Brett woke as if from a nightmare.

And, really, that's what it was, right? The nightmares he'd had as a child, including the bear. He hadn't thought about the bear in such a long time. It was a being that visited him nightly when he was small. When he couldn't understand the dark feelings that plagued him all the time. He'd thought there must have been something tangible following him around, feeding off his pain. Of course, now he understood it was a manifestation of his imagination, something he'd created to explain why he'd felt so terrible all the time. Still, it was horrible to encounter it again. He thought it was a vestige of his childhood that he'd shrugged off, but of course nothing in life was really ever gone, as long as the memories were there to conjure these things up during sleep.

But there was still a heaviness, upon him. A real weight that was nailing him to the floor. He slowly opened his eyes, groggily. The thing pinning him to the floor was a body. He didn't want to see what it was, but it was there, even when he tried to blink it away.

It was bloody, with a knife sticking out of its back.

It was Lauren.

"No, no, no," he said, his voice rising in panic.

What had happened? What had he done? He didn't feel as if he could have hurt her. He'd been lying on the floor, for godsakes. How would he have been able to get up, go to the kitchen, and attack her? He wiggled his way from underneath her body and jumped to his feet unsteadily. He backed away from her, that girl who only wanted to be understood and had somehow met her untimely end. Where had that knife even come from?

On the coffee table, he spied something that hadn't been there before. It was a tray of brownies, a slit where something sharp had slid through the gooey chocolate. The knife. But how...? Who?

His eyes slid from her to the tray that hadn't been there before, and he remembered a snippet of conversation that he hadn't even sure had been real. A conversation between Lauren and someone else, someone who had brought something but realized they had come at an awkward time, that they'd been participating in something strange and unknowable.

There was only one person he could think of who would bring him a tray of brownies.

Calista, who lived upstairs. The one who had given him the greatest gift he'd ever received, the blessing of peaceful sleep. At least, that's what the superstitious part of him thought after she'd tossed an effortless "Sweet dreams" his way. And that's what he'd had since then. Had she come down to check on him, see how he was doing, maybe to inquire about his sleep since then?

He knew where she lived just from living in the same place for about a year. What should he do, go to her and see if the knife did in fact belong to her?

But no. First he had to tend to his friend.

He knelt next to Lauren and held two fingers to the side of her neck to check her pulse. There was no doubt about it. She was gone. She lay on her side, her hair falling across her face. The expression there was one of confusion, her eyebrows raised above her hazel eyes. Her mouth was open in a half-scream. He ran his hand across her face, brushed away the hair and lowered her eyelids.

He looked around, for his phone. He had to call 911. They wouldn't be able to do anything for her, but this was a crime scene now. He briefly considered how it looked. Just him and her and a knife. But he was innocent, wasn't he? He had to alert the authorities. His gaze fell upon his cell phone, on the coffee table next to a baggie of the pills that yet remained, the one that Lauren had drawn from her coat pocket before she settled onto his couch. That is one thing he didn't want to come to light--that she'd convinced him to participate in something illegal. He didn't want that to be her legacy, didn't want to taint her image by the tiny ovals that huddled in that plastic baggie, taunting him.

He grabbed them and disappeared into his bathroom. When he'd moved in, he noticed that there was a drawer with a false bottom, probably where the previous tenants kept their weed or other drugs. He slipped the pills inside, and then returned to the living room, where he made the call.

"911. Please describe your emergency." The woman's voice was clipped, tired.

"My friend is hurt. She's... she's dead. Please send someone right away."

The voice became all business. She got his address and kept talking to him for the next ten minutes while the police and paramedics headed his way. She asked what they'd been doing. He couldn't say they'd been watching TV or sharing the tray of brownies. He told the truth, or at least part of it. They'd been talking. He fell asleep. When he woke up, she was dead, lying on top of him. He now was fully aware of how this sounded. He realized that soon, instead of a psych ward, he'd be held up in a different kind of institution.

Tonight, he thought to himself, he'd be having his sweet dreams in prison.