Chapter 5: 04

At the end of the day, I returned to homeroom.

I played with Owens' graphing calculator. It was from Texas Instruments, a company that went over to East and Midwest and not Anaheim or CDMX. Tammy had hold me that the Commissioner at the time had leapt for joy when the exclusive contracts were concluded. Why?

It wasn't for her to understand, it was for me to understand, she had said.

She was a receptacle, and I was her prophetess.

Some secrets belonged to the world community of espers.

Except that's not really true, I had replied. After world initialisation, hadn't the curse (Tammy immediately replied it was a blessing) of psychic power bled, bled bled bled, inkstained and stolen every single facet of human life? If you could name it could be sensed or extrasensed and therefore psychically manipulated. What else did she mean whenever she said 'phones are psychic power?'

That didn't counter her point, she had replied. But it did, if you were involved with something you had the right to Know.

Of course I thought that, she replied, and stared forward blankly. You're a rank 7. This world is your birthright. And for the rest of us?

Owens had said something along those lines when I had came in. "It's the girl who owns the world," more blank than she had been in the morning. Which was strange to me, since the school glowed with her goldenrod, her sparks of silver. Well, those of others, probably. As I said, the power of the Second City is shared, even if they say it's 'yours to keep.'

"What do you mean," I'd replied.

"You know what I mean. And furthermore, I gave you the power to realise it."

"I actually don't?"

"Take a seat." (I did, at that point, dragging a chair at the front that belonged to nobody I knew beside her desk.) "You think of yourself as, maybe you don't say better than others, but brighter than others. More luminant, more deserving. Worse, you absolutely can back that up!"

"I think that's better."

"Shut up. You're the one with the talent. And you use it, consciously or otherwise, to make yourself live an easy life, a life that's easy because nothing happens in it. Maybe the monochrome of darkness-"

"The what," I said, knowing exactly what she meant-

"is some affliction of your ability, completely unrelated to your conscious or subconscious desires, I don't know, you're pretty easy to read but I don't have the raw power to interpret, but anyway in your personal time it's not like you do anything with your ability, you just play about with your friends, shopping fine dining whatever. You have zero social responsibility."

"What a disgusting phrase," I replied. If I had been read there was no point in keeping up pretenses, was there?

"What's so disgusting about it," Owens replied. And I decided that if she couldn't figure out why I thought that after having read my mind so casually, after making me participate in her little class demonstrations automatically, she didn't deserve an answer. So I took her graphing calculator off her desk and began fiddling around with it, and she just continued to wait for my answer.

'Oh, but you came to her room.' Shut it she invited me. I know she did because I share my light little by little I don't correct or purify every damned little deviation seamlessly, like whispering, better than whispering. The only perfection there is is my own as it exists, damn it. Damn you. Damn you!

She took it well, took it lightly.

Of course she did, set out the little damned prop for some unknown but very definite purpose.

People who believe in social responsibility don't believe in fooling around, wasting time, burning resources, letting things be. They're always caring, desiring, avaricious, invested, dictate a certain result to you, a single goal that everyone in 'human society' must whittle away at their time to achieve. And they're really good at it too, turning little moments of play into lessons. Nothing was ever without purpose.

(This, of course, was why my parents just couldn't abide their dearest and only daughter making sure she passed and only passed. Her light couldn't be a taste of heaven. Hannah had to become worldly. Damn you.)

I added numbers over and over again. I subtracted them from themselves until they hit zero. I typed in random equations and the calculator solved them. I typed in random equations and it plotted them. Started a statistical table but couldn't be assed to finish. Went into the distributions option and pressed random numbers to get bar graphs and bell curves. What was going on there? If you can't tell, I definitely wasn't paying attention in that class, ehe. Went to the physical constants section and only then did Owens turn around and say, "you of all people should probably be careful there."

"It's just a calculator. There's no meaning to it."

"It's not just a graphing calculator. It once was a living person, with real dreams and real aspirations. Then I caught the bastard and transmogrified him with scientific witchery!"

"What?"

"I'm just joking. It's a calculator. But I believe the world is meaningful, if not fated. Every little moment," and I have to interrupt, trite phrase, "you spend doing something has a little purpose, some more than others. It'll inspire you later or help you cool off from a hard day. I think that mindset makes the world so much less dark, and shouldn't we carry that forward in the way we interact with others?"

"I don't care for the dictatorship of meaning. It's possible to do whatever with others without any consequence as long as you don't hurt them, as long as everyone enjoys it." That was the ethos of my light, after all, even if the likes of Tamara found definite purpose in it.

"Ah. So Hannah's heart is cold and empty."

"Judgy. So you're so damn caring and warm-hearted? I haven't stopped the world or anything. I haven't deprived anyone of anything! My power creates a place of unity and respite."

"Unyielding-"

"Well, what have you created? Nothing, I'm damn sure."

She read me. Ah, so it wasn't that I was too prissy and polite to swear at a so-called fucking teacher. I was heaven and I'd damn my enemies to hell. Evangelical background-

I flicked my wrist. Ameli- Owens snapped back to her reality. I remained in mine. (Didn't everyone. Did everyone?)

"Well, read me back?"

"Do you people do that so casually in the Second City?"

"Only during arguments."

"Damn disgraceful. You're so far beneath me."

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"I won't even deny that."

"Well, I don't even know what you're fucking playing at? So stop meddling-"

"Other people are still here, you know. Maybe it didn't matter if anyone but your little friends heard you before, but it does now."

"What do you mean."

"Isn't it damn disgraceful to see someone so much better than me stagnate and call it heaven."

"I'm not stagnating, I'm just not rising."

"So-called heavens. That's what I gave you the power to realise, you know? Your heaven. I've graduated from the Second City, I'm a teacher, isn't psychic development what I'm supposed to do?"

"The power to realise my heaven," I repeated, monotone. (Monochrome. White, which contained every colour in heaven and earth and hell.)

"I like answers to rhetorical questions."

"I like answers to my actual questions."

"Then put a question mark after them?"

"It's not like you can see that?"

"Well, if you can, it's working better than I expected."

If I could what? See question marks in the way people speak? Isn't that a silly thing to do. Owens was obviously using a metaphor. You don't say question marks, you raise your voice a little higher when you want to ask a question.

And then the sea of texts I foresaw in the earliest morning fell upon my head, the little descriptions of projects, obsessions, contributions, things with purpose, not of play, and I drowned for a second in air, my breath not working properly, entirely well. I rasped, gasped, hand slid up to my neck. Owens rose, patted my back but nothing was caught in my throat was it why would I work and then the humanity's beloved cherished texts came from my mouth choking like sludge oil angels' tears ambrosia perfect imperfect disgraced with the malfunctioning of the human body and then, then there was none and I was standing again why was I standing no not possessed by her possessed by everything and then I fell down to my knees and tried to scream.

Nothing came out. Owens knelt down. I looked up vacantly at her monitor, at the ghost, palimpset of some erased and rewritten token reply.

"What. What's working better than expected."

"You already divided the world into people who were relevant to you and people who aren't-"

"People who are Relevant to me and people who aren't."

"That's what I just said- oh, okay. So when your power went obviously a little haywire, I amplified that importance. Encouraged you, it, you to draw in more and more people into your world, and moreover, make more things matter to you, things happen to you inside and outside of class, so you'd have to do things, make changes, face and repair adversity. I'm not even saying that you have to be a good person or anything, but at least do things other than keeping yourself safe. Wouldn't want to end up killing yourself from the emptiness. I nearly did."

"Did you now."

"Yeah. Probably shouldn't be venting about it to one of my students."

"Shouldn't be fucking around with your students' worlds, either."

"All teachers do that, whether they like it or not. And, while I'm not saying you have to be a good person, I want to do good, even if it hurts. Help my darling best friend with his games company, save you from her stagnation, Carmen from her desp-"

"Oh fuck Carmen why would you want to save fucking Carmen."

"I hate Carmen fucking Aletheialand, don't get me wrong-"

"Oh. You have a Carmen as well."

"...oh? Do you know Brackash or Cauchy."

"I thought there was only one Carmen."

"Do you not know."

"Know what."

"I guess I didn't read that far, if I missed that you knew a Carmen."

"Know what."

"There's multiple of them. The SEER dictates the circumstances of their births, the infliction of their power unto them, every four years. Aletheialand, Brackash, Ferret, their parents abandoned their old last names after marriage, Cauchy, Dedekind, Erdosh, I think their parents were shipped together by the SEER? And we, well, the Second City Council just decided to name them after mathematicians after that."

"Oh."

And I told myself, I couldn't give in, my friends still need me, my light, that I could keep everyone safe from tampering, that I could create a pointless elysium detached but not cut away from the world, that I wouldn't be given to meddling, the weird things I saw, that urge to perfect things with my life or the desires of others for me to do something important.

And I was too tempted by the strange meddling or the sleep or maybe the shock of my fate, hate-

I fainted.