Chapter 1

"Hello? Earth to Sarah!"

"Huh?" Sarah jerked back into her own brain and found her friend Jessica waving a hand in front of her face impatiently. Her coffee was clutched in her unfeeling hands, but she took a sip of it as she came back to her senses before addressing her friend.

"Sorry, Jess. I just spaced out. Haven't been sleeping well lately."

"Don't I know it," her roommate muttered, taking a sip of her own sugary coffee.

The two sat opposite each other in a busy café near their college. It was a typical, trendy, college town, and the girls blended right in in their boots, yoga pants, oversized sweaters, and knit hats. Jessica's long blonde hair was pulled back in a messy bun, while Sarah's long, dark hair hung plainly down her shoulders.

Jessica was a musical theater major, and she had become fast friends with Sarah during their shared time within the drama department. Sarah was focusing on her acting and had been devoting most of her time to rehearsing her lines for the upcoming play.

The pair had met their freshman year. Now sophomores, they had agreed to live together since it was convenient for both of them, not to mention that Sarah was just about the only person on earth who could put up with Jess's incessant singing.

"I haven't started sleepwalking or anything, have I?"

"No…" Jess looked at Sarah from beneath raised eyebrows. "Is that something I should be concerned about?"

"No!" Sarah said hurriedly. "I just…sometimes I wake up and I feel like I've been running all night long."

"Toward something, or away from it?" Jess asked, laughing while she checked her phone that had just vibrated on the table.

"That's the question, isn't it?" Sarah rolled her eyes. When she was younger, she had always assumed that by the time she was 20, she would have had more answers than questions in her life, but that certainly wasn't the case.

"That's Alex," Jessica said, finishing her text and shoving her phone back in her purse. "We'd better head back. I've got to get ready."

"And I've got to rehearse," Sarah said, pushing her chair in at the table.

Jessica rolled her eyes as the pair exited the coffee shop and started to walk back to their apartment. "You know, your script isn't going anywhere…"

"Jess, I know what you're about to do-"

"Come on!" Jessica mockingly tugged on Sarah's free arm. "It's a Saturday night, and Alex is taking me to the best frat party on campus tonight!"

"And then you get there and it's just a bunch of drunk guys with a terrible taste in music trying to hit on even drunker girls. You come home tired and hungover and swear you're never doing it again, but then you'll promise next week that it's really going to be the best this time…I know how this works."

The pair crossed the street, Jessica huffing indignantly. As the breeze picked up, autumn leaves were blown of the trees and down upon the pair as they made their way back to their apartment.

"Okay, you're not wrong," Jessica finally admitted. "But that doesn't make it any less fun!"

"It does for me," Sarah muttered, thinking of all the times she had dragged a drunken Jess back home during their freshman year.

Jessica knew this was probably true and finally ran out of things to say as the pair approached their home.

Sarah dug out her key and unlocked their ground floor apartment in a sad-looking, grey brick building. She shouldered the door open with a solid shove since the bent wood of the doorframe always caught the door and held it firmly in place, especially as the weather changed.

The pair entered their dingy apartment. The fluorescent lights flickered when Sarah first turned them on, revealing a small but functional kitchen, a living room with no TV and barely enough room for a couch, a bathroom, and two small bedrooms on opposite sides of the living room. Jessica threw her oversized bag down on a rickety, plastic white table the pair was using as their dining room table.

Tossing her hat down beside her bag, Sarah undid her bun and shook out her hair while saying, "You could at least try to come…"

Sarah sighed, digging her script out from her bag on the floor in the corner of the room. She could try to come. It would be nice to finally meet a few people who weren't obsessed with practicing their vocals or reading their scripts all day, not to mention some boys who weren't just interested in each other. But her Saturdays were quickly becoming more for script-reading and for sleep than for parties. It just wasn't worth the effort of going out, no matter what her friend said.

"Have fun, Jess. Me and my script will be right here to console you when you come back."

Jessica sighed and rolled her eyes, moving past Sarah to go to her room. "That's a love story, right?" Jess asked, nodding toward the binding in Sarah's hands. "Maybe if you finally get laid it will let you get inside your character's head a little more-"

Sarah whacked her in the arm with her script. "Goodbye, Jess."

Jessica scurried off to her room to escape her friend's wrath. "Bye, weirdo."

Jessica grabbed her makeup bag and curling iron and made her way to the bathroom while Sarah plopped down on the off-color couch and flipped to where she had left off in her script. Soon, there was music and all sorts of fumbling coming from the bathroom as Jessica began to get ready. The sound of Jess's obnoxious singing to Demi Lovato soon became white noise to Sarah, though, and before she even realized what had happened, she was drifting off to sleep.

However, even if she had stayed awake, it was unlikely that she would have noticed the large barn own perched on the tree outside the living room window, peering in, watching her…