Jessa uncoils her tightened bow-legs, the tenseness of her muscles coursing with every moment. The Westminster County Library has a bizarre buzz at this time of night, and the fluorescent square lights checkering the ceiling seem rudely dishonest as they parallel the darkened windows. Atop her desk, a pile of unopened textbooks, and beneath it, her ratted sneakers wedged together in the dip of a chair. She stares at a misshapen apple and contemplates motion. Yet with the prolonged ache of her thighs from her mid-morning run, she has barely enough resolve to fidget in her seat.
The last time Jessa had been to this catacomb of books, she had sworn never to return. She had sworn to reverse her unwilling memorization of each aisle, each bug-slaughtering bulb of light. Her tiny body coated in cold droplets of crystallizing sweat and panting across fields of puke-colored carpet. Panting towards nothing, no one in particular.
And yet somehow the boomerang universe has spoken. Somehow she is here and she has always been in some state of here, it seems to her now. Even in the years she’s tried to label “healthy” and far-removed. She snatches the apple and plunges her asymmetrical teeth into its flesh. The satisfying crunch fills the void of the buzzing, open room.
Jessa has never been a devout fan of silences. In cars, in hallways, in choppy, forced conversations. In the white noise moments of radio leading into a new song. She has made it her business to fill these spaces with often embarrassing monologues, much to the discomfort of the more socially-relaxed witnesses around her. The propagators of intense introversion, the window-looker-outers. The well-adjusted friends.
But here, in the nakedness of etiquette, Jessa has no choice but to crunch bits of fruit in the rivets of her teeth, praying each morsel will harness more decibels than the one before.
What caused her swift left turn into the humbled library parking lot, she cannot venture a guess. Past the tattered elementary school, past the strip mall where she’d once bummed cigarettes from any and all sunken faces that passed by. Past the asbestos-ridden cinema and its halfway-lit, halfway-fallen sign, like alphabet soup on fire. She had remained in her car in the lot for a minute or two, relishing the roar of the exhaust as it blended with waves of electric guitar. But then she’d jumped, she’d rushed through automatic doors, as if by a force of nature, and crash-test-dummy collapsed herself into the nearest wooden chair.
She must have been sitting directly across from here when it happened. Neon murder mystery novel splayed carelessly on ripped jeans, pinks and greens framing pages of bubbly text. Her father resigned to his maroon armrest, leaning over his laptop across from her awkward, pre-pubescent body. Jessa was stuck somewhere in the plot. Somewhere she crouched in a wetted back alley alongside the narrator, the two of them panicking and watching the approach of a shadowed suspect, an exaggerated figure beneath trench coat and wielded knife. Jessa swallowed hard at the three borders of concrete wall and the narrator’s feet quaked aside a rusted dumpster. They had no route of escape, no plan. They had no choice but to wait on the crux of all that was inevitable.
And suddenly Jessa looked up from her book, her father’s lengthened frame catching in the corner of her eye. His body was contorted, pushed all the way to one side of his chair, a tremble running through him as slight as glass bottles on tables. Jessa rushed to him, novel crashing to the carpet, taking in the white moonscapes of his eyes as they locked on the ceiling. He looked just the way no father should look. In dreams or in waking, rounded chairs. Screaming. Now she was screaming. A crowd gathering with fingers trickling over phones. A mushrooming bomb in the base of her gut.
Was there a second, a ticking of some merciful clock on some merciful wall, was there a chance for you and your hollowed-out voice? Could I have saved you, preserved the spots in your brain before they melted in your head? Could I have asked you a stupid question from a twelve-year-old mind, something insignificant, something that was anything, a cause for you to speak before your body forgot how? -- to get ice cream, to spell a word, to leave the library and go home and read at home and be at home.
Could I have bound up all your words and bordered them in neon?
It’s getting late and people are starting to stow things in backpacks. Jessa returns her sneakers to the floor and curls the lip of a sticker from the apple’s spotted skin. Her eyes travel like a search engine through rows of leather bindings. Past families of encyclopedia, past gold indented letters and ladders balancing on wheels. Past published thoughts collected and then scattered once again.
Through a rectangle of space, between two dusted shelves, she catches the subtle sight of maroon fabric. And with her apple browning in hand, under mountain ranges of bite marks, Jessa crunches one hard, final crunch and again contemplates motion.
