In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

by Ashley Winstead

College: a freedom so profound the joy of it didn’t wear off the entire four years.

The East House Seven. Mint, Caro, Frankie, Coop, Heather, Jack, and me.

After all that, and the hard work of cramming my stuff into the small, cinder-block dorm room, I thought I’d be relieved to see them go. But as soon as I was alone, I bawled like a baby.

College was not what I’d expected. All the other freshmen seemed to become best friends instantly. They were having the time of their lives. In the afternoons I walked down the hall with my head ducked, listening to conversations in doorways about all-night frat parties and hangovers so bad they had to skip 8:00 a.m. classes. In a flash, I was nine years old again, walking into that classroom and finding no one. It was like being invisible. Nothing had changed.

I finally opened Coop’s fortune. Seven strange words: Today, something starts that will never end.

“Jack didn’t kill Heather. But someone in this room did. One of you is a monster, hiding behind a mask.”

At the front of the float, Frankie turned to me. “Just like freshman year, huh?” Jack banished. Heather dead. And your friends ambushing you to ask if you killed her. Yes, Frankie, exactly the same.

Memories are powerful things. But—and this is important, my therapist said—so are the dark spaces. The things you choose, consciously or not, to repress. Always, they’re the things you need protection from. The too much: too terrifying, too shameful, too devastating. The things that, if allowed, would threaten the very core of who you’re supposed to be.

It turns out the real you is a quilt, made up of the light and the dark. The life you’ve lived in sunshine and your shadow life, stretching underneath the surface of your mind like a deep underwater world, exerting invisible power. You are a living, breathing story made up of the moments in time you cherish, all strung together, and those you hide. The moments that seem lost.

I want to remind you: there is not, in fact, a whale in my pants. It’s just me.”

My mouth dropped open. Frankie. “He wasn’t lying!” Jack yelled, jumping in after him. “It’s a whale of a tale!”

Crying!!!!

His golden hair was disheveled, flipped over his forehead so you could only see one of his eyes, making him look a little mad. Perfect Mint, campus big shot, heir to a real estate empire, king of the East House Seven. A killer.

seventeen, sixteen, fifteen.

Ahhh floor numbers the same as stab numbers. Clever