Chapter 1: The Last Message
The air in the dorm room was thick, a physical thing pressing down on Ethan. It smelled of stale beer from last weekend’s bottle still upright on the windowsill, of unwashed gym socks, and underneath it all, the bitter, burnt scent of the coffee he’d been reheating in the microwave for the past three hours. The single desk lamp flickered, a sputtering heartbeat of light that stretched the shadows of his textbooks into strange, hunched creatures against the cinderblock walls.
He wasn’t looking at the calculus book open in front of him. The symbols on the page had long since blurred into a grey, hostile mass. His screen glowed, an oasis of blue light in the yellowed gloom. His fingers hovered over the keyboard, trembling slightly. The chat window was a private message thread, just him and one other person. The last received message stared back, innocuous and devastating.
We all have to do things we don’t want to sometimes. That’s life.
He’d been staring at it for forty-seven minutes. The number in the corner of the clock ticked over. Forty-eight.
A fist pounded on the door, a hollow thud-thud-thud that made him flinch.“Miller! Open up, you hermit. Pizza’s here and we’re short on cash.”
Liam. His voice was a familiar, grating comfort.
Ethan swallowed, his throat dry. “Go away. Midterm tomorrow,” he called back, aiming for his usual easygoing tone. It came out flat, a tinny recording of himself.
“Screw the midterm. You’ve been locked in there since Tuesday. You’re turning into a mushroom.” Liam’s voice faded as he shouted down the hall. “He’s being a loser! Extra pepperoni for us!”
The sounds of his friends—the groan of the common room couch, a burst of loud laughter, the tinny bass line of a video game—filtered through the door. A normal Thursday night. He was supposed to be out there, slouched between them, arguing over the last slice, making a dumb joke that would make Liam snort Coke out his nose. The distance felt astronomical, a gulf he’d carved himself and now couldn’t bridge.
His gaze dragged back to the screen. The cursor pulsed beside his half-typed reply.
It’s not about want. It’s about... I can feel it crumbling. Every day. This face I put on.
He deleted the sentence. Tried again.
You don’t understand.No one does. I’m so tired of the sound of my own laugh.Deleted. Too pathetic.
He ran a hand through his hair, gripping it until his scalp burned. The pressure in his chest was expanding, a cold, dense balloon. He looked at the beer bottle on the sill. He looked at the closed door. He looked at the perfectly curated grid of photos on his desktop background—him and the guys at the lake last summer, arms around each other, faces sun-reddened and grinning. The Ethan in that photo looked like a stranger. A happy, simple stranger.
The cursor pulsed.Waiting.
He leaned forward, the chair groaning under him. His fingers began to move, not thinking, just spooling out the raw, unfiltered thread of what was in the balloon.
You keep saying it will pass. That it’s just stress. But what if it’s not? What if this is the real thing, and the guy you all know, the guy I pretend to be... what if he’s the costume? I’m so good at wearing him. The engineering student. The loyal friend. The guy who’s always up for an adventure. He paused, breath catching. But the costume is getting heavy. And the person underneath... I don’t think anyone would recognize him. I don’t think they’d even like him. I can’t keep pretending.
He didn’t read it over. He just highlighted the entire block of text, his mouse pointer shaking. A single, definitive click. Send.
Instant regret, cold and sharp as a knife blade, sliced up from his gut. It was too much. It was true, every awful word, but it was too much. He’d broken the unspoken rule. He’d let the thing underneath show.
The three dots appeared immediately. Someone was typing. A response. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic animal. He couldn’t see it. He couldn’t.
His hand shot out, a panicked reflex. He control-A, delete. The words vanished from the message box. But it was already sent. It was out there, in the digital ether, a piece of his raw interior now existing outside his body. The dots continued to bounce.
He slammed the laptop shut.
The sudden silence was a roar. The flickering lamp, the muffled laughter from the common room, the faint hiss of the radiator—it all telescoped into a single, high-pitched whine in his ears. The room was a box. A cold, smelly, suffocating box.
He stood up so fast his chair rolled back and cracked against his roommate’s empty bed frame. He didn’t grab his coat. He just yanked the door open and stumbled into the hallway.
Liam was in the common room, a slice of pizza dangling from his mouth. “Whoa. Look who emerged. You okay, man? You look like hell.”
Ethan looked right through him. “Need air,” he mumbled, the words sounding thick and foreign.
“It’s like twenty degrees out,” Liam said, chewing. “And you’re in a t-shirt. At least take your—”
But Ethan was already moving, a sleepwalker, down the linoleum-tiled hall, past the flyers for band parties and tutoring services, through the heavy fire door that led to the stairwell. The concrete steps were icy under his socks. He pushed out the exterior door into the night.
The cold hit him like a physical slap. It was a clean, shocking pain, scouring away the staleness of the room. The campus was quiet, just the distant groan of a bus and the skeletal rustle of trees in the wind. The sky was a bowl of black ink, starless. He started walking, his breath pluming out in frantic white ghosts. The frozen grass crunched under his feet. He didn’t know where he was going. He just had to move, to outpace the thing growing inside him, to outrun the response waiting on his screen.
The image of those three blinking dots haunted him. What was being typed right now? Pity?Concern? Platitudes? Annoyance? A chill that had nothing to do with the temperature seeped into his bones. He had shown the wound. Now he couldn’t bear to see how it would be dressed—or ignored.
He crossed the empty quad, the library a dark monolithic slab to his left. His mind replayed the sent message, word for terrible word. I can’t keep pretending. The finality of it echoed in the frozen air. He had drawn a line, and now he was on the other side of it, alone.
He found himself at the edge of campus, where the tidy paths gave way to the darker, tree-lined street that led toward town. A streetlight hummed overhead, casting a sodium-yellow puddle on the gritty, leftover snow. He stopped, shivering violently now, his arms wrapped around himself. He was miles from his coat, from his laptop, from the expectant dots.
From a distance, back toward the dorms, he thought he heard someone call his name. It might have been Liam. It might have been the wind.
He didn’t turn back. He stepped out of the yellow light and into the deeper dark of the road, the cold biting deeper with every step. The shape of him, pale in the t-shirt, grew smaller and less distinct, swallowed by the hungry winter night.