5

Bobby

Saturday: 12:28 AM

Once we were outside in the brisk March night, I pulled Gabe in close to me. “Don’t ever lie to me like that,” I murmured into her hair.

She pulled back to look up at me and smiled, a challenge on her lips. “Or you’ll what?”

Bright strands of hair stuck to her forehead like a golden web. My own thoughts were a tangle of confusion as I struggled to make sense of the weird night. “Or I’ll hug you to death.”

“Not a bad way to go,” she said. We looked at each other for a moment and then kissed as if we both breathed through the same set of lungs.

Holding hands, we walked in silence the few blocks east to our campus guest apartment. Columbia had put us up in a furnished studio, equipped with Internet, a fully equipped kitchen, and a cheap flatscreen. I was more than eager to get back there. It wasn’t every day we had a place of our own, and I wasn’t about to waste the opportunity.

“Do you think she’s a liar?” Gabe asked suddenly.

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

She stared at her feet as we continued walking, lost in her own thoughts. I loped beside her, tensely aware of our surroundings, my nerves jangling with the thought of that ring tucked inside her pocket. The empty streets stretched around us in a network of unknown threats. I wanted to time-warp us back to Morton, where the dangers were familiar ones. Where at least there was a chance I could protect her.

We’d just passed a small patch of park on the corner of 111th Street and Amsterdam when I froze in my tracks. An electric prickle buzzed up from under the sole of my boot straight into my chest. My eyes twitched, the pain behind my sockets kicking from dull to white hot.

“Ouch, Bobby!” Gabe said, wrenching her hand free of my tightened grip. “Why are we stopping?”

I closed my eyes and breathed around the pain. “I—I don’t know.” She led me to a bench beside the small park. Shadows and light slithered across my line of sight. My stomach rolled with dread. Not again. Not here. Not now.

My flickering gaze locked in on a small silver object glinting on the sidewalk where I had just been standing. “What is that?”

Gabe crouched, picked it up, and plopped Marisa’s silver coat button into my open hand.

Before I could pull free, my surroundings were blotted out by a ferocious fluorescent glare. I tried to blink it away, but I could see nothing beyond the grainy brightness. Then my eyes—because I was seeing with both eyes, not just the one—adjusted. Rows of churning coin-operated machines stood at attention in an otherwise deserted laundry room.

Behind the vision, I could hear Gabe’s voice, low and distant, talking gibberish to me. I couldn’t answer—I was already sucked into someone else’s reality.

I floated along, helpless—a disembodied spectator—in my arms a basket of neatly folded laundry.

Marisa wore the navy coat with the silver buttons. It was hot in the laundry room, but because she was headed out right after to meet Jeremy, she’d worn it to pick up her dry clothes. She balanced the basket on her knee, pulled her phone from her pocket, and glanced at it. Another text from Jeremy.

These were Marisa’s thoughts—her viewpoint—but I experienced them clearly as if they were piped through a mental intercom. I tried to break the connection, but my fist was clenched around the button. I was powerless to resist the onslaught.

◆

Marisa carries her basket of folded laundry to the hall and waits by the elevator. It’s late—not the best time to be doing laundry, she knows, but she’s been too busy with her studies and now that Jeremy is here she’s totally run out of underwear. He’s waited this long. He can wait some more.

Meanwhile, the damn elevator was taking forever.

At first she thinks the figure that rounds the corner is one of the dorm’s maintenance crew. That is, until she notices the black bandana covering his mouth and nose, the black beanie pulled over his hair, and the mirrored sunglasses covering his eyes. Not your standard maintenance man look.

It all happens so fast. When the elevator doors open, he pushes her in, pulls the emergency brake and throws her to the floor, then reaches up and covers the security camera with something.

It’s over in just a few moments. He zips up his pants, releases the brake, removes the covering from the camera, and gets off the elevator, which is still in the basement.

Marisa lets the elevator take her to the twelfth floor, carefully places her folded clothes in the drawer, and calls Jeremy.

◆

At last I felt the hard bench beneath me. The cold silver button in my hand. I could feel Gabe shaking me, hear her muffled speaking. But I couldn’t see past the scene that had frozen and stuck in place.

“Let go of it,” I heard Gabe say. “Bobby! Let go of the button!”

I couldn’t. My heart was racing, my throat tight around the scream I couldn’t release.

I felt her pull and bend at my fingers. I held on tighter until finally my fist released, and the burden lifted.

I sagged on the bench, my normal sight and the vision leaching into smoke and shadow.

“We’ve got to go back there,” I said.