Page 18 of This Might Hurt

I’m losing it. Last night after Ramona went to bed, I climbed out onto the roof and smoked some weed I’d been saving.

Then I called my mom and hung up immediately three or four times before lying out there all night pretending to talk to her.

I asked how many people I had to hurt before I could come home.

She told me there was no number, that it would never end, and I felt relieved because at least I’d be busy.

Ramona convinced me to see a psychiatrist the last time I had a night like that, around Lena’s birthday last year when I drank for two days straight and told her my brain wouldn’t stop screaming.

After the strangest hour of my life, where an old man asked me questions in a warm room with the blinds down, he told me he suspected a mood disorder.

I was supposed to get a prescription after our second session.

Sometimes I wonder if he noticed I never came back, or if he still has a file in his cabinet somewhere about the fucker who was really cool until he went crazy and almost got his poor sister killed.

I’m so overstimulated all the time, bored and angry and sad and itchy, with ten tracks in my head running at once but never going anywhere. If I took meds, would it stop? I bet it would. And then everyone would love me again. That’s the worst part.

The little bell Ramona hung over the library door jingles.

I can hear her call out “Welcome”, so I stay lying on the library staff room floor under an open window.

Fiddling with the laptop balanced on my stomach, I take a pull of my cigarette occasionally and tap it out in a paper cup by my elbow, pretending that sticking my feet out the window is the same as smoking outside like Ramona told me to do.

I click randomly back and forth between the forty browser tabs I opened in the last fifteen minutes—most expensive home repairs, how fast does concrete set, what’s a drain field, do hardware stores track what you buy.

Like I’m prepping for one of the home improvement projects my dad and I would work on through the hot summer afternoons—building a deck or putting in a fish pond that never worked right.

Back when we created things, instead of destroying them.

“Fuck.” Slamming the laptop shut, I put out my cigarette and flush the entire cup of ashes down the employee toilet.

I drop into the broken spinny chair at Ramona’s big desk, covered in figurines and toys and cartoons of gray and white cats, anything that reminds her of Buckley.

Checking the time, I put my phone on speaker in front of me and unwrap the ham and cheese sandwich I’m supposed to be eating instead of smoking my lunch break away.

I’m not technically an employee at Ramona’s library, but when I’m around, I pay her back for her hospitality by using my half-of-a-community-college-literature-degree to help her make displays, recommend books to people, and run events.

I peel crusts off my sandwich and pile them on the wrapper as I listen to Lena’s phone ring.

“Hey, skid mark!”

I close my eyes and let her voice wash over me like sunlight. She hasn’t sounded so happy in a long time. “How’s it going, toilet weasel?”

“My friends are over! We’re decorating our graduation caps. I was wondering, would it be okay if they wrote your name on mine? I’m listing a bunch of my favorite things.”

“Um…I—I dunno.” Our parents will get pissed, and they’ll have a big fight over some version of me they loved, one that doesn’t even exist anymore.

I don’t want that for her. She thinks I’m the one choosing not to come back.

I let it stay that way because my parents were right when they kicked me out—if I create any kind of rift between them, it will just hurt her more than I already have.

“I’ll put a J,” she offers gently.

“Sure.” I can barely keep my eyes open, between not sleeping and fighting back the restlessness that’s eating me alive.

“Look, I wanted to ask if you needed any stuff for your housing in the fall. Or books? Or accessibility equipment? I found like a… a fund or something, it pays for kids with disabilities starting college.” I’m not even trying; I didn’t even think up a lie.

Andrew would kill me. I’m begging her to give me a reason to exist, somewhere to go, any purpose so I don’t open those browser tabs again.

“Oh, I meant to tell you! My friend Eva’s dad works at a church that has a donation program for stuff like that, and they accepted me. Isn’t that cool? You can finally take a break from researching all those grants.”

I pause halfway through dissecting the layers of my sandwich, a lettuce leaf covered in mustard dangling from my fingers.

“Jude?” she prompts finally.

“Uh… Wow.” I push the pile of ingredients into the trash can and rest my head sideways on the scratchy paper of the desk calendar. The worst part of me wants to be mad at her for taking away the only thing I had left. “That’s awesome, kiddo.”

I must not have sold it. After a long pause, her voice gets quieter. “Are you okay, Jude? I know you said you can’t come to my graduation, but none of us know where you are or what you’re doing. You have friends and stuff, right?”

Jesus. I remember sitting with her in the back of my truck, trying to give her advice about how to meet people because I was actually pretty popular back then.

Now everything’s backwards, and I’m supposed to tell her that I’m great—I have a grandma, a geriatric cat, a gun, and the ghost of a pissy suicidal man I’ll never meet again.

“I’m good, Lena. Don’t worry about me. Just, I guess, text me if you need anything. If that fund doesn’t come through.”

Her friends start shrieking with laughter in the background, so I tell her I love her and let her get back to what she was doing.

My skin crawls as I sit back and study the cozy little room, the old posters and seasonal decorations Ramona and I have made together.

All I can think about is the gun under my bed and the high after I steal for her that tells me I’m worth something.

Sometimes I think love is like a river. It flows in, it flows out, everything’s good, exactly the way it should be.

But if it can’t flow out, if there’s nowhere for it to go, it turns into a rotting, festering lake of need.

If I can’t clear it out, it’s going to explode or kill me with a deep, slow infection that hollows me out to nothing.

When I reach for the laptop, a wretched wail floats all the way across the tiny two-room library.

“Good lord.” Muttering under my breath, I jog past Ramona at the counter and weave through the stacks to the kids’ activity area in the back corner.

Of course it’s Mikey again. It’s always Mikey.

The white-haired three-year-old with his giant glasses strapped to his face screams again.

His shitty-ass mom dumps him in here and sits blocking the front steps while she talks to her yoga friends with their expensive leggings.

Ever since Ramona moved into town forty years ago as a single, middle-aged Black woman who wanted to start a library, she’s had to endure every form of disrespect under the sun.

“Careful,” I tell Mikey, plopping down on the beanbag next to his. “If you make too much noise, Ramona puts you to work. I thought I’d be leading book clubs about Haruki Murakami, but mostly I cut up construction paper.”

He shuts up and stares blankly at me with snot glistening on his upper lip.

“Now what seems to be the problem?” My heart sinks when he points to where he’s managed to glue his coloring page of Booky the Magic Book completely flat to the surface of the kid-sized table. “Well great. How does this even happen?”

When I try to peel up a corner, it tears a tiny bit and he screeches. “Okay, okay.” I hold up my hands in defeat. “This looks like a job for Ramona.”

“Jude.” The sound of my name makes me jump, because I go weeks on the road without hearing it at all.

The woman herself smiles at me from between the neatly organized shelves.

She has a lifetime collection of quirky blouses and sweaters—today it’s a sky blue knit with fluffy yarn clouds and a red kite drifting peacefully up from the bottom hem.

“There’s someone on the phone for you, honey. ”

“Huh?” Bewildered, I scramble to my feet while Mikey whines and clings to my leg.

“The desk phone?” That ancient piece of beige plastic, with its rubbery keys and spiraling cord, is exclusively used to ask us whether we’ll be open on President’s Day or if we have some book they don’t remember the title or author of but expect us to find anyway.

She shakes her head with a don’t ask me face. “Some boy. He didn’t introduce himself.”

A boy.

A boy who didn’t want to leave me behind.

It can’t be.

It’s probably that dick who cut me off with his cart at the grocery store and yelled at me for taking the last prepaid card. I said some pretty ungodly things to him.

But maybe, maybe, maybe.

I gesture at Mikey’s glued-down masterpiece and mouth sorry before sprinting across the room and throwing myself over the circulation desk. The cracked handset is lying on its side, cord dangling off the back of the counter. It has a satisfying weight as I pick it up. “Hello?”

No one says anything. Just a slow intake of breath against my ear, then a longer exhale.

“Oh my god,” I murmur. Cradling the phone tight in both hands, like I can somehow shove him down my ear into the center of my brain, I scramble up to sit cross-legged between the check-out computer and a stack of hold orders. “Hi.”

“I need to ask you something,” Andrew announces flatly.