"Alright, I'm here, what do you need?" I stood in his doorway, breathing heavily to catch my breath.
"Oh," He looked up. "Will you walk with me to the store?"
I breathed in through my nose and out slowly to still my fast-beating heart. "I just ran here from half-way across campus. I thought you were in trouble."
He looked up at me. His wavy hair fell into his eyes and he brushed it away. "I'm fine." He turned back to his desk where a miniature house lay in half.
"Why would you send me a text that says ‘I need help.' If you weren't in trouble?" Anger flared in my chest, but it was quickly dimmed by how tired I was. I sighed. "Don't you know how that sounds to me?"
He looked up again. "I see you're upset. I'm sorry." He put down his tools. "Now, will you go with me?" He tilted his head and stared at me, waiting for my answer.
I sighed again. "Yes. Let's go." I turned around and opened the door.
He got up, picked up his jacket on the way out and followed me.
We walked out the door of his hallway and turned the corner. The lobby lights were bright but I squinted and kept walking. There were only a couple people out here this late, talking quietly to each other. I looked at my watch. It was 2 am.
He followed me out the double doors and I turned around and walked backwards, keeping my eyes on him.
"So, whatcha up to so late at night?" I stuck my hands in the pockets of my jean jacket. My fingers fondled an old gum wrapper in one of the pockets. I needed to throw it away sometime soon.
"I was working on a project." His voice was flat but I knew he was just tired.
"So, like, for school or what?" I shrugged my shoulders.
He shook his head. "It's a personal project. I'm making a miniature farm to grow vegetables."
We walked along the sidewalk till we got to the main road. It was quiet out here. The humming of the streetlights was the only sound I could hear.
"So are you growing tiny vegetables or big ones?" I laughed. I could just imagine a tiny farm overtaken by life-sized vegetables: giant cucumbers and bell peppers and string beans thrown in for good measure, all curled up together in the potting soil.
He looked very serious. "Of course they're going to be tiny. I'm trying to engineer miniature vegetables." He tilted his head at me. "I thought I told you this."
I hummed, "Maybe," and shrugged.
He looked off into the distance as we walked. I let out a long breath and it hung in the air like smoke. I turned around to walk beside him.
"What do you need at the store?" I asked, mostly to fill the silence at this point. He wasn't very talkative tonight.
He shrugged but reached into his hoodie pocket and pulled out a list.
"Milk, hydrogen peroxide, Band-Aids, Mercurochrome..." He trailed off, still looking ahead.
"Did you hurt yourself?" I asked. He didn't answer. I stopped in my tracks and reached out for him. He slowed to a stop a few steps in front of me and looked back. "What happened? What'd you do?"
He wouldn't meet my gaze but his face was devoid of any emotion I could read. "Nothing. I noticed I was out. I need more." He started walking again.
I ran to catch up with him. "Are you sure? It's not like Band-Aids and hydrogen peroxide are normal late night purchases."
"It's nothing. I also need milk and eggs. Normal things." He nodded to himself and sped up.
I narrowed my eyes at his back, but I dropped the issue. I couldn't force it out of him.
We kept walking. I had assumed we were headed toward the campus mini-mart considering how late it was, but we had turned in the opposite direction at the stoplight. I hadn't noticed.
He looked both ways before crossing the next street, motioning for me to follow.
I looked back and forth, even though there were no cars on the road this late.
"Where are we going?" I asked when I caught back up with him.
"I heard from someone else about a 24-hour store down here that'd sell me something else I need for my experiment."
I glanced over at him. "Sounds sketchy."
"That's why you're here. You can defend us."
I stopped and laughed. "How am I supposed to defend you? The only thing I've got going for me is my height. I'm still skinny and to be frank, kind of a pussy."
He looked over at me. "Aren't you trained in martial arts?"
"No, who told you that?" We were both stopped.
"Jonathan. Why would he lie?"
I squinted. "Jonathan, the stoner, Jonathan? You know he makes up stuff all the time." I put my hand on his shoulder. "Did he refer you to this place?"
He nodded. "Yes, of course. I asked him."
"Why did you ask him?" I shook my head, "Never mind, we're not going, come on." I took a step back, nudging his shoulder. He didn't move.
"I asked him because I knew this store would have what I need. It's very important that I get it tonight." He stood his ground. "I'm going whether you're with me or not."
I sighed. I couldn't let him go alone. Who knew what kind of trouble he'd get himself into?
"Fine," I said, "Lead the way." I gestured in front of us. He started walking.
We walked for five minutes and then turned onto a smaller street which cut through dense trees, the light of the moon just barely breaking through. The streetlights were dim and spaced far apart, making it hard to see my own feet.
"How far away is this place?" My voice sounded whiny to my own ears. Flip-flops had not been the best choice.
"It's just a mile more." He said. His eyes were scanning side to side.
"A mile? Raph, come on." I kicked a few stones out of my way. "How are you even gonna pay for this stuff?"
"I have money." He said.
"How? Where'd you get it?" My eyebrows furrowed. He had no job, no parents, no obvious source of income.
"A man gave it to me the other night." He looked back at me. "You were there."
"What are you talking about?" A shiver ran through me. This jacket was not warm enough.
"Don't you remember the party?"
I thought for a moment. I hadn't been to any parties in the past month. I shook my head.
"Hmm." He said. We kept walking.
"Oh," He broke the silence, "The guy with the eyes gave me $100 for later."
"The... guy with the eyes? What does that mean?"
He sighed, frustrated that I apparently wasn't able to keep up. "You were the one who pointed them out. You said his eyes were ‘obscenely beautiful.'" He made finger quotes.
"Okay..." I still couldn't remember. Maybe I'd gotten drunk and forgotten everything. But that wasn't like me. I looked at him, trying to catch his eyes. "Did you... do anything with him? Why'd he give you money?" If he'd gotten himself into a bad situation and had to do something he didn't want to...
"What would I have done? He gave me the money and disappeared."
Disappeared...? I was about to question him more when he stopped.
"Jonathan said it'd be right through here." He pointed into the trees.
"Where?" I asked. I looked around. "We're in the middle of nowhere."
"Jonathan said it was right here." He pointed to the trees again.
"Right where? There's just trees!" My voice echoed a little. I looked around again, down the road. There were only a few more streetlights before they stopped. The road got narrower the longer it went on. I assumed it led into a farm or something.
"He said there'd be two trees that looked weird." He pointed to two trees. Sure enough, they did look...weird. The rest of the trees were fairly straight, with rough bark, but these two were gnarled, with smooth trunks. There was a small opening between them, just large enough for a person to walk through.
He stepped forward, off the sidewalk. I raised my hand halfway to stop him from going any further but there was no reason. He looked back at me, waiting.
I could see very well here. A streetlight shone down on us and the surrounding area. He motioned for me to follow him.
I stepped off the sidewalk.
He pushed his glasses up and took a step forward. "I'm going in."
"Wait," I said. I grabbed his hand. He looked down at it. "I don't want you to get lost in there."
He nodded and we both took a couple steps into the darkness of the forest.
It was so dark I couldn't tell if my eyes were open or shut. I blinked a few times, and when I opened my eyes again, my vision was overwhelmed with light. I shielded my eyes with my other hand and squinted into the light.
Impossibly, we were in a store. It was a little larger than the campus' mini-mart, with people bustling around.
I was still holding his hand and I looked at him in disbelief, expecting him to be staring back at me, but he was looking at a shelf filled with items like this was totally normal.
I couldn't understand what happened. One second we stepped into a forest and the next we were in a store?
"Where are we?" I asked him. He glanced at me before turning back to the shelf.
"We're in the store." He said.
"Wha--How? We were just in the forest a second ago." I blinked again. My brain felt slow.
"Yes, like I said, it was a shortcut." He shrugged and let go of my hand. My skin felt clammy.
He walked over to the next aisle. I followed, not wanting to be alone in this strange place.
"No," I said firmly, "we stepped through the trees and then we were here, in the entrance." Another shiver ran through me and I noticed my jacket was tied around my waist. I didn't remember doing that. I untied it and slipped it back over my shoulders.
He gave me a look. "What's wrong with you tonight? Are you sleep-deprived? You can't seem to remember anything."
I shook my head, unsure of what to say. Someone brushed too close to me and I glanced at them as they passed. Their eyes were brilliantly blue, almost unreal. They didn't say anything to me, just picked up an item off the shelf and walked away. I looked around at the other people in the aisle--they all had the same beautiful eyes, the only differences were in the eye colors.
"I don't understand how we got here." I said. He reached something off the shelf and handed it to me. It was a bottle with some kind of liquid in it.
"We took a shortcut." He said, again. "It was just a path through to the other side of the street." He was staring at me, like he was wondering if I'd somehow gone insane.
I took a deep breath to keep from screaming. I knew what I'd experienced. Maybe I was being pranked. If he wasn't going to come clean yet, I may as well play along for the moment.
He was still looking at the shelves, searching for something.
"What are you looking for?" I asked him. I tried to remember his list. Milk, hydrogen peroxide...
"Band-Aids?" He kept searching.
"I'll look over here." I turned around to the shelf across the aisle.
There were signs denoting different sections but the words seemed funny to me--They looked like English but I couldn't read them. The more I tried the more the letters moved around and got less coherent. I frowned. That was more than just odd. Maybe I was having a stroke.
I scanned the shelves for the right design: red and blue and tan bandages. I saw what looked like them down the shelves a little bit.
I took a couple steps toward it, and it seemed like the amount of people in the aisle had doubled suddenly. I scooted around a couple groups, and had to slip in between people standing in front of different items. When I finally reached the Band-Aids, there was a group of three or four people talking right in front of the boxes. I cleared my throat and they all turned toward me, staring me down. Their unnaturally bright eyes bore into me and my face burned.
"Excuse me." I said. They shuffled away a few paces from the wall and continued their conversation. My face cooled as I investigated the shelf.
I grabbed the first box I could find with Band-Aids on the front and made my way back through the crowd over to Raph.
He turned back around and I handed him the box.
"Thank you." He said.
I nodded. "Anything else?" I didn't want to leave him again, but asked just to be polite.
He shook his head and I felt an enormous sense of relief.
"I've got everything else, we can check out."
We made our way to the line. It meandered around, doubling back on itself and going so far as to cut through another smaller line at the back of the store.
The people in the smaller line seemed to be waiting for someone to come out of the employee door. There was a desk up against the door and a chair in front of the desk. I watched them as we waited. No one came out from the back, and no one moved to sit in the chair. They all just stood there, staring ahead, not moving.
We moved up a little and he elbowed me.
"Ready?"
"What?" I asked. I looked away from the other line. He was facing me. We were at the checkout counter, just out of line.
"Are you ready to leave?" He asked. He pushed his glasses up and they glinted in the harsh artificial light.
"Sure," I said, my mind struggling to catch up.
He slipped his hand into mine. "Just in case." He smiled and warmth spread through my chest. I wanted to ask how we'd gotten through the line so quickly, but he pulled me towards the entrance of the store, and then I stepped out onto the dirt in front of the sidewalk and everything was dark.
I blinked in the dim light, starbursts of light behind my eyelids. Where had that come from?
As my eyes adjusted, I realized I was facing the street.
Hadn't I just been facing the trees? I didn't remember turning around.
"Will you hold this for me?" He asked. He was already on the sidewalk again, looking back at me.
I looked at him. He held a plastic bag full of stuff out for me. I took it.
"What is this?" I asked as we started walking away from the trees. I opened the bag and looked inside. A box of Band-Aids, a vial of something shimmery, a small bottle of Mercurochrome, and a half-dozen eggs. I looked back up at him. "Where did you get this?"
He sighed, frustrated. "Why do you keep forgetting everything?" He looked into my eyes and sighed again. "You need to go to the doctor. You could have amnesia."
"How would I have gotten amnesia?" I asked. "I didn't hit my head on anything." Unless I'd forgotten that too somehow.
He shrugged. "Could be a brain tumor." He looked at me and his lips quirked up. It was a joke.
"Why would you say that to me?" I sighed and went to stick my hands in my jacket pockets but my jacket wasn't there. It was tied around my waist. I frowned, I didn't remember doing that. Maybe he was right.
We walked in silence.
It was cold so I pulled my jacket on again. My hands went back to my pockets.
"So what are we doing now?" I asked.
"I'm going back to my room." He said.
He looked both ways and we crossed the street. It was less chilly on this road.
We made our way down the sidewalk, back onto campus and I led the way back to the dorm buildings.
"Do you mind if I go back to mine? Are you okay to get back alone?" My head throbbed and I didn't feel like being teased about this memory lapse.
He glanced at me and then to his building. "Will you drop me off in the lobby?"
I smiled, that was easy enough. "Sure."
He swiped his card and pushed the door open for me. The warm air hit me as we walked in and I let the door slam shut behind me.
"Are you going to bed?" I asked. He was already halfway to his hall door.
He shook his head. "I'm going to complete my miniature farm tonight."
I laughed, "Okay." I shrugged my shoulders, exaggerating the movement. "Well I'm dead tired."
He smiled. "Goodnight." He turned and opened the door for his hall.
"Have fun with your vegetables." I said and I turned away from him too, waving my hand in the air. I leaned on the door to push it open and stepped out into the cool night air. It was very dark out. I checked my watch, it was 2:15 am. I frowned, surely it'd been more time. When we left it was 2.
I shook my head and walked back to my dorm. It was late.