Door No. 8

Door Number One - Space (3)

The next day, while she was at the library checking out some reference materials for her assignments, Taylor recognized the now familiar stance and ducked behind a stack of shelves to avoid what promised to be an awkward encounter.

"How did you do on your class assignments?" a dreaded voice whispered from behind her.

"Are you following me around or something?" Taylor protested, irritated that her avoidance scheme had backfired.

"You haven't figured it out yet, have you?" he chuckled. "What time is it?"

"It's four," she said.

"Care to sit down? We need to go over your findings. Did you read the notes I assigned?" he asked.

"You mean the homework you did for me?"

"What homework?" he looked really surprised. "You didn't even look at the notes, did you?" he frowned, displeased, and scrunched his face to bring the glasses back up on the bridge of his nose. "If you think this lackadaisical attitude will allow you to sail through this school you should seriously reconsider your options. For one, you'll definitely not pass my class, I hate slackers. Here, a copy of the notes. Read them! We won't advance to the next door until you do."

He got up before she had a chance to answer, and left behind a stack of papers, both printed and handwritten, highlighted and underlined in several colors.

"'Cause I didn't have enough reading assignments already, without this exercise in crazy," Taylor thought. She glanced over the top paper, covered in a fine print that seemed to incorporate some vaguely mathematical formulas, and decided the guy was not all there, and maybe dangerously so, well with this stalking obsession of his, and decided that she should go to the student counsel at her earliest convenience and ask for a room change.

Days passed, and in the rush of classes, assignments and social activities, the doors, the notes and her potentially unstable neighbor fell to the wayside. She was kind of surprised when he didn't show up at four to disturb whatever activity she happened to be engaged in at the time, and she was even more surprised to notice that the door in the wall between the rooms was gone. She thought she might have dreamed or hallucinated the whole thing, felt glad that the uncomfortable occurrences were a thing of the past and focused on her school work. After a while she found the notes which she had mixed up with those from one of her biology classes, thought they were part of that class syllabus and studied them in detail.

She was kind of surprised as of why she had to learn about the folding of hyperspace and wave harmonics in the middle of a course on phenotypic plasticity and polyphenism, but because she had taken the criticism about her lack of discipline to heart, she did her best to cover the material, even if she hardly understood any of it. She just hoped that whatever this was about would not show up on the midterm, filled in the questionnaire to the best of her abilities and called it done.

The following morning the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was the damned door on the wall in front of her.

"Oh, God, please make it go away," she closed her eyes really tight, in the hope that when she opened them again the cursed door will be gone. Fifteen minutes later, it was still there, so she avoided staring at it the best she could, got ready for school and spent every spare minute with her friend Christine and her latest gossip.

On her way back to the dorm she rolled her fingertips over the little shard of concrete in her pocket and wondered what if any of that experience had been real, and if any if it had been, what kind of fool finds herself in Sydney in the blink of an eye and spends her entire time there crying and panicking, instead of looking around and enjoying the view. She vowed that the next time she found herself accidentally stranded in Zanzibar, or Phuket, or some other equally exotic destination, she wasn't going to repeat that mistake.