It could have been Sally who’d taken a murderer to her bed, Sally who’d been pushed down onto the covers with a palm over her mouth, Sally who’d laid there twitching as someone carved a smile under her chin.

Now, I bet you’re wondering: how’d Sally know about all that?

Because she was there, of course.

As with every variant of this story, Sally was out too late for one reason or another. Realizing she’d forgotten something, she stumbled upstairs to her room. In the popular version, all she heard was breathing, a drip drip dripping to tell her that something was wrong.

In this one, her roommate whispered:

“Sally, help.”

And she froze.

There was a smell in the air: pennies, salt, an ammonia reek. There was a sound in the air too: a gurgling noise, a shlick of steel peeling through skin, someone kicking against a bulk too big to move.

I don’t know why she walked away, why she didn’t flick on the lights, and scream for the police. Maybe, she was scared. Maybe, it was late and she was tired and certain that it was all her imagination. Maybe, Sally thought to herself, “I ain’t dying for someone I barely know.”

Whatever the case, she left.

And well, you know how the rest of this tale goes, so I won’t bore us both with its end.

Was that one of the meaner tellings?

Hell no.

See, no one likes much talking about it, but everyone’s got a little blood on their hands. Most of the time, it’s metaphorical. That little lie that gets our siblings in trouble. The broken heart we blame on someone else’s lacks. Everyone is guilty of a few small sins.

What Sally might have done? It wasn’t evil, per se. A little selfish, maybe. But can you blame her for being frightened? Imagine being on the cusp of freedom, full of hope for the first time in your life. Would you give that up for a stranger? Would you lay down and die for them?

Yeah, I thought as much.

I digress, though.

Stories are defined by a beginning, a middle, and an end. In more literary circles, people talk about denouements and layers, textures, the way a word can transcend to a synesthetic experience. But at the end of day, it all comes back down to those three things. A beginning, a middle, an end.

You’d be amazed as to how much detail gets lost in between, how a good storyteller can make you forget the bits that don’t make sense.

What happened that night?

What drove Sally down to a drafty basement when she could have found sanctuary in the library? If you think about it, none of that makes sense. Every college has its reading rooms, its communal spaces. So why a basement, exactly?

Did she really go there of her own accord?