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strained to weave them together into a cohesive whole once more.  She felt like she was looking through a fog.  She remembered being crouched in some small dark place, hiding, the feel of cold metal seeping through the thin leg of her pants.  She wasn’t alone.  She was holding someone’s hand, clutching it, not daring to breath.  She knew they were being stalked.
    Who was hunting them?  She couldn’t remember.  Boot steps…  She remembered the sound of boot steps approaching their hiding place.  She remembered panic welling up in her chest, tingling in her fingertips, her muscles taut and ready to spring.  She remembered regret, thinking of the sturdy knife stored inaccessibly in her knapsack, the hopelessness of fighting.  Most of all she remembered dread.  She knew that if she was caught, it would be the end.
    Finally she recalled the light, a bright dazzling light suddenly filling the alcove, blinding her.  She remembered a dark gloved hand emerging through the light, snatching at her, at him.  Him…  The ghost!  But not a ghost – he was alive, next to her, grasping her hand in the same grip of terror as the gloved arm reached for them.
    What happened next? The dream was slipping… The images frosted over in her mind and she could feel them sliding from her grasp.  They had grabbed him, yanked him from her side.  She knew it was over.  She couldn’t face what came next.  A crushing sorrow descended on her, the tears streaming down her face.  And then she had woken up.
    What had woken her?  A scream.  Her own scream.  One word cutting through the blinding light and ringing clearly into the night.  One word filled with all the pain, all the loss, all the hurt that one person could bear.  Her own ravaged voice, desperate to bring back the one thing that meant everything to her, the one thing that would enable her to survive.
    “Isaac!”

9. Preparation
     
    By the time she got out of her physics lab, the last thing Alessa wanted to do was hang up flyers for the party.  She had slept fitfully after that terrifying dream, unable to shake her anxiety until the first rays of dawn peeked through her bedroom window.  When she’d finally fallen back asleep, there had only been a couple hours until morning, and though she couldn’t remember any other dreams, she suspected that those feelings of panic and dread had chased her through the remainder of the night.
    The worst part was that she hadn’t even been able to talk to anyone about it.  Janie unfortunately was assigned to a different lab session, so Alessa was forced to work with a stranger to complete the day’s experiment.  Mercifully, her partner took charge of manning the motion sensor and calculating the coefficient of restitution while Alessa stood on her stool and mindlessly bounced the basketball, leaving her alone with her thoughts.
    She spent most of the lab mulling over what the dream might mean and why it had affected her so deeply.  By that point she had already lost most of the details, so she focused on piecing the major elements together.  Trapped, with the ghost, terror, sorrow, Isaac.  It did sort of make sense when she broke it down.
    Feeling trapped seemed to be one of the overriding themes of her life right now, in a variety of ways.  Trapped at this school, trapped into participating in the sorority’s nonsense, trapped in this world without her parents to guide her.  She was even almost physically trapped whenever she saw the ghost lately, unable to move her feet.  Yes, trapped was a feeling she was familiar with, and it was only logical that her subconscious might surface this feeling as literally being trapped in some kind of small recess.
    The ghost had obviously also been a major player in her life lately.  She’d been devoting most of her mental resources towards thinking about him – who he is, what he’s feeling, why he’s here – or trying to recover after he ransacked her emotional state.