I jerk awake when I feel someone staring at me. 

I lay there for a minute, putting off the action required to find the answer to my burning question: Is the stare attached to a real person or a fake person? I don’t have any patience for fake people right now.

Naturally, night one in the nut house, and I wake up from a dead sleep because someone is standing over my vulnerable body, because why not? That’s obviously the only way this was going to play out. 

I pull myself up on my elbow and squint through the dark as best as I can, following the sound of heavy mouth breathing. God a mouth breather makes this so much worse.

“Are you okay?” I hear from the fuzzy blackness. 

Uh? “What?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

Silence.

What the fuck is going on. “Why are you in my room?” 

“I could hear you crying. I wanted to come and make sure you were okay.”

I jerk a hand to my cheek and feel that it’s dry. “Oh, I wasn’t crying.”

My eyes are adjusting to the room and I see an outline of a small body that’s holding the feminine voice I’ve been volleying with. She sounds young, very young. And scared. I swing to the edge of the bed before shooting her question back at her.

“Are you okay?”

Long pause. 

“Can I help you at all? Maybe a glass of water?” What do kids need when they’re scared at night? “Milk?”

Silence. To be fair, I wouldn’t want milk either. 

I feel around on the nightstand until I find the switch for the lamp. The light cuts through the space around the bed in a soft glow and not a skull splitting spotlight, and for that I am praising God. My eyes find a girl in front of me who must be barely 100 pounds, drowning in a fluffy blanket with the sharpest cheekbones I’ve ever seen. Her eyes are bloodshot and wide, almost surprised to find me sitting here. In my room.

We stare at each other for a minute, my end full of confusion and I have zero idea what’s happening on hers. 

“Anna, what hole did you crawl into?” I hear a rough voice attempting to whisper from the hallway outside my door. Oh great, more new friends. 

Both of us look towards the sound and then back at each other. 

“Are we pretending we didn’t hear him or are we looking for him?” I’m starting to feel an odd sense of camaraderie for my awkward new guest even though she’s making this conversation difficult, which is slightly frustrating since she is the one who waltzed in here and stared at me while I slept and breathed disgustingly through her mouth. 

I pull to my feet and go to peek out the crack in the door, looking for the voice in hopes he can help with this situation, because I really need some help right now. I see a body walking away from me, towards the stairs leading to the bottom floor and throw out a low “pst”. 

He stops and turns, the low lights strong enough to show a curly mop of hair and broad shoulders. As he walks towards me and the light falls in a way I can see him better, I feel my heart immediately fall out of my ass. He’s cute. Why is he cute? Of course he’s cute. I feel dread creeping in the closer he gets and I know I’m in trouble. I cannot leash in the snapping interest and I am fully aware that this is really not the time in my life to be fantasizing about what could be the greatest love story of my life. This is all based on the hair and the shoulders; I’m a simple woman.

He stops in front of me and we stare at each other for an awkward amount of time, his scrunched brows over his brown eyes searching my confused blue ones.

I feel the girl come up behind me and join in on our huddle and big curly dude latches onto her approach, relief filling his expression.

“Anna, let’s go back to your room and get you into bed okay?”

It’s at this point that I realize it’s surely been over 15 minutes. Where are the people that are supposed to be doing their jobs by checking in on us in an annoying frequency? Seems a bit risky to leave people like us to our own devices and I think the scene playing out in front of me is a perfect example of that.

“Why hasn’t anyone come to check on us? I think she’s been here for a while.” It’s the only thing I can think of to say.

Anna floats past me like a cute, creepy ghost and continues down the hall and I am only certain she’s a real person, and not a fake person, because the new guy is speaking to her too. 

Dude scowls at me like I’m an idiot. “Most of them fall asleep on the night shift.” I feel the shift in his personality when talking to me versus Anna and it hurts a little. I’ve always been a sensitive Sally but we are all in this place together, shouldn’t we be bonding over it? Holding hands and singing about something stupid is surely penciled down in my daily routine. That coupled with my love story to a man that scowls at me like I’m stupid.

He turns away with nothing more to say and I watch as he nudges Anna into the room next to mine with a whispered good night, and he goes into the room to the right of hers and closes his door.

Alrighty then.