I hate her, but I can't escape her. She's on every channel, in every newspaper. I can't even turn on the radio without hearing her name.

I force my gaze away from the TV where the wonder girl is smiling her way through a press conference in filthy, blasted Paris, focusing my attention on the music piping through my headphones. I can't - won't - turn it up any louder, but I can still hear her voice, that lilting California accent that makes every sentence a question.

This girl is going to drive me insane.

I step inside my own front door, loving the silence, the peace. The only noise I allow here is my own music. I haven't even turned on the radio in months.

"Cat?" I call, throwing my bag down on the couch. There's a half-wild cat in the area, and she likes to hang out in my apartment for whatever reason. "I'm home, cat."

I don't hear a sound, except maybe the quiet clang of a step on the fire escape out the window. My upstairs neighbor is probably out there having his mid-afternoon cig. I take a deep breath, smell the black-coffee odor of his Parliaments. Yep, it's him.

The water bowl on the kitchen floor is untouched except for a dead fly floating in it, which tells me that Cat hasn't been by. Fine. If I wanted a pet I'd get one.

The couple next door have the TV on too loud as usual, and when I hear her name my shoulders get reflexively tense; anger blooms in my stomach, faint and sour.

Instead of banging on the wall as I sometimes do (all right, once, when they had the gossip channel on and I swear to God it was wonder girl twenty-four-seven for a week talking about her latest breakup), I close my eyes, focusing on the summer air that fills the room. It's not worth getting angry over.

So instead of thumping on the wall and shouting at them, I step to the record player and drop the needle. I don't care what it is. I need distraction.

Distraction won't stay with me, though, even as Mario Lanza's sweet tenor fills up the air. My mind is busy, full of the latest bad news.

I didn't believe it at first; the news went viral on Twitter, but I refused to believe it until one of my friends texted me. And then one more, and one more, until half my address book was feverishly asking antisocial me whether I was all right.

"Paris is gone."

I couldn't believe it. I can't believe it. The city of lights? The place where photography was invented? It takes a lot to wipe a place like that off the map - but sure enough, it was gone. I stayed in front of my laptop in horrified wonder at the streaming video sites until my eyes ached, and kept watching until I fell asleep.

But it was true. The iconic image wouldn't leave me - a blurry webcam transmission from someone just outside the zone of most destruction. You could see the Eiffel Tower in the background one moment, beyond the shoulder of the vlogging twenty-something - then there was a sound like freight trains passing, the camera shook, and dust rose up in the background, obscuring the skyline.

We all have a kind of disaster fatigue - so much has happened, we can't process any more tragedy. But Paris - Paris made me feel something again, made me feel a spark of sorrow. I knew people who had been there. I'd planned to go there myself, if I had the money someday. Now I never would - it wasn't like Katrina where they could rebuild to some degree; it looked to me like Hiroshima, buildings pressed flat to the earth, piles of identical rubble where there had been a city.

The first reports came out slowly from what was left of the French government: the bomb had not been nuclear, there was no radiation risk, the damage was minor. We knew better than that; we had come to expect the worst. More news trickled out: the blast had been massive, no one knew what kind of explosives had been used, but everything was fine.

Fine, hell. There still isn't a final death toll, and I don't think there ever will be. There are too many dead.

The scientists say the blast shifted Earth six inches on its axis.

Someone buttonholed me the day after, pulled me to a doorway saying I had to see this. I could hardly see the screen, but there was a deathly quiet in the crowd and I could hear fairly well.

They knew who had caused the explosion. Some no-name bunch of kids calling themselves the Doomsday Group. The name rung a bell, like I imagine Aum Shinrikyo must have just after their sarin attacks.

The other question everyone was asking, no one knew the answer to, but there was speculation - the blast had been triggered just as one particular someone was detected within city limits. It could've been coincidence, but I didn't want to think that.

I couldn't see her face as she spoke, but I heard that voice:

"I'm so sorry for the people of Paris. We lost someone too - please, if anyone's seen a little girl with blonde curls -"

I turned away, made my way out through the crowd. My mouth tasted bitter, my chest felt tight - I have always been a calm, rather phlegmatic person, but I wondered if what I was feeling was fury. I had simply reached the tipping point of my anger.

I knew her. Of course I did. I didn't live under a rock. Maximum Ride, savior of humanity. Toppler of the global economy. Darling of the media.

I had wept over the protests at Itex - I had friends who worked at the division in our city, friends who I saw next with black eyes behind sunglasses, with bandages on their arms and lacerations from broken glass. This girl, this teenager who had never worked a day in her life - she'd caused this suffering, and something that she'd done caused Itex to go under, and with Itex went the economy.

This one girl.

Before her, we'd had an unemployment rate of four percent; after, ten percent and still rising. Before her, cancer drugs had been on their way to the market - I'd heard only rumors, and the press releases were modest, but my friends had been giddy, passing on second-hand news of the best drug yet - now they'd been indefinitely delayed.

I cried for a while. I was afraid that I'd lose my job.

But there were earthquakes and forest fires, outbreaks of cholera, and I forgot for a while. I didn't have time to care - all I could do was note a new death toll and wonder if the end was coming for me, too.

In my own life I saw the changes suddenly. Maybe they'd been coming for a long time. I saw more homeless people, saw more people looking hunted and struggling to make every dollar count.

And the death came close to home. I was estranged from my family already, and I saw none of their hometowns in the growing list of the devastated, but places where I had friends continued to fall. They walked barefoot through broken glass to get home. They boiled water from floods over a Sterno fire to drink it. They lost their jobs, had to move back home.

And this girl, this teenage girl - who said she came from an abusive home, whose stories were doubted by almost all the professionals who spoke on her, who had a pretty smile and short-cut hair - this girl was everywhere I looked. Nothing of the dead and dying. No plea to think of the suffering, though they were far away. No reminder that anything was amiss in the world.

I could understand that people wanted to forget, to laugh and cry over simple things, but somehow I found myself hating her. She complained about her boyfriend leaving her - boyfriend! She was fourteen - and in New Zealand aftershocks shook the land.

The room is silent, and I can hear the news again - I jerk myself from where I've fallen to the couch and throw another record on. I don't care what it is. But if I have to listen to even a hint of her again, I might go mad.

I'm smoking again - I've lost my job, and it helps me deal with the stress. I smoke O.P.'s mostly, just to give my hands something to do, to burn the clutching pain out of my chest.

Some people say the world is ending. I don't want to believe them - I want to keep living, to make it through. But it's getting hard to believe that it will ever get better, that the world can ever heal from this endless year.

I climb out the window. I need the blue sky, the view of the distant city, the burn of smoke. Cigarette companies are profiting like they haven't in years; seems a lot of people stress-smoke.

My upstairs neighbor is on his escape, sitting on one of two white plastic chairs, staring out at the horizon, at the outlines of distant skyscrapers. Evening's coming on, and not all the windows are lit, here or downtown. Electricity's too expensive for that, after what happened in the Middle East.

"Got one for me?" I yell up to him over the churn of a passing train.

"Sure!" he hollers back. "Come on up! I saved you a chair!"

"Thanks!" I swing out to clamber up the ladder and fling myself down on the chair next to him.

He offers me the pack in silence. It's worn on the edges, and the cigarettes inside are hand-rolled, not machine. He's been rolling his own for months now, to save a few pennies. He says every little bit counts.

I slip one out, and I'm about to bum a light from him when he says

"Did you hear what happened?"

and oh God if it's That Girl again I'll jump, I swear I'll jump, from this height I'll break my neck on the filthy alley pavement.

"No."

"Some city in Russia is gone," he says, and breathes out deep and smoky. His eyes are red. "Like Paris, remember Paris?"

"Never forget," I say, summoning a hint of humor from somewhere.

There's a thumping sound in the distance, and we look to the horizon, where a mushroom cloud is blooming among the buildings.

He laughs harshly. "Right."

I can't take my eyes off it; it's fearful and grand. The end of the world is coming home.

"Got a light?"

"Always," he says, and I lean in without taking my eyes away from disaster.