Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

The campus outside my window was unrecognizable. Students everywhere, juniors and seniors mixed, the specific chaos of people who had been given one night and were spending it correctly. Campfires. Music from somewhere. Shouting from somewhere else. The sound of students saying goodbye to an institution.

I went outside.

***

May materialized from the crowd with the timing of someone who had known I was coming before I knew myself. Mini skirt higher than anyone else’s on the lawn, heels on grass, completely unbothered by both.

"Good to see you," she said. "Where are you heading?"

"Teachers’ quarters."

She smiled. The dimples. "I’ll walk with you." She fell into step beside me without asking. "Do you want to burn it?"

"Burn what?"

"Hogsby." Pleasantly. "Last night here. Probably the most memorable thing you could do."

"May."

"Fine." She accepted the redirect without losing pace. "I’ve wanted to climb that tower since my first week here." She pointed through the gap between two buildings where the water tower caught the moonlight, high and dark.

"That’s genuinely dangerous," I said.

"The probability of falling is extremely low," she said, with the flat confidence of someone who had run the actual numbers.

"For you," I said. "You manipulated the probability. I’m just a person."

She laughed. We reached the fork in the path. Teachers’ quarters to the left, the tower to the right. She stopped. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

"I’m waiting for you," she said, turning right.

"May—"

She was already walking.

****

I knocked on Daphne’s door. Nothing. I pushed it open.

The room was organized. Everything set, surfaces clear, the comfortable chaos of her daily life packed away or put straight. The couch where I had sat. The wardrobe standing closed. All of it ready. She wasn’t inside.

I stood in the doorway and looked at the room that had been a mess a day ago and was now prepared for whatever came next. Something about it felt like a decision made. Not abandoned. Prepared.

Then I saw it. On the bed. A photograph.

Daphne and Miss Brown. Younger, both of them, standing somewhere that wasn’t Hogsby, smiling in the unself-conscious way of people who don’t know they’re being photographed.

Brown can’t leave you behind, I thought.

The worry that had brought me to the teachers’ quarters at this hour quietly resolved itself. Daphne was going with us. She had to be. Miss Brown would not move to a new school and leave that photograph behind her.

I was still young enough to make bad decisions on the last night of something. May was down at the base of a tower waiting to make one with me. I stepped out, pulled the door closed, and walked back into the cold.

****

May was exactly where she’d said she’d be. Arms crossed. The expression of someone who had known I was coming and had chosen to find it funny rather than annoying.

"So you’ve come." She said it with satisfaction. "Told you I’d be waiting."

"It’s a genuinely bad idea," I said.

"It’s the last night." She looked up at the tower. "I think we can see beyond the walls from up there."

I looked at it. High. Dark. Old iron rungs disappearing into the night.

The walls, I thought. From up there.

I had spent twenty years looking at those walls from the outside. The idea of seeing beyond them—even just the shape of the plain in the dark, even just the direction I had come from—was doing something to my chest that I wasn’t going to examine closely.

"Ladies first," I said.

"Chivalry from the outside." She grabbed the first rung and went up without hesitation, heels and all.

I followed. The iron was cold and slightly uneven, the specific texture of something that had been there longer than anyone had been maintaining it. Below us, the campus assembled itself in pieces between the buildings. A campfire near the junior dormitory. Students in small groups. Music arriving from somewhere I still couldn’t locate.

"How are you climbing in heels?" I called up.

"Carefully," she said.

I was beginning to understand that May did everything carefully. She just made it look like she didn’t.

The air changed as we got higher. Cooler. The sounds from below started arriving with a slight delay—that specific quality of distance, the campus becoming something I was watching rather than something I was in. The same feeling as the tower at the plain crossing, looking back at something you’re already leaving.

May pulled herself onto the platform. I came up after her.

Oh, I thought.

Hogsby from above was a different institution entirely. The tired quality of the buildings, the worn edges, the sense of something that had been making do for longer than was comfortable—all of it was gone from up here. Just shapes. Just the bones of something that had been built before the catastrophe and had refused, against all reasonable expectation, to stop.

The dormitory lights. The sparks rising from the courtyard fire. The stray town beyond the gates, small and lit and quietly alive.

And in the far distance, where the lights ran out, the dark.

I couldn’t see the walls themselves. They were too far. But I could feel the direction of them—the specific pull of something that had defined my entire life from one side and then from the other.

May was looking at me.

"What are you thinking?" I asked.

"Tell me you want to fuck up here," she said.

I looked at her. At Hogsby below us. At the cold dark sky above us. At a girl who had engineered a detention, climbed a tower in heels, and was now standing on a platform in the wind asking the most May question that had ever been asked.

"That’s stupid," I said.

A pause.

"But worth a try."

She laughed, and I laughed, and the campus below us kept burning its fires and playing its music, and tomorrow we were going to the city, and tonight Hogsby had one more memory to give.

I’m ready, I thought, looking at the lights in the distance. For whatever comes next.

I thought I was ready.