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what was happening to her; it was painfully obvious. She was losing it, that was what. And she wouldn’t be the first graduate student to crack under the strain of an overly ambitious load. Hardly a term passed without one or two dropping out of the program. The survivors always shook their heads and gossiped mercilessly about how so-and-so “just couldn’t take the pressure.” She knew; she’d been among them.
    But I
can
take the pressure! I’m doing great; look at my GPA!
she protested inwardly.
    Right. Uh-huh,
logic countered flatly,
so what other explanation is there for the crazy hallucinations—or dreams—or whatever they are—that you’ve been suffering for the past few days?
    She sighed. There was no denying it; in the past few days she’d had two distinct bouts of . . . well, something . . . during which she’d not only been incapable of distinguishing reality from fantasy, she’d not even been in charge of her own fantasy.
    Which hardly seemed fair, she thought, biting back a bubble of near-hysterical laughter. If a girl was going to lose her mind, shouldn’t she at least get to enjoy it? Why on earth would she conjure the perfect male specimen, the most incendiary of hotties, then make herself the hapless victim of some bizarre murder plot?
    “I just don’t get it.” Gingerly, she rubbed the pads of her index fingers in small circles on her throbbing temples.
    Unless it had actually
happened
.
    “Right. Uh-huh.” A man in a mirror. Sure.
    Still holding her temples, she raised her head, peering about the dimly lit office, seeking clues. There was no indication that anyone but she had ever been there. Oh, the lamp was on the floor, rather than in its usual perch on the table, and a book was lying on the rug near the wall, but neither of those things could be construed as conclusive evidence that someone else had been in the office with her last night. People were known to sleepwalk in the midst of highly vivid dreams.
    She forced herself to look in the mirror. Directly into it.
    Hard silvered glass. Nothing more.
    Forced herself to stand up. Walk over to it. Place her cold palms against the colder glass.
    Hard silvered glass. Nothing more. No way anything had come out of that.
    Squaring her shoulders, she turned her back on the relic.
    Moving stiffly, she retrieved her backpack from the floor, scooped up the books the professor wanted, stuffed them into her bag, let herself out, and locked up the office.
     
    For the first time in the entire history of her academic career, Jessi did the unthinkable: She ditched classes, went home, took some aspirin, tugged on her favorite
Godsmack
T-shirt, crawled into bed, pulled the covers up over her head.
    And hid.
    She never gave up. Never abandoned her plans and schedule. Never failed to meet things head-on. As tight as her schedule was, if she let a single thing slip or fall behind, a dozen others were affected. One tiny lapse could initiate a wildly entropic downward spiral. Ergo, everything had to be tackled and completed as planned.
    Last winter, she’d trudged to class in the middle of one of Chicago’s most brutal snowstorms, trembling from head to toe with violent flu-chills, so sick that all the millions of tiny pores in her skin stung like little needle pricks. She’d lectured on more than one occasion while bordering on laryngitis, forcing her voice only with the aid of a disgustingly vile tea of orange peel, olive oil, and varied unmentionables she still shuddered to think about. She’d graded papers with a fever of a hundred and two.
    But craziness wasn’t something one could tackle and complete, moving on to the next project.
    And she had no clue how to deal with it.
    Figuring chocolate was a start, as soon as she stepped through the door of her apartment, she grabbed a bag of Hershey’s Kisses she kept stashed away for emergencies (i.e., bad hair, severe PMS, or just one of those good old men-are-stupid-and-suck days) and in her warm cocoon