It ends up being more than just a couple of hours; Beth and I don’t get back until almost eight o'clock. By the time we do, the temperature’s dropped at least twenty degrees, and it was pretty cold to start with. The minute the train stops at the University Circle station and the doors open, the frigid air hits me. I hurry out and down the platform and take the steps three at a time until I’m out of the station, with Beth right behind me. We cover the three blocks to Carson House at a dead run, and we’re both completely winded by the time we get there. I collapse onto the ugly purple couch, raising a small cloud of dust – which normally I’d find gross, but right now I’m too cold and exhausted to care.

And hungry, too, as my stomach loudly reminds me. Everyone in the lobby is already staring at me. Melody Katz laughs. “You shouldn’t skip dinner, don’t you know that?”

We got caught up shopping, and then I wanted to get back so I could spend some time with Brian tonight, so we ended up not eating. “We were busy,” I pant, pointing at our shopping bags. I just now notice that Joe Karver is hooking up the communal VCR to the TV. I take a couple of deep breaths until I can talk in something close to a normal tone of voice. “Sorry to interrupt. What are you guys watching tonight?”

“Yeah, that is a good question,” Melody says, a little too sharply. Clearly we came in right in the middle of the regular Friday night argument over who gets to pick the movies. It’s bad enough when the debate is what to rent at Vidstar video up in Coventry. It’s worse on a night like this, when nobody’s willing to brave the Arctic conditions outside to go there and the choices are limited to what videos the folks currently in the lobby have in their rooms. Which doesn’t leave much.

After a couple more minutes collecting my breath I head upstairs, Beth right behind me, as the argument gets up to speed. I put my shopping down, throw my coat on my chair, and my hand’s on the phone and dialing Brian before I even realize what I’m doing.

Beth rolls her eyes while the phone rings once, twice, three times until Brian picks up. “Hey,” I greet him.

“I was starting to worry when I didn’t hear from you all day,” he answers me, but I hear more hurt than worry in his voice. I said I’d meet up with him sometime after my exam; I guess we had different definitions of “sometime.”

“I lost track of time. Beth and I went downtown, we only just got back,” I tell him, trying to put a bit of reassurance into it. I try to suppress the thought that I haven’t done anything wrong and I shouldn’t need to be doing any reassuring.

“Are we still getting together tonight?” Apparently, I do need to be doing it.

I put my hand over the mouthpiece of the phone, and I sigh. “Absolutely!” I tell him, trying again, and this time it seems to work.

“What were you thinking?”

Considering that it’s about minus two hundred degrees out right now, the options are pretty limited. He can come over here and sit on the couch downstairs with me while we watch a movie, I can ask Beth to give us a couple of hours to ourselves in my room or I can go over to him. It’s no choice at all, really.

“My roommate was talking about having her boyfriend come over here,” I say, looking over to Beth, and she nods, “so how about if I run over and meet you? Give me fifteen minutes or so,” I say, shuddering already at the prospect of going back outside, even to run a couple of hundred feet. “I need to work up the courage to go back out into the cold.”

“I’ll be downstairs to let you in,” he says, and the line goes dead. I can almost hear his door slamming shut as he heads for his lobby to meet me.

“That’s not a bad idea, actually,” Beth tells me once I’ve hung up the phone. “I wouldn’t mind seeing Ron, so long as I don’t have to go back outside to see him. Besides,” she says, “it’ll be better than watching Monty Python downstairs for the twentieth time this semester."

She’s on the phone almost immediately, while I’m getting my coat, scarf, hat and gloves on, ready to brave the elements once more. When I get back downstairs, wrapping my scarf around my neck, covering up every possible inch of flesh as I head for the door, I see that Beth was right – it’s “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” again. Somebody in this dorm really needs to stock up on some new movies.

It must be my imagination, but I swear I can feel icicles forming inside my nose, just from the thirty seconds I’m outside running from Carson House over to Allen. Brian’s already got the door open, and in I go. I notice he isn’t quite meeting my eyes, though. We head straight upstairs to his room, and when he shuts the door behind us, he still isn’t looking at me.

I can’t believe he’s upset that I didn’t call him earlier. I sit down on his bed, and he sits across from me, on the spare bed. He doesn’t have a roommate. At least, he hasn’t had one, since the one he did have, Paul, started to have crippling panic attacks and withdrew from school two weeks before Thanksgiving

Brian looks like he’s about halfway towards having one himself right now. I really don’t understand. Does he really think – what? I don’t even know. “Brian, come over here. Sit next to me.”

He does, after a minute or two. “Look, I’m sorry I wasn’t around all day. I know I said we’d get together, and I should’ve waited to hear from you before I went downtown. Do you forgive me?” I haven’t done anything that needs forgiving, but I try very hard to keep that feeling out of the words I’m saying. I think that comes across because he relaxes a bit, nods his head slightly. “So how was your first college final exam?”

That’s what the problem is, right there. He thought I’d be waiting for him after he got out, to congratulate him. On top of which, he was probably terrified about his first exam, and if I’d been paying attention I’d have known that.

“Easier than I thought,” he says. “I was expecting…”

Something horrible and impossible. Exactly. My first final, freshman year, was Chemistry. I knew that class backwards and forwards. I’d gotten an A on every quiz, I did every piece of extra credit offered. I could have aced that test in my sleep. And I was still frightened when I walked into the classroom and opened up my exam book. I was so relieved afterwards, so proud of myself for getting through my very first final…

Just like Brian. And he wanted to share that feeling with his girlfriend, wanted me to be proud of him.

Oh, my. I just had another thought, and now it all fits together. I wasn’t just his first time. I’m his first real, proper girlfriend. Everything he does with me, he’s doing for the first time. Including the first time something happens that isn’t exactly how he imagines it should be – the first disappointment, however silly and minor. Like the first time his girlfriend blows him off when she said she’d be there, even if it is only for a couple of hours.

I move right next to him, touch his cheek, turn his face to me. Now he’s finally looking me in the eyes, and I take his face in both hands. I pull him closer and kiss him. I’m not sure how long it lasts, but it feels like forever.

It’s ten-thirty now. We’ve been – mostly – talking for the last two hours. I was absolutely right about him, about being the first girlfriend he’s had. I can’t believe I didn’t realize that right away. It was pretty obvious. It’s easy to forget that he’s only a few months out of high school. Then again, in my defense, I have been somewhat preoccupied lately.

My thoughts are interrupted by one of the most hideous sounds I’ve ever heard, and what’s worse is that it comes from me. Brian is so startled he backs several feet away. He’s looking at me as though he thinks something’s going to explode out of my stomach like the guy in “Alien.”

“I’m hungry, OK?” I say, and Brian bursts out laughing. I glare at him for a moment, and my stomach rumbles, very loudly, again. I can’t help it; I have to laugh too. “Wow, that was pretty bad, wasn’t it?”

Brian very gallantly offers to go to the only place we can think of that’s open at this hour, Little Caesar’s Pizza, and bring me back some much-needed food. I don’t feel right about sending him out alone into the freezing cold, and I definitely don’t feel up to going out there with him. Besides, I’ve got a better idea. I ask him how much money he has on him, and he says “Thirty dollars.” I ask him to give it to me. I pull my clothes back on – I did say mostly talking, didn’t I? take his money, and tell him to wait here.

I go down to the lobby. At the bottom of the stairs, I loudly clear my throat, and call out to the small crowd gathered there watching a movie on their dorm’s communal VCR (I notice they’re watching Monty Python, too. Clearly the video selection here isn’t any better than in my dorm. At least it’s a different Monty Python, “Meaning of Life.”). “I’ve got twenty bucks here for whoever will go to Little Caesar’s, pick up a double-cheese-and-pepperoni pizza and a two-liter of coke, and bring it up to me in room 411. Anybody?”

Someone answers, a redheaded guy I vaguely remember from a couple of my chemistry classes. “That’s Brian, right? 411?” I get a couple of questioning looks, which quickly become knowing looks when they – and I, at the same time – see that my sweatshirt is inside out.

Oops.

I go a little bit pink – but only a little. And – I’m kind of surprised at myself for this – I have no desire to run for it, or to try and make up some excuse and pretend that things are anything other than exactly what they appear to be. “It certainly is,” I say with the biggest grin I can manage. “And we’re both very hungry. Doesn’t anybody want twenty bucks?” The redhead agrees to go, so I give him the twenty, plus the other ten to pay for the food. “I’ll call it right now, so it’ll be ready when you get there,” and I turn around and walk back upstairs.

“I owe you thirty dollars. I’ll pay you back tomorrow,” I tell Brian when I open the door and sit back down on his bed.

“What did you do?”

I laugh. “I just did wonders for your reputation,” I tell him, and he blushes a very satisfying shade of red. “Oh, and I arranged for our dinner.” This time a week ago, I would never have done something like that. Instead of blushing slightly pink, I’d have been even redder than Brian is now, and I’d have slunk back upstairs as quickly as my shame would have allowed me to. But just now, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to do. He is my boyfriend, and I do love him. Why shouldn’t everyone know it?

The redheaded guy – I finally did remember his name, Mark Maxwell, we’ll see if I remember it next time I see him! – brings us our pizza a half hour later, and we have our belated dinner. And afterwards, dessert.

…Sara’s sitting in a comfortable chair, looking at a painting on the wall that seems very familiar to her, although she can’t quite recall why. She gazes around the room – the bedroom – and all of it seems familiar. The brass lamp on the side table, the sliding closet door that’s never – it doesn’t occur to Sara to wonder why “never” is the word that comes to mind here – closed all the way, the Rolex watch on the dresser. She knows she’s seen all of it before, but for the life of her, she can’t imagine where. And then the door opens, and a man, a large man, comes in, with a brown-haired girl who can’t possibly be older than sixteen. Now Sara knows exactly where she is and what she’s seeing, and she can’t leave, can’t look away, can’t do anything except…

…“Stop! Stop it! Oh, God, oh, fuck, stop it!” someone’s shouting, in a ragged voice filled with anger and mixed and absolute revulsion.

It’s me. I’m in that bedroom – no, no, that was the nightmare. I’m in – where? Brian’s room. Brian’s bed. He’s looking at me, eyes full of confusion. I can tell exactly what he’s thinking – “why is she yelling at me to stop? I wasn’t doing anything. I was asleep,” or something along those lines, and then the penny drops.

“Sara, you’re in my room. You’re safe,” he says, in what ought to be a reassuring voice. But I’m not in a state where words are any comfort. I put my arms around his neck, pull myself to him, and I squeeze, holding on for dear life. I think I’m probably hurting him, but he doesn’t say a word, doesn’t even wince. He just wraps his arms around me, holds on to me equally tightly. We lie there like that, not saying anything, until I can feel my heart rate start to fall back close to normal. I don’t know how long it takes, but it feels like forever.

We’ve been talking about it for an hour. We keep going around and around. That’s all I’ve been doing since the nightmares started, and I am so, so tired of it. “There’s got to be some kind of logical way to figure this out,” I say. “You’re going to major in mechanical engineering, I’m in pre-med. We’re both intelligent and logical and all that other crap, and we’re taking all these stupid science courses and, damnit,” I punch my hand into the wall, which does nothing at all except hurt, “we ought to be able to come up with some kind of answer!”

Brian’s expression says very plainly that he’d gladly give everything he owns to be able to tell me something helpful right now. He starts to say exactly that, and I hold up my hand. “I know, I know. OK, one more time?” I yawn. I don’t want to go back to sleep, but my body does and it feels like my body is winning the argument. Still, I’m determined to take one more stab at an explanation.

“So the first time this happened, it was you. You turned me on,” I say, and I’m not sure if it’s because of exhaustion or my sometimes-slow sense of humor that it takes me a good ten seconds to realize what I said and why Brian is fighting to keep from laughing.

“You flipped my switch,” I try again, and Brian just looks at me, a tear starting to leak from his left eye from the effort of not laughing. “I give up,” I say, throwing my hands in the air. “There’s no way I can say it and not have it be a bad pun, is there?” he shakes his head. I almost smile, it’s the most I can do right now. Even though, actually, it is pretty funny.

“Fine. It was you. You dreaming about me is what started this. You were close by, it’s probably not even two hundred feet, right, from here to my room?” he nods. “You were dreaming about me, and you had very powerful feelings so maybe,” this sounds absurd as I’m saying it but I press on, “it’s all electrical signals, right? Maybe we do broadcast when we’re dreaming. Maybe it’s too weak to measure, or maybe we just don’t know as much as we think about our brains.”

“OK,” Brian says. “That makes sense so far.”

I’m glad one of us thinks so. “So, fine, you’re broadcasting, I’m broadcasting, everybody’s broadcasting, every night. And that night, you broadcasted just a little louder than usual, in just the right way, and my brain picked it up. Maybe it’s like a radio,” and this is starting to make sense to me too, now. “You know how, when you get really bad reception, all you hear is static, right?” He agrees. “But then you finally manage to tune in a station, and once you’ve heard that you get better at hearing the other stations in the static. Maybe they’re not as clear, but once you hear the first one, you know what to listen for.”

I’m not sure if this is actually reasonable or if I’m too tired to think clearly, but I soldier on. “So once your signal came through, the radio in my brain got better at picking up all the other signals around me. That’s why I’ve been seeing Beth’s dreams, and Jackie’s, and all the other people I’ve seen.” And the killer. Because his broadcast is coming from the tallest radio tower with 50,000 watts behind it, even if nobody in their right mind would ever want to tune it in.

And then Brian has to go and ruin my wonderful theory. “If all that’s true, if you’re right – does it help at all?”

No. I can’t see how it helps. I start to say something nasty, but I catch myself. Barely. To be totally honest about it, if our places were switched and he’d just told me what I told him, I’d probably have asked exactly the same question.

I sigh, and I grab his arm and pull him down until we’re lying next to each other, and I pull the covers over us. “It doesn’t help. But you know what does? You do.” I say, and I kiss him quickly. “We can still get some sleep. I’ll be OK now. I’ll be OK as long as you’re with me,” I say, and with him holding me I do feel – well, not OK, but a lot closer to it than I was. I guess that’ll have to do for now.

Brian and I walk over to breakfast, but that’s all the time we’ll have together today. I have to keep at the physics, and Mark Bainbridge from upstairs agreed to take two hours to try and help me. Hopefully that’ll get me to the point that I can go to the review session a few of my classmates are having tonight and be able to keep up. On top of that I’ve got some paperwork that’s due Monday to finalize things for the volunteer program at University Hospital that I’m going to be doing next semester. So it’s a busy day.

We chat about Christmas, and what our families will be doing. Brian just found out the other day that his brother won’t be coming this year. He’s got just the one brother, Jack, twelve years older than him. The story is that Jack went into the army right after high school, got sent to Germany, got married, and stayed there after he was discharged. He’s got two kids that Brian’s never even met. Apparently, there was some hope that Jack would bring the family back here this Christmas, but it fell through. I think it’s really sad, that Brian has a niece and nephew he hasn’t ever met.

We still haven’t figured out when we’ll be able to meet over the holiday. I guess we’ll just have to play that by ear. We’ve got nine days to be together before then, though, and I intend to make the most of them.

We “dilly and dally” over our food, as my Mom puts it, until I can’t put off studying any more. Brian walks me back to Carson House before heading off to the library, and he kisses me just outside the front door. A girl could get used to that.

Then it’s up to my room, and I get working on the paperwork for the hospital. There’s a ton of it to go through, and it takes me a good hour to finish it. Just as I plop myself down on the bed for a few minutes before I move on to my least favorite course, there’s a loud, heavy knock on the door.

“Hang on,” I call out and I sit myself up, get to my feet and open the door. Jim Quarters, who I’ve known since my first day here, fills my doorway. I mean that literally; he’s a lineman on the (not very good) football team. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him on my floor in all the time I’ve lived here. “What’s going on?”

He’s looking into the room. “Your roommate’s not here, right?”

He can see that, so I’m not sure why he’s asking but I hold back a smart answer. “She’s at the library, finishing up a paper. I can tell her you’re looking for her.”

He shakes his head. “No, I thought that’s where she was. I wanted to ask you something without her here,” he says.

I’m confused; I can’t imagine what he wants with her. He can’t be interested in her, can he? He’s got a serious girlfriend, and he knows she’s got a boyfriend. I’m pretty sure they aren’t in any classes together. On the other hand, he’s never been anything but decent to me, so it probably can’t be anything too weird. “Come in,” I say, ushering him into the room. He sits down on my desk chair and it creaks a little. “You’re being very mysterious. What’s the big secret?”

“It’s the Secret Santa. I’ve got your roommate, and I have no idea what to do.”

Secret Santa completely slipped my mind. I’m glad for the reminder, and I’m also glad that suggesting a gift for my roommate – unlike the dreams, or my physics final – is a problem that I can actually solve. “No problem. You want to play it straight and give her something she’ll like, or embarrass her a little?” I wouldn’t say that, except I know Beth wouldn’t really mind an embarrassing gift, so long as it wasn’t too mean-spirited. Jim isn’t up for that, though.

“Straight.”

The only rule is that you’re supposed to spend less than $25 for all the gifts. But considering it’s finals week, it’s also got to be something that’s relatively easy and quick for him to get. I think I can suggest something that’ll cover all that, and that she’ll get a good laugh out of as well. On top of all that, it’s even something she’s dreamed about, in a way. “OK, we can do this. Five gifts. Let’s see,” I’ve got a pretty good idea, if I do say so myself. “Can you get somebody to give you a ride up to the mall?” He nods. “You’re twenty-one, right?”

“Last month.” He doesn’t bother to ask why I’m asking. It’s nice when people put themselves in my hands and just let me run the show sometimes.

“Good. You’re going to go to the state liquor store and get her a decent bottle of gin. That’s the big gift. The other gifts, you get her everything else to make a martini with. Olives, toothpicks, maybe you can find one of those cocktail shakers for five bucks somewhere. Sound like a plan?”

He seems very pleased. “Nice!” which he says as though the word has four or five syllables, is his answer. But then he lapses into deep concentration for a minute. “You’re missing an ingredient. Vermouth, right?”

True, I think. “But the limit is $25 and you’ll already be going a little over as it is.” There’s a solution to that. I get my wallet, fish out a $20 bill. “Here,” I say. “Buy a bottle of vermouth, too, and drop it off to me when she’s not here. I’ll give it to her after.” I have no idea how much vermouth costs. I wonder if I’ll see any change?

He looks doubtful, but he takes the money just the same. Then he peers at me more closely. “Are you all right?” he says with some concern in his voice. I guess that means he’s noticed the circles under my eyes and the hollow, lifeless stare that’s been looking back at me in the mirror far too often the last couple of weeks.

“I haven’t been sleeping all that well the last few nights,” which is as much truth as I’m interested in telling him.

“I know what you mean,” he says knowingly, even though he doesn’t have the slightest idea. “This semester’s been brutal. These group projects are killing me; I’m up until two in the morning every night trying to get everything done.” I wish schoolwork was the only reason I’m up until two in the morning. I’d trade with him in a heartbeat.

“Yeah. Exactly,” I say. “Anyway, do what I said, Beth will love it.” He gets up, starts to head for the door. “Oh,” I stop him, remembering something else. I take the box with George’s Slinky in it and hold it out to him – I don’t even remember when I put it in a box and wrapped it, which I think is kind of a bad sign. “Here. Can you put that by 418 when you go upstairs?”

He takes George’s gift. “Sure. And thanks!” he says as he goes, closing the door behind him. Well, I’ve done another good deed, and now I get my reward. Several hours of studying physics. That seems very unfair somehow.

At about five o’clock or so, after Mark graciously spent not two, but nearly three hours trying to force my protesting brain to understand some of the things it’s refusing to grasp about physics, Beth tries to get me to take a break. I refuse.

Brian calls at seven-thirty, after two and a half more hours of working on my own – I didn’t feel up to the review session with my classmates after all – to try and tempt me out of the room. I refuse again.

It’s almost nine o’clock now, and I don’t think I can stand to look at my notes or that textbook for another second. I feel like my eyes are about to start bleeding from the strain. I turn my attention to a small, very nicely wrapped box, my Secret Santa gift. I tear open the paper, open the box, and find – nothing. It’s an empty box. Someone went to all the trouble to do a professional wrapping job, with a bow and everything, for an empty box. Why would someone give me an empty box? What does it mean?

There’s a knock at the door, interrupting my questions. I get up to open it, and Mona the RD is standing there, with Melanie Vondreau and another of my floormates, Janet Black, right behind her. “Get your coat,” Mona says. “You’re coming out with us.”

I just stand there. I’m not sure what’s going on. “Come on,” Janet pleads.

I’m still looking blankly at the three of them. “Where?”

“I’m taking you girls out to the movies,” Mona says.

But the campus movie is usually at seven and nine o’clock. We already missed it. I don’t know what Mona’s talking about. “I’m not taking ‘no’ for an answer. Now get your coat and your hat and whatever else, we need to get moving,” Mona demands.

With the three of them all glaring at me, I don’t feel like I have much choice. I grab my coat, scribble a quick note to Beth and leave it on her bed, and follow them out. Mona leads us downstairs and out the back door of the dorm as I button up my coat. Her old, beat-up Jeep is parked right there and we all pile in.

She’s a much more aggressive driver than I’d have imagined. She’s laying on the horn, passing people in what doesn’t seem like a very safe manner and not even worrying about the patches of black ice that I’m sure are out there on the roads. Despite all that, we manage to get where we’re going in one piece.

Where that is, is a second-run movie theater about ten minutes away from campus. As we walk past the posters outside the theater I realize why we’re here, and why specifically it’s me, Melanie and Janet that she took. “Four for ‘Gross Anatomy,” Mona tells the pimply boy in the ticket booth, and she sends me and Melanie in to get seats. She and Janet join us a couple of minutes later, passing out drinks and popcorn to us as they do.

Then the lights go out, the projector whirs to life, and for the next two hours, I watch a pretty good story about a plucky group of people struggling through their first year of