After another night of insomnia, I stare at my stack of textbooks. I’m certain I look like a wreck. Rat’s nest for hair, ice cream stains on my T-shirt. I’m surrounded by coffee, cookies and a box of my favorite chocolate-crunch cereal, attempting to start the outline for the big paper that counts as half of my grade. I don’t have one single word written, and I never procrastinate. College is hard. And different. At least this one is.
After half an hour, I have to admit I just can’t concentrate. I’ll work on my journalism project instead. It’s turning into more of a detailed video account of the manhunt for my lost roommate. Hey, that’s a strange phenomenon at Silas University, right? Every time I try to talk about anything, it turns into my quest to locate Betty.
Carmilla is nowhere to be found, which is fine by me. The less I have to interact with her, the better. I wish she was the one who was lost.
I turn the camera on and begin my vlog entry, keeping my voice low just in case. “Betty is still missing and she has been replaced with the roommate from hell. Look at this footage.” I click a link to what the camera caught while I was in class this week. “She steals my chocolate, she wears Betty’s clothes, she’s never up before four o’clock and there’s a nonstop stream of girls in our room. Check this out — this is a girl from my anthropology class with Carmilla on my bed.”
Danny should be there with me.
“Carmilla is the worst.”
I dunk a Pop-Tart in my coffee. “Well, guess what,” I continue. “I told the girl of the week that Carmilla has a longtime girlfriend. She went crazy. Bam, revenge is mine. Now, I’m gonna use her soy milk on my cereal.” Maybe no one is following my video blog, but I sure feel better.
I reach into the fridge for her box of nondairy blech. MINE is scrawled in black Sharpie across the front, like she has to protect it. She has one thing in the fridge and lays claim to it while eating all of my food as she pleases.
I pop open the box and pour the soy milk all over my cereal. And I’m not gonna lie — I feel smug and victorious until I look down. The shrieking sound I’m sure the entire campus just heard came from the depths of my being.
This isn’t soy milk at all.
It’s blood. Or something that looks suspiciously like it.
The floor monitor, Perry, rushes into my room trailed by her sidekick, LaFontaine. I mean, these two are never apart. Perry is the dorm’s resident worrier, like a mom away from home. She’s by the books; rules are her jam. Perry is preppy, straitlaced and so uptight, her rules have rules. LaFontaine is all punked out in an X-Files T-shirt and jeans, their short, spiky hair gelled to perfection. Like my high school friend Sam, they’re genderqueer.
I am officially freaking out. “Do you see this? It’s definitely blood. Isn’t it? How could there be blood? This is the most disgusting thing ever. It’s blood!” I yell, waving my bowl of befouled cereal at them. Carmilla has ruined a perfectly good bowl of chocolate goodness.
LaFontaine and Perry stand close together, exchanging glances. Inspecting the cereal, LaFontaine says, “Well …” Like Carmilla should be innocent until proven guilty or something.
“Come on, you guys, it’s blood. For sure. And, it’s the only thing that she keeps in the refrigerator. Not a crumb of anything else. She drinks it all the time. Something isn’t right.”
Suddenly I see a pattern here adding up to who knows what. Carmilla never studies, she’s out all night and girls throw themselves at her. She tends to appear out of nowhere. It’s spooky.
And, well, the blood.
Perry assesses the situation. “I admit that I find it a bit odd.”
LaFontaine nods. “Odd? That’s where you’re going with this? No one takes type O in breakfast cereal. She’s off. Sounds like there’s something terribly wrong with this one.”
“Thank you.” I almost kiss LaFontaine, I’m so happy to have someone on my side.
Perry dismisses her friend’s comment with a tone in her voice that grates on my last nerve. “You are not here in an official capacity, Susan.”
“Do not call me Susan,” LaFontaine barks. I have to admit that the name LaFontaine fits. I’ve never known a Susan who could pull off the funky badass that LaFontaine does. I mean, my grandmother’s name is Susan. Case closed.
“That has been your name since I’ve known you, you know, for the last sixteen years,” Perry snaps.
“Well, now my name is LaFontaine.” They are not giving an inch.
Perry turns to me. “Maybe you should let Carmilla explain. It might be some sort of a protein supplement.”
“Right. For extreme hemoglobin deficiency?” quips LaFontaine.
I scoff loudly.
“Not helping.” Now Perry’s getting pissed.
LaFontaine rolls their eyes. “Sorry, Perry, I know you want to believe the weird here is all Dr. Seuss, but in my world the Alchemy Club tests subjects in the cafeteria and participates in all sorts of bizarre things one hundred percent of the time. Silas is all about the weird, like it or not. As this floor’s unofficial truth speaker, I’m gonna tell Laura here to wise up if she wants to survive.”
Gulp. “Survive? Carmilla wants me dead?”
“Anything’s possible.” LaFontaine is not making me feel any safer.
Still acting like everything is roses and unicorns, Perry argues, “A lot can be solved with good communication —”
LaFontaine cuts her off and turns to me and says, “Or a lot of things can be solved with hair and blood samples.” Then whips out a syringe. My startled gasp stops any further action.
“I’m a bio major,” LaFontaine explains. “It’s totally cool. It’s what we do.”
I can’t take it anymore. This place is nuts. The door to my room blows open, but no one’s there. It could be just a draft in the hallway, but nothing here is what it seems.
Nothing.
I’m not going to let the bloody cereal distract me from my bigger problem. Why is Carmilla here in the first place? Because Betty is still missing, and it’s been days.
“If I’m going to get anywhere, I think I should go to the dean,” I tell Perry and LaFontaine. “Surely, she’ll get right on this. One of her students has vanished into thin air. It’s not normal.”
Perry and LaFontaine face each other and shake their heads knowingly. “Yeah, no. That’s not such a good idea,” they say in unison. This, at least, they agree on.
I’m not understanding. “What good is a dean of students who doesn’t help students? Isn’t that her job?”
“Well, she’s not really known as the warm and fuzzy type. She likes things her way,” LaFontaine explains.
Perry softens her tone. “The only thing she would do is assign you another roommate. Carmilla is better than what could be.”
“I don’t know about that,” I argue. “She’s awful. She’s up all night, drinks blood and is a total slob. Did I mention she drinks blood? There’s not one redeeming quality about her. She is no Betty.”
“You might get a snorer or hater,” LaFontaine insists. “Don’t call attention to yourself with the dean. Trust me. Wait it out. I’m sure Betty will come back.”
“All the other girls that disappeared did,” Perry adds.
All the other girls?
“All what other girls?” I ask, my voice cracking. This is a new level of weird and slightly terrifying, if I’m being honest.
“It’s not like they stayed gone. They returned to campus,” Perry starts to explain.
Now my head is spinning. “Let me get this straight. More than one girl disappeared from campus and no one said anything? No one did anything?” Or thought to mention it till now?
Perry stammers and backpedals. “It wasn’t really that unusual. Girls having fun. Maybe they got a little carried away. You know.”
“No, I really don’t.” A tiny part of me wonders if my dad was right to be worried about me coming here.
“How do you not know this?” LaFontaine asks. “Two girls from our floor disappeared, then showed up a few days later — one in her dorm room, the other in psych lab — with zero memory of anything in between. Like, zilch.”
“Why the hell would I just happen to know this?”
LaFontaine gives me the once-over. “Everyone does.”
“It was the beginning of frosh week,” says Perry. “Week one. There were nonstop parties. You know that. Burning the candle at both ends, twenty-four seven. I’m sure they just had too much to drink.”
“Because that causes random disappearances?” LaFontaine says.
I stand up, pleading. “You know these girls? I need to talk to them. Now. They might be able to help us find Betty.” The answers could be right in front of us! Betty could be back tomorrow!
LaFontaine puts a hand up to stop me. “You need to chill. They’re traumatized enough already and they don’t need you stirring up those feelings. You’re clearly on a mission.”
I protest, “But, I need —”
“Dial it down. You can be a little intense.”
Then Carmilla arrives, chuckling like she’s in on some joke. “Intense is about right,” she says. Her tone is like fingernails on a blackboard.
“You must be the new roommate. Welcome to our floor,” Perry greets the roomie from hell.
LaFontaine nods kindly in her direction. Carmilla keeps walking toward the fridge. When she bends in, the girls disappear.
I glance in Carmilla’s direction. “You won’t find your soy, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
She sees the box on my desk. She knows I know. “Lighten up. It was a prank.”
“Blood in a milk carton isn’t a prank. It’s sick and twisted,” I tell her.
She bursts out in a belly laugh. “You have no sense of humor. Please. It was food coloring and corn syrup.” She totally dismisses me. “Just testing you, Hollis. You failed.”
“You’re a freak.”
“Aw, you’re angry?” Her condescending tone causes a visceral reaction. I feel my face scrunch and tense up. Even my eyes shut.
Carmilla torments me. “The bunched-up face you’ve got going on is hilarious, buttercup.”
I hiss, “How hilarious do you think it will be when I get the dean of students involved to kick you out of here?”
That stops her. “Wait a second, you’re going to bitch to the dean? I’d pay top dollar for that show. Be my guest.” The invisible wall between us is steel. The silence deafening. I welcome the interruption of two girls who show up in our room. Our door is never closed.
The energetic blonde introduces herself. “I’m Sarah Jane and this is Natalie. Perry sent us down to talk to you. She thought you might have some questions we could help with.” These have to be the girls who disappeared. Both of them seem ready to talk.
Carmilla just snorts.
“Thanks for coming down,” I tell the girls. “I’m Laura. Ignore my sociopath roommate. So … you kinda disappeared at the beginning of the year?”
“Quite the killer interrogation technique you’ve got going on,” Carmilla taunts me.
I will myself to ignore her as Sarah Jane speaks up, explaining. “One minute I was at the swim team’s Under the Sea party, downing Fizzy Dagons, the next I was in my dorm room and people were yelling at me. They said I was missing for two days. I don’t remember anything. It’s like everything is blank.”
“How is that possible?” I ask. Sarah Jane simply shrugs.
I turn to Natalie, who’s a little skittish and a lot mousy. “What about you, Natalie?”
She twists toward me. “I was at a wine-and-cheese party enjoying a nice rosé, then a day and a half later I was standing in a lecture hall listening to my professor drone on and on about the American Revolution. Like thirty-six hours flew by with nothing in between.”
I’m incredulous. You don’t just lose days. “You can’t remember anything? Nothing out of the ordinary?”
Both girls cock their heads, deep in thought. Natalie says, “Nada about the lost days, but you know, there’s a ton of Fireball in the Dagons.”
Carmilla can’t resist commenting, “Now that’s the scoop of the century.”
“Fuck off,” I snap before turning back to Natalie. I catch Carmilla grinning. I can’t believe I let her get to me. Crap.
Natalie thinks for a moment. “You know, there is one thing. I had the same recurring dream a few days before I disappeared. It was really visual.”
I encourage her. “Okay, that’s something …”
“I was awake in the dark and there was a big black cat prowling under my bed.” She takes a step back. Her voice gets increasingly quavery. “Sometimes a shadowy figure in a white dress would appear. Standing over me. I don’t remember seeing a face. My throat started to close and I couldn’t breathe. It seemed so real.”
Carmilla starts whistling the theme to The X-Files. Natalie is ruffled now. Her eyeballs start to twitch and so does she. Just when we were getting somewhere, Carmilla had to break the spell.
“What is wrong with you?” I say.
Carmilla shrugs. “I’m out of soy milk — that makes me testy.”
Natalie starts fidgeting with her hair and freaks out. “I have to go. Now. I hope that thing doesn’t touch your face,” she says nervously. She races out the door and down the hall, making a humming sound.
Sarah Jane moves toward the door, too. “Sorry. Nat is kinda PTSD about the dreams. I’m gonna need to go talk her down. That happens a lot since the whole vanishing thing. Humming is supposed to help. It doesn’t. See you later.”
The whole encounter leaves me shell-shocked. So much to absorb. The dreams are really nightmares that must mean something. But what? Betty didn’t mention any dreams.
Carmilla just skulks around the room like a lion stalking prey. She really hangs on to her anger. Munching on some of my cereal right from the box, she says, “Seriously, if someone’s going around kidnapping girls, I can see why they threw those two back.”
“Oh my God, you are the devil. If you don’t stop acting like this, I’m going to punch you in the throat.”
Carmilla sticks out her lip, “Oh, cupcake. So violent.”
“That was a real person who had something traumatic happen to her. As a freshman, I see it as pretty much my worst nightmare. I can relate. If I disappeared, would anyone care that I was gone? Or even notice?” I’d really like to slap her but my better judgment takes over. I’m not an aggressive person. Yet.
Carmilla keeps shoveling cereal from the box into her mouth.
“Are you so damaged that you’re incapable of caring about anything or anyone?” I fire off.
She gets inches away from my face, so close that I feel her warm breath as she spews bits of cereal at me. “Do you really think you’re doing anything to help that girl? Or Betty? Come on, Hollis, be honest here. Do you know anything that you didn’t know before she vanished?”
I don’t have a comeback for that. She is 100 percent correct.
“That’s what I thought.” She circles me like she’s about to devour me. “You’re a child. You understand nothing. Not about life, not about this place. Nothing. And certainly not about what it takes to survive in a world like Silas.” Carmilla grabs my shoulder, sending an electric shock through me. “Word of advice. The sooner you stop playing Lois Lane, the better off you’ll be. Trust me.” She throws herself on the bed, leaving me speechless. For just a moment.
I take a deep breath. “No. No, I’m not going to stop. The eighteen-year-old who’s never been outside the city limits before she got here, who thought that university was gonna be some big adventure full of books to read and parties to dance at, I never thought anything bad could happen. Turns out this new world isn’t quite what I thought it was. My university is creepy. Idiots getting hammered. Girls going missing and no one cares. They reappear and no one questions what the hell happened. Maybe that’s the way it is but I don’t have to accept it. I deserve better. Betty deserves better. Even you deserve better.”
She does the slow clap. “Bravo.”
In that moment, I know what I need to do. I turn back to my computer and get to work.
Carmilla moves up onto her elbow. From the bed, she asks, “What are you doing?”
“I’m officially changing the core of my journalism project. I’m shifting the focus of my vlog to solicit the students of Silas to help me find Betty. Someone had to have seen something. If the student body pitches in, we can do this together.” I almost believe this. I almost believe I can solve this mystery all on my own.
Carmilla purses her lips and blows out. “That’s gonna piss the dean off.”
“Then she can come talk to me.”
Delight spreads across Carmilla’s face like a sunrise. “Oh, my money is on that happening. Sooner rather than later. You’re asking for trouble.”
“I’m asking for answers,” I correct her.
“You’re crazy.”
I stroke a few keys. Voilà. “Hello, students of Silas University, my roommate vanished,” I say, firm but calm. “I need your help to find her. She isn’t the first to disappear either. No one else will help me, not even the dean of students. But I have faith in the human spirit. If you’ve seen anything out of the ordinary at a party, message me or leave a comment.”
I rewatch it. A little rough but it gets the point across. I post it, then tweet out the link. I’m in business. I’m pretty pleased with myself, feeling borderline cocky. To celebrate, I open up a new bag of chocolate cookies. I’m just about to take a bite when a shrieking alarm sounds.
“What is that?” I panic. A fire drill? A lockdown?
Carmilla is positively giddy, clapping her hands. “Here we go. You’ve done it now.”
Perry races in, full-on execution mode, shouting commands. “Let’s go! Town hall meeting! Everybody move now! Remember your training! Five-minute drill! East stairs! Proceed in an orderly fashion!” She gestures for us to go to the right, down the hall. She’s signaling like a traffic cop, arms waving. I jump up to follow the others. As I do, I turn around to see Carmilla snatch a cookie. My cookie.
Then mug for the camera as she takes a bite.