3.1.5

[going to have to edit the end of 3.1.4, don't confuse yourself trying to make them match up]
[changed Ama to Ame]

Ame certainly did not pass all of her exams. She blamed it on that guy - not Alick, but the other one that she had met that night. The one that died that night in the hospital from the skull fracture cutting into his brain. Even thinking about it brought the taste of bile up her throat. He had been about to kill her, so why did she still feel so sick about the fact that he had died? Still, even thinking about that night made her start shaking, which was a hole in her normally rock solid personality and one that she would rather avoid. Her friends all told her that her best trait was how outgoing and never-back-down she was, and she planned to not let them down in that respect.
Although really, she probably would have failed at least one of those two exams anyway. She had no patience for studying, there was so much else she could be doing with her time!
Reflecting on how much easier Math 116 was going to be the second time around, she maneuvered her way out of the circulation office's back room with a cart of books to be reshelved. Even with no patience for studying, Ame had always had a love of reading (she had long ago adapted the ability to navigate while reading, which was much easier than people seemed to think), as she waited for the elevator, she perused the books that she would be reshelving. The rush after finals week always meant that, unlike most of the year where a cart would contain books for floors four through ten, the backlog of books was enough to have one cart for each floor, which meant she had to work overtime instead of glory in the fact that she passed, well, 50% of her classes.
These books were bound for the tenth floor. Tenth floor... PS through Z, library of congress classification, that's American literature, health books, archival and librarian studies. Ninth floor was her favorite because of the array of books about television shows. The idea was incredibly ironic to her, as most people watched television to avoid reading, didn't they?
The library was almost completely deserted. Most of her co-workers had taken the day off to sleep off their end-of-finals hang overs, so she basically had the run of the library to herself. She considered just leaving the cart on the tenth floor and going back to the shelver's office and grabbing her speakers to blast music - no one would be able to hear it, right? She turned this option over in her head as the elevator doors dinged and she pushed the cart out into the open, empty tenth floor.
Not empty.
What greeted her was the sound of heavy footsteps pounding down the hall to her left and the door that led to the stairs at the end of the room being slammed against the wall. Ame rolled her eyes, figuring it was someone vandalizing the library. This happened from time to time, where she'd walk onto a floor only to discover whole shelves of books having been knocked off of their shelves or fresh spray paint on the ground (never on the books though, thankfully). She turned left and walked the few paces so that she could get a clear view down the hallway towards the stairs, to see what they had done. She prepared herself to see vandalism of some kind, but that's not what she found.
She couldn't breathe for a minute as she saw the scene. There was a boy collapsed on the ground in the aisle, blood surrounded him and spatters of it continued towards the stairway. He was face down, his hair long enough to soak in the blood slowly pooling around him. Ame ran forward, "Hey!" she called, desperate for a reply that didn't come, "Hey you! Fuck. You! Are you okay?!" her voice broke on the last word as she knelt down beside him, swallowing at the bile that rose to her mouth when she realized the stains that would appear on her pant knees when she got up. It hadn't even occurred to Ame to call 911 until after she rolled the boy halfway over, and realized who it was. "Alick! Oh God, okay, I'm calling 911, you're gonna be okay-"
She was removing her phone from her pocket as she spoke. Alick's eyes flickered open at recognition of his name. His face registered panic, and Ame felt like she might vomit again. He could barely breathe, if at all. His mouth, there was something wrong with his mouth. It was brimming with blood, and his tongue was at an awkward angle, as though it had been taken out and stuck back in sideways. "Ye- yes, hello?" she stammered into the phone, "Uhm, yes, the central library, I'm on the tenth floor. There's someone here and, and he's not breathing." She didn't know what to do, what to say. She needed to make this all right. What happened? This was the guy that saved her life. He was dying. Something was desperately wrong here.
The man that had picked up her call on the other side was very calm, and after a moment had managed to get her to explain the situation at hand.
"Okay, Ma'am? I'm going to need you to help me here, because the van's not going to be able to get there fast enough. You're going to need a drinking straw and something thin and sharp, like a knife. Can you find those items for me?"
Oh God. He expected her to do something? Ame's mind raced. "Yeah, uhh..." she laid Alick back down on the ground and dashed back to her cart of books, where her water cup. Straw, check. The knife, she didn't have though, right? "Uhh, sir? I don't have a knife. Could a... a bobby pin work? It's all I have."
The man on the other end consented, and she raced back to Alick, feeling for one of the pins in her hair and tearing it out. At his instruction, her shaky hand located the base of his neck and bore the bobby pin into his soft skin. I'm killing him, she thought, Oh God he's not going to survive until the emergency team gets here because I will have killed him. She opened up the hole wider and the straw went in. The extremely shallow breaths that he had been able to muster up before had totally stopped when she had pushed the bobby pin into his neck and they needed to resume. Now. She pushed, rhythmically and desperately, on his chest for what felt like an hour until... The breath came. Not through his mouth but through the straw in his neck. "Oh God. Oh God I think it's working-" she almost sobbed into the phone, Alick was alive. Alive.