Mirabella was my roommate first semester. She seemed nice, very quiet, and like she always had something deep she was thinking about. One night about a week into the semester she must have been having a bad dream. She cried out, “No, I’m good!” and then a loud moan. I sat up in bed and asked her if she was okay.

“Yeah,” she said, “just one of those stupid bathroom dreams.”

“I hate those,” I said.

She went on to tell me about it. It was the first time she’d really said much. She said the bathroom in the dream was one of those with toilets randomly all over the place, most of them without seats, and all out in the open, no privacy. She finally settled for one, and just as she was finishing, some guy—it was a coed bathroom—came up to her and asked if she might be interested in a silver butt fuck. “No, I’m good,” Mirabella told him.

“The thing is, I knew this guy, like from real life,” Mirabella said. “A couple of years ago I was staying the summer with Cassie, my best friend at the time, at a cabin her family had up in the woods. One day we’d gone looking for blackberries. Cassie’s dad told us to keep an eye out for bears, kind of in a joking way.

“We rode our bikes up this really steep road. It had a funny name, like Grahamcracker Road. Grahamcracker Road was so steep it was really hard pedaling and sometimes we had to walk our bikes. ‘Think how fun it will be going down,’ Cassie said, and we laughed because we knew what ‘going down’ was. So every time we had to walk our bikes up the steep parts we said ‘Think how much fun it will be going down,’ and we laughed.

“We did find some blackberries, believe it or not, and we realized we didn’t have anything to put them in. We picked a few and ate a few, and they were really good, and then I had the idea that we could take off our shirts and kind of wrap the blueberries in the shirts. ‘They’ll get all stained, of course, but who cares?’ I said, and Cassie said, ‘And think how much fun we’ll have going down,’ and we laughed.

“So we picked a few more berries and bundled them in our shirts when we heard a heavy rustling noise right nearby. We froze. Then at the same time we said, ‘Bear?’ in a loud whisper, and we jumped on our bikes and took off lickety-split down Grahamcracker Road, leaving our shirts with the blackberries behind.

“So fast we went down the hills, and at last we reached the bottom, skidding to a stop. On the other side of the little road was this guy. He was barefoot and wearing blue jeans and his penis was out and he was pissing. The piss stream was like a white waterfall. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. He looked at us but he didn’t stop pissing, and then the last spurts came out and we jumped on our bikes and raced away.

“Back at the cabin we put on fresh shirts and didn’t say anything to anybody about our blackberry picking adventure. But that guy in my dream just now—he was the same guy as at the base of Grahamcracker Road.”

Mirabella let out a deep breath.

“Wow,” I said. “That’s ... wow. So, do you think it was really a bear?”

Mirabella laughed. “Probably,” she said. “Probably it ate our shirts, blackberries and all. Would you like to come in my bed?”

I was so taken aback. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t say anything, and after a seemingly forever silence, Mirabella said, “It’s okay, no big deal.”

A couple of days later I came back from classes to find her gone. All her clothes and books. Everything. Vanished. It was upsetting. I didn’t know how to handle it, so I didn’t do anything for a couple of days, but then I called the administration office to ask if she’d switched to a different dorm or what, and at first they said they couldn’t say, but when I explained that she was my roommate and had disappeared they said she was no longer at school and I shouldn’t worry.

But I did worry. It’s strange how much I miss her, even though we hardly knew each other. I think of her so often, and part of me really wishes I’d gone to her bed that night.