Room For Rent

Nya has one semester of college left and no money, which is the whole reason she is still in the house. It is rundown but cheap, and for a while the only real drawback is that her roommate Sidney is strange in a way that is hard to put a finger on.

Then things start happening. Small at first, and deniable, the kind of thing you could talk yourself into having imagined, except that there is nobody else in the house they could be coming from. Nya cannot afford to break the lease and she cannot prove anything, so she does the arithmetic every student in that position does: hold out until the end of term.

Noelle W. Ihli spends the first half of the book on that slow domestic pressure, and then moves past it. The mind games are not the point of what Sidney is doing; they are the setup, and by the time Nya understands the difference she has been living with it for months.