ERIN SCANNELL
Hero
S
hould I call him? It might be weird, but what’s the worst thing that could happen? I stare at the white, stucco ceiling from where I lie, allowing my body to sink into the 5 inches of foam beneath me.
I hear a knock at my door. I sit up and swing my legs off my bed and onto the floor. My movements seem overly vigorous in this empty, colorless room since I am the only dynamic thing in here besides the pipe dripping water onto the floor in the closet. “Hey! What’s up?” I ask, propping the door open with the wooden wedge beside the rubber trim in the hallway. Edith and Amanda are at my door wearing sleep shirts that hang down to their knees. Right now with their long shirts, halos of stray hairs, and faces washed clear of makeup they look 12 instead of 16. “There’s a bug,” Edith says with a soft laugh. The girls lead me with my sheet of paper and dixie cup down the hallway to the their room where four other students who are supposed to be in their beds right now since it’s after lights are giggling and screaming at a house centipede scuttling across the grey carpet. I approach the bug slowly and slam the cup down over it with the skill and precision of a capuchin monkey cracking open a palm nut with a rock. “Hero! Hero!” the students chant as I leave the dorm to go upstairs to release the centipede back into the wild. Not really, but I am pretty sure they were all thinking it. I go outside onto the patio, the bricks damp and shining under the motion-activated lights and release the creature back into the wild. He moves silently off of the sheet of paper into the bushes, and now I am really alone. And now I am thinking about you, because that is what I do when I am abruptly left alone, even if my abandoner is an insect. I keep wanting to share things with you, and my chest twists up like a mop in the hands of a robust housekeeper when I remember that I can’t. Like when I read something I know you’d love or whenever I see literally any movie. On Tuesday, we watched Space Jam with the campers to introduce them to a cornerstone of American cinema, and I cried because it was the first movie in six months that I’d seen without you. And when I think about how we’re only broken up only because you wanted to go to college in the most gratuitously hipster city in the United States, I know it is not a good enough reason for me to let go yet. But regardless of my unresolved feelings, I am sorry I sent you that nude last night. I could tell that it made you a uncomfortable since you responded,
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