Even if you asked him today, Tom would be unable to properly explain what happened to them, even though he did replay the scene countless times in his head.

The four of them cut through the cafeteria to get to the admin area quicker and, there, a group of other students was there too. Tom knew one of them, a boy that lived down his street, a junior maybe, the girl looked vaguely familiar, a senior, he was pretty sure, she might even have been in one of his classes, and he didn’t know the last one. Whether it was because it was a prospective student or because they had never interacted, Tom couldn’t have said. He didn’t particularly pay attention to them at the time.

Just as they were about to leave the room – and get to the promised cakes – when Tom heard the girl laugh, and it was a clear, happy sound that caught his attention for whatever reason, and he turned around.

That’s when it happened. In movies, there is a clear passage from one world to the next. People go through a door and end up in a different place, they fall in a rabbit hole or a looking glass, there is some kind of vortex… something.

And Tom wouldn’t say that nothing happened, just nothing spectacular or even tangible. The room… seemed weird. It was perfectly normal, but it also wasn’t. The light was odd. Slightly too blue. Or maybe too green, he couldn’t tell. He wasn’t even sure he wasn’t making it up.

The younger boy of the other group, the one Tom didn’t know, looked around a little puzzled. Did he notice the light change too?

Tom blinked – on purpose, to shake off that odd feeling – but things weren’t back to normal when he opened his eyes: he was now alone in the middle of a forest.

It would be hard to describe the feeling of panic that washed over him at that moment. His first thought was obviously not that he had instantly been transported to a forest, instead, he thought that something was wrong with his brain. Was he seeing things or had he just forgotten a chunk of time. He blinked again, and he was back in the school cafeteria. That reassured him. Not entirely, because clearly, something had happened that wasn’t normal, but at least it was a fleeting thing. A temporary thing that he could hope would not come back.

But that would be a completely different story and of course, on his next blink, he was back in the forest. As he looked around in panic, though, and he realized that he wasn’t alone. Edwin, Claire, and Maya were with him.

For a moment, none of them moved, they just kept looking at the forest, then each other, then back, on and on, eyes filled with a feeling midway between incomprehension and terror. Yet neither of them managed to react in any way. Some realities are just too big for the brain to handle and this definitely was beyond the realm of possibilities. It wasn’t even plausible.

Tom doesn’t know how long they would have stayed like this, just looking at each other in this unknown place, if they hadn’t heard the scream.

Not far, just behind a bunch of trees that he wouldn’t have been able to name – although for reasons other than he thought at the time. Now let’s face it: when you are in an unknown environment, and you hear a scream, you should flee. They did not do that and they ran toward the sound. And there they were: the other three students from the cafeteria. They hadn’t been attacked or anything, they simply had been the first ones to react.

For a fraction of a second, they seemed relieved to see someone else, someone familiar, but that faded as soon as they properly looked at them. Probably because they saw the reflection of their own feelings in someone else’s eyes.

Out of the seven teenagers, not one knew what they were doing there, what was happening, or what their next step should be. That, at least, was obvious.

“What’s happening?” the girl asked and no one had an answer for her. “Where are we?” That remained unanswered too.

“That’s not the most important question,” Ed said.

“Well I beg to differ,” Tom replied. “I think she asked very valid questions.”

“Agreed but those are not the most pressing ones.”

“Fine, then what is the most pressing question?”

“What do we do now?”

And Tom had to admit that he had a point. Perhaps at this stage survival and an action plan were more important than a few answers, even if that would have helped him stop feeling like he was losing his sanity.

“Are we talking about a real forest or a metaphorical one?” Doctor Stanford asks him.

“What is a metaphorical forest?” Thomas asks back, ever refusing to answer direct questions.

She tries anyway: “I suppose I am asking you if you really went to a forest after leaving the school or if this is a less scary name for another place.”

“Such as what? A scary basement?” he asks, a little sarcastically.

“I don’t know. Was the forest a scary basement? Or were you actually lost in the woods?”

“I wasn’t anywhere. This is just a hypothetical story, remember?”

She sighs. Fine, she’ll put the pieces together on her own. The nearest forest is at least six miles away so it is unlikely that six teenagers – five teenagers and a pre-teen, technically – just randomly walked there, unless they had a plan. Could it be that they decided to do something there? She makes a note to check if there really was cake given out at the open house because it might be another clue from the boy. Instead of getting caked down the hall, did they get to the woods or near it for some reason or other? But what? Two of the boys lived close to each other, three of the teenagers were seniors, but other than that, there were no obvious links between them.

Drugs, maybe? But how did Maya get involved? Not that Doctor Standford hadn’t seen children addicted to substances before, but that didn’t especially fit here. For either of them, actually. Apart from John, maybe.

Someone might have taken to the woods. Were they willing or were they coerced?

There is also the very real possibility that there hadn’t been any forest and that she needs to see through the metaphor. He mentioned a basement and it might just have been a random comment but she cannot just dismiss it either.

The only thing she knows for sure is that wherever they end up, however they got there, they were scared.

“Alright,” she says after putting down a few notes, “what did they do, then?”