Eric was a really nice guy. I met him my second day visiting Sarah in San Francisco. He was funny, incredibly intelligent, and very friendly. I have to say that I was fairly attracted to him.

He and Sarah met freshman year at Stanford and their friendship was going on three years now. She still had nothing but good things to say about him, so I naturally trusted him more than I would any stranger off the street. The second to last night of my visit, Sarah, Sarah’s boyfriend, Eric, and I went to a late dinner in Palo Alto. The night was deliciously warm and I hated for it to end. Eric suggested we go for a walk to see a nearby house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright about half an hour’s walk away.

Sarah and her boyfriend decided they’d rather watch a film at home, so we made plans to meet up with them back at the dorms.

Everything started off very romantic. We were dressed the part; he wore a blue, button-down shirt and I wore an empire-waist, soft cotton, yellow dress that swayed with the gentle breeze. Our conversation was light and easy-going, but dropped off once we reached our destination. There was a pond outside the Frank Lloyd Wright house and somehow we both ended up kneeling over it, watching our reflections in its calmness. It was dark, but we looked into one another’s eyes in the reflection for a time. In the water, the moon seemed to be painted a foot above us, it’s beam highlighting the angles of our cheekbones and adding sparkle to our eyes. We had been silent for nearly five minutes before he raised an eyebrow, release it, rose the other one, then released that one. I watched him in the water, his eyebrows dancing. I laughed, and then he laughed.

We headed home, both laughing, drunk on mirth, dancing in the echoing streets, which were probably abandoned around midnight. We reached campus half an hour later and began to pass a few dormitories when Eric had an idea: “How about we got to my dorm last year?”

I looked at him skeptically and he explained, “It’s really beautiful, actually. Its large, white-washed, five stories, Victorian-styled. There’s a series of fire escapes whose ladders climb all the way up to the roof. From the roof, you can see all of the campus. It’s really quite the view.” He paused. “It’s on the way.”

We stood outside the dorm. It was beautiful.

“There’s about forty rooms in the house,” he told me. “They should all be empty now, but you never know where they put those high school campers that come out here during the summer. We should be fine, though, we’re not going inside. No need to scare anyone.”

I looked around before following Eric up the fire escape, but the streets were vacant. The fire escape ladders looked pretty steep, though, and I wondered if it was such a brilliant ideas to climb five flights up in heels and a flowy dress.

With Eric’s promise to help me, we slowly ascended. My heels made the trip upwards a little more complicated. “Those heels will need to come off at some point,” he told me.

“I don’t want to lose them. I like the sequins.”

We had made it up to the fourth storey and were approaching a window. A moonbeam shone onto the figure of a young girl, looking dreamily out of it with her elbow resting on the windowsill and her chin in her hand. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen and I could tell she was still in her Guinevere phase – the phase where a young girl stays up at silent hours of the night, waiting for her white knight, a boy probably around sixteen, to profess his undying love to her. Upon seeing Eric, she sat up abruptly, looking confused, probably wondering whether he was the one she had been wishing for or if she should scream bloody murder.

Instead, Eric screamed, “Fourteen year old girls! Run!” As Eric climbed past me down the ladder, I thought that this experience would probably traumatize the girl at least until her next birthday.

Eric hopped down to the landing and then proceeded to descend the stairs as quickly as his monkey ancestors would have. I climbed down as slowly as I dared in my shoes. A more aggressive breeze picked up the bottom of my dress and caused it to balloon out; it appeared as though I were floating through the air like one of those yellow fairies in Fantasia.

Lights began to pop on all over the house, but the blinds were still closed. I watched Eric race across the driveway and disappear through the hedges surrounding the house. The girl hadn’t screamed, so the lights must have been a reaction to Eric’s shocked outburst. In frustration, I threw my shoes off and hauled ass after him.

I didn’t know the area, so it took me about an hour to find my way back home.

The news headline the next day read, “Unidentified Male Leaps Over Dormitory Hedges, Leaves Behind Sequined Shoes.”

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