Dead End

Lena -

At two in the morning, the blue light from my phone is the only thing awake in my dorm room.

My hands shake as I stare at those three words.

I saw that.

I’ve read them so many times that the letters have stopped looking like words and started looking like accusations, like evidence in a trial I don’t remember agreeing to stand for.

Saw what?

The kiss?

Julian’s hand against my jaw?

The way my brain apparently stopped functioning the second his mouth touched mine?

I don’t know.

That’s the problem. The not knowing has become its own kind of torture, a blank space my mind keeps trying to fill with worse and worse possibilities.

I don’t tell anyone.

That might be what scares me most. How easily I’ve slipped into this. How natural it feels to carry the fear by myself, like I’ve been training for isolation my whole life without realizing it.

I don’t tell Julian because what am I supposed to say? Someone’s watching us. I don’t know who. I don’t know how much they’ve seen. Saying it out loud would make it real in a way I’m not ready for, would drag it out of the shadowy corner of my mind and into the light where it might grow teeth.

I don’t tell Sophie either.

Sophie is my best friend. I’ve told her everything since freshman year. Every awful date. Every fight. Every cruel thing my mother has ever said to me. She knows the shape of my heartbreaks better than I do most days.

But this?

I keep it inside.

I swallowed the secret on purpose, and now it feels stuck there, lodged somewhere behind my ribs, refusing to go down or come back up.

I open the search bar anyway.

How to trace an anonymous text message.

Search.

Reverse lookup unknown number free.

Search.

Nothing useful. Just spam sites promising answers behind paywalls, and forums full of people as desperate and clueless as I am.

Of course.

My hands won’t stop shaking. Not because I’m cold. My room is stuffy, and the radiator beneath the window keeps clanking every few minutes, a metallic groan that used to be background noise and now sounds like something creeping closer.

I lie back against my pillow and stare at the ceiling, at the water stain shaped vaguely like a rabbit that Sophie once pointed out during a study session that turned into a three-hour conversation about nothing and everything.

Julian.

His name keeps running through my head, insistent, warm, terrifying.

Julian.

Julian.

Julian.

My phone buzzes against my chest.

I nearly drop it.

Tyler.

Hey. Thinking about you. Sleep well.

I stare at the message.

It’s so normal that it almost hurts. No panic. No warning. No anonymous threats. Just Tyler being Tyler, sweet, steady, completely unaware that his girlfriend is lying awake three feet away from a full nervous breakdown over a professor’s mouth and a phone number she can’t identify.

I wait for something to happen inside me.

Warmth, maybe.

Guilt.

Anything.

Instead, there’s this awful emptiness, a hollow so wide I could fall into it and keep falling.

Then the guilt comes.

But not because I kissed someone else.

Not really.

It’s because Tyler’s kindness doesn’t reach me anymore. It used to feel like a blanket. Now it feels like something I have to perform gratitude for.

I read thinking about you and all I can think is: I hope Julian is thinking about me too.

The thought hits hard enough that I close my eyes, as if that could undo it.

Then comes the one I don’t want.

What if I lose him because of this?

Not what if Tyler finds out.

Not what if my relationship falls apart.

What if I lose Julian?

That is the thought that keeps me awake, circling like something with claws.

And that’s when I realize how bad this has gotten.

Tyler barely weighs against what Julian has already taken up inside my head. I used to think love meant comfort. Now I’m starting to wonder if it just means whoever occupies the most space in your chest.

I type back.

Sleep well too. Love you.

Three words.

Words that used to mean something.

Now they look strange on my screen, foreign, like a language I used to speak fluently and have since forgotten.

I hit send and turn the phone facedown against my chest, as if I can somehow smother the conversation.

As if I can smother all of it.

I lie there listening to my heartbeat until it stops sounding like a heartbeat and starts sounding like his name.

Two days pass before I tell anyone.

Even then, I don’t tell the truth.

I give Sophie the safer version, the one I can actually get out without choking on it.

We’re walking back from the dining hall, her tray balanced against one hip while she complains about her chem lab partner. Apparently, according to Sophie, he thinks flirting counts as a valid pipetting technique. There was a time this story would have had me doubled over laughing. Now I can only manage the shadow of one.

I almost laugh.

Almost.

The cold bites through my sleeves, and I shove my hands into my jacket pockets, grateful for something physical to focus on besides the tightness in my chest.

I need to sound normal.

I need to ask a normal question about a normal problem.

“Hey, so...”

My voice catches slightly.

Sophie glances over, her expression open, curious, the way it always is when I’m about to confess something.

I keep going.

“This is going to sound weird, but has anyone ever texted you anything creepy? From a number you don’t know?”

She doesn’t answer right away.

It’s barely a pause.

Less than a second.

Most people wouldn’t notice it.

I do.

I’ve spent the last five days looking for cracks in everything, training myself to catch the smallest hesitations, the briefest flickers, because somewhere out there, someone is watching me, and I refuse to be caught off guard again.

Something flickers across her face.

Gone almost immediately.

Her fingers tighten around the edge of her tray.

Her knuckles turn white.

Then her eyes move toward the quad, where bare trees stand against the gray sky, their branches shaking in the wind like something trying to warn me.

When she looks back at me, her expression is normal again.

Easy.

Unbothered.

“Probably a creep,” she says with a shrug. “Block the number.”

That’s it.

Four words.

A shrug.

I should probably ask more.

Who?

Why?

Has it happened to you?

Instead, I let out a small laugh.

“Yeah. I guess creeps are everywhere.”

“Pretty much.”

She laughs too.

A little late.

I notice that.

I don’t know what it means, though some small, cautious part of me files it away anyway, the way you remember the exact moment a floorboard creaks under weight it shouldn’t.

I don’t ask why she didn’t want to know who texted me, or what the message said, or when it happened. Those are all questions a curious best friend would ask.

But I’m too relieved that I said something at all.

Nothing happened.

The sky didn’t fall.

We keep walking.

For another few minutes, it feels normal again, almost enough to convince me that I imagined the pause, the white knuckles, the late laugh.

I’m still looking for the danger somewhere out there.

A stranger with a phone.

A shadow behind a screen.

Someone with a reason to hate me.

I never look at the girl walking beside me.

She matches my pace perfectly.

Close enough that I can smell her shampoo, the same lavender scent she’s worn since sophomore year.

Close enough that I could reach out and touch her.

Her knuckles are still pale around the edge of her tray.