Sarah Jacobson was grinning as widely as anyone had ever grinned. Summer Vargas sighed and rolled her head, while Jessica Beauregard sat to the side and stared at the ground.
“Not to say I didn’t have any faith in you, but I had absolutely no faith in you. Now, my reward?”
Summer faked a smile and handed Sarah three hundred dollars in twenties. Sarah flipped through them, inspecting each as if she expected them up up and disappear.
“Pleasure doin’ business with you, Vargas. I trust the money wasn’t hard to come up with?”
“They didn’t even ask why I needed it. I think my dad was offended that I didn’t just e-mail him. It was totally a tender family moment.” This diffused the tension a bit, and Jessica was finally able to relax and let her shoulders droop as the other two girls laughed.
“Alright, I gotta go show off my new stack of hard-earned bills, I’ll come by later and we’ll tie one on. Keep it classy, ladies!”
Once Sarah was gone, silence descended upon the dorm room. Summer sauntered over to her bed and fell onto it, sighing into her pillow.
“I’m sorry, Summer,” Jessica said from across the room. “I know you wanted that album.”
“Honestly, it wasn’t really about the album. I would’ve liked to have it, sure, but part of me was hoping that maybe the dreams would have stopped now that I was older…I don’t know. How do you even begin to work around something like that?”
“Tell me about it,” Jessica muttered, falling back on her bed. “It’s like…my entire worldview has been turned upside down. I never would have believed you if I hadn’t seen your eyes.”
“Well, at the very least it shows me I’m not entirely insane. Any time I ever tried to act on something I saw, people ended up thinking I was doing it and just looking for attention or something. At least now I now my eyes go all crazy. It’s kind of reassuring, in a way.” She let loose a small chuckle, and stretched out on her bed.
—
It wasn’t often that Marcus Ellenbee Found himself on the West Campus. He was about as terrible at working with computers (and technology in general) as anyone his age could afford to be, so aside from a single biology course two days a week he had little reason to walk the impeccably straight walkways outside the main building.
In fact, the only reason he was there at all was to check two books out of the library, two books that the East Campus library did in fact stock but had checked out already. Unfortunately, they were absolutely necessary to complete a project he’d been assigned, which resulted in the long walk across the campus as night descended.
Being used to the warm, rustic buildings he spent most of his time in made the West Campus seem stark and sterile. The minimalist lamps were exceptional at doing their job of lighting his way, but they seemed to him to lack any real character. He was thinking about the comfort of stone walls and soft lights as he idly looked to the side and saw a boy standing on top of the roof of one of the buildings, silhouetted by the moonlight.
Marcus paused, tilting his head and squinting as if he thought his eyes had ceased to work correctly for a moment. There was, however, someone on the roof. He stood close to the edge, facing the expanse of the West Campus. A large pair of headphones encircled his head, his eyes closed. No idea how to react, Marcus simply watched, attempting to make sense of the bizarre scene.
As he looked on, the boy opened his eyes and lifted his head slowly, until he was looking straight up into the sky. Marcus’ heart seized, and it felt as if chains had wrapped about his entire body. He could not move, could barely think; all he could do was watch. The boy raised his hands slowly, painstakingly, and for a second he froze in place. His entire body shuddered, and his head snapped back down, a look of terror etched onto his face. He reached up to grab the headphones on either ear, and attempted to wrench them away. Something like a spark passed between his skin and the earpieces and he let go, letting out a weak cry of pain. His body tensed up suddenly, an invisible jolt going through it, before it gradually relaxed again.
And then Ian Westport smiled, and fell forward.