Last summer, I worked as an assistant for my college’s housing office. When all the students moved out of their dorm rooms, my boss asked me to check each room and make a list of any egregious damage—destroyed carpet or a demolished wall, for example. Armed with a walkie-talkie and a universal key, I began my task. I’d spent the previous week filing away returned dorm keys in a windowless room and was excited to do something different.
1,240 rooms needed to be checked. I knocked before entering each room, scared that at least one person had mixed up the move-out date. I started with the fancy, expensive dorm building and had fun looking at the random things people left behind: half-finished homework, balloons, an occasional television. In the fancy dorms, I recorded no damage.
With only a few hours left in my shift, I decided to finish the day by looking through the “party” dorm building, which has a reputation for being rowdy. I thought I might find some interesting damage. I opened the first dorm door. The floor was littered with empty wine coolers, but there was no damage to the floor or walls. The other dorms on the floor were surprisingly clean.
I checked the time and decided to check one more floor of the party dorm before my shift ended in an hour. I wish I had returned to the housing office and hadn’t unlocked another door that day. But maybe that wouldn’t have helped. Maybe she would have found me anyway.
When I knocked on the first door on the floor, someone grunted in response, the sound people make when they're first waking up. It was 3 p.m.
“Hi, this is the housing office,” I said. “Do you have special authorization to stay in this dorm past the move-out date?”
“Sorry, I can’t hear you very well. Could you repeat that?” said the girl on the other side of the door.
I repeated myself as loud as I could. She told me she couldn’t hear me again, even though I could hear her perfectly through the thin dorm door, and she spoke at a normal volume. She asked me to open the door. I thought she might be partially deaf and needed to read my lips.
I opened the door with my key and peeked my head in. Inside the dorm, a girl with dark tousled hair and light eyes stared at me from her bed. The dorm was clean and nicely decorated. She had posters on her walls, trinkets lining her desk, and the bed was covered in throw pillows. I repeated my script about being authorized to stay past the move-out date.
“Oh, um, sorry,” she said. “I thought move out was next week.”
“Yeah, my boss said someone always gets the date mixed up. Let me ask him what we should do,” I said. I shut the door behind me, eager to stop feeling like I was invading the girl’s space. I pressed the talk button on my walkie-talkie.
“Hi, this is Amber,” I said to the radio. “I’m doing rounds of dorms and found an unauthorized student in room 200 in the Keyes Residence Hall. She said she got the move-out date mixed up. What should I tell her?”
“Tell her she needs to start packing right now. We’ll send an official representative from the housing office to escort her from the dorm by 5 p.m.,” my boss said. He sounded a bit angry. It’s a serious transgression to stay past the move-out date, even if it’s an honest mistake. I told him I would tell the girl this.
I knocked on her door again. There was no answer. I knocked again and again. Maybe I shouldn’t have unlocked the door the second time, but I was scared something might have happened to her.
“Hello?” I half-yelled when I entered the room. All the girl’s stuff was still in the room, but the girl was gone. I started to look for her: in the closet, under the bed, under the desk, behind the curtain. The room was very small, and I looked for a long time.
Maybe I shouldn’t have done this either, but I started to look through her things. It was all so normal. Freshman chemistry textbooks and a sorority tote bag hanging from her desk chair. Then, I looked at the Polaroid photos on the wall. Lots of people make collage walls in their dorms with photos of their friends. At first, the photos looked like any other photos. Then I looked closer.
In the middle of the grid of polaroids, there was a photo of me. The girl I’d just seen on the bed had looked very similar to me, and I tried to convince myself it was a photo of her. But it was unmistakably me: my eyebrow piercings, my bangs, my nose and lips and chin. The photo only showed my face, but it looked like it was me asleep in my bed. I noticed more photos of me on the wall, interspersed between photos of people at parties. Me studying at the library, my hand against my striped bedsheet, the back of my head during a lecture. I quickly returned to the housing office. I didn’t tell them about the photos when I got back. It felt like I might’ve imagined it. But as the months go by, the memory of those photos becomes more solid and true in my mind. That was me in those photos.
The next day at work, I asked my boss if they moved the girl out of room 200. He told me it was strange; there was no girl in the room. I asked about her things. He said there was nothing in the room at all. It was one of the most well-cleaned out dorms he’d ever seen. And they checked the other dorms, just in case I had the room number wrong. The whole building was empty. She must have moved out before they got there, he suggested.
I tried to convince myself that what I thought happened did not happen, but when the fall semester started, I was looking over my shoulder constantly and checking the locks on the doors and windows of my off-campus apartment. I told my friends about it, and some laughed and said I must have imagined it. Others urged me to tell the campus police I had a stalker. In the end, I did nothing. I hoped that I had imagined it. It was too strange.
By the time final exams started, I was almost convinced that what happened in the dorm room that summer was a heat-induced hallucination. They stop running the air conditioning in some dorm buildings when the students move out.
One night in December, while I was studying for an exam in the library, I didn’t even look over my shoulder before I entered the bathroom.
It was around 4 a.m. Lots of people stay late at the library studying around that time, but I was one of the last people there. I was playing a game on my phone while sitting on the toilet, trying to extend the time before I needed to go back to studying. Something flesh colored on the ground moved my attention away from my phone screen.
A pair of bare feet on the bathroom floor. My eyes moved up the body. Through the crack in the door of the bathroom stall, I saw a light-colored eye. As soon as the eye saw me looking at it, the person scurried away, taking short, quick steps. I heard them open the bathroom door and shut it behind them. I ran from the bathroom without washing my hands. I didn’t grab my backpack or laptop from where I’d left them in the library. It would be there the next day.
I ran home with my head perpetually turned around. No one was following me. Once I got home, I promised myself I would report a stalker. I was fine until I was on the same block as my apartment. Then she was behind me. Walking fast.
I stopped turning around once I made it to the front door of my apartment building. Just focused on unlocking the door, opening it slightly, slipping inside as fast as I could, and slamming the door behind me. When I looked up, she was on the other side, clawing at the glass door with one hand and rapidly rattling the handle with the other.
I ran to my apartment and locked the door. I called the police. They didn’t find anyone outside the door. The next day, I filed a report with the campus police. They did a search, and a football player lived in room 200 last year. They weren’t able to find a girl in the student body who matched my description. They even reviewed the library security footage from the night she chased me home. They said that I entered the bathroom and exited the bathroom without anyone entering or exiting while I was inside.
I haven’t seen the girl since, but when I went home for Christmas this year, I told my mother the whole story. After, she showed me a photo I’ve never seen: me at the hospital, swaddled beside another baby. We look like twins, I told my mom. You were twins, she told me. I used to have a twin sister, but she died in the hospital. Low birth weight. My mom never told me. Maybe she didn’t want it to be real either.
My mom said my sister might be back. She might be jealous. Or she might miss me. I look over my shoulder all the time now.