/* $press tracks how hard you lean on her; it colors the ending. */
<<set $press to 0>>Friday night, a little after nine, and Pemberton Hall is doing its Friday-night thing — muffled music behind a couple of doors, someone's laughter three rooms down, the ordinary racket of a building full of people with nowhere they have to be tomorrow. The third-floor corridor runs long and fluorescent-bright ahead of you, that institutional light that makes the carpet look grayer than it is.
You just need the bathroom. That's the whole errand. It's four or five doors down, past a woman leaning against the wall near it, thumbs moving over her phone.
Except she isn't really on her phone. You clock it the second you get close — the way her eyes come up to you and stay there a beat too long, calm and unhurried and completely aware, before dropping back to the screen. She's parked herself exactly where the corridor narrows toward the bathroom door. Not blocking it, quite. Just... occupying the geometry of it.
She glances up again as you slow. Friendly. Waiting to see what you'll do.
[[Excuse me, I just need to use the bathroom.->Polite]]
[[Just keep walking, straight for the door.->SlipPast]]
[["Everything okay over here?"->ReadRoom]]"Yeah, so — that one's out of commission right now," she says, easy, apologetic, tucking the phone away like you've earned her actual attention. "Trust me, you don't want to go in there anyway. There's a working one on the second floor, straight down the stairs, first left. Thirty seconds, tops."
She says it so smoothly that you're already half-turned toward the stairwell before you register that she hasn't actually moved, and that the bathroom door behind her is very definitely shut.
[["Oh — no problem. Thanks."->AcceptRedirect]]
[["It's kind of an emergency, honestly."->Emergency]]
[["Out of commission how? It was fine an hour ago."->Suspicion]]<<set $press to $press + 1>>
You angle for the door. It's the most natural thing in the world — you have to go, the bathroom is right there.
You don't even see her push off the wall. She's just suddenly, unhurriedly in the path, phone still in one hand, one shoulder turned in a way that isn't aggressive and isn't going anywhere either. It's the body language of someone who has ended a lot of arguments without raising her voice.
"Whoa. Hey." A small, real smile. "Not that one tonight. What do you need — bathroom?"
[[Back off. Ask properly.->Polite]]
[["Come on. I really have to go."->Emergency]]She takes a second to look at you before answering — the frank, calibrating once-over of someone deciding exactly how much to hand you, and landing on: not much.
"All good," she says. "Long night. Someone's just having a rough one, and I'm doing a friend a favor keeping it quiet for a bit. You know how it is." A tip of the head toward the stairs. "Bathroom you can use is down on two, if that's what you're after."
The friend part lands like the truth. Everything around it is doing work you can't quite see.
[["Fair enough. I'll head down."->AcceptRedirect]]
[["Is somebody hurt? Should I get someone?"->Concern]]<<set $press to $press + 1>>
"Okay, okay — genuine emergency, I hear you." She holds up a hand, unruffled, like she's talked people down off bigger ledges than a full bladder. "But that one's actually a no. There's water on the floor, maintenance is a whole thing, it's gross, I'm not even exaggerating." A beat. "The one on two is nicer anyway. Cleaner. I'll walk you to the stairs, I'm not doing anything."
She's already drifting to put herself between you and the door as she says it, so gently you'd only notice if you were looking for it.
[[Take the stairs down.->AcceptRedirect]]
[["I'll be ten seconds. I swear. In and out."->TenSeconds]]<<set $press to $press + 1>>
"How does anything break?" She spreads her hands, dry as anything. "Dramatically and at the worst possible time. Old building. It's very theatrical, plumbing." She doesn't blink, doesn't fidget, doesn't over-explain — just holds the line with the flat, pleasant certainty of someone who could keep this up all night and would find it mildly funny.
"Two's got you covered," she adds. "Promise."
[[Let it go. Head down.->AcceptRedirect]]
[["I thought I heard something up here earlier."->Concern]]She goes still for exactly one second — not caught, just recalibrating — and when she answers, her voice drops the breezy cover and gives you something plainer instead.
"Nobody's hurt. Nobody needs a doctor, or campus security, or you." Not unkind. She means it, and she wants you to feel that she means it. "Somebody needs a few minutes with the door shut and nobody making it a thing. That's the entire situation. I'm just the person making sure they get it."
She lets that sit. Then, softer, almost conspiratorial: "You'd want someone doing it for you. Wouldn't you?"
<<if $press gte 2>>You would. That's the annoying part.<</if>>
[[Yeah. Okay. I would.->AcceptRedirect]]
[["I really, really need to get in there, though."->TenSeconds]]<<set $press to $press + 1>>
"Ten seconds." She repeats it back to you like she's admiring the craftsmanship of the lie. "See, I believe that you believe that."
And that's it. Whatever gave a little on the earlier tries doesn't give here. She's not annoyed and she's not moving, and there's something almost kind in how final she is about it — she's decided, she decided a while ago, and no amount of shifting your weight or gesturing at the door is going to relocate her from the spot she has clearly appointed herself to hold.
"Two," she says, one more time, and points down the corridor toward the stairwell with a patience that has stopped being negotiable. "Go on. You'll make it."
[[Give up. Go downstairs.->AcceptRedirect]]
[[Give up. Just leave — forget it.->GiveUp]]You go.
The second-floor bathroom is exactly where she said, exactly as ordinary as promised, and the whole thing takes less time than the conversation did. By the time you climb back up on your way to wherever your Friday night was actually headed, the third-floor corridor has gone quiet in that particular late-evening way.
She's still there. Back against the wall, thumbs moving over the phone, the perfect picture of a person waiting for nothing in particular. She gives you a small nod as you pass — mission accomplished, no hard feelings — and doesn't look up again.
The bathroom door down the hall is still shut.
<<if $press gte 3>>You'll think about it more than it deserves, probably. The closed door. How immovable she got, so calmly, over a bathroom.<<else>>You'll half-forget it by tomorrow, probably.<</if>> But for a second, on the stairs, you get the odd, weightless sense of having brushed the edge of a night that turned on some hinge you never got to see — a door you were kept, very gently, on the wrong side of.
Then it's gone, and it's just Friday again.
[[.->End]]Forget it. You can hold it, or find one on the way out, or on another floor, or anywhere that isn't this strange stretch of hallway with its calm sentry and its shut door.
You feel her watching you go — not smug, just confirming — and by the time you hit the stairwell the whole small standoff has already started to blur into the ordinary noise of the night.
You won't think about it, mostly. Except sometimes, weeks later, for no reason at all: a woman leaning against a wall, pretending to look at her phone, keeping the entire world out of one unremarkable bathroom on a Friday in September. And the peculiar, unshakable feeling that something happened in there that you were never, ever going to be allowed to know.
[[.->End]]<div style="text-align:center; margin-top:2em;">
''Excuse me, I just need to use the bathroom...''
//Some doors, you're better off on the near side of.//
<<link "Try again">><<goto "Start">><</link>>
</div>NON-CANON reader-insert. "You" = an anonymous Pemberton Hall student, Fri Sep 26 2025,
~9pm, third-floor corridor. This is the guarding window immediately after the Book One
transformation (Ch. 3): Emmy texted Priya to casually guard the hallway "while
pretending to look at her phone." Priya is improvising cover and does NOT herself know
the full truth, so she can't reveal it; the reader must never learn what happened, and
NO hint of the cause may appear (deepest locked layer). Priya stays discreet — refers
only to "a friend," never names Emmy/Julian/Juliet. Voice: sharp, pragmatic, dry humor,
practical warmth, frank calibrating attention, kind-but-immovable, "managing before
asked, meaning what she observes." American English throughout. Dramatic irony is for
the series reader only. (Unreachable passage; ships in source unless kept in a separate
non-compiled file.)