Batting her delicate eyelids, Lily Nagashino came back to the world of the living. Her eyes focused, reality set in, and she immediately remembered her dream. And what a great dream it was! She quickly and stealthily patted her crotch to see if any wetness seeped through. Nope. She was in the clear. She saw Emily across the room, nose deep in her book.
"What time is it?" Lily asked Emily.
"Quarter 'til," Emily said without turning around. Lily sat up on the couch, making her book fall off of her chest and onto the floor. She shook her head groggily.
"Quarter 'til what?"
"Quarter 'til Nine."
Lily stood up. She had slept for about an hour while attempting to study. Freud looked up at her disapprovingly from his spot on the back cover of the book.
"Shut up," she told him, picking her book off of the floor.
"What?" Emily asked, still reading.
"Nothing." Lily threw her book on the couch, reserving her study spot for later. She was pretty hungry for some snacks, so she left the dorm's study room, went to her room and stole some of her roommate's lychees. She topped it off by consuming some graham crackers, and then decided to go back to the study room and try and stay awake this time.
On her way back, Matthew poked his head out of his room into the hallway. He called to her, "Hey, Lily."
Lily turned around. "Hey, Matt, what's up?" She hadn't talked to Matthew much, but she hung out with his roommate pretty often.
"Nothing much." She walked to his room.
"Is Kurt here?"
"Naw, he went out to eat, but he'll probably be back soon."
"What are you doing tonight?"
"You know, studying and stuff." He had spent the last hour downloading porn on his computer.
"Yeah, me too." She walked into the room, looking around. "Freud sucks so much."
"I don't know, I think he's just misunderstood," he reasoned.
"Don't you think the whole id, ego, superego thing seems... too easy of a construct?"
"Well, he's not trying to define the only way to look at a mind. It's a paradigm useful for psychology. Or it was supposed to be."
"Okay," she relented, "but the part about children's sexual stages..."
"You mean... you women don't all have penis envy?" She laughed disapprovingly.
"You're horrible."
"I'm not so bad." She looked at him. He leaned against his bed in the tiny room, avoiding her eyes. She wondered if he liked her.
He looked at her. She was a beautiful woman. It was curious how American she sounded and acted; yet she looked so exotic with her Asian eyes and amber skin. She even had chopsticks in her hair with red Chinese lettering running down it. Wait, she wasn't Chinese.
"Hey let me show you something," he said.
"What?"
"Okay, first close your eyes and put your hands behind your back." She looked at him in disbelief. "C'mon."
"I don't know if I trust you," she told him, following his commands, but half-squinting out of one eye.
"No, this is cool." She closed her eyes, knowing that he was definitely into her. But she wasn't that into him. He was very strange. He walked behind her and she felt her hands tighten together as he tightened a black plastic cable tie around her wrists.
"Hey, what are you doing?" She opened her eyes.