A few minutes later, Penelope cautiously poked her head out of the bathroom door.

“Hello…?”

No one answered. She stepped into cluttered hallway: there was no sign of the man she’d been hooking up with nor of the pen-brandishing girl who’d burst in on them.

“Anyone?”

She made her way to the front foyer, where she’d heard all the commotion. No one was there, either.

Penelope shivered. She was beginning to doubt that the events of the past half hour had even occurred outside her mind, but that still didn’t explain how she happened to wind up in some stranger’s empty house. Being a hip urban girl, she could hardly afford to keep losing her head like this…

But then she saw the small, familiar newspaper clipping lying on the table next to the front door. The first words read,

“Oversized Cozy Sweater seeks…”

And at the bottom, scrawled in cheap black ink, was an address.

She folded up the paper and slipped in into her pocket.

“Okay.” She said, and stepped outside.