False Signal

She's cheating on you.

Ryan checked over his shoulder trying to find out where the noise came from. The words still boiling around behind his ears. He stood up and checked his bookshelves (all neatly ordered and alphabetized).

"She's cheating on you," The voice said again. It was louder this time and broken by bits of static. The only piece that was out of place on the shelves was a palm-sized blue IKEA alarm clock.

He stared at the tinny speaker in the back. Noise floated up through it in staticy chunks. A few notes from a saxophone peeked out between the bursts. A voice that was barely recognizable muttered. "What?"

Then he heard it again. "Dude, she's cheating on you." Then some more static, this time it was a lot louder. "... I didn't mean to see it... you should know."

His fingers started trembling, while his heart slammed in his chest. But he wanted to know, what these people were talking about. He needed the data. This time he could definitely hear people in the background, the sound of a band playing smooth jazz floating between them. Again the responder said. "I can understand."

"Don't get angry." Was that Chad?

"I'm not angry... I'm... I don't know what I am."

"You're pissed. I can tell. Just don't do anything stupid."

"Do I ever?"

Ryan's mouth started to dry out. He could picture the image in his mind, butt planted in the pleather bar stool next to Chad. People swinging around him, getting their drinks. He would be looking deep into a cup of coffee - watching the creamer swirl, fall down and rise back up to the top. As Chad answered. "Of course not. But you're kind of a golden boy, if you know what I mean. You haven't had something like this happen to you before."

"I'll be fine." The way he said it made Ryan know that he wasn't all right. That things would be heading south really soon.

Then the feedback kicked up, lancing him in his ear.

Better than...

Ryan hopped out of the elevator as fast as he could. The whole experience left the hairs along the back of his neck standing on end. Shaking his head, he jammed his thumbs into his eyes and worked them around in circles until he saw a golden pattern form in his vision. He opened them up, blinked twice and turned away from the stainless steel doors.

The hallway to his room was just another example of institutional planning at its best. The white walls blared underneath the long tracks of flourescent lighting. Most of the doors were closed, except for Derrek's, but he had his face planted so far into his computer he didn't even wave when Ryan passed by.

He took out his keys and unlocked his door. The surrealness of the morning started to fade when he saw Alice still tucked underneath the covers. A few blonde strands of hair drifted in the breeze from the heater. Sucking in a deep breath, he went over to her and pecked the top of her head. Her hair smelled like canned peaches.

A hand snuck out and pulled the comforter higher over her head, turning her into a lump. "Go away. Haven't you had enough?"

He smiled, despite himself. "Oh I can never get enough of you. Especially when you first wake up, didn't you know that?"

The blanket came down an inch and one red-rimmed eye peeked out. "Flattery? This early in the morning? What's the matter? Did Martins drop another quiz on you?"

"No, just had a wierd morning." He plunked down on the edge of the bed, close enough to Alice's legs to feel the heat coming from them. "Or at least I've had a wierd twenty minutes."

She cuddled next to him, wrapping her legs across his back. "Oh, poor baby. You really need to lighten up though."

"As you keep telling me. I think I'm pretty light, though. It really was a wierd twenty minutes." He stretched, laying down next to her feet.

She sat up, staring down at him with that crooked half-smile she always had before she said something smart. "We're not talking about your skin tone, buddy. Really though, you get rattled by the strangest stuff. It's like you have this great plan of how everything is supposed to go and when it doesn't you fall to shit. Happens every time."

Ryan groaned, sitting up again. He couldn't explain the elevator too her, or that wierd look Christy gave him. "Sure, sure. So don't you have class?"

"Skipping it today. It's too nice of a day to waste not sleeping. But I got to get back to my room. So are you going out tonight?" She hopped out of the bed and stood in front of him. She still had her "sleeping clothes" on, which consisted of a T-shirt and boxers. Right then, with the sunlight playing with her hair and the smirk on her face, she was beautiful. Ryan's heart cramped in his chest. For a second, he almost loved her more than he loved Math.

Then she giggled. "You know, I never have to worry about you though. I can always tell what your thinking." She leaned down and pecked him on the cheek. "And I love you too."

"You really shouldn't skip class though."

"Nope your right, but I'm going to anyway." She winked as she sauntered over to the door, pulling it open and walking right out.

He collapsed back into the bed. A smiled stretched across his face. She really was better than he deserved, but he was glad he had her. Running his hands across the blankets, he soaked up her smell.

"She's cheating on you."

Surrealevator

When the door opened, Ryan hopped in. Almost instantly he found himself pacing the edges of the box. Going around as the elevator pulled him up. The pockmarked, grimy tiles passed beneath his polished tennis shoes - four steps on the left, six steps along the back, four steps on the right, six steps across the front.

And he went again, four steps along the left, six steps along the back, three and a half steps along the right. He stopped, taking a look at the side he just crossed.

Wait a second. That can't be right.

Counting the tiles along both sides of the elevator, they matched. It had to be wrong. He knew it had to be wrong, just a miscalculation made by taking a step too long. He turned and counted his steps, making sure they weren't any longer or shorter than a normal step. One, two, three, four... and a half.

He searched the walls for some sort of camera. Someone had to be playing a joke on him, but no one could make a trick elevator car without something showing up, like some scraping across the floor or a wall that didn't quite match. Shaking his head, he went back to the first wall and started counting steps again.

One. The hairs on his arms stood on their end. Two. A chill went down the base of his spine. Three. The colors of the walls washed out for a moment as he stared at the distance between him and the wall. Would that be enough for one more step? It should be. He lifted his right leg up to make the step and...

The elevator stopped.

And his foot came down.

As the doors clanked open, he stared at the space between his toes and the back wall of the elevator. There couldn't be more than a couple inches there. But he remembered his toes crunching there, bending back with a satisfying solidity. No way. There's no way that this is any different than what it was.

He walked into the hallway when the doors opened.

An Average Day in an Average Life

Ryan Almocadi lived for math. In fact he loved math so much he liked to capitalize it in his head - Math. Everything from the likelihood that the trees lining his campus would grow healthy and tall, to the chance that he would walk into his dorm room and find Alice still curled underneath the blankets could be defined by Math.

It wasn't that Ryan even consciously thought about it. At times he did, like when he was doing his Differential Equations homework or was watching his teacher explain an example on the chalkboard. He loved the elegance of it.Almost as much as he loved Alice. It wasn't her fault that even with her sleek thighs and full lips, that she couldn't compete with Math.

But she was his second love, and when he stepped through the steel and glass door of his dorm, he found himself primping in the reflection between the doors.All in all he wasn't a bad looking man. He was thin, but not anorexic thin. The long hours in his dorm had left him a bit pale, but not pasty. In fact the worst any one could say about him was that he was average.

Stepping through into the lobby proper, he smiled and waved at a few of his friends. They waved back, a few shouting a hi across the lobby. A group of them from his floor had clustered around the mail counter, he walked up to them. Alice could wait. She never liked it when he came into the room before she got up. Especially on the random nights when she decided to stick around.

Christy, his RA, smiled when he stopped at the counter. "Hi there Ryan, how are you doing?"

He shrugged, "I could be better, I could be worse. You know how it goes. School, life, homework, some more school again."

"Really?" Her eyes narrowed, and there was a hint to her voice that sent a small shiver through Ryan's stomach.

For a moment, he pictured the probabilities about why she could be giving him that look. Bell curves and F-tests floated through his head. His mouth picked out the next words carefully. "Yes... why?"

"Well... It's nothing really. Don't worry about it." She waved her hand.

But it was something. Something that brought color to her cheeks, making her lips tremble a bit like the words were stuck right on the edge of them, waiting to tumble out. "Come on. Something's bugging you. I'm not going to freak out or anything."

She smiled weakly. "Really, it's nothing. I'm just having a rough week."

"Okay. I'll see you later then. I hope it gets better." He walked away from the counter, barely registering the guy with the laptop in one of the uncomfortable lobby chairs. Instead his mind played with the possibilities of what he would find when he went into the elevator. No, it was probably nothing. In fact, there was only a four percent chance that it could be something.

But what kind of something would it be? Was there another guy up there in the room? Did Alice get another call from her mother and was now sobbing her heart out in the lobby? Were his parents in the hospital? Anxiety looped itself through his brain.

He was still playing back the questions in his head when the steel door of the elevator slid open.