Out of Nowhere

The first time something went missing Mary was sound asleep on the top bunk in her dorm room. It was the middle of the night and she woke up shivering, covered only by a thin cotton sheet. Her roommate liked to keep the room cold, even in the middle of winter, which was normally fine. Mary’s mother had given her a thick, blue comforter as a parting gift for her first year away at college.

It was not so fine though, when that comforter had disappeared into thin air. In her sleep addled state Mary assumed it had fallen over the railing and landed on the floor several feet below her. She groggily grabbed her winter coat, which she had hung on the top bunk’s bedpost the previous evening. She curled up in a small ball under it and quickly fell back asleep.

In the morning however, the big down comforter was not on the floor. Her roommate’s classes started an hour earlier then her own, so she assumed Kathy had found it and folded it up for her. Her roommate was very thoughtful and Mary considered herself lucky to have been assigned to room with another young lady who kept her spaces clean and was as dedicated to her studies as she was. They were both single children and had never had to share a room with anyone before. Mary was grateful that the transition to dorm life had gone so smoothly, especially after the warnings during orientation.

During that meeting, the residence hall director had explained that everyone should sit down with their new roommates and make a list of rules and guidelines that they would both agree to follow. He had explained that each floor had a resident advisor that lived in a room on their hall and that they could go to him or her with any problems they had, but that they should first try to resolve disagreements on their own.

Mary and Kathy had never gotten into a fight. They rarely disagreed about anything. They joked that they were secretly twin sisters because they shared so many of the same hobbies and interests. They often finished each other’s sentences and they both even liked the same foods. They would listen to the other young women on the hall arguing and giggle. Compared to them, they found the other ladies very immature.

Mary checked the closet first. Her clothes were neatly arranged by color and length on matching daisy yellow hangers. Kathy’s clothes hung beside them, arranged in the exact same way on sunny lemon hangers. Their extra shoes lined the bottom of the closet in two tight, even rows. The shelves above the clothes were mostly empty, except for a few yellow hat boxes that both women used to store their lose odds and ends. There was no blue comforter.

Mary glanced around the room. It wasn’t on either of their desks or on the small table that held their microwave and mini-fridge. It wasn’t on Kathy’s bed. She leaned down and looked under the bottom bunk thinking maybe it had gotten kicked underneath somehow, but it wasn’t there either.

The chest of drawers they shared seemed much two narrow to contain the big, poofy bedding without a lot of squishing and shoving, but it was the only other place it could be. Mary opened each drawer one at a time starting on the left side. She felt a bit guilty when she got to the drawers on the right. On move in day they had decided those ones would belong to Kathy. Mary felt like she was invading the other woman’s privacy, but there wasn’t anywhere else in the room where it could be hidden. As expected though, she didn’t find the comforter shoved into them either.

Mary got dressed and ready for her first class of the morning. On her way out she stopped by the laundry in the basement. Maybe Kathy had found the comforter on the floor and had put it in the wash for her. Kathy was always sweeping the floor. She had a preoccupation with it being dirty, even when Mary couldn’t see a spec of dust on it.

It was reasonable to think Kathy might believe the comforter was in need of a wash after having spent the night on the floor. But all that Mary found in the laundry room were three women loudly arguing about lost socks. She quickly left before they could turn the interrogation toward her. She didn’t want to be late to class.

When Mary got back to her room that evening, she found Kathy was already there and hunched over a text book with a look of deep concentration on her face. Mary hated to interrupt her, but her bed was still conspicuously absent of her blue comforter.

“Hey Kathy? Have you seen my comforter?”

“Huh?” Mary mumbled around the pencil she was nervously chewing on. She didn’t look up from the book she was studying.

“The blue comforter that was on my bed. It’s missing. Do you know where it is?”

Mary watched Kathy’s shoulders go up and down in a distracted shrug. She took the pencil out of her mouth and grabbed a nearby lab book and pulled it over to compare the two texts.

“Did you check the laundry?” She asked, still not looking up from her books.

Mary slept under her coat again that night.

***

The next day Mary woke up late for class. She hadn’t slept well and had hit the snooze alarm on her phone one too many times. She wasn’t going to have time to shower or to get a proper breakfast at the dining hall. She decided to grab a granola bar from her bin on top of the mini-fridge.

To her shock though, most of her granola bars were gone. She checked Kathy’s bin, but it was completely empty. Even her roommate’s chocolate bars were missing and Kathy had a strict, one desert a day rule. The two women walked to the grocery store together every Sunday to restock their small makeshift kitchen. They always bought exactly what they needed for one week’s time. It was only Tuesday. There should be plenty of snacks left in both their bins.

Mary returned to her room in-between classes hoping she’d run into Kathy. They really needed to have a chat. She didn’t know if her roommate was playing some sort of practical joke on her or was stealing from her, but she didn’t intend to spend another night sleeping under her coat.

When she entered the room she found Kathy rifling through her drawers, one of her granola bars hanging out of her mouth. Both snack bins where turned upside down on the table. The hat boxes were out of the closet and on the floor, their lids off and their contents clearly combed through. Kathy jumped at the sound of the door being slammed shut and glared at Mary.

“You ate all my chocolate!” She accused, dropping the half eaten granola bar on the table. Crumbs scattered across the wood.

“No I didn’t! And since when do you eat my granola bars?!” Mary shot back.

“Since you stole all my chocolate!” Kathy yelled. Mary had never heard Kathy raise her voice before.

“I don’t know what you are talking about.” She yelled back.

“Then where is it?” Kathy swept her hand around the room angrily, indicating all the spots she had already searched.

“How should I know? Maybe you ate them all, along with my granola bars!” Mary balled her fists in anger. How dare she accuse her of stealing when she had just caught Kathy in the act of eating her food! “Where did you put my comforter?”

“What?” Kathy lowered her voice a degree and looked genuinely confused.

“My blue comforter! Remember? I asked you about it last night. I’m sick of sleeping under my coat. This isn’t funny. Where did you put it?” Mary didn’t bother lowering her voice.

“I don’t have it. Why on earth would I take your comforter?” Kathy snatched up her purse and headed to the door. “I’m going to the store. You had better not steal what I buy this time!” She slammed the door behind her before Mary could argue further.

***

The two women spent a tense evening giving each other the silent treatment, each pretending to study at their own desks. Mary noticed that Kathy ate two whole chocolate bars that night. Kathy finally gave up and went to bed. Mary sat at her desk for a while longer, not wanting Kathy to know she’d been waiting for her to turn in first. She tried to work on some calculus problems, but she couldn’t focus.

Mary remembered how excited she had been when all the college pamphlets had begun arriving at her house in her senior year of high school. She had gone through them all, studying each glossy printed page, but one had stood out from the rest. The campus seemed incredible and the classes that they offered were unique and exciting. She almost couldn’t believe she qualified for this kind of college, even if she had worked really hard throughout high school to keep her options open.

When her parents agreed to pay for it, she knew her life was going to be perfect and her future absolutely amazing. But so far the school had seemed like any other. She was halfway into her first semester and none of the classes were particularly interesting or unique. It was basically just a review of all the normal stuff she had learned in high school, only with more homework and more tests. She knew her parents were paying a lot of money to send her here and she was beginning to wonder if she had made a mistake.

For the first week Mary had suffered from a bout of homesickness, but that had quickly dissipated as she had settled into a new routine with her new roommate and friend. Now it all seemed to be falling apart and she felt the homesickness starting to return. It was too late to call her mother without scaring her. No one called at this hour unless it was an emergency.

Instead, she tried to distract herself by doing some assigned reading for literature class. Mary grabbed a pencil and a pad of paper to take notes with, but found that her hands were stiff with cold. She peeked over her shoulder and verified that Kathy was asleep. She snuck over to the thermostat and increased the temperature. If Kathy wasn’t going to return her bedding then she was just going to have to deal with it being hotter.

The book was really boring and covered a topic she wasn’t interested in. A couple of chapters in and the room was finally beginning to reach a comfortable temperature. Mary started to nod off at her desk, a highlighter in one hand and a pencil in the other, when two soft popping noises jolted her awake. The highlighter and the pencil were gone from her hands. She noticed their absence and thought it peculiar, but her sleep deprived brain didn’t let her think much more on it. She left her coat on the chair and climbed into her bed. The room’s temperature was nice and comfy now.

***

Over the next couple of days things got increasingly strained between her and Kathy. They only spoke to each other when they absolutely had to and then it was with the stiff politeness of strangers. Mary began to dial her mother’s number several times, only to hang up before it could ring though. She wanted to go home but she knew that would mean losing this semester’s substantial payment and giving up on her dreams. Other colleges didn’t offer the kind of classes this one did.

The entire hall seemed to be on edge. The arguments between the women on the floor were getting more frequent and spilling out into the hallway. Without Kathy to laugh about them with, they were becoming stressful. One morning she even had to skip her shower because a brawl had broken out in the bathroom over “borrowed” lip gloss. The resident advisor was in there physically holding the two women apart.

Kathy had noticed the increasing tension and accusations of stealing on the floor as well. By Friday the two roommates were mostly back on speaking terms again, both having come to the conclusion that a thief was among them. Several other items of theirs had gone missing. Kathy had lost a pair of shoes and some earrings. Mary had a bath towel and a novel she hadn’t finished reading disappear. Neither was quite ready to apologize yet though and trust between them was tenuous at best.

That evening when Mary got back to her room she found the entire hallway was suspiciously quiet. The past few days had been loud with all the arguments. She noticed that all the doors had identical notes taped to them. She pulled the one off her door and read it. It directed her to go down to the common room on the first floor for a hall meeting. She went into her room to drop off her book bag. It appeared that Kathy had already left.

Maybe this meeting was about the disappearances. Maybe they had found the thief. She hated how strained her relationship with Kathy had become. She was hurt and insulted that the other woman could even think she was stealing from her. Things were slowly mending between them, but a solid resolution would go a long way towards making things better. Mary just wanted their lives to go back to their normal, calm routine.

She got down to the first floor and found all the women from her hall waiting outside the common room. The door was locked. A couple more women filtered in. She saw Kathy in the crowd but she was hesitant to join her. A short time later their hall’s resident advisor entered. Her face was flushed a deep red and she was acting uncharacteristically timid. Normally she was loud and confident.

Tonight she wouldn’t meet any of their eyes and she spoke softly, calling the meeting to order. All the women had to quiet down just to hear her. Accompanying the RA was one of Mary’s professors. The older woman taught first year biology as well as advanced herbalism and horticulture. Their RA glanced at the professor and she nodded her head encouragingly.

“So as many of you know, we’ve been having a bit of a problem on the hall with things going missing. It’s caused a lot of grief between roommates and for that I am truly sorry. I didn’t realize until this morning that I have been the cause of it.”

Gasps went up around the room, but any resulting commentary was quickly squashed by the harsh look the professor gave the crowd.

The RA took a deep breath and began again. “I know when you got here you were given a list of rules specific to this college and the unique classes it offers. One of those rules is that no undergraduate student is allowed to perform magic unsupervised outside of class.” She paused to take another deep breath.

“Well, I broke that rule. I thought I was conjuring things I needed, or wanted, out of nowhere but I didn’t have a full grasp on what I was doing. Things don’t just come out of nowhere. They have to come from somewhere. And apparently they came from your rooms.” The RA’s blush deepened.

“I am very sorry for the inconveniences I have caused. I hope I can make it up to you. I will do my best to re-earn your respect and confidence.” The RA finished quietly and stared at the floor. The professor patted her shoulder comfortingly and stepped forward to speak.

“We all make mistakes. The best thing we can do is learn from them. I assume that I will not hear about any more unauthorized use of magic, yes?”

The women all mumbled in agreement. The professor unlocked the door to the common room and motioned for the ladies to follow her inside. Everything from clothing, to school supplies, to brand new food covered the surfaces of the tables and the couches. On one chair, freshly washed and neatly folded, was Mary’s big, blue comforter.

Mary picked up her comforter and went around the room collecting the other things that had gone missing over the past few days. Kathy joined her and did the same. It was like a very weird potluck. The other women chatted as they gathered their missing items. Mary noticed the tension from the week disappearing into thin air, just like their possessions had. She hoped that this was one thing that would not be recovered.

The two women headed back up to their room, arms laden. Kathy chuckled nervously in the elevator. “I can’t believe I thought you were a thief.”

“I can’t believe I thought you were a thief.” Mary replied, also laughing.

“We all good again?” Kathy asked.

“Yes!” Mary tried to hug Kathy, but with both their arms full it was more of a shoulder bump then a hug.

“I didn’t want to say anything, but I had really begun regretting my decision to come here. I thought what is the point of paying extra to attend a college with a minor in the magical arts if we don’t actually get to do any magic. All our first year classes are just so...normal. It’s been rather boring.” Kathy confessed.

Mary laughed as they stepped off the elevator and headed down the hall toward their dorm room. “I’ve been thinking the same thing! But after tonight, well I don’t think its so normal or boring anymore.”