But then I’d been awakened around two o’clock by insistent banging on my front door. Half certain I was dreaming, I closed my eyes and waited for the noise to stop.

Then I heard my name.

Bewildered, I dragged myself from bed and carefully descended my spiral staircase. I peered cautiously through my peephole, almost expecting to see the apparition of Emily Snow, eyes cold, mouth sneering, face bloodied. Instead, there was Audrey, wearing pink cotton pajamas and flip-flops, hair in a sloppy ponytail and a purse strung incongruously across her body. As soon as I opened the door, she flung herself into my arms, jabbering incoherently about someone outside. It took me five minutes to get her calm enough so that I could understand what she was saying: she had awoken to find someone spying on her from the alley. I shuddered. I’d known that alley was bad news. That whole apartment was bad news. Audrey should have taken my advice and moved in with me. But I wouldn’t dream of rubbing it in, not when she was in such a state, so when she moaned that she couldn’t sleep there, I simply patted her on the shoulder and assured her the guest room was all hers.

Thinking the matter resolved, I yawned and returned to my own bedroom, but Audrey followed me like a lost puppy and sat on the edge of my bed. She twisted her hair around her fingers as she repeated how frightened she was. I sympathized; I did. It must have been terrifying to find someone watching her while she slept, and I could only imagine how vulnerable she must feel. But she was safe now, secured in my home on an upper level behind a solid door. She could rest.

But instead she rehashed the night’s events again and again, embroidering the details slightly with each pass. As my agitation grew, I remembered one night in college when Audrey and Nick had had some fight, the cause of which had long been forgotten, and Audrey had kept me awake all night, asking on a loop what she had done wrong and what she could do to win him back. My answers (that she had done nothing wrong and that she should not attempt to “win him back”) did nothing to console her. She seemed so distraught that I had prioritized her personal crisis over studying for my Biology 101 midterm the next day, and I had done so poorly on the exam my grade wasn’t able to recover. I got a B instead of an A in the class, ruining my perfect 4.0 GPA. Later, when I was rejected from Harvard Law, I couldn’t help but wonder if it had been because of that blemish on my record. To add insult to injury, I’d returned from that bio exam to find Audrey and that slimeball Nick making out in our shared room.

You’re not twenty years old anymore, Cat, I told myself. Just tell Audrey you have to go to bed.