray hair stands with her back to me, eyes on the shadowy corner.

"Are you—are you okay?" I ask. The woman cries out and spins toward me, her hand clutching the collar of her blouse, a shawl unraveling around her shoulders. She's my professor for Intro to Gothic Lit. Behind her oversize glasses, her face is pale and distorted by fright, so different from how she looks in class. She's usually smiling, lit up from within by her own enthusiasm for the subject. But now she looks shattered.

"Dr. Hendrix?" I ask. "Has anything happened?"

She turns away from me and gestures at the corner. "I found—I found her. Is she—is she...?" The professor lets out another moan and claps her hand over her mouth.

I take a step forward and peer around her. The fluorescent light overhead stutters and hums, barely casting its light onto the body that lies on the floor. Still, there's enough illumination for me to see everything I need to know. Masses of long red hair, a pale face, green eyes open and staring.

My breath catches in my throat and lodges there, leaving my lungs burning for air. But like someone in a trance, I stumble forward and kneel beside the girl. I feel for a pulse at her neck. Her skin is cold. Her heart isn't beating.

Meredith Brown is dead.