#return 0;

Lyra passed the auditorium, walking towards nothing in particular. Groups of students were practicing for the fall performance, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Lyra ignored the loud yelling of what sounded like Latin. The muffled sound of the Harry Potter main theme being played on piano could be heard from the entire hallway, with the occasional “Expelliarmus!” and “Expecto Patronum!” Lyra wanted to get away; the thought of being in a room with other people nauseated her.

Lyra looked at the wall across from her; posters covered much of the space above a cluttered desk. She recognized a few popular bands that Kat liked, including one that bore the same Twenty-One Pilots logo on Kat’s shirt, and other bands that Lyra only knew because Kat had recommended songs to her; Fitz and the Tantrums, Melanie Martinez, Saint Motel, Panic! At The Disco, Lyra didn’t listen to music that much, and had a limited knowledge of what bands played what. She liked most of the songs Kat recommended though. A rather large poster of a drawn red-haired woman caught her eye. “ÌÕMPÆØË” was printed in thin, white letters at the bottom. [...] An Apollo 11 poster with a launching space shuttle hanged next to an exploding Van Gogh TARDIS. Below was a calendar with a generic landscape painting every month. It read July; Kat must’ve forgotten to change it. A map of the sky with various constellations marked and a Voyager poster were taped to the left. A few photographs were pinned to the wall on the right. Lyra saw one from last year, from when she and Kat went to Midwinter together since neither had dates. Other posters of various bands, games, art, and things that Lyra didn’t recognize filled the wall.

Lyra opened her school issued laptop, the screen blinked on and showed a login screen, and without looking down, she typed in her password and her desktop came into view. She opened up a textedit program and typed in lines of C++ code, her fingers dancing over the keys like playing a violin. She then logged into the school server and executed her crude program through the Terminal. It asked for the administrator username and password. She executed another program, and a username and password was generated: two strings of random numbers, registered as an admin account. The account existed for a brief 4.3 seconds; it allowed access to one computer, then was deleted. Lyra downloaded all the notes, presentations, and test answers for the Theology course she currently ignored. She copied the notes into a separate Microsoft Word document, named it "sem_1_theo_ecclesiology.docx" and saved it to a folder in her Documents.

The lights momentarily blinded her, leaving a strange afterimage of the cinema hallway on her eyes. A muffled echo of far off voices drifted though the wall, the score of a romantic film played past thin walls behind them. She leaned back, resting her shoulders on cheap wallpaper. Her hand went up next to her ear, a force of habit, before remembering that her hair was tied up in a bun. Nervously, she pretended to adjust the earrings she wore, a small sterling “int main()” on her right ear and a matching “return 0;” on her left. Being such a computer nerd, she couldn’t resist buying them when she saw them on Tumblr. The music swelled, the vibrations traveled through the walls and she felt it against her back, she should have worn any other blouse, it was a bad idea to wear the one with the exposed shoulders. The walls were cold. Or maybe she was. Either way, it was a bad idea, she always forgot how much they blast the AC in theatres.