Alice wakes in her dorm to blinding light and a savage hangover, her pillow damp and her body aching. She searches the bed for the violet-haired girl from the night before and finds the room empty. A phone alarm plays a haunting song while a purple Post-it on the lampshade reads, “Goodbye, Alice. xo Lottie,” offering no contact or promise of seeing each other again.

As Alice tries to recall the night—flashes of rain, music, heat, and tangled hands—she notices she is naked under a stained sheet. Purple dye marks speckle the cotton, but three distinct, dark-red drops of blood draw her focus. Checking herself, she finds no fresh injury; instead, she discovers half a dozen lipstick marks on her skin, realizing the bruises are pomegranate-colored kisses, and feels both exposed and chilled.

Her hangover spirals into a pounding rhythm that triggers a childhood memory. The narrative shifts back nine years: Alice, age nine, chases her twelve-year-old sister Catty, who bolts from a family dinner after their father’s partner, Eloise, implies she and their dad might be “meant to be.” Catty resents Eloise as a replacement for their late mother, Sarah Moore. The sisters end up at a low stone wall above their small town of Hoxburn, where they lie head to head and listen on repeat to a spare, incantatory song about a child lost—and maybe claimed—by the woods.

In the flashback, their differences are quietly drawn: Catty’s defiant streak, her freckled ease, and clear blue eyes, contrasted with Alice’s paler, anxious self. The song becomes a spell Catty refuses to let finish, restarting it just before the word “home,” holding them suspended in the moment and away from returning to the house and its tensions.

The scene snaps back to the dorm as Alice finally silences her alarm at the same point in the song. Lizbeth appears in the doorway, irritated that the alarm has been sounding for ages, and complains she had to study elsewhere. Alice panics briefly on seeing the time before remembering it is Sunday, not a class day. Lizbeth declares she will stay with her boyfriend Jeremy to avoid catching whatever Alice has, then leaves.

Feeling foul and unkempt, Alice dresses in loose clothes and stumbles into the suite’s common room, where Rachel and Jana react to her state with concern and humor. Still shaky and dehydrated, Alice decides the dorm’s air is stifling and, recalling Eloise’s knack for practical care, chooses to go outside for fresh air. She exits the building, hoping the outdoors will steady her after a day of illness and uneasy, fragmented memories.