Claudia awoke to the chatter of voices.
She turned over slowly and curled up, knees brought toward her chest. Her eyes were pressed shut, prolonging her confrontation with whatever reality might be forthcoming.
She ran her hands across a comforter that was draped over her, at first hesitantly, then with a sudden, escalating excitement. The stitching. Familiar fabric. The comforter from her dorm room. With a jump, she sprang up in bed, beaming relief, before her heart bolted up into her throat and she shrank back into the covers.
The door of her room was propped open, and a few of her floor-mates were chatting directly outside, entirely oblivious to her.
"Shut the door!" she yelped. The students shot her first confused, then irritated glances, before leisurely strolling away in a huddle down the hall. Claudia scampered to the edge of her bed, stretched out her leg, wedged her foot between the door and the wall and kicked it loose.
It hit something on the way shut.
A dull noise, in fact, the precise noise of a door hitting a forehead, followed by a low curse and shuffled footsteps, brought Claudia off her bed and to its source. She heaved the door back open with a force that sent it banging back against the interior wall, the noise echoing down the hall.
"You!"
Zen boy, with hemp cloth jacket, ear-flapped hat, and a growing red spot on his forehead, stood in bewildered pain in front of the now hysterical Claudia.
"I didn't mean for the organization to bring anything up," he scrambled for words, "I mentioned it to someone, I said that my nonconformity practice didn't go well, and I thought they would leave it at that. I swear, I didn't want them to tell your RA, I just wanted to be done with it. I'm leaving the group, it was crazy to begin with-"
"Has anyone ever called you Stevey?" Claudia blurted out, cutting through his babble.
The boy opened his mouth to continue rattling on, but he stopped, as a kind of confusion spread across his features. "Excuse me?"
Claudia leaned in, a kind of excitement bubbling in her stomach. Her voice had dulled to a whisper, cracking as she spoke.
"Jinksy?"
The boy's jaw hung open, and he seemed to contemplate replying, some internal battle of priorities taking place in the space behind his eyes. Claudia looked on with intense curiosity and the tiniest sense of dread, should she be wrong, yet more so if she should be right. The former would end in embarrassment and a curt "Sorry, I've been mistaken," though the other would lend credulity to a wholly inexplicable turn of events - something she was not sure she wished to confront at this hour of the morning.
Or, perhaps she would never know.
The boy snapped his mouth shut. He eased back onto one foot, body pivoting away from the doorway. He possessed an alternative set of choices than hers; fight, or flight.
"Wait-"
Claudia fell forward in a lunge, scrabbling at the air, trying to lock her fingers around a baggy jacket sleeve. But the boy sprang back, pulling away just beyond her reach, before he sprinted down the hall. He slipped through the throng of Claudia's chatting dorm mates, a shoulder knocking into one of theirs, causing a girl's books to fall, piling onto the floor. Claudia swore loudly, and moved as if to pursue him, but was overwhelmed by a sudden surge of early-morning grogginess, which she had all but suppressed up until this point. The hallway seemed to stretch before her, longer than it had ever appeared - the floor looked unwelcoming to her bare feet, and the more self-conscious side of her recognized that her polar bear print pajama pants were not exactly the attire she wished to be seen in, in a cross-campus chase. Furthermore, she was altogether unsure of how she might even begin to explain her knowledge to this Steve, if she could catch him. At the moment, the only rational explanation, considering that she just awoke in her usual bed, was that she had a very vivid, and very disturbing dream last night. A dream which revealed previously unknown facts to her.
She bitterly retreated back into her room, away from the prying eyes of the people down the hall.
It was 9 minutes before her first class of the day, which was located on the opposite side of campus. Despite whatever disorienting experience she had the previous evening, she still had an education to attend to, as apathetic as she felt toward it. She determined that teeth-brushing could wait, and a quick running through of her fingers in her hair would suffice for grooming today. After slipping on a pair jeans that had been crumpled at the foot of her bed, she jammed her feet into sneakers, grabbed her backpack, and power walked down the hall.
