Last bell of the day. Allie tucked her papers away, grabbed her binders and walked out of the school, eyes downcast. She walked by her old desk at the front of the class, where she used to sit and chat with friends, where the teacher was always proud when he handed her work back to her. Now she sat in the back, quiet and unnoticeable. Her grades had finally stopped dropping, hovering close to failure.

She walked out of the school, out of that constant noise of a hundred conversations, none of them directed at her. No one seemed to notice her anymore. She barely saw the Cute Boy with the Green Binder, and when she did; he didn’t smile and wave anymore. He gave her that look of someone who wants to help, but can’t find the words or the courage. It made her want to cry even more. So she didn’t see him anymore.

The walk home seemed like it had grown longer and longer with each day. The world seemed to have gotten more gray. She barely noticed the cars and other people on the sidewalk. They barely noticed her. She didn’t lift her eyes off the ground when she got home. She just quietly walked in and shut the door behind her. The house was bright, but it was an empty brightness, everything was in order but something was missing. Something important.

As usual, she went to her room and shut the door. She tried to watch television, but she couldn’t pay attention. Just a flashing box. She tried to mess around online, but she couldn’t find the energy. Just a bright screen. She tried to listen to music, but she didn’t like any of it anymore. Just noise. One of her friends called her, Allie let it go to voicemail. Another invitation to hang out. Allie didn’t have the energy to do it and didn’t have the heart to tell her friend no. She barely ate. Her appetite had gone along with everything else.

Her closet door was open. From where she sat, she could see into it. She saw all the bright, colorful, cute clothes she used to wear, shoved to one side. In their place was the drab, the dark, the shapeless things she wore now. They fit her mood. Not worth seeing.

Just like every other day, the only thing Allie had the mind to do was sleep. She curled up underneath layers and layers of sheets, buried her head in pillows, and waited in the dark.

She woke up in the dark. Almost the dark. There was the weak, gray light of a house with every blind shut and every curtain drawn. She could feel right away that something was wrong, and knew what as she got up. Somehow she was still wearing the t-shirt and jeans she wore to school, but that wasn’t it.

She was in a house, an empty house, with blank white walls and plain wood floors, but it was all too big. As she walked across the empty room, she could barely reach the handle on the gigantic door. But even as it was huge, it seemed familiar. She knew exactly where she was going when she opened the door, but she couldn’t say why.

It opened into a long, equally dark hallway. There were more doors, all shut tight. The first one she tried was locked, and the rest looked no different. As she reached the far side of the hall, she heard a massive clunk behind her. She whirled around and saw the door she came from was shut. But then she saw the floor and almost screamed.

She backed up against the wall, her heart pounding. They hadn’t been there when she walked down the hall, she hadn’t heard them being made, but they couldn’t have just appeared, right? Gouged into the floor, repeating from the end of the hall right to her toes, was, “not where you belong get out wake up not your world.” And as she looked back up, she saw the same phrase scratched deeply onto every door, every wall, messy and hurriedly, words overlapping each other until it looked like someone had taken a hatchet to the walls and doors. Allie couldn’t open the door behind her fast enough.

She was now in what was a living room, but large and empty. She could’ve walked into the fireplace if she ducked. She walked into a dining room, the plain, square wooden table and chairs the only furniture she’d seen, and on scale with the rest of the house. She couldn’t see the top of the table from the ground; she would’ve had to climb into the chairs.

The only way out was a hole in the wall, like a large rat hole, big enough she could walk into it, tucked away in the corner. Allie bit her lip as she stood in front of it. Pitch black. Yawning. Empty. No end in sight no hope in sight. But just as she thought about turning around, she heard the slow, heavy creaking of a door behind her, followed by the latch catching and a deadbolt sliding into place. Slowly she turned around, looking at the door to the hallway, and this time she did scream. It was shut, but worse than that, just as silently as before, something had been scratched into it: “stop coming here.” She turned and ran down the tunnel.

It was still black inside. She could feel soft earth underneath her feet as she ran as fast as she could, her arms and hands finding dirt walls around her, delicate roots brushing her face and hair as she kept running. Then she heard the sound of earth moving and settling behind her.

She didn’t stop, stumbling and tripping as the tunnel grew rougher and stale, dusty air enveloped her as the tunnel closed behind her as fast as she could run. She started to cough and pant as more dust and dirt choked her, and could even feel the solid dirt starting to rain on her back before her foot found nothing and she fell.

Allie couldn’t tell how long she fell, she bounced and scraped against the walls the whole way down, until the tunnel spat her out into blinding light, onto a steep slope she bounced and rolled down until it finally leveled out. It was several moments before she got to her knees, and several more before she could realize what she was seeing.

It was the largest valley she’d ever seen. Tall, green grass stretched on for miles and miles, the sides gently sloping up into steep, gray mountains. A yellow afternoon sun hung in the air above, sometimes hidden by wispy clouds. She could see creatures playing in the far distance, although she couldn’t see details, she could see them chasing each other and rolling down the slopes. Of the tunnel she had just came from, nothing. The only indication it ever existed was the dirt covering her.

Then Allie did something that had become rare in recent days, something that she didn’t usually have much desire to do: She spoke, more specifically she asked, in a small, scared whisper, “Where am I?”