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The library reopened several days later.

For those miserable few days, I studied at home. Summer, its momentous time now arrived, beat on my apartment windows until it ignited inside a furnace. Sweat fountained out of my body. My pores expanded, stretched wide like the apertures of mollusks, and secreted salty water as if I had become akin to a snail.

I found myself needing to shower four to five times a day.

I stripped down to the bare minimum, putting on clothes only when I needed to walk to the local grocer to buy food and supplies at night. I shut down my electronics, invested in hand fans, and set the plants on my shelf further away from the window to not encourage any unwanted growth.

The day the library reopened, I packed some spare clothes and arrived there first thing in the morning. It was an auspicious day. For the first time in a while, a fleet of clouds guided me to the library’s entrance.

Half-dead flowers had been littered by the bottom steps, a rather poor choice by school staff given that the flowers had not even been planted and had been left to rot beneath the sun, surrounded on all sides by black mold that had survived and usurped the once dominant weeds. I tiptoed around the outbreak, for the only thing worse than risking touching the mold was to return home and wait for the sun to boil me alive again.

Once inside, I returned to my rightful place on the seventh floor.

But when I arrived, the table there had already been occupied by the girl with the tourmaline eye. Except, like all the other times I had seen her, the color configuration of her eye had changed. This time, her eye had reverted to its original black shade.

“I thought you might show up today,” said the girl with the black eye.

“Where did you go?” I asked.

“I went back to the film club,” she replied. “After what happened last time, I knew they’d just punish more people until I returned.”

“I still don’t know what they want you for,” I said.

“Can we not talk about that?” she replied. “Can we… can we just pretend again? Just for a little bit.”

“The last time we pretended like this, you went straight back to the film club,” I rebutted. “Maybe it’s best that we stop pretending. You don’t have to go.”

The girl with the black eye shook her head.

“I won’t be in the film club for much longer anyway,” she said. “In fact, my last day with them is coming very, very soon. After this, everything will be okay.”

“Well, why didn’t you just say so? That’s good news, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she smiled. “Yes it is. That’s why it’s okay for us to pretend for a little bit longer.”

To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure what the girl with the black eye meant by pretending. She pulled out her textbooks and began taking notes and so I did the same, albeit at a much slower rate. What was there to pretend?

The library filled up over the next few hours. An unsettling, unfamiliar buzz reared its head whenever people walked by. Students and school staff alike were glued to their phones. They rambled amongst themselves as if possessed by some disturbing excitement, and a central conversation surfaced amidst the cacophony.

“Have you seen this?” they would all ask.

“Yeah,” they would all answer. “Is it true?”

“I don’t know,” they would reply, “but it explains all the weirdness recently.”

“Should we go then?” they would ask.

“I think we should,” they would answer.

“Don’t pay attention to them,” said the girl with the black eye. “We’re the only good students in this library now.”

“You know what they’re talking about?” I asked.

“I do,” she nodded. “But right now… let’s not talk about them. Can we talk about anything else? How about the class material? How far have you gotten?”

“You seem to know it a lot better than I do,” I replied sheepishly.

“Not really. I’m only familiar with the concepts that I’m interested in,” said the girl with the black eye. “Like evil, for instance.”

“Evil?”

“Yes,” she nodded. “How do we define evil? What makes people do evil things? Why and how do we allow it to happen? How do we defeat it? Can we defeat it?”

“Can we defeat it?”

She smiled. She closed her textbooks and stuffed her stationary back into her bookbag.

“It’s time,” she said. “Come with me.”

“Where are we going?” I asked. “What is it time for?”

“Just follow me.”

The girl with the black eye led me to the eighth, then ninth floor. We trekked up to the tenth, before taking the express elevator to the twenty first. There, it was a short walk past the history and religion shelves to reach the special access staircase that led all the way to the roof.

The staircase was blocked by a door locked with an electronic reader. The girl with the black eye fetched her wallet from her pockets and pressed it against the panel. Red LEDs turned green. I heard a beep and the door clicked open.

“I don’t think we’re allowed up there,” I said. “How do you have one of those passes?”

“The film club has its ways,” she chuckled.

“Professor Medea gets them for you, doesn’t she?”

“I think she uses it all the time, so yes.”

The roof was chillier than I expected. The clouds had thickened further since that morning and so the rooftop was covered by a wide gray blanket. Cool winds brushed past my shirt and whipped against my ears.

“What a shame,” the girl with the black eye sighed. “I was hoping we’d get a clearer view of the sky from here. It looks so… anxious today.”

“Why are we up here?” I asked.

“Have you ever felt like you were living for other people instead of for yourself?” she asked instead of answering my question.

“...I’m not sure,” I replied.

“I think everyone needs to know what it feels like to live for someone else,” the girl with the black eye explained. “When you know what it’s like to live in someone’s shoes, live for their ambitions and dreams, then you truly come to understand them. How could you hate them, hurt them, do terrible things for them, if you knew what it was like to live like them?”

“Are you saying that’s how we defeat evil?”

“Not entirely,” she said. “For all the evil in this world to disappear. No, for all the evil in my and your world to disappear, it’s not enough for us to just live for someone else. We need to live for all people, you see. We need to live and reside in everyone’s worlds all at once. Deskny is the root of all evil.”

“This is just what the film club keeps talking about,” I sighed. “You have to get away from them. It’s all nonsense!”

“No, you don’t understand,” the girl shook her head. Tears started to drop from her eyes. “I’ve known Valerie and the others for years now. I’ve never gotten away from them. It’s only now, after I showed them Apocalypse Anew, that I finally have a way out.”

“...you what?”

“They all changed after watching that film I made for them, and then changed even more after I introduced them to that streamer, Destiny,” the girl with the black eye laughed. “Sure, they still hurt me, but we all have a way out now. Valerie, me, all the others. Once our plan comes to fruition and we stop deskny, we’ll all understand each other. We’ll all know how much I suffered. We’ll know how much I suffered. No one can hurt anyone again if they know how much it actually hurts. All of this. All of my pain will have meant something, surely.”

Faint steps emerged from behind me. I turned around and spotted a yellow sundress and a burgundy shirt. The film club must have lurked in plain sight behind the rooftop enclosure.

“Good job in bringing her here, Natasha,” said the girl with the blue denim shorts. “I didn’t think she’d fall for it so easily.”

“I told you to come watch Apocalypse Anew before it was too late,” Valerie muttered. “Why didn’t you listen to me?”

“What’s going on?” I growled. “What’s happening?”

“The waves are reaching a tipping point,” Valerie explained. “Natasha is getting ready to save the world, to purge the nonbelievers and to bring about a wonderland where we all share our suffering until it is no more.”

“You led me here?” I faced the girl with the black eye. “You led me to them?”

“They knew who you were the moment they saw you,” she said. “How could I resist not letting them meet their idol? They’re your biggest fans.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“You’re the one who predicted all of this,” Valerie grinned. “Everything’s come to pass just like you said it would. The teachings of the Electromagnetic Man. The return of the waves. Students falling from rooftops preceding the imminent deskny crisis. We’ve prepared everything for you, just as you predicted.”

What followed, if only for the briefest of moments, could only be described as a total utter destruction of perspective, fourth dimensional vertigo, the space where all interiority proved helplessly insufficient, and the only means to truly see “her” in any capacity was to fall into an impartial omnipotence.

That was when Rosalyne’s eyes snapped wide open. She felt naked, exposed, not just to Valerie and Natasha and the others, but to herself.

And everyone else too, was naked before her. Rosalyne spotted every detail on Natasha’s blood red wrists and counted the veins that bulged along the black bruise around her eye, her eye that must have been battered and bruised in a cycle that could not be counted in days or weeks or months. She envied Valerie’s beautiful red lips and the stylish crescent jewels hanging from her earlobes and her golden hair which was so much better cared for than Rosalyne’s over bleached pink highlights.

But most of all, Rosalyne could finally see Apocalypse Anew. Each film club member played it on their phones and held it up to her in unison. All the students below had been watching it, showing it to each other, indulging in its insipid corruption.

The film club knew that to watch Apocalypse Anew was not just an appropriate induction ceremony. It represented, quite literally, the beginning of the destruction of a particular world, one that Rosalyne had refused to watch and could now no longer look away.

For at the center of the Apocalypse Anew was no black mold, but a single man, a young man whose face was easy to recognize, who looked into the camera, looked at Rosalyne, and began to speak.

“My name is…”

And then the moment was over.

“No,” I screamed. “I didn’t predict anything! I never wanted any of this. All I wanted was my brother–”

“Freeze!”

Mr. Caraway’s voice roared from the bottom of the staircase. He burst onto the roof, his two hands clenching an eight chamber revolver full of silver bullets. I counted the number of people on the rooftop. One round for each of us.

“Everyone hands up, all of you!”