Clara was near tears as she sat still on the edge of the bed watching as her sister slowly adjusted her eyes.

“What’s wrong Bette? Please tell me what’s wrong. Please Bette, please.”

Lana looked at her through a glaze of sleep filled eyes. Who was this strange woman and why was she sitting on her bed in the middle of the night?

In the dark she favored one of her dorm-mates from down the hall, but why would Kathy be in her room at...she looked to the right to check the time. Who moved the alarm clock? How was she supposed to wake up for her classes on time?

“Bette, what’s wrong?” Clara asked again.

“Kathy, my name is not Bette. It is Lana. Lana Fier! You should know that by now. We’ve been in the same dorm as next door neighbors all semester. Now what time is it? And who moved my fricking clock?"

“Bette! What is wrong with you? You want to have these nightmares and have me run in every hour to comfort you and then act like you don’t know me? Your name is Bette and it has been for the past sixteen years! Snap out of the dream.”

“Pardon me. But I have not been sixteen for five years now! Good night Kathy. I’m tired of the games. Go back to your room. I’m going back to sleep.” Lana spoke into the dark room, annoyed that her alarm clock was missing and that Kathy felt the need to play games in the middle of the night. She fell back onto the bed and into a listless sleep.

Lana awoke in a frenzied state a few hours later. She threw the white duvet covers off of her in a panic and snapped her head around to look at the time. The clock was still missing. She’d never make it to her...wait a minute. This was not her dorm room and her roommate Susan was not there.

As I watched her in her state of confusion I wondered if he knew already. Lana was here and he was now looking in the wrong place.

***

Bette turned her head from one side to the other to avoid the sunlight that made her eyelids light up red from the inside. Brown waves fell over her face helping to block some of the offending light.

She wasn’t in the mood for school and the math test she’d have in Trigonometry. Despite studying she was too tired to think straight.

She forced herself awake, slowly opening her eyes, rubbing the sleep away, and blinking as she tried to focus. Nothing looked familiar. “Where am I? How’d I get here?”

She looked around the cramped room that held a single twin bed with a simple wooden slatted headboard along one wall and another twin bed that matched the one she was in, against the other. Her eyes tried to make sense of what she was seeing before her heart began racing again.

The bed across from her had rumpled turquoise and white floral covers and the pillow had fallen to the side. It now rested there, leaning against the mattress. She definitely wasn’t in a prison. She had the fleeting thought that maybe she’d been kidnapped by someone really twisted but with a sense of style.

Whatever had happened, something was wrong. She promised herself she wasn’t going to scream this time as she looked out the window. Below her and around her looked like the dormitories she’d often seen in movies. She hadn’t woken up after all, she sighed with relief.

She moaned and wondered how deep asleep she must be. She pinched the skin on the back of her forearm hard and winced in pain. It hurt. She wasn’t asleep and she wasn’t where she was supposed to be.

Bette began to panic as she wondered if she’d been kidnapped, drugged, and a number of other scenarios that could possibly explain how she wound up in that foreign place.

It was all unfamiliar. The buildings. The grassy area beneath the window that led to a sidewalk. A park in the distance was already beginning to fill with people carrying their life possessions in bags and baskets. The noises outside and city skyline didn’t make sense. She was on some kind of city college campus.

“No, that’s ridiculous,” I heard her whisper.

She thought again that maybe she was still dreaming. Bette heard her own nervous laugh escape her throat for thinking such a scary and stupid thing - her at a city college campus and not in her Valdosta suburb home. It was laughable.