I Could See My Roommate Sleeping and I Still Could Not Scream

The worst part of being frozen is the math you do. You lie there and you think, if I could just move my little finger, if I could just kick the wall, if I could just make one sound, my roommate would wake up and this would end. Six feet. That is all the distance was. Six feet of dark dorm room air between my bed and hers, and I could not cross it with so much as a whisper.

We had moved in together in the fall, two strangers assigned by a housing office, and by spring we were the kind of friends who left the closet light on because neither of us liked total dark. That light is important. That light is the only reason I saw anything at all.

I woke, if you can call it that, sometime after two. I knew I was awake because I could see the closet glow and the shape of Danielle under her comforter and the poster of the mountains she had taped crooked above her desk. My eyes worked perfectly. Nothing else did. My arms lay at my sides like they belonged to a mannequin. My chest felt strapped down. When I tried to call her name the word formed somewhere behind my teeth and died there, and all that came out, I think, was a thin dry click.

I told myself to stay calm. I had read once that this happens, that it passes, that it is just your body being slow to wake. I held onto that. I really did. And then the door handle moved.

Our door was shut. We always shut it. And the handle, that cheap silver lever, tipped down slowly, the way it does when someone on the other side is being careful not to be heard. My heart went off like an alarm. I stared at it and willed Danielle to wake up, willed the handle to stop, willed my own throat to work.

The door did not open. The handle rose back to level. And the cold came instead, moving across the floor and up over my bed, and with it the sense that whatever had tried the handle was already in the room and had never needed the door at all.