Hero / erin scannell

Hero

Should 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,

“okay... this makes me uncomfortable.”

I need to move on, and I should go inside.

I wrap myself up in my crinkley, grey blanket and turn out the light. Silence. Should I call him? You’d be mad if I did since we all went to high school together. And I know he likes me since he started spooning me on the couch while you and I were still dating at the beginning of the summer, so maybe I will call him. Okay... yea. I will.

I dial his number. My heart beats faster and faster with each dial tone. Each one seems impossibly longer than the next, until the last tone is interrupted by, “Hello?”

“Hiya, I was just calling to say hello... do you like talking on the phone? If you don’t we can just hang up,” I say, my tongue swelling and arm muscles stiffening with nervous energy.

“No, I like it,” he says, I imagine with a smile.

We talk for thirty-five minutes, and it’s effortless and fun, and I haven’t thought about you in thirty-six minutes, and that’s great.

But for thirty-four minutes I’ve had to pee, and the conversation is going so well, it doesn’t seem like we are going to be hanging up anytime soon. Minute thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight.

I swear this is the most I’ve had to pee in my entire life. But ending this conversation early would be such a shame, and I’d be mortified if he heard me using the bathroom and flushing the toilet over the phone. That’s strictly a closefriends and family phone conversation thing. I spy a water bottle on my dresser, its curves and ridges shining like a beacon in the moonlight. Perfect. I turn on the lights, put him on speaker phone and take out a pair of scissors from my desk drawer. I cut off the top of the water bottle, so as to make the target a little wider.

Thank god I am so brave and resourceful.

“No, I’ve never seen HunterxHunter...not really into anime,” I say as I squat awkwardly over the half-remaining Aquafina bottle.

“Really? Okay for real you’ve gotta start watching it...”

Things are going well.

“Okay yea! I’ll check it out,” I lie.

Then absolute horror. The bottle is too small, and it’s spilling over onto the dorm room carpet.

I’m disgusting. I feel like Bill Buckner in 6th inning of the the 1986 World Series. I feel like a femme fatale outside of a French cafe coughing and choking on the first drag of her cigarette. I feel like a feral animal who has never known civilization or decency.

“Great, we can watch it together and talk about it!” he says.

“Yea! Can’t wait!” I say as I run to the bathroom quietly to grab handfuls of paper towels, silently praying nobody else would see me and ask what I was doing.

I know that from now on this memory of me secretly peeing on the floor while talking to a crush on the phone will flash in my brain, and I’ll be flooded with reminders of all that lies beneath my heroic facade. I’m much more (and much less) than the brave girl with curly hair who can catch bugs and is so full of feeling that she is moved to tears by masterpieces of art such as Space Jam .

But he will never know about this, and neither will you. Which begs at the age old question, why do we tell our crushes we’re going to watch their shitty anime as we secretly sop up our own urine on the ground? Probably for the same reason that each morning I have to bother Edith and Amanda away from the bathroom mirror so they’re not late for morning group, probably for the same reason that Kenneth let out a Spartan war cry before he “passed out” on the climbing tower last week, a limp banana peel bumping into the wooden structure as he was lowered down. Girls rushed to his side once he was safe again on the ground as I stood watching, rolling my eyes.

We want to be seen, not known by those we find attractive. So part of me looks forward to when I’m 87 and I lose control of my bowels shopping at Target with my partner, when it’s all just out there, and so is the love.