My roommate sleepwalked in the middle of the night. When she woke up the next morning, we asked her what she had been dreaming about. She said she had dreamed of cutting open a watermelon, but it was not ripe yet. We all laughed.

Chapter 10

I was staring at the screen, growing colder by the second.

“Emma?” Reilly asked. “What’s wrong with you?”

I did not answer.

Instead, I took the phone from her with trembling fingers and zoomed in.

“Look at the mirror,” I whispered.

Near Madison’s barricaded door sat a small vanity table. On top of it was a round makeup mirror angled toward the window.

The camera showed the front door.

But the mirror showed the side of the room the camera could not capture.

It showed the window.

I enlarged the reflection.

And there, in that warped little silver circle, was Madison.

Climbing out the window.

Every trace of color drained from the room.

Madison had never walked out through the door.

But in the reflection, she had absolutely left.

Jessica made a strangled sound. “I just remembered something. The police said the hallway cameras at both dorms never showed anyone going in or out.”

“Because they didn’t use the door,” I said.

Suddenly, everything lined up in the worst possible way.

Madison’s new room was directly above the literature freshman’s room.

The boy in the computer science dorm lived in a building with outside ledges, pipes, and air-conditioning brackets that someone athletic could potentially climb.

Jessica frantically pulled up footage from the night the first girl had died.

There it was again.

In the reflection, Madison climbing out the window.

Reilly slowly turned to her, face bloodless. “Maddie… you’re on the rock-climbing team.”

Madison loved climbing. We all knew that. She could scale indoor walls like gravity barely applied to her.

Now no one was joking about it.

Madison staggered backward. “No,” she whispered. “No, that’s not possible. I wouldn’t… I couldn’t…”

But even she did not sound convinced.

She looked sick, horrified, like someone watching her own life split apart in front of her.

“I couldn’t have done that,” she kept saying. “I would never hurt anyone. I would never—”

Then she gagged, turned, and ran out of the room.

Jessica called after her instinctively, but none of us followed.

Fear rooted all three of us in place.

I grabbed my phone again.

This time Reilly caught my wrist.

“Emma, wait.”