IV.

I did not resurface from my room until the following Monday at 1PM.

Rest assured, that was not my intention, but matters concerning my residence required my attention. I spent what remained of Saturday, after waking up late in the afternoon, looking for the black mold that I had heard the night before. But despite my sincerest efforts it remained elusive, as if it had become a rat taking refuge in tunnels architected by the termites behind the walls.

I reorganized my shelves. I grabbed my brother's action figurines and dug graves for each of them beneath the withering stalks of his potted plants. For the first time since I inherited them, I took each pot and poured water from my bathroom faucet until a shallow pond pooled above the dirt patches where I had spooned a final mound over melted plastic masks.

As for the monsters, I set them by the window sill. What meager sunlight would enter through my south facing room would be cast on them. The ultraviolet would prevent black mold, for one, but more importantly, the electric eel figure would serve as a kind of buffer. The radio had grown distorted lately, no doubt caused by the waves transmitted by local humans.

It was my brother who taught me this.

He was the one who showed me that concentrating radiation at the nexus of the cranium with a magnifying glass produced unsavory results, that other forces beyond our reckoning were waiting to snatch us when we crossed paths with transparent planar dimensions. As such, I was always careful about venturing too close to the window, even at night, when the windows were thrown open, and mother’s shock absorbent garden was right below.

After clearing away space, I lifted the shelf boards that used to carry heroes and villains. I placed the boards on the floor, then pried the empty shelf from the wall. A lone nail at the top of the case groaned as I twisted the anchor it had been screwed into outwards, pulling a strip of the wall along with it.

Much to my chagrin, that turned out to be the only visible hole in the wall. No labyrinthian caverns. No detritus where the mites had left their handiwork. The black mold had vanished also. I spent the evening repairing the damage, and before I could do anything else, it was time for bed.

Normally, I would have left my room on Sunday. I made an effort on weekends to head to the local supermarket to pick up groceries. There were sales on Sundays too, steep discounts on minced meat and frozen TV dinners. But not only was I not very hungry that day, I still had plenty of meal replacement beverages in the miniature fridge beneath my desk.

I was also well behind on my university readings.

I won’t bore you with which preeminent philosopher of which canonical period I read that Sunday, but suffice to say stroking one’s chin for sixteen hours straight does not a philosopher make.

And then Monday came.

By then, I had convinced myself that my failure to parse formal logic over the weekend was not by any means a matter of intellectual ability.

Instead, I told myself that I had been distracted. The girl with the black eye remained at the forefront of my available mindspace all the way until 12:30PM, when I rinsed myself in the shower and prepared to go to class.

The weather, thankfully, was cooler that day, as if a late September breeze had cut in line on the seasonal calendar. Clouds sailed over my apartment and, further ahead, a gallery of white houses that stood on both sides of the asphalt road that led to campus.

If I tilted my perspective, I could process these homes as if they were oil paintings, with their sunlit windows dressed in olive green pastel and the trees swaying behind them blurry, distinct only by the application of shadow cast from clouds. Older families, suburban men and women with white hair reclining on reading chairs, paid no attention to the myriad students drifting towards the iron gates that marked the edge of campus.

Most students made a sharp left or right turn once they reached the gate. The center dirt road, the road I took, led to only two interest points, the Bergarac Building, of course, and several of the campus’s sports centers, which had been constructed then abandoned when the university lacked the funds to sponsor any competitive athletes. The buildings themselves looked clean but were locked tight by faculty and hardly anyone loitered around them.

“Hey!”

I heard the muffled thumps of padded sneakers on gravel. Had I any reason to suspect the greeting was not for me, I would not have turned around. But there was no one in front of me, and no other people behind, and my ears were sharp enough to determine that I was standing at the locus of converging sound waves.

When I turned around, I spotted a lone black eye.

Several things were different about the girl with the black eye. She was mindful of colder weather and dressed in long sleeves and complementary thigh high socks. Her eye seemed different too. The edges were no longer black and looked more like faded magenta. 

I decided to readdress her by this change.

“Hey,” the girl with the faded magenta eye repeated. “Are you heading to the Bergerac?”

“That’s right.”

“Do you mind if I go with you?”

What for? You already know the way, was what I wanted to ask, but if it was not evident by now, social situations, especially those regarding persons of existential interest to me, did not often fall right into my lap. So I shrugged and nodded and continued on my way.

The girl with the faded magenta eye, instead of following behind me, pulled ahead and walked in lockstep in front of me. I didn’t mind. I was hoping to occasionally turn around to glance at her, but I figured it would have been weird, as I soon discovered when she began to occasionally turn her head to glance at me with her eye.

“What?” I said. “Trying to make sure that I’m still here?”

“Yes. Stay right behind me. Just like that. They’re coming.”

“They?”

“Valerie! Wait for me!”

Another shout came from further behind me. Curiosity aside, I knew, even before the girl with the faded magenta eye closed her left hand over my wrist like a vice grip, that the voice was the reason the girl was acting so strange.

“Don’t look,” she said.

“I know.”

Her hand relaxed.

Myriad footsteps closed in behind us, close enough that I suspected my body would not do a very good job of hiding the girl’s silhouette. But then a quintet of voices started speaking rather loudly and flippantly as if they did notice us at all.

“Did you see Natasha on your way here?”

“Nah, not after film club yesterday. She seemed like she was in a hurry.”

“It’s because of you, Sayu.”

“Me? You were the one–”

“Will you all shut up? I need to think.”

One pair of feet separated themselves from the pack. They walked briskly with impatient uneven steps. In my peripherals, I spotted a sundress with its trimmings whipping back and forth as it paced around the coven. In response, the girl with the faded magenta eye mechanically circled clockwise such that she maintained a perpetual one hundred and eighty degree angle opposite the golden garments.

“It’s fine. She'll show up for class. We can talk to her then.”

“I don't get it Val. Why are you so obsessed with her? We fulfill the minimum requirements with just the five of us and Professor Medea.”

“You think I don’t know that, Candace? You think I’m stupid or something?”

“...No, that’s not what I’m saying.”

“Sure sounded like you were implying it, but this is why I’m the president and the rest of you should just fall in line. We need Natasha Yu for Apocalypse Anew, just like we need the rest of us and the professor and all the others.”

“We shouldn’t be saying that so loudly, Val.”

“Why not? The only one who could stop us was the Electromagnetic Man, and no one’s seen him in a long time.”

“I still don’t get what any of this has to do with the film club.”

“You don’t get anything, Monica. You’re the dumbest one among us.”

The women, who until that moment had been nothing more than disembodied voices, finally passed me, and they promoted themselves into faceless mannequins dressed in familiar clothes, like a chestnut blouse fixed with a lattice neckline, a pair of blue jean short shorts, and of course, the yellow summer sundress that led them.

They paid me no attention as they walked by.

I thought this was strange at first given my company, but when I swiveled my gaze to the right, I realized that the girl with the faded magenta eye was no longer there.