We went out into the rain without an umbrella and without proper clothes. Kai had said that there was a convenience store nearby that was open late on Fridays. It was not raining very hard, but still my hair frizzed in the moisture. Most of the streetlights on our street did not function properly, and so we were enveloped in black. We passed by an alleyway where hooded figures blew smoke rings at us. I don’t know why, but Kai stopped for a moment and looked at them. Just stopped and looked as if he’d never seen anything like them before.

They glowered at him and then they stared at me. Young faces. Hard faces.

I was afraid Kai would keep on watching. But it was only for a moment before he turned his head away and we went on our way.

I let out a long, low breath. For three steps, there was nothing but quiet. And then, I heard the soft, heavy footsteps behind us. I didn’t dare look back. I stayed a little closer to Kai than I usually did. He pretended not to notice, but he knew I was uneasy. Neither of us had cellphones. We were walking along a small black street with rundown apartment buildings and it was getting very hard not to panic.

The footsteps drew closer. Fast, shuffling steps. How many of them were there? I hadn’t seen clearly. Were they going to mug us? I only had a few dollars on me. What could they possibly want from us? We looked like the broke students we were. They couldn't want anything from us. There were no reasons for us to panic. So long as we kept going straight, there was no way we could get lost. So long as I focused on the ground, so long as I didn’t trip, it was going to be fine.

Kai and I started walking faster and faster. We were almost running. We were panicking.

“How much farther is the convenience store?” I asked. There was a stitch in my side. He didn’t answer. I tugged at his sleeve.

He ducked his head. “I think we missed the street.”

Oh. It was fine. We would be fine. “Can we double back?”

“I don’t know my way around here,” he said, trying to stay calm. “Let’s just keep going forward. We’ll be fine.”

We went on, and after a while, the footsteps behind us seemed to slow.

“Okay,” Kai said. He sounded relieved. “Okay. We’ll just keep going a little more. They’ll probably give up after a bit more and then we can go back.”

Was it just my imagination or was the street constricting? No, the sidewalk was slinking away into the road. Grass and road. But it was fine.

It was all very fine until Kai stopped walking.

I looked up and it took me a moment to see what he was seeing.

Oh.

A dead end.

A wall painted black in front of us.

No buildings around us.

Footsteps behind us.