I used to be a champion sleeper.

I once slept through a fire alarm that blared through my apartment for 45 minutes. I used to sleep obstinately, with purpose, dreaming normal college freshman dreams about forgetting final exams or showing up to class naked.

That was all last year, back in those blissfully simple days before I shared a room with Joren Leuenbach.

Before college, I'd never shared a bedroom – I'd never even gone to summer camp – and I was ready to be Best Friends Ever with my first roommate. Joren arrived three days late, headphones blaring, with no books, no parents, two torn-up bags, and zero interest in, well, me.

At first glance, I thought I'd gotten lucky. We weren't going to be best friends anytime soon, but at least Joren wasn't nosy. He kept to himself. And he was cute. Tall, dark hair, severe eyes (I have a type), deeply uninterested in me and the world around us, quietly fuming as if he was perpetually on the edge of setting his standard-issue college mattress on fire (I didn't say it was a healthy type).

Since his arrival, I have slowly gotten used to two key things.

First, unless you ask him a direct question, it is extremely difficult to get any words out of Joren.

Second, the above is only true while Joren is awake.

See, Joren talks in his sleep. That doesn't do it justice. Joren talks backward in his sleep.

I have embraced the possibility that no one has ever told him this. After all, I am among the people who have never told him this. I did tell my mom, the most wonderful woman who ever lived and whom I tell everything. She assured me that Joren is not possessed, probably, because possession is highly rare, and that some people just talk in their sleep, and that I should go see the school exorcist in the morning if I was losing sleep over it. I told her that we don't have a school exorcist because we're not a fancy, seventy-thousand-dollar-a-year private school, and public schools don't get visits from exorcists until a student literally dies.

It does not escape my attention that that student, in this situation, would be me.