Chapter 5

I felt all of the blood drain from my face as I stared at the screen. Someone had been in my room. Something must have gone wrong in my brain, because I soon found myself on the floor.

I decided I must be dead because there was an angel grabbing me, shaking me. Must be trying to teach me to fly. It felt wrong though, that the angel was crying, I must be doing so bad that I’ve made her job hard, I didn’t want to be a bad student.

“I’m sorry, Angel” I manage to say despite the swirling pool of unconscious grasping at my tongue. I tried to stand but the swirling only got worse. I fell into the angel's pretty auburn hair and sighed at the smell of apples.

She pulled me through the doorway with her shirt over her nose and kicked the door shut behind us.

The fog in my brain quickly began to clear. I shook my head trying to clean the rest out of it and looked into Rita’s panicked eyes.

“Was that written in blood?” Rita asked. I only blinked at her in response.

There had been no angel dragging me to safety but there had definitely been someone in my room, and there was definitely someone who had tried to hurt me.

Rita called campus police and they called the fire department. They cleaned everyone out of the building and checked for gas leaks but found nothing. They insisted that I probably just fainted, “college exhaustion” one of the guys says. Rita said that my room smelled like chemicals when she dragged me out, but when we returned, the room had been left open, and so had the window.

I felt like I needed to clean, like too many people had been in my precious space and asked Rita to leave me to it. She went to the common room to watch Drag Race but promised to check I was still breathing during commercial breaks.

I put on my rubber gloves for cleaning the bathroom and started bleaching anything I could, the rose was thrown away, the computer bleached and cleaned. I never found the source of the chemical smell but I felt like it had been taken away on purpose. Someone was trying to make me look crazy. I wasn’t going to stand for it.

Once I had finished with my room. I went to get Rita. I needed my best friend to help me figure out who could be doing this, but when I went to the common room to find her, she was underneath Sarah. The two of them were making out on the common room couch, with Drag Race on in the background, and none of the usual crew watching it.

My phone vibrated in my pocket and I was immediately glad for an excuse to look away from the happy couple and focus on something else. It was from Darren.

“Hey I’m free right now if you’re ready to tell me about that dream ;)”

I had told him that I would see him tonight. I wondered if I should cancel, if he might actually be dangerous. I decide that I can be more dangerous. I slip my stun gun into my shoulder strap as I message him asking to meet me for a run at the base of my building at 20. I put on my running shoes and stretch, knowing that if he wants to fight me, he has no idea what I’m capable of.