The alarm that rang in the library became the start of Nenne

Back in college, I used to spend afternoons at the university library, at a desk in the reading room. I was not studying for an exam. Instead of a textbook, I just had my laptop open, tinkering with an app I was building on my own. The room was quiet, filled only with the soft clatter of keyboards and the occasional turn of a page.

A few seats away, another student had fallen asleep at their desk. It was a common enough sight on a weekday afternoon, so I did not think much of it.

Then, without warning, a loud alarm broke the silence. It was playing straight out of the phone's speaker. Startling as the sound was, the student who had set it showed no sign of embarrassment at all. They calmly picked up their phone and turned it off, unbothered.

It was everyone else who looked startled. Heads turned toward the sound, one after another. No one said a word, but I could see surprise, and a flash of irritation, cross a few faces. The student who had set the alarm off, without so much as an apologetic glance, put their head back down and went right back to sleep. They had let a sound meant for one person fill the whole room, and somehow stayed completely unfazed by it.