lofi beats to kill to

Jamie looked critically at her desk. Steam rose from a cup of freshly brewed tea. Her desk lamp was set at two - bright enough so she could see, but dark enough to give the room an aesthetic academic gloom. Next to the tea, a scented candle called STUDY was burning. Jamie didn’t know how something could smell like STUDY but incredibly, that’s exactly what it smelled like. She breathed it in.

Everything was perfect. 

Settling into her chair in an oversized hoodie, Jamie opened her laptop. The conditions were ideal. All she had to do now was write this frigging essay.

The cursor blinked in the empty word document as Jamie surveyed the vast expanse of blank white screen that she had to fill with 3,000 words about James Joyce’s Ulysses. 

“James Joyce’s Ulysses," she wrote. 

A good start, she thought. 

Not sure if those esses are in the right place, though. I should probably look that up, she continued, and was in the process of doing so when a peal of laughter from the floor below caused her concentration to shatter like a foot onto which someone had dropped a copy of James Joyce's Ulysses. 

It was Hannah, who had the downstairs bedroom. Hannah found everything hilarious and had the most piercing laugh in human history. Jamie frowned.  Once Hannah started, it took a lot for her to stop.

It didn't matter though, because that was when the sound of atonal heavy metal started punching its way in from the room next door. That was Nick, who listened to music whose melodic qualities were not improved by being filtered through two feet of brick. 

Didn't seem to harm the volume though.

Jamie sighed, opened her desk drawer and pulled out a pair of headphones that had been a Christmas gift from her parents. The accompanying Spotify gift card had run out last month, but that's what YouTube was for, Jamie thought to herself as she gratefully tabbed away from the mostly blank essay and typed "study music" into the search bar.

There were plenty of results, but the one that caught Jamie’s eye was a livestream called "lofi beats to study/chill to."

Jamie clicked the video. Immediately Hannah and Nick vanished from her consciousness as her ears filled with music that was simple enough not to be distracting, but relaxing at the same time. Piano, simple drums, and light guitar dominated the sound, along with a faint hint of vinyl crackle and the occasional sound of birdsong.

The accompanying video playing in a window on her screen showed an animated girl in a cozy, oversized sweater wearing headphones similar to the ones Jamie was wearing. 

She was sitting at a desk, in front of a laptop, writing in a notebook. Next to her was a pot with scissors, pens, and other stationery. In the back of the frame was a window looking out onto a snowy city scene. On the windowsill, there was a cat, its tail moving lazily, almost but not quite in time with the music's mellow beat.

Occasionally, the girl looked out of the window. 

Jamie noted that 34,000 people were also watching the livestream, which made her feel a bit better about her essay. Like they were all in it together, somehow. Along the right hand side of the screen, the live chat scrolled by almost too quickly to read, but the messages Jamie was able to catch were nice, full of motivational pep talk and encouragement.

"Who's watching from Spain?" asked one.

"You got this!" urged another, followed by several study-related emojis; stacks of books, a pencil writing, and a frog, for some reason.

Encouraged by her new classmates, Jamie tabbed back over to her essay. Her fingers settled onto the keys, and she began to write.

#

Jamie looked at the paper her professor had just handed her in disbelief. She’d scored 95 for the essay, her best graded paper during her university career by a significant margin. 

"Excellent work, Ms. Martinez," said her professor. "Some fine writing." She smiled and turned her attention to another student. 

Jamie flicked through the paper in wonder. The professor wasn't wrong; this was good stuff. Some of it Jamie didn’t even remember writing herself, but she had worked pretty late that night. 

"Just got in the zone, I guess," she said to herself, and tucked the paper into her backpack.

#

A few weeks had passed, and another essay was due. 

Which is why it was so aggravating that Hannah had chosen this evening to purchase and set up a karaoke machine in her room. It was quieter now, but her and Jamie had had a blazing row about it, and Jamie had fled, furious, to her room, her mind racing with fantasy scenarios in which she smashed the karaoke machine over Hannah's stupid, tone deaf head.

She wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands and turned on her laptop. Opening YouTube, she noticed in the sidebar that the lofi beats to study/chill to livestream was still going. 

As far as she could tell, it had never stopped.

She went through her usual pre-essay ritual, but this time she turned on the monitor on her desk and put the lo fi beats video on the second screen, so that she could look at it while she was working. It was nice. It was like having company. 

The girl was working hard, and Jamie would too.

Once again, the music flooded Jamie’s ears. It seemed slower this time. More deliberate.  It was still relaxing though, and beautiful twinkly synths and mazey basslines twisted their way into Jamie’s mind as she flexed her fingers and began to type.

Hours passed, or maybe minutes. Jamie didn't know. What she did know was that it was the easiest essay she'd ever written. The words seemed to come to her, whole paragraphs springing fully formed into her mind and flowing through her fingers, through the keys, and onto the screen in front of her.

The chat scrolled past in her peripheral vision. It was 40,000 strong tonight. 

"Anyone here studying for SATs?" asked one.

"My brain hurts :(" wrote another.

"Essay done! EZ" typed Jamie, happily, and closed the browser window.

#

This time, the professor stared at Jamie quizzically for a brief moment before handing back her paper. 

"Not your best work, Ms. Martinez," she started. "Some… odd interpretations of Lawrence. I’ll be honest with you, I was a little disturbed."

Jamie flushed hot with embarrassment. What had she written? 

"Is everything okay at home?" continued the professor, head tilted slightly to the side. She looked at Jamie expectantly. 

Jamie folded back the cover letter and looked at the first page of the essay. She didn't remember writing any of this.

"I... I've been tired lately," she managed. "I guess I let it affect my work."

"If anything is bothering you, you can come and talk to me or any of the staff here on campus. We're here to help."

The professor smiled. Jamie could tell she meant it.

"Thanks," blurted Jamie, shoving the essay to the bottom of her bag. She couldn't get out of there quickly enough.

#

In the campus coffee shop, Jamie sat with a fragrant cup of chai and read through the essay. Her professor was right; it was disturbing.

It started out normally enough, but as the essay went on, the sentences started to run together and even occasionally switch into other languages. What started out as an examination of the themes in D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers descended into a written rant about how one character should have killed his father and graphic descriptions of how he should have done it. 

Jamie didn't recognise any of it. It had to be a copy-pasting error or something, she reasoned. Or one of her asshole roomates pulling a prank.

Now that she thought about it, that seemed like the most likely explanation. Fuming, she put the essay back in her bag. The last thing she wanted to do was confront them about it, so instead she reached a compromise with herself: she'd buy a muffin, and eat it angrily. 

It was delicious.

#

More weeks passed, and Jamie forgot about the essay. 

She’d been doing well in her seminars, and her professor seemed pleased with how things were going. All she had to do to close out the term was write her end of year dissertation.

She'd had weeks to do it but had been putting it off, partly due to stress but partly because Nick and Hannah had become far worse the longer term had gone on. All three were now not talking to each other (Nick and Hannah had had some kind of separate falling out), and the atmosphere in the house's communal areas had become so tense that Jamie spent most of her time at home in her room, listening to lofi beats to try and calm down.

Tonight though, she was using it to write her essay.

Double tapping her browser icon and muscle memorying the first three letters of the URL into the address bar, Jamie was quickly back on YouTube and searching the sidebar for the livestream which, as expected, was still going with 64,000 concurrent viewers. Its presence comforted her. She hadn't seen it offline once in the months since she'd discovered the channel.

Jamie clicked on the video, dragged it over to the second monitor, and settled into her chair while the ad played. The voice on screen wound up its sales pitch for invisible dental aligners, and then the familiar warm sounds of the lofi beats rushed into Jamie's headphones. 

Jamie had been working away in her document for a few minutes when she first started to notice that something was different. She couldn't place it at first, but an odd movement in her peripheral vision caused her to look at the video properly for the first time.

Something was wrong.

At first glance, the video was the same as it always had been, but a closer look revealed the city outside the window had turned dark. The cat was no longer in its usual perch on the window sill; the pane it had been sitting next to was cracked, and there were streaks of what looked like blood across the glass.

There was something different about the girl, too.

The beats began to get slower. 

Heavier. 

Louder. 

Jamie made to try and lower the volume on her headphones, but her arms hung heavily at her sides, unwilling to cooperate. The music was crawling now, woozily shifting downwards through octaves and settling into a low drone. There were words now too, but they were in a language that Jamie didn't understand.

And then the girl turned to look at her.

Jamie had never seen her from this angle before. Her eyes were solid black, and from the front, it was clear that her mouth was open wide as if she were screaming. But the noise that came from her mouth wasn’t a scream. It was the music. Hazy, shifting, and now with words.

No, not words.

Word.

A single word. Repeated endlessly.

A single word that Jamie suddenly understood.

The girl on the screen drew the scissors from the organizer on her desk and stood up, turning the glittering blades back and forth in her hands. Mirroring her action, Jamie reached into her desk drawer and pulled a pair of scissors from the disorganized pile of stationery that lay within. 

She rose from her chair, walked to the door, and left the room.

Moments later, the muffled sounds of a struggle could be heard from downstairs, followed by screaming that ended as abruptly as it had started. 

On the screen, the girl’s chair sat empty. The chat overlay sped past faster than usual.

oh my god //]]]   a

   what is happening ?              \

///// help me plese help eme

what have i done

                       / no please no

no no no no no

  she

e

Then, abruptly, the music stopped, the picture vanished, and four words appeared in their place.

**This livestream has ended**