[ WP ] One day you come upon a pair of headphones . You soon realise that you 're able to the hear the world through someone else 's ears by looking at them with the headphones on , including their thoughts . What do you do ?

The girl in the stairwell wanted to die. 
 
 This was a thing that Ariana realized, slowly, as she ripped the strange headphones out of her ears and put on her real ones, flicking her iPod to a Santigold song and continuing on her way to history class. She tried to memorize the stairwell girl's features -- she was slim, with light brown skin and a pale blue headscarf loosely wrapped around her hair. Ariana did n't want to think about it, and she certainly did n't want to deal with it, but she reasoned that she had a new responsibility now. The complexities of thought were new to her, and she had been entertained, her life enchanted, for the past few weeks simply by listening. The headphones had given her so much: a boyfriend ( she had listened to his thoughts and found out that he liked her ) a brand new cell phone ( acquired by listening to her father during the begging portion to see what his concerns were and addressing them ) and a later curfew using the same strategy. 
 
 As Ariana walked into class, though, she felt a strange heaviness come over her. This had been the first time she had heard something so dark and it shook her to her core. She wondered, as she had when she had first found them, if it would be best to simply throw them off the pier. That was always the best idea in the films she watched, when someone got a high-tech gadget that invaded privacy. Destroy it and never think about it again. Suddenly, her body began to work on its own. While the teacher lectured about the Cold War, Ariana leaped out of her seat and went to find the stairwell girl. She was exactly where she remembered, and relief washed over Ariana. 
 
 But she had no idea what to say, and that struck her a minute too late. A bright red alarm started going off in her head, but she was stuck in the situation. How could she explain she knew the girl was struggling? How could she explain any of this? 
 
 Why did she never think before she acted? 

