Déjà Vu

When you were a kid, you used to read those Choose Your Own Adventure books – the ones where you’d decide whether to run down a tunnel (pg. 27) or call the police (pg. 63), and each choice would take you to the next page, and the next event, and so on and so on till an ending.

Your best friend read them too, with her fingers holding her place in the pages, so if she made a wrong decision she could flip backward. Dead end? Caught by the bad guys? No problem. She would flip back, make a new choice, and repeat the process until she got the happy ending.

You thought this was cheating – but then, you were the one who was devastated when you went through the whole book only to have the hero fail.

After spending this week running down tunnels and following clues, you’re starting to wonder if there were choices you didn’t see, other actions you could have overlooked. Are you going to reach a dead end? Are you going to face something terrible and wish you could flip back and make a new decision, like calling the police, or telling your friends everything, or simply putting that first red envelope back in the snow and walking away?

But you don’t have that clear path forward. You don’t even understand why things happened the way they did. All you have are boots dirty and salt-stained from tromping all over campus, and bloodshot eyes, and fifteen puzzles.

Well, that’s not everything you have. You’ve also got the text you received while you were still standing in front of that bulletin board, with its bizarre accompanying image. You have everything you need to find the truth.

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