My roommate always liked to smoke in the dark at night. At first, she smoked on the balcony so she wouldn’t disturb us. But after the heiress sharing our dorm complained that the freshly washed clothes smelled of smoke, she moved indoors. I tried to reason with her, warning that it could easily start a fire, with unimaginable consequences. She scoffed. “You just want to be the heiress’s lapdog.” That very night, she accidentally set the heiress’s bedsheets on fire. The heiress had taken melatonin and died in the blaze. Afterward, my roommate and another girl cried and claimed I was the one who’d been smoking. Grief-stricken, the heiress’s brother dealt a devastating blow to my mother and me. When I opened my eyes again, I was back at the moment my roommate was about to smoke indoors.
