I turned the key and opened the door to my dorm. My roommate had yet to arrive. I laid my backpack on the first bed, left of where you walk in, and took a deep breath. I closed my eyes. Relief rushed through my body faster than the Aerosmith ride at Disney. I finally got away. I was free. I could go by a different name if I wanted to. No one from my past could find me. I started to silently weep.

Once my composure was regained, I unpacked my few belongings, like putting my drawers in the dressers’ drawers, and putting some books on a shelf above the antique microwave. I opened my phone’s notes section and jotted down a reminder to get a single burner, as there was no stovetop in the dorm, and one cannot live by microwave alone. I then looked up the closest bar. I was anxious to start anew, be anew, and look at what was new. I heard the girls at Pomona College were way better than those Camden County College. I’m sure that’s not all California had over New Jersey, either. I was also pretty positive that being a new twenty-one year old college transfer sitting at a bar on move-in week could make me look cooler than I was.

The bar was empty. Most move-ins were freshman who couldn’t drink, and most upperclassmen lived off campus or dropped out, or so the bartender told me. I had a few pints in silence, not even able to try out a fake name on the barkeep since he asked for my ID when I walked in. After my few pints I walked back towards my dorm. I noticed a food truck with a decent line, and decided I should eat. I waited in line, and ate the, what turned out to be, overpriced tacos by a middle aged white woman on a park bench. After discarding the trash of the trash, the walk to my dorm was about twenty minutes.

When I got to my dorm, it was about eight at night. I turned the key and opened the door to my dorm. I was greeted with snoring. My roommate was in the bed to the right of where you walk in, facing the wall. I must have just missed crossing paths with him earlier. He hadn’t unpacked his bags before passing out. I found this strange, but I wasn’t going to wake the stranger up. I figured I would introduce myself in the morning. I put my headphones to cancel out his snoring, and read a book until falling asleep myself around eleven.

I woke up to the smell of coffee. My roommate must have brought a coffee pot, I thought. Clutch. I sat up in bed and wiped my eyes open. No one was there. There was a coffee pot, half full of coffee, but no roommate. One of his bags was gone, as well, and nothing was unpacked. “Gym”, I muttered to myself, “could be at the gym.” I swung my around the side of the bed and shuffled over to the coffee pot. There was two mugs sitting next to it. One white, which was clearly dirty and used by my roommate, and one black, left for me, I assumed, and clean. I stared at the mugs, feeling a sense of hiding-in-plain-sight-messaging in the colors. But, that was silly. I moved three thousand miles away, cut my hair, lost weight. No one knew me here. I was finally safe. Those are common mug colors.

I poured some coffee into the black mug and brought it back to bed with me. I opened my book, took a sip, and collapsed onto the floor.

I couldn’t move. My eyes were the only part of my body that I could control. My fingers, arms, legs, toes, mouth, all immobile. I frantically looked around the room, not that much was visible from the floor. The coffee started flowing slowly into view, coming towards my face at a snails pace. Then, the door started to slowly open. I saw a pair of white Adidas shoes walk up to me. I couldn’t look up enough to see past the ankles.

“Got you, fucker.” I heard his voice say. My heart sank. “I got a lot of money from when my father died,” he continued, “but, this little adventure has made me spend a great deal of it. Flight to California, enrollment in college, bribing the powers at be to let me be your roommate. Worth every penny.” I tried to scream, but couldn’t. My eyes jolted side to side, picking up the slack for the rest of my paralyzed body. It was Shane. He had found me, and quickly.

“I missed you.” Shane said, slowly kneeling down. His face was now in my view. It looked aged by ten years. He picked me up and sat me on my bed. He grabbed a chair and sat in front of me. “Did you come here to escape me?” He said as if he was a child. “You know I wouldn’t be able to live without you. You’re so silly.” He leaned forward and kissed my motionless mouth. Heat shot through me like fire ants. “It will wear off,” he said, “in about an hour when I’m done with you.”

I had been raped by Shane before, often. All through high school, and both years in college. That never got easier, but it wasn’t anywhere near new. What was new was being an inanimate object that is conscious. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t do anything to stop how rough it got. I had to feel and watch my body being torn apart without being able to do anything about it. My bed was covered in my blood - half from my mouth, half from the sodomy. I had to lay in the blood, feel the throbbing, until whatever he put in the coffee finally started to wear off. He went down to the showers when it did. I sat shaking for a few minutes, then decided that if running didn’t work, I could accept my fate, or change it forever.

I grabbed the coffee pot that still had a little bit of contaminated coffee in it. I smashed the pot on the floor and picked up the biggest and sharpest shard of glass. I laid back down in my blood, like I was before, just now I had a shard of glass between my wrist and torso. I waited like this for about fifteen long minutes, until I heard a key go into the knob. He entered the room, just a towel around his waist and white flip flops on his fat feet. He looked at me. I tried not to move a single muscle. He smiled a warm smile - a smile that couldn’t hurt anyone. He started getting changed facing away from me.

“Sorry, it’s taking a little longer to wear off than I thought it would.” He said. He came back over to me and leaned in for another kiss. When he closed his eyes I grabbed the glass and in one motion jammed it into the side of his neck. I plunged it deep, and wiggled it up and down jaggedly, in hopes of cutting his jugular like it was the Join, Or Die snake. Blood was squirting in four different directions, two of which landed on the bed, joining our blood together on the mattress. Shane collapsed on top on me, gasping with a wide open mouth. I pushed him to the floor, on top of the coffee stain.

Students rushed the room, but I barely noticed what they said or did. The world was moving so slowly as I sit on the bed, holding the bloody glass. Apparently there was police, there was an ambulance, there was handcuffs. I noticed none of it. All I noticed, was that I was free. And this time, it was real.