Death isn't an option

Chapter Five

Professor Caldwell’s voice is soft enough that you almost have to lean in to hear her.

Which is a problem, because I’m doing everything I can not to feel present.

“—and for years, psychologists assumed fight and flight were the only instinctive responses to threat,” she says, pacing slowly in front of the whiteboard. “But we know now that’s incomplete. Who can tell me the third?”

A girl in the front raises her hand. “Freeze?”

“Exactly.” Caldwell smiles. “Freeze. In some situations, the safest thing your nervous system can think to do is lock up. Make yourself small. Wait for the danger to pass.”

My pen stills on my notebook.

The room smells like dry erase marker and too many bodies in too small a space. Late afternoon light slants in through the tall windows on my right, painting everything in gold. Each desk is filled; the low hum of laptop fans is a constant undercurrent.

“And the trouble,” Caldwell continues, “is that people often blame themselves afterward. ‘I should have run. I should have fought back. I did nothing.’ But ‘nothing’ is doing something. Freeze is not a moral failing. It’s a survival strategy.”

The word freeze sits in my chest like a stone.

I see headlights. Hear the long, warped wail of a horn. Feel the way my feet rooted to the crosswalk two nights ago while a car hurtled toward me. The familiar, hateful paralysis.

It’s like she’s narrating my worst moments out loud.

“Research shows,” she says, “that freeze is especially likely when the threat is sudden and overwhelming, or when the person has felt powerless in previous situations.”

My fingers tighten around my pen until my knuckles ache.

You don’t know anything about me, I’d told Knox.

Apparently my psych professor knows the broad strokes.

Around me, people type. Someone raises a hand to ask if “playing dead” counts as freeze. Caldwell nods, elaborates—some animals literally shut down to survive. People do, too, in their own ways.

I write nothing. My notebook has a few lines from the beginning of class and then a flat line where my brain checked out.

Caldwell walks back toward the front of the room, the heels of her sensible boots clicking softly. She writes three words on the board: FIGHT. FLIGHT. FREEZE.

“For Monday,” she says, underlining them, “I want you to write a short reflection. One to two pages. Think about a time your sense of safety changed. It doesn’t have to be dramatic. It could be as simple as realizing you don’t like walking alone at night. Or it could be a major event. If you’d rather not write about yourself, you can write about a character from a book or film who went through a change in their understanding of safety. But be honest with yourself about which parts of the story feel familiar.”

The class groans softly, a half-hearted chorus of complaint.

My stomach drops.

A major event.

The crash flickers across the inside of my skull again—metal folding like tinfoil, my mother’s hand going slack in mine, the scar that cuts across my chest like punctuation. The near-miss two nights ago slams into it, fresh and sharp.

If you’d rather not write about yourself, you can write about a character.

I already know which “character” I’ll pick. She’ll look suspiciously like me.

“Alright, that’s it for today.” Caldwell claps her hands once. “I’ll be in my office for the next hour if anyone wants to talk through the prompt. Please don’t wait until Sunday night to start this.”

Chairs scrape. Laptops snap shut. The spell of collective attention breaks as everyone shifts into that restless end-of-class shuffle.

I shove my notebook and pen into my bag and stand slowly, stretching the kink out of my neck. My scar pulls a little under my shirt; I rub absentmindedly at it.

“June?”

I look up.

Caldwell is by the door, one hand on the frame, watching the river of students file out. Her eyes flick to me and hold for a beat. “Can you hang back a moment?”

The phrase makes something cold curl in my stomach. It should be fine. Professors do this all the time. It’s probably about the reflection, or attendance, or—

“Sure,” I say, forcing my voice to stay neutral.

I wait until the room empties. The buzz of hallway conversation seeps in through the open door. When the last student drifts past, Caldwell closes it most of the way, leaving it cracked.

She props a hip on one of the front desks, arms folding lightly, posture open. Her hair is streaked with gray at the temples, her glasses perched on her nose. She looks like every kind, tired academic woman I’ve ever met.

“First week treating you okay?” she asks.

“It’s… fine,” I say. “Busy.”

“Busy can be good,” she says. “Keeps the mind from looping.”

The way she says it makes me wonder how many looping minds she’s seen.

She tilts her head. “How are you finding the material so far?”

“It’s interesting,” I say.

She smiles faintly. “You’re a very observant student. You take everything in.”

“I take notes,” I correct.

“You take the room in,” she says, gently. “You sit near the aisle. You always know who’s behind you when the door opens. You flinch at sirens and loud laughter. Today, when we talked about freeze responses, you went very still.”

Heat crawls up my neck. I fight the urge to cross my arms, to fold in.

“I’m not—” I start.

“I’m not asking you to explain,” she says quickly, palms up. “You don’t owe me that. I just want you to know that if this class ever feels like too much—or if it touches something you’d rather not stir up on your own—I’m happy to help you connect with resources. Counseling. Accommodations. Even just talking through an assignment so it doesn’t feel like a trap.”

The word trap lands a little too accurately.

“I’m okay,” I say. “Really. I mean, I’m tired. But… okay.”

Her eyes search my face for a moment. She must see something she likes, or at least something she can’t pry at without pushing too hard.

“Alright,” she says. “Just remember: you’re not a case study. You’re a person. You don’t have to turn everything you’ve survived into homework.”

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. I didn’t think anyone noticed that reflex—my tendency to turn myself into an academic problem instead of a human mess.

“Some things are easier to look at from the outside,” I say.

“Of course they are,” she agrees. “Just don’t forget you’re on the inside.”

She reaches to her desk, plucks up a small card, and offers it to me. Campus counseling info. Office hours.

“If that changes,” she says, “I’m here. And June?”

“Yeah?”

“Be careful with the stories you tell yourself about what you deserve,” she says. “They’re harder to rewrite than any paper.”

My throat goes tight.

“Have a good evening,” I manage.

“You too,” she says.

I tuck the card into my bag like it’s a live wire and step into the hallway.

Students stream past, arguing about dinner plans and weekend parties. The normalness of it all grates. My skin feels too thin, like if someone brushes against me wrong I’ll spill out.

“Hey.” Ian appears at my elbow, falling into step like he’s been waiting. “Caldwell kept you after? You in trouble already?”

“She just wanted to talk about the assignment,” I say.

He gives me a look that says he doesn’t entirely buy it but isn’t going to push. “You hungry? We could hit the dining hall. Or I can bribe you with takeout if you promise not to psychoanalyze me at the table.”

“Tempting,” I say. “I think I need… air first. I’ll probably just walk for a bit and then head back.”

His brow furrows. “You sure? I can walk with you.”

“I’m not crossing any streets today,” I say, aiming for a joke. It comes out flatter than I mean it to. “I’ll text you when I get in.”

He hesitates. “June—”

“I’m fine,” I cut in, maybe too sharp. Then I soften it with, “Really. I just need to move my legs. You should go eat before you get hangry and ruin some freshman’s day.”

His mouth twitches. “I do not get hangry.”

“You get extremely hangry,” I say. “It’s documented.”

He sighs, defeated. “Text me,” he says again. “If you don’t, I’m coming to your room and eating your snacks as punishment.”

“Rude,” I say. “But fair.”

He squeezes my shoulder briefly and peels off toward the exit.

I shoulder my bag and turn the other way, toward the stairwell that leads down to the side doors. The hallway feels longer on the way out. The late light through the windows is softer now, the sky outside shading toward lavender.

As I pass one of the big windows, something outside catches my eye.

A man stands near the base of the building, just off the main path. Phone at his ear, posture relaxed but watchful. Dark shirt, dark pants, shoulders too straight to be a student’s.

My chest tightens.

Knox.

He’s half in shadow, the fading light catching on the angles of his face. He nods at something I can’t hear, says a few words into the phone, then falls silent again, listening.

There’s no obvious reason for him to be here. This isn’t near the student center or the admin building or anything that screams security incident. It’s just a psych classroom building at the end of a long Tuesday.

My hand hovers over the glass without touching it.

As if he feels it, his head lifts.

His gaze cuts to the window, straight to where I stand.

We’re separated by glass and thirty feet, but it doesn’t matter. The eye contact hits with the same force it did in the auditorium, on the quad, in the bar, in the street. Like somebody tying another knot in a rope I didn’t ask for.

I should duck my head. Pretend I don’t see him. Pretend we’re two strangers occupying the same geography.

Instead, for one long second, I look back.

His expression doesn’t change. No surprise, no smile. Just that steady, assessing study, like he’s checking a variable he’s been tracking.

Then I remember myself.

I drop my eyes to my bag, fussing with the strap. By the time I look up again, his call is over. His phone is in his pocket. He’s walking away, cutting across the lawn toward another building.

Coincidence, I tell myself. He has contracts all over campus. He’s probably coordinating something boring, like camera maintenance or fire drills.

Funny how it never feels like coincidence when his orbit and mine intersect.

I push out through the side door into the cooling air.

The main walkway is busy with people heading toward the dining hall. The noise is too much—laughter, footsteps, someone playing music through a speaker. It should feel safe. Safety in numbers, all that.

I don’t want safety in numbers.

I want quiet.

The path that skirts the edge of the campus woods is quieter. I know because I walked it earlier this week in daylight, noting the lamps and the curves. It shaves a few minutes off the trip to my dorm, cutting behind the science buildings and along the treeline.

Everyone says not to walk alone at night.

Everyone says be careful.

Caldwell’s voice, Ian’s, Knox’s—all layered on top of each other.

I hesitate at the fork where the main path splits. The busier route glows under bright lampposts, full of people. The side path is narrower, stretching off toward a darker strip of trees.

You’re being dramatic, I tell myself. This is a college campus, not a horror movie. The worst thing you’re likely to encounter is a skunk.

Still, my feet stay planted.

I think about Knox’s hands on me in the street, the way he said you don’t get to gamble with your life like that like it was an order, not an observation. About Caldwell’s careful eyes. About Ian’s worry.

I’m so tired of being handled.

Of everyone else acting like my choices are a bomb they’re waiting to defuse.

“If you keep wrapping yourself in bubble wrap, you might as well not be alive at all,” I mutter.

No one hears. No one answers.

I turn toward the trees.

The farther I get from the main path, the more the sounds of campus thin. The chatter fades, replaced by the chirp of insects and the distant rustle of leaves. Lamp posts still line the sidewalk, but they’re spaced farther apart, little islands of light with longer shadows between.

On my right, the woods rise up—a wall of trunks and undergrowth, dark and dense. I can’t see far past the first line of trees. The spaces between them are black, like doorways into another world.

My scar starts to ache. Not sharp, not like the car—more like a headache localized behind bone. A dull, insistent throb.

“Great timing,” I mutter, pressing my palm flat over it through my shirt.

The air feels… wrong.

Thicker, like walking into humidity after air-conditioning. The fine hairs on my arms lift. My senses spike, everything too loud and too quiet at once.

I take another step.

It’s subtle, but I feel it: a change in pressure, like walking over a threshold. One step I’m on campus, thinking about homework and dining hall hours. The next, I’m not entirely sure I’m in the same place.

It’s still the same concrete path. Same trees. Same lamppost buzzing quietly. But beneath all of that, there’s something else. A sense of an unseen border I’ve just crossed.

My vision glitches.

For a moment, I see not just the trees, but fine strands of something stretching between them—light or energy or whatever my stressed-out brain wants to call it. A net woven through the trunks, shimmering faintly in the edges of my sight. A few threads reach toward me, curious, tasting.

I blink hard.

The threads vanish. The woods go back to being just… dark.

“You are exhausted,” I tell myself. “You are having stress hallucinations. Congratulations.”

I speed up, heart ticking faster.

Behind me, the distant sounds of campus life are almost gone. Ahead, the path curves, disappearing briefly from sight behind a thicker cluster of trees before looping back toward the dorms.

“You’re fine,” I whisper. “You’re on a sidewalk. There are lights. This is stupid.”

Something growls.

The sound rolls out of the trees to my right, low and deep. It’s not loud, but I feel it in my bones, like the vibration of a passing train or thunder in the distance.

I stop dead.

The hair on the back of my neck stands up. My grip on my bag strap tightens until my fingers hurt.

“Hello?” I say, hating how thin my voice sounds.

Silence.

Then another growl. Closer. Answered by a third, further back, an echo.

My brain scrambles for explanations. Dogs. Big dogs. Two of them, maybe three. Somebody’s off-leash pets. Coyotes.

Coyotes don’t growl like that, a cold part of me thinks. Not that low. Not that… intent.

One of the lampposts flickers.

I force myself to turn my head slowly toward the tree line.

At first I see nothing but shapes of trunks and leaves, the dark mass of undergrowth. My eyes adjust a little more. Shadows resolve.

Then I see them.

Eyes.

Two sets, staring back at me from between the trees.

They catch the lamplight and reflect it, too bright and glassy. Too high off the ground for a normal dog. Too far apart to be one animal. One pair slightly higher than the other, both fixed in my direction.

My breath hitches. My heart forgets how to beat and then overcompensates.

“Easy,” I say, though I’m not sure who I’m talking to. “Nice… whatever you are.”

The eyes blink. When they open again, they’re closer.

Shapes detach from the darkness around them—massive forms that move wrong for humans and too large for any dog I’ve ever seen on campus. For a second they’re low to the ground, then they shift, rising, blurring the line between four legs and two.

Every instinct in me starts screaming.

Move. Run.

My feet finally listen.

I stumble backward, nearly tripping over my own bag. My muscles feel sluggish, like they’re three seconds behind my brain.

The growl swells, no longer low and distant but right there, vibrating the air, vibrating my ribs.

The shapes break fully out of the tree line, surging toward the path, toward me.

I turn and bolt, the sound of their pounding pursuit crashing through the twilight behind me.