Kenny couldn't believe it. She refused to accept the fact that Tellie was gone. The young girl, now fully awake, counted the number of people in the room several more times. After the sixth or seventh time around the room, she threw her feet over the edge of her mattress and stepped onto the floor.

Kenny crept over to Metal and Tellie's shared bed and peered into Tellie's bunk. The sheets were bundled up in a heap as though someone had picked them up from the floor and tossed them onto the bed. Tellie wouldn't have done that if she was simply getting up from the bed to go to the bathroom, would she? Perhaps the sheets had fallen off of the bed. Then Kenny realised that perhaps Tellie had tumbled from bed along with her sheets.

That could have been the thumping sound from before, the young girl surmised, and she was almost certain her inference was correct. Tellie probably fell off of her bed, then took a visit to the restroom, and she would be back in a few milliseconds. But...what if that wasn't the case? What if something had happened to Tellie? Kenny began to pace the floor, thinking of all of the possible causes and outcomes of her roommate's disappearance.

However, Kenny found herself ruling out possibilities as fast as she could think them up. If Tellie was in the bathroom, she would've been back by the time the young girl had finished pacing the floor and went to sit on her bed. Kenny checked the clock once more. It was 2:30 now, and Tellie was still gone.

At 2:31, the young girl found herself walking to the door. She stared at the doorknob, debating whether to go to the bathroom to look for Tellie. She turned away after a moment, only to stride back to the door a minute later. Kenny touched the knob on the blue door, recoiling at the cool temperature of the metal. This alone sent her back to her bed, deciding for a second time to wait for Tellie to return rather than go after her. After all, what if Kenny left just to have her friend—could she call Tellie that?— return while she was gone? Then again.... Kenny was back to her feet.

The young girl knew she couldn't keep this up for much longer. Her eyelids were beginning to close when she wasn't paying attention, and with each minute, it was getting closer to three in the morning. Before something else could prevent her from the leaving the room, she grabbed her ID card, stumbled to the door, and opened it.

Cool air rushed into the warm dorm. Kenny shivered in her thin pajamas. She let the door click behind her, a noise that was as loud as a sonic boom in the silent corridor. Her heart pounded in her chest, and her breathing was heavy enough to wake the girls sleeping in the room next to Kenny's dorm. She took a step, glad for the carpet that lined the floor, and began to make her way to the bathroom.

Kenny's heart was still pounding as she entered the restroom. She shivered once again when her foot touched the cold tile floor and quietly tiptoed into the room. The door closed louder than Kenny had expected it to. She froze in fear. Certainly someone had heard that out of all of the noises she had made while she was breaking curfew.

However, no one came after the young girl. After a still moment of letting her eyes adjust to the darkness surrounding her, she began to look around the bathroom.

Kenny took another step toward the stalls. She continuously turned around to see if anyone (or anything) was coming up behind her. She knew demons and other monstrous creatures were fictional, but that didn't stop her from imagining being ripped in several pieces or gruesomely murdered by them in the dark bathroom. She walked faster, checking all of the stalls and showers for Tellie. However, Kenny knew before the restroom door had fully closed that her friend was not in the bathroom.

Tellie had truly disappeared.

Once Kenny finished checking every compartment and corner in the dark bathroom, she tiptoed back to her dorm. She was more than halfway there when she noticed a light at the end of the hallway near her room. It appeared to be getting closer to Kenny, and it was only when she heard the shuffling of feet against carpet that she realized what the light was.

A flashlight, Kenny thought, a cold feeling spreading from her chest.

Someone was in the hallway, and they were walking towards her.

Kenny forced herself to turn and sprint back to the bathroom through her panic. The restroom was in her line of sight when she slipped, and her foot knocked against the wall to someone else's dorm. The flashlight behind the young girl began to shake as if the person who was holding it was running.

"Who's there?" a voice demanded. It was quiet enough not to awaken anyone sleeping in their warm dorm rooms, but loud enough to make Kenny jump to her feet and scamper into the restroom. The young girl pushed the door closed behind her, and breathing heavily, she listened for the footsteps of the person who had been chasing after her.

Kenny couldn't hear much as the carpet on the floor muffled sound, but the beam of the flashlight grew closer to the restroom door. The light peered through the cracks on the bottom and sides of the door, growing brighter as the young girl's pursuer grew closer. When the light stopped in front of the bathroom, Kenny looked around for somewhere to hide. She ran quickly but quietly to the shower compartment she had used only hours before and closed the door behind her just as someone opened the bathroom door.

Heavy footfalls neared the center of the room, and Kenny hoped the person after her couldn't hear her breathing. All she could think was how if she was caught, she would be punished horribly. No one was supposed to be out of their room after curfew, no matter what. Kenny should have known that, and with an inward groan, she realized Tellie would have known that. Her friend wouldn't have broken curfew to use the bathroom. She must have gone somewhere else, perhaps with approval from a teacher or administrator. Kenny was the only one breaking the rules.

The young girl suddenly felt sick. She was breaking the rules. She wondered if turning herself in would allow her to have a lesser punishment. However, before she could open the door to the shower compartment, the flashlight's beam turned toward the door.

"Ah, poo," the owner of the flashlight muttered. "I'm hearing things again." They murmured something about hating curfew patrol then exited the room.

Kenny could have cried tears of relief. She waited a few minutes before coming out of the shower and looking out of the bathroom door. Once she decided it was safe enough, the young girl sprinted back to her dorm and collapsed onto her bed.

****

When Kenny woke up less than four hours later, Tellie was in her bed. The young girl sprang from her bunk in a spring-like fashion and rushed to her friend's bed. Tellie was curled in a small ball to insulate her body heat, drooling on her pillow. Kenny hesitated to rouse her, but Jump then called, "Get Tellie up for me, would you Hawking?"

Kenny put her hands on Tellie's arm to gently shake her awake, but the girl's eyes opened before Kenny could begin to rock her. Tellie turned to look at her and sat up. Confusion painted her roommate's face, and she looked around as if she didn't know where she was.

Are you okay, Tellie? Kenny thought.

Tellie didn't seem to hear the young girl until an awkward minute of her repeatedly thinking the same phrase had passed. She then looked up at Kenny and replied, "Oh, yes! I just had a dream where.... In fact, I can't remember."

Tellie giggled, but she continued to look around. She threw her blanket off of her, and Kenny noticed there was a contusion on the girl's arm. The young girl remembered what had happened a few hours before: how Tellie had fallen from her bed and gone missing, the disappointment Kenny had felt when her friend wasn't in the bathroom like she'd hoped, the moments of panic she had experienced when she was chased down the hallway by a school administrator on curfew patrol. She stepped in front of her roommate and thought, Tellie, where were you last night?

A thoughtful expression replaced Tellie's confused features. "Hmm...I think I was sleeping."

You weren't in your bed.

"I wasn't? I probably went to the bathroom."

What happened there? Kenny pointed to Tellie's bruise. She knew her friend had fallen off the bed, but if the girl couldn't recall going to the bathroom—

"I fell off of my bed." It sounded like a question, but Tellie seemed certain of this answer at the same time. It threw Kenny off and made her as confused as the girl before her was when she had woken up. She paused, trying to sort thoughts and ideas out into actual sentences, and Tellie got up from her bed. The girl grabbed her toothbrush from her closet as Kenny watched.

"Come on, Hawking! By the time we get to the bathroom, we'll have to queue to brush our teeth."

Kenny didn't respond. She simply followed her friend out of their dorm to the restroom that was now teeming with students. She brushed her teeth after waiting for approximately eight minutes in a line behind groups of girl who were tired enough to be ill-tempered but not enough to stop their perpetual babble. Tellie had slipped off somewhere after the first two minutes to join the chatter, the same calmly confused expression on her face while she spoke with other girls Kenny's age.

Once Kenny was finished brushing her teeth, she made her way back to her room. She put her uniform on, took her index cards out of the box she kept in her closet, and picked her backpack and violin up from the floor near her bed. The young girl sat on her bed and waited for the bell to ring as her roommates changed into their uniforms and hurriedly scribbled down answers on unfinished homework papers. Finally, the bell rang, signalling that breakfast had begun.

The hallways in the Girls' Dormitories were crowded with backpacks, instruments, female AGC students, and administrators keeping vigilant watch over the girls. If Kenny stopped walking for a moment, she would be swept away, so she didn't stop moving until she entered the spacious Dining Hall. Students spilled into the room, boys and girls alike, and the girl's brisk pace slowed to a tired trudge. She sat down before buying breakfast for she knew the lines were going to be atrocious.

Color slumped into the chair next to the girl, yawning. Rather than hello, the teen said, "It should be illegal for them to require us to be up this early."

Kenny barely heard her. The young girl's attention was focused on the C groupers.

Most of the C groupers were waiting in the breakfast line, yawning and stumbling forward with the rest of the students in line, but some of them had taken Kenny and Color's tactic of letting the crowds by the counter thin out before going to buy anything. As Kenny watched the ones who were sat at their table, she noticed that they all possessed the same expression as Telle— tired and confused, yet calm and untroubled at the same time. Kenny went through her index cards until she found one that would sufficiently explain what she wanted to say.

What's wrong? the card asked as Kenny pointed to the C groupers.

"What?" Color turned and examined the students sitting at the table. "It doesn't look like anything's going on. Nothing's wrong."

Kenny gestured to her face and then pointed back to the table. Color took another look, and this time, she came back with a differnet reply.

"Oh! You mean their faces. They probably skipped curfew and played virtual reality games in the Recreation Area last night. I don't know. But you shouldn't worry about it." Color waved her hand as if she could swat away the idea of anything being wrong with the C groupers.

Kenny frowned. She didn't know how a whole group of people could slip away from their dorms and sneak past the curfew patrol when she could barely get to the bathroom and back. Plus, weren't the doors to the Recreation Area locked as soon as the tenth graders' curfew began? Kenny tried to recall a conversation she had overheard in the bathroom about it, but she failed to remember what time the student-friendly building closed.

Kenny looked away from the C groupers after a moment, shrugging the incident off. Color had been an AGC student longer than her, and if the teenager wasn't worried, then she shouldn't be either. She just had to focus on her studies. Yet, at the back of her mind, the young girl told herself to remember the expression on the C groupers' faces.

Just in case, she thought to herself, rubbing her eyes. Though if someone were to ask her in case of what, she would be unable to answer.