“Have the lessons from yesterday’s field trip reached you yet?” he asked, smiling politely.

“More than I care to process,” she thought, still upset about the musts and the have to’s, but she answered in the same good mannered vein. “A few, I’m still analyzing them.”

“Just remember, before we go through door number three, that not every rule is there to be broken, but it helps, every now and then, to question your assumptions. It seems fitting, since we are on this subject, and given that all of these doors look more or less the same, to remind you of a rule that you shouldn’t be breaking. Do you remember what I warned you about during our first encounter?”

“Don’t go through door number eight,” she recited, trying very hard to suppress an eye roll.

“You say that, but you don’t believe it, not in your heart, anyway,” he probed her with a sharp gaze, and then, not finding what he was looking for, continued, slightly disappointed. “Anyway, ready when you are,” he took a bow, pointing towards the door.

“What’s through there?”

“You.”

“I have to ponder this rationally,” Taylor thought and quickly put together a plan to address the current situation. Whether it was real or not, she figured all of this weird stuff kept happening to her around four o’clock, and if she managed to avoid her haunting ghost, hallucination, prankster or whatever he was around that time of day she should be fine. Since the thought of locking herself in the women’s restroom for an hour sounded a little bit like overkill, she moved to the next best option, which was spending every single second in Christine’s company.

First, she wanted to assess whether Christine could see her “ghost”, or if he was a hallucination of her stressed out mind, and second, she was kind of hoping that a public setting would deter future kidnapping attempts.

Taylor woke up and got ready for classes, as if nothing had happened the day before, trying to avoid looking at the door, somewhat uneasy with the thought that if she did, she might not see it there anymore. The first day was filled with the trepidation of adjusting to new settings and finding her way through the maze of buildings and hallways, and in all the excitement she almost forgot about the “class” that was supposed to start at four. She hadn’t had anything to eat the whole day and stopped almost without thinking at the cafeteria for a quick bite.