“I know it’s not a good dream,” she’d say. “I’ve been having it for years now, I’m aware of the general mood.” She always said it as if it was the simplest thing on earth, and while it was probably the most confusing thing she could have heard at that particular moment in time, it somehow made sense.

“You’re in my dream. Why are you in my dream? You shouldn’t be here, Jen. You shouldn’t be seeing this.”

Jenny would shrug and smile back at the girl, a little too widely for it to be genuine. “I’m not in your dream, Shane. You’re in mine.”

She always shook her head after she said it, as if she couldn’t believe Shane was being so ridiculous. Shane never responded verbally, just looked from the girl with half her face torn off to Jenny. Jenny’s eyes, and the one the girl had left, were always devoid of anything that could be considered human.

“You don’t need to ask who she is. You already know,” Jenny would say, and that damn paralysis would come back again. Jenny would always lace their fingers together, and they were inevitably cold as ice. “She’s been here much longer than you have. Longer than either of us have.”

Shane would always try to remove her hand from Jenny’s, but was never able to. She couldn’t take her eyes off the girl’s face, either. For some reason her eyes were drawn to the visual of bone.

Jenny would get up on her tiptoes, as if she was going to whisper a secret into Shane’s ear. Her breath was as dead as the little girl had to be, and although everything in her told Shane to run away from this thing masquerading as her roommate, she didn’t have the will.

“She’s you,” the Jenny-thing would whisper, and everything would go black.

**********

“Jenny.” The voice came to her as if it was from some great uncharted distance. “Jenny, wake up.”

She groaned in protest to both the voice and the stream of light hitting her eyelids. Slowly, she became vaguely cognizant of skin, a body pressed against her own, soft hands shaking her awake. “It was just a dream, Jen.”

She recognized the voice. It seemed like that fact would make it worthwhile to open her eyes, so she chanced it. Shane smiled and kissed her.

“Another one?”

Shane sighed. “Yeah. I think they might be getting worse. You woke me up crying.”

“I’m sorry I woke you up.” It was all she could think of to say.

“It’s all right. Sometimes if I hold you long enough you fall back asleep, and I don’t think you dream anything then.”

It always made her smile, that Shane would watch over her while she slept.

**********

She closed the laptop as quietly as possible. Shane hadn’t been sleeping well lately, and it would make her feel horrible to wake her up. Still, she couldn’t stop herself from padding down the hallway in her slippers, touching her fingertips to Shane’s door so lightly that they made no sound.

She could hear the crying from inside the bedroom, but made no move to open the door to comfort. She’d tried it, once, back when the dreams had first started. Shane had freaked out at first, and although she’d calmed down afterward, she was embarrassed. Jenny never wanted to make her feel that way again, so she just acted like she never heard anything at all.

She stood there, fingers pressed to Shane’s door, thinking about the last words she’d written that night. They made her smile, and she felt like maybe she could sleep now, if she really tried. With a silent sigh, she padded back down the hall to her own room. Away from the crying, which was what had woken her to begin with.