Tara closed her door behind her and leaned against it, feeling lightheaded and weak-kneed and flushed with sensation. She couldn't stop thinking about Willow. This dumb, fleeting crush was spiraling out of hand faster than she'd imagined possible. Willow was so cute and so sweet and so cool and so smart. Tara was sure she could listen to her talk all day and never get bored. Lunch had gone so long that they were the last two people in the cafeteria by the time they realized they should go.

She was still convinced that the sudden weirdness in her life had something to do with Willow, but she still had no idea if Willow was the cause of it, or if she was just another symptom of some larger magical event. She wished she hadn't mislaid A Compendium of Witchcraft. It was her best reference source for all forms of magical hijinks, on top of being a beloved family heirloom and one of the few possessions she had inherited from her mother. But now she had found her pen, and she was determined that she would find her book as well.

Feeling newly motivated after her lunch with Willow, she pulled out the school directory and began making a list of names and places. If someone found a book like hers and they wanted to turn it in, there were only so many places it could sensibly be handed off. The library, the rare books room, maybe some history or religion professors, campus security…

She would call around (or, more likely, her voice would fail her on the phone and she would be forced to go in person or send emails) and see if anyone had heard of a book being turned in. And then she would make a flyer about the lost book, with her dorm phone number and maybe an offer of some reward. She wasn't going to stand idly by while the only happy parts of her past were systematically ripped from her.

She paused as she was flipping through the directory, past the long list of students, arranged by year and then by last name. A name had caught her eye— Summers, Buffy. She tilted her head, staring at it for a moment. Hadn't Willow said that her roommate was named Buffy? Next to the name was the extension for her dorm room. It was in Stevenson Hall, which only confirmed her identity. It was Willow's number. Tara wavered for a second, wanting to write it down but not wanting to seem like a creepy stalker. Finally, she compromised by sticking a post-it note onto the page so that it just barely stuck out. She could decide later what to do with that knowledge.

Feeling hopeful, she set her list by her phone. It was the weekend, so there was no use in calling the campus offices today. No, today she had another use for her time.

She gathered a notebook, some post-it notes, and— thinking of Willow— a half-dozen different colored pens, and headed back to the library. She may not have her best magical reference on hand, but there were at least a handful of others that she could look into. Maybe one of them would hold the answer to her mysterious situation.

After all, there were a lot of possibilities on the table. Maybe they were memory lapses, maybe they weren't. Maybe Willow was involved, or maybe she was an innocent bystander. Maybe she was a side-effect, rather than the cause. Tara really wanted to believe that.

The library was bustling with students who had already finished their classes for the day, so Tara kept her head down and made her way back to the occult section. The books from earlier had been re-shelved, so she slowly walked up and down the rows of titles, eyes scanning for anything that might be relevant.

She sat down with a small pile of carefully collected volumes and began her search. 'Finding yourself somewhere without knowing how you got there' obviously wasn't a chapter in any of the books— she would never get that lucky— but as she flipped through, she scribbled down options, flagging pages with post-it notes as she went.

Memory alteration? Possible. Not outrageously difficult, if you had the right ingredients, but it also begged the question of why? Why make her forget walking across campus, of all things? There didn't seem to be any evidence so far that she was doing anything else with her lost time, so what would anyone gain from making her forget?

Mind control? Harder than memory alteration, but more specific. It would at least do more to explain how she could end up in some random dorm building or coffee shop without remembering how or why she went there. It was worth considering, at least.

Forced teleportation? It was technically possible, but rare and difficult, and the sheer amount of magic required would be incredible. It was hard to imagine someone successfully teleporting her without her sensing the change in energy flow around her.

Altered time? The most ridiculous of all of them. She dismissed it instantly, and almost considered tearing those pages out of the book, or putting a note in there about how it wasn't even worth attempting.

Hours later, her eyes were tired, her stomach was growling again, and her neck was sore from being bend over texts all afternoon. She stood and stretched, biting back a groan. The books she had chosen were littered with scraps of paper and post-it notes, and she had four pages in her notebook filled with possible (if increasingly unlikely) explanations.

She had made a list of follow-up options as well. After all, she had other magical texts besides A Compendium of Witchcraft, although none that were nearly as good. But she could check them, just in case. And if she still came up empty, she could ask Mr. Bogarty at the Magic Box if she could look at his collection. And if even that failed, her last resort could even include going back to that ridiculous campus Wicca group just to see if any of them might know of other resources she could draw from. But that was the worst case scenario.

She pulled all her loose papers and post-it notes out of the books she had used and moved them back to the shelving cart, although she could have sworn she had started with a five or six books, and now there were only four. Given everything else she was dealing with, she opted not to dwell on it. She had to pick her battles. She just hoped that she would finally start getting some answers soon.