A new place is the opportunity to make a fresh start; moving to a new town, switching to a new school, or starting college give you the freedom to reinvent yourself, to become a version of yourself that isn’t tied to the perceptions or expectations of the people in your old life, or to break out of familiar but destructive habits. This is the chance that the young female protagonists of Diane Hoh’s Nightmare Hall book The Roommate and R.L. Stine’s Fear Street book Runaway seize as they try to shake off the traumas and dark secrets of their previous lives.
Hoh’s The Roommate is the second book in her Nightmare Hall series and plays a foundational role in establishing the dynamics of campus life at Salem University, and the larger narrative patterns of the series as a whole. The first semester of college is a huge transition experience and one which suitemates Lacey Sakurada, Danni Spelling, Maureen Ross, and Margot Hanes find themselves sharing, as they navigate the challenges of first-semester classes, romantic complications, and getting involved around campus. All four girls are just getting to know Salem University and one another, and part of that involves deciding how much to share about where they’re from and their pre-college lives. The suitemates like one another, and after just a couple of weeks, Danni “never felt she belonged in a place so much as she belonged at Salem. The easy friendship of the others in the dormitory was all she had hoped for. There was always someone to talk to, or hang out with, no matter what time of day or night, and Danni soon felt she had known her roommates forever” (79). However, this familiarity is illusory, and despite how much they like each other, the roommates are well aware of how little they know about the other young women they are sharing their living space with, an uncertainty that takes on darker undertones when things begin to get scary.
The unsettling events seem to center around Danni: She receives a threatening phone call, with a mysterious voice saying “I know who you are” (109, emphasis original), and she comes back to her room one day to find one of her favorite sweaters slashed and covered with nail polish, accompanied by an ominous message in lipstick on her mirror that reads “YOU MUST DIE” (132, emphasis original). Danni’s friends are unnerved but at the same time, it feels like they all have something to hide: Margot arrived at Salem mysteriously late and is really sensitive about people touching her things, particularly a big, sharp letter opener she keeps on top of her dresser; Lacey is a volatile party girl, who just might be capable of anything; and Maureen is almost debilitatingly shy, though it soon becomes apparent that there’s more to her than meets the eye, as her work on the school newspaper draws her out of her shell. These young women all have secrets and as much as Danni likes them, they’re also high on her suspect list.
Danni might not know much about Margot, Lacey, and Maureen, but it seems like there might be some things she doesn’t know about herself, either. She gets conflicting reports about things that she allegedly said or did that don’t coincide with her own memories. For example, when Danni sees Margot wearing her sweater and confronts her roommate, Margot flies into a rage, telling Danni “You told me I could have the sweater” (92, emphasis original). It could be that Margot misunderstood or is defensively overreacting, or that Danni is misremembering their conversation, but whichever it is, things aren’t adding up. There is a similar moment of disconnect when a cute boy named Jordan who Danni has been seeing comes to pick her up and take her to a movie at the student center. They’re showing Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho and Jordan tells Danni, “You haven’t forgotten? You said you loved those kinds of movies” (123, emphasis original). Danni doesn’t really like horror movies, but goes along with Jordan anyway, though her post-film assessment is that “These movies are gross” (124). Again, there are several different explanations: Jordan could be misremembering or confusing Danni with someone else or, if they were having their conversation in the midst of a loud party, something could have been misheard or misunderstood. But once again, Danni’s memory and what others are telling her don’t match… which makes sense in the end, because Danni isn’t quite who she seems to be.
While Danni tells her suitemates that she calls home to talk to her family every week and she’s always checking the mailroom for care packages, this is either a ruse or self-delusion. Danni’s wealthy parents are distant and disengaged, traveling all over the world while they left her home with a caregiver. Danni’s life has been a lonely and isolated one, first because of her parents’ lack of engagement, and, as she got older, because she developed violent tendencies and it wasn’t safe for her to be around others. Margot, Lacey, and Maureen discover that “Gradually one wing of the enormous house in which she lived had become a sort of posh prison for the increasingly psychotic child, with bars on the windows and paid companions and nurses twenty-four hours a day” (179). Danni got to Salem University because she killed her nurse and made her escape; she has been working to stay under the radar and avoid her parents’ detection ever since. Danni attacks Margot and nearly kills her in the basement tunnels beneath their dormitory building, but Lacey’s astute deductions and the other girls’ quick thinking save the day.
As Margot, Lacey, and Maureen comfort one another and analyze the horror they have just collectively endured, their secrets come out: Margot has been hiding the fact that she is a scholarship student, ashamed that she doesn’t have the money or resources of some of her peers, and Lacey is a straight-A student who has only been playing dumb as a sort of rebellion against her goody-goody high school reputation. Maureen doesn’t really have any secrets to keep, but does find herself becoming more comfortable and outspoken as she finds her place among her friends and at Salem University, revealing previously hidden depths, like her advanced placement in a psychology class and her avid interest in sports, which she parlays into a spot as a sports writer for the campus newspaper. Danni’s secrets remain a bit more mysterious, even after she has been taken into custody. No one’s quite sure how much Danni hallucinated and how much was subterfuge, or how much of what she was doing was a secret even to herself. For example, as the girls are talking it over the aftermath of Danni’s attempted murder of Margot, they speculate that Danni really believed she was receiving threatening phone calls, but at the same time, Lacey says, “I think Danni started to sense that she wasn’t quite pulling it off. That someone was onto her […] She was losing her grip on reality, and all she could think was to protect herself” (177). Margot, Lacey, and Maureen work together to make sense of what happened and to try to figure out the truth, but they may never know all of it, and it seems unlikely that Danni ever will either.
While Danni, Margot, Lacey, and Maureen were all on common ground as new arrivals at Salem University in The Roommate, in Stine’s Runaway, Felicia Fletcher is the only new girl in Shadyside, arriving in a town where everybody already knows everybody else, and she’s the only one who hasn’t heard the dark whispers about Fear Street. Everyone knows Shadyside’s secrets except Felicia, but she’s keeping secrets of her own, so at least on that score, they’re even.
In The Roommate, a lot of the tension and suspense centered on who’s hiding what, but from the very start, Runaway makes it clear that Felicia has something to hide, a reason that she has run away from home and doesn’t want to be found. In the opening chapter, Felicia remiscises on the place she left behind, including a college laboratory where she was a test subject as a result of her telekinetic powers. The lead researcher, Dr. Shanks, badgered Felicia into using her power, and “She forced all her anger, fear, and frustration into the shaft of the pencil. She knew it was wrong. But she couldn’t help herself” (6-7), as she sent the pencil hurtling straight toward Dr. Shanks’ face. He dodges the pencil and is thrilled at this new display of Felicia’s power, constantly pushing her to do more. Flashback chapters throughout the book depict another terrifying scene in which Felicia’s power has even more devastating results, when her friend Debbie antagonizes Felicia and dares her to test her power by trying to destroy an abandoned, decrepit beach house. Felicia succeeds, stunned by the destruction of which she is capable, though this takes a tragic turn when she realizes that two of her and Debbie’s classmates, Andy and Kristy, were inside the house—their favorite spot for clandestine trysts, apparently—and were killed in the collapse. Later that night, Debbie tells Felicia that the cops know what happened and will be coming for Felicia. Like a good friend, Debbie loans Felicia her car and tells her to make a run for it, though her escape gets a little more complicated when the car explodes. Felicia still manages to make her escape… to Shadyside, where things aren’t likely to be much better.
Felicia is resourceful: She finds a place to stay when she overhears two guys at a diner talking about a housesitting job that’s getting in the way of their fun plans, and offers to take it off their hands. She talks her way into getting enrolled at Shadyside High School with a lie about delayed paperwork and she scores a job at the local burger restaurant. She makes friends with Nick and his girlfriend Zan (short for Alexandria), and starts trying to settle into as normal a life as she can manage while she’s on the run. It isn’t long though, before she realizes her secrets aren’t exactly safe. Someone leaves a photocopy of her license with her real name and address on it, along with the threatening message “I KNOW ALL ABOUT YOU!” (44) in her locker at school and one night when she returns to her borrowed home, she discovers that someone has gone through her things and left another terrifying message on the wall: “RUNAWAY! GET OUT NOW! I KNOW EVERYTHING!” (61). Felicia’s afraid that someone may have followed her to Shadyside, but she’s also not sure about her new friends either, especially Zan, who has a violent jealous streak and has definitely noticed that Felicia has a crush on Nick.
Felicia is obsessed with keeping her own secret, but it turns out that it’s really other people’s secrets she ought to be worried about. As Zan becomes more violent, Felicia does some digging into the other girl’s past and finds out that Zan killed her last boyfriend, Doug, after learning he’d gone out with another girl. The official story is that Doug’s death was a tragic accident: he and Zan were arguing on a balcony at her house and he fell, impaled on the wrought iron fence below. But of course there’s more to this “accident” than meets the eye and in their final confrontation, as Zan attacks Felicia she confesses “Of course I killed him! […] He hurt me. So I hurt him back. Do you know what it’s like to watch someone realize they’re about to die? I stood on that balcony for fifteen minutes watching Doug die. He kept trying to say he was sorry. Can you believe that? I mean, he was just a little late with that apology, you know?” (129). Felicia uses her power to save herself, restraining Zan until she can be taken into custody. But Zan isn’t the only “friend” who has been keeping secrets. As Felicia prepares to pack her stuff and hit the road again, she finds Debbie waiting for her… and pretty disappointed that Felicia isn’t dead. Felicia’s not the only one with powers, though Debbie did a better job of hiding hers, goading Felicia into attempting to take down the beach house as a cover for her own premeditated murder, motivated by her unrequited love for Andy. Felicia was supposed to take the fall and then die in the car explosion, leaving Debbie free and clear—but she didn’t, and now Debbie has come to finish Felicia off with her telekinetic powers. It’s a pretty epic showdown and, just as Felicia used her powers to keep from being murdered by Zan, she taps into strength she didn’t know she had to protect herself and fights back against Debbie, defeating the other girl and putting her in a coma. Felicia comes to realize that maybe her powers aren’t so bad after all, she controls it well enough to avoid killing Zan or Debbie, and in the end, she decides she better go back home and return to Dr. Shanks’ laboratory, so that she can learn more about what she can do and how to use it responsibly (which doesn’t seem like a great idea, given his exploitative abuse, but this new, tougher Felicia isn’t as scared as she once was, so maybe she’ll be able to more effectively advocate for herself and establish a less toxic relationship with the not-so-good doctor. Here’s hoping).
In both The Roommate and Runaway, Danni and Felicia are running from both their mistakes and from themselves. While Danni actually committed murder, Felicia has only been tricked into believing she did, though the burden of guilt she carries is overwhelming. Both young women are also eager for the opportunity to reinvent themselves. Danni is out of her parents’ house and on her own for the first time, but this exhilarating sense of freedom is complicated: While she has gotten out from under her parents’ control, that control was apparently necessary to keep Danni from killing people. Felicia’s bid for freedom is less about independence and more about leaving her past self behind, rejecting her telekinetic powers and the violence of which she believes she is capable. For both Danni and Felicia, these new beginnings are overshadowed by dark secrets from the past that refuse to stay buried, and between new and old friends, it’s hard to know who you can trust. The person who wants to kill you could be your new roommate or your oldest friend and while running is easy enough, it’s only a matter of time before the past catches up.
