“So, let me get this straight.”

The girl talks to Suzy with what sounds like intense reluctance. Suzy’s mind calls her “the girl”, though she undoubtedly has a name. Suzy is too worried to ask what it is, though. She’s never interacted with this girl, this fellow student, before.

Suzy’s first thought for help was her introverted roommate, but her conscience quickly stopped her upon remembering the “introverted” part. So, she began looking for more “extroverted” people, and this girl is the first option she found.

This girl’s appearance, to use high-school terms, would be “Goth-Lite”: a mixture of darker and lighter shades of the traditional “black” of “Goth” culture. Her hair is dyed black; her face has a small bit of eyeshadow that highlights her curved black eyelashes; a black choker lies around her supple neck. She wears a very dark gray T-shirt and a black skirt that extends past her knees; thin gray pants lie beneath the skirt and go down to her ankles, meeting up with black sneakers sporting white highlights.

What makes this girl “Goth-lite” is the lack of piercings, rings, or tattoos that Suzy remembers from certain groups of students when she was in high school. Those “Goth” boys and girls sometimes smoked cigarettes or drank cheap beer while bemoaning the existence of things. Suzy never stuck around and listened to that talk, but their appearance remained recognizable even in a reduced form.

“Yeah?” Suzy’s hopes that this exchange will go well diminish with each passing second. Nevertheless, she feels compelled to not give up. Even now, before the class she shares with this girl, she feels she must try.

“You want me to record you.” The girl pauses, the black eyeshadow enhancing the dismissiveness in her stare. “In your bedroom. During the night. While you sleep.” She emphasizes each point with its own, likely deserved, pause.

“Yes.” Suzy swallows, feeling some cold sweat sliding down her back. Even though she is standing, and the other girl is sitting, Suzy feels she is not the one in control here. Just speaking up to this girl took tremendous courage on her part; who would believe her claims as she does?

“And this is to help solve your issues of memory loss.” The girl flicks to the next page of the book she holds in her smooth, manicured hands. The book covers displays a title Suzy does not look at, knowing her own reading interests are disconnected from this girl’s.

“Yeah.” Suzy’s inner voice tells her to speak up and speak more. She’s already given what she believes to be an honest explanation, but it does not feel like enough.

The girl sighs, rubbing a hand through her hair. “Are you saying you’re attracted to me? Is this some bizarre form of confession?” Her dull brown eyes give Suzy a once-over, noticing the red tint on her cheeks and the meekness of her demeanor.

Suzy blushes hotly. “This is just for an investigation,” she repeats, standing rigid and looking at a space on the girl’s forehead. The skin there is clean, her hair parting like curtains against a nice window. It looks nice.

“Damn weird investigation.” The girl shifts her posture, her gray jeans not blocking the twitch of her lower leg muscles from Suzy’s notice. “If you are into girls, you can just say it. I don’t judge.”

Suzy squeezes her eyes shut to avoid further awkward arousal on her part. “One night! Just one night, that’s all I’m asking!”

Suzy suspects that her words sound more like pleading, like begging for one more piece of candy from a friend. But Suzy and this girl are not friends, just classmates sharing an overlapping point in their schedule. This particular classmate has been listening to Suzy’s request so far; perhaps she will go along with it…

The girl grunts, shutting her book with a sense of finality that gets Suzy’s eyes to open again. “Fine, I’ll play along. But if you start snoring, I’m out.” Her warning comes with a sharp glare at Suzy. She then looks behind Suzy at the sound of a few other students coming into the classroom through its only doorway.

Suzy does not look back to the arriving students. “Thank you for doing this,” she tells the girl with relief. “Come by around 11:15 tonight. Like I said, the problems start at 11:30.”

“Yeah, yeah, got that.” The girl puts her book inside of the carrying bag she has beside her desk, the strap and bag colored the same burnt brown. Suzy rushes to sit down before the professor arrives. It occurs to her, as she brings out her materials for the class from her larger book bag, that she never got this girl’s name. By the time she thinks about it, she is no longer willing to walk back to their desk and ask.

The names will come later. Suzy figures knowing this kind helper’s name eventually is better than never.

Thanks to Suzy’s mental focus on the evening’s activities, the rest of the school day passes by without major interest from her. The work she sis assigned gets the same treatment; she completes as much of it as she can with little fuss or distraction. Suzy may have a voice in her head, but she is certainly not a bad student on her own.

At 11:12 PM, three quick knocks come from the door to Suzy’s room. Suzy, still wearing the same clothes she had on from earlier today, freezes up at the sound. Then she remembers who is supposed to be here and dashes to the door so she can open it. She sees the girl she spoke to today wearing a thicker gray overcoat over her clothes, but her face Is left uncovered. Those brown eyes are no longer looking dull.

“Oh, hey.” Suzy’s greeting comes with an awkward smile, which the girl does not return. Seconds tick by before the girl asks, “You gonna let me in?” to push the situation forward.

“Gah, sorry.” Suzy takes three big steps back from the door so the girl can come inside. “I’m really nervous about all this,” she admits while she moves around and back to the door so she can close it. She gives it a tug to make sure it is firmly closed.

“You’re not the one staying up all night with a video camera.” The girl looks around Suzy’s room with no comment, her eyes taking in details with a lethargic acceptance. Suzy’s simplistic, utilitarian room design has no discerning features beyond the throw rug and the camera setup. The girl soon goes over to the camera, checks it over, finds it good to go, and then sits on the edge of Suzy’s bed to begin reading something on her cell phone. She also gets out a flashlight and tests it, making sure it has enough charge to produce a steady beam, or a strobe effect, with the push of a button.

Blushing at the fact another girl is in her room now, Suzy jerkily sits down and returns to her work. She tries to rush through a discussion question for an assignment, hoping she can get it done before the time her “problems” start. As she types, she momentarily sees her own reflection on a darker corner of her laptop’s screen.

Suzy stops typing. Her reflection’s eyes look glazed over. That looks wrong. She should fix it and—

“Almost time.” The girl’s voice gets Suzy out of a panic attack. “I’ll start recording now.” The girl has moved the camera’s tripod over to a clear corner of the room and stands by it. The camera’s lens are already pointing at Suzy.

S: “O-Okay.” Suzy adjusts her hair for a bit, turning her chair around to face the camera straight on. “Hey, I, uh, never got your name.” She says this to the camera, but the other girl understands that she is the one Suzy is talking to.

“My name’s Gina.” She waves her hand around in a slow spiral, a lazy action that she does not notice while she states, “My parents are weirdos when it comes to names.”

“I don’t mind.” Suzy’s brain catches up to what she just blurted out a beat later. Blushing again, she adds, “It’s, uh, a unique name,” and then clams up. Gina manages to look at Suzy’s facial features for a few uninterrupted seconds and finds them… not disarming. Innocent, maybe.

“Alright, I’m recording.” Gina presses the corresponding button on the camera, causing a red light to appear near the camera’s top. “Video’s started. You want to say anything now?”

Suzy stops blushing and sits up straighter in her chair. “Just, uh, don’t do anything perverted to me.”

“Same deal for you. I swear, you’re doing this just to get in my pants.”

“Agh, no!” Suzy covers her face with her hands, not seeing Gina’s amused smirk. “I’m not… I’m not like that!”

“Like I said before,” Gina suggests while she walks away from the camera and towards Suzy, “this is a weird sort of confession. But if you don’t swing that way, that’s fine with me.”

Suzy lowers her hands and gives Gina a confused look, the “Goth-Lite” girl now standing beside her chair and in view of the camera. “You do? Uh, you “swing that way”?” She feels fresh embarrassment for even asking these questions.

“One or the other,” Gina cryptically states. “When you live on the edge of college cliques, you tend to learn a lot about your preferences.”

“Oh.” Suzy feels like a novitiate facing gentle admonishment. This is a college campus; people are experimenting with who they want to be as adults. Sexual interests, attractions, and limitations should be part of that, right?

“Oh, hey, it’s that time.” Gina points to the clock on the opposite wall from her and Suzy, which does show “11:30”. “You feel any different?”

Suzy swallows, remembering how things went for her last night. “No. Not yet.” She forces the memories of that night, and what was recorded afterwards, to her lips, so she can say them. “I-It took a bit of time before.”

Gina hums in acknowledgment as she walks back over to the camera. “Well, maybe I can keep you from watching the time.” Gina’s eyes look at the camera’s smaller screen as she seems to find a bit more enjoyment with this than before. She then asks Suzy a surprising question:

“Care to hear a joke?”

Suzy answers straight away with a firm, “Sure.” Why the hell not? No need to get worried about this.

Suzy closes her eyes and breathes a little easier as Gina stands up from examining the recording. “Okay, what delivery service do monkeys use?”

“I don’t know.” Suzy’s eyes stay closed, her voice sounding calmer and her body feeling looser in the chair. She braces herself for a bad pun or twist. The punch line comes a few seconds later:

“Amazon Primate.”

Suzy’s body stiffens, though Gina does not see it. Separate from the joke and its low-hanging humor, Suzy feels something wipe itself over her mind. She is unable to stop it, unable to see its movements, only feel its effects. Her conscious thought gets brushed up with the rest of her mind and rolls into a ball. Then, the ball rolls out of sight and mind.

A smile appears on Suzy’s face, and then disappears with unexpected speed. Her lips move with surprisingly smooth motions for so swift an action. Her eyes, however, remain shut. “Ha,” she says. “Ha-ha-ha,” she repeats with a robotic cadence.

“Eh?” Gina snaps her gaze onto Suzy, breaking out of her own humor-induced thoughts. “You okay?”

Suzy’s eyes open. The camera and Gina catch the glaze in Suzy’s stare, different than how she had been a short while ago. “Provided amusement is within acceptable parameters,” she says in the same smooth voice from the previous night’s recording. “Thank you for sharing this humor, Gina.”

Gina’s legs quiver at the mention of her name in this new voice. “What the hell? You pranking me, Suzy?”

Suzy says nothing.

Gina turns to the room’s clock: it reads “11:32”. So then, what Suzy said appears to be true. It took a little more time than expected for the change to occur.

Suzy looks at Gina and warmly smiles. “You laugh to get rid of anger. We all do that, Gina. But you, Gina, need more than laughter right now.”

Gina’s brain shouts, “Nope!” as she steps back from Suzy for safety. That voice… Gina feels funny inside from that voice. A bad, tingly kind of "funny". She gets up from her seat, reaching for the camera. “You stay right there, okay? I need to use the r-restroom.”

Suzy stands up—no she surges up—and strides towards Gina. Gina gasps, grabbing the camera off its tripod and holding it in front of her. The lens faces Suzy head-on, and she stays still. Gina looks between the camera and Suzy a few times, her heart pounding fast in her chest.

“Do not leave this room, Gina,” Suzy demands. She then smiles, but it looks uncannily hollow with those glazed eyes. “Please, Gina. Do not leave me alone, Gina. I don’t know what I’ll do, my dear Gina.”

Gina’s stance falters, her mind bombarded with tiny bursts of pleasure whenever Suzy says her name. “Sss… Stop it,” Gina gets out. “I just need to go outside!”

Gina ends her sentence with a lunge for the door. Suzy intercepts her, grabbing onto her arm holding the camera with one hand and pulling hard. Gina almost falls, unable to grab onto the doorknob in time. As she stumbles over her own two feet, Gina loses her grip on the camera in her hands. She watches it fall with relief and terror mixed together.

Suzy also sees the camera falling. Acting fast, she spins Gina around with a wild burst of strength before letting her go like a shot put. Gina flies onto Suzy’s bed, the air knocked out of her lungs in one big whoosh. In the meantime, Suzy grabs the camera before it hits the floor and firmly holds it in one hand. She then rapidly approaches the bed, jumping the last foot of distance while Gina coughs and tries to get up.

“What the hell, girl?!” Gina shouts as Suzy flips her body onto her back and straddles her waist. “Screw your recording, I knew it was all smut!”

Suzy ends Gina’s rant there by grabbing onto Gina’s mouth with her free hand. Squeezing hard, Suzy immediately blocks Gina from breathing save through her nose. This narrows Gina’s focus down to just what is in front of her right now; the fear of dying by suffocation.

“Follow my instructions, Gina.” Suzy’s new voice has lost its former pleasuring tones; it is now hard, firm, and mechanical, yet still obviously feminine. “You will obey.”

Gina screams, but the sound is muted heavily by Suzy’s hand. She tries to rise, to turn, to get out of this moment. Suzy keeps her legs and waist secured from her position atop Gina, wearing Gina down with each failed attempt. Quickly, Suzy puts the camera down on the bedside table, still recording but now looking at Gina’s head and chest.

With one hand free, Suzy plunges into Gina’s pockets; her other hand presses down harder on Gina’s head, pushing her into the bed’s soft embrace. Gina struggles harder, twisting her waist from side to side. However, Suzy’s hands do not skirt near her genitals. Once Suzy has what she wants, she wraps her legs around Gina’s and smooshes the girl’s body beneath her own.

“Guh!” Gina stares up at the much-closer face of her captor. Suzy smiles at her again. Before Gina can speak, her own flashlight comes into her view. Suzy presses the button at the back enough times to start its strobe effect. Being so close and unable to escape, Gina is exposed and vulnerable.

“Look into the light, Gina…”