On the trail, he hugs me to his side, and I slide my arm around his waist, as close as we’d be if we could spend the night together, share a bed. How amazing would that be, a whole night in the warm dark with him?

“You really can’t stay out any later?” he asks.

“Not without my parents killing me.” I catch his look—distracted, frowning slightly, and I’m not sure what it means, how the tone of things changed so quickly. “You better get back, too.” We’ve reached the fork in the path that leads to the Terraces, the stretch to the trailhead partially lit by the streetlight at the bus shelter. “Summer Street’s, like, halfway across town. I took you pretty far out of your way.” He shrugs. “Do you have a phone? You need a light.” I hold my phone out.

He moves a step back from me. “Nah. I’m good. You’re going to miss that.”

“I can survive one night without tweeting. Go ahead. I’ll get it back from you tomorrow.”

When our kisses end, he presses his fingertips to my lips as his goodbye. I stand, watching him leave. “Hey.” Calling after him again, not ready for it to end. I hear his footsteps hesitate, waiting. “Confess. When did you start liking me back?”

“I’ve always liked you.” And that’s it. He goes.

I could fly back to our unit on those words, and I practically do, my steps light, my nose already full of phony floral fabric-softener smell gusting from the vents of the laundry building.

In time—how much, I’m not sure, but no more than a minute—I hear the other. The follower, mirroring my steps almost exactly, leaving enough of an overlap that I don’t register the sounds at first, just sense something off. I glance back. The woods are blackness.

“That you?” I say. My voice too loud, alien.

No answer. Kincaid would say something—he wouldn’t mess with me like this. I don’t think.

Somewhere, in that inky tangle, a twig snaps.

Panic snaps with it, spurring me forward, my walk turning to a run. The streetlight’s ahead, but it’s my dream become real—trapped in an endless moment of gut-sinking dread, the cold in my bones making me brittle, my skeleton turned to ice.

When I burst out of the tree line, my breath explodes—I’ve been holding it all along—and it’s like I can feel the hands (impossible fingers, wriggling black snakes) stop just short of my shoulders and reduce to vapor as I spin, stumbling back, staring at the trail. No one.

But the woods are alive with new sounds. Crackles and rustles, either from my own sprint or from something receding, moving away through the trees, now that I’m out of reach.