Her whispering stopped. The door creaked, though this time it was more like a sigh after a heavy load had been lifted. Mercy tried the knob one more time and mumbled, “Fuck me.” (I hate to pull you out of the moment here, but her saying “Fuck me,” and saying it like anyone of us would say to themselves when something went awry, is a small, humorous [at first blush] detail that makes everything else that happened before it seem more true, because it is true. If I were making this all up, I’d have her say something more obviously threatening or frightening. Don’t let my self-awareness here truth-dissuade you. This isn’t an I-know-that-you-know-that-I-know kind of thing. Could I have misheard her? Maybe. But that possibly is as remote as Gilligan’s Island. And the thing of it is, her forlorn and very human declared exasperation makes everything that happened and will happen more frightening and sadder.)

Mercy slid a square slip of paper under the door and flippered it side to side. And fuck me, it was a Polaroid photo. I futilely patted the bed mattress and scanned the floor for the picture I took and had had in my hand at some point during my maddest of dashes while knowing, of course, that the pic (my proof) was currently tonguing under the door. As much as I wanted to see it, I wasn’t going to leave my bed; the floor was lava.

I said, “Leave me alone.”

Mercy retracted the photo from under the door and clomped down the stairs. Was she going back to the couch? Hiding somewhere downstairs? Was my locked door enough to protect me if I ever fell asleep? What about my parents? Did I need to do something to save them? I wanted to cry because I didn’t know what to do. After a few breathless minutes of silence, my back pain, somewhat forgotten in the excitement and terror, insisted I pay attention to it.

Sundial slow, I eased out of bed and slothed to my bedroom closet. Inside there weren’t any monsters or Narnias, just my back brace, the personless shell I’d filled with so many of my worst hours. Dusty from its banishing, I dragged the brace out of the closet and wriggled into its unforgiving mold. Maybe it would make my back feel better and the hard-plastic chest plate would protect me if something or Mercy herself were to sit on my chest. And maybe this sounds totally fucked up, a part of me felt like I’d failed this night somehow, that I must’ve done something wrong for everything to have happened the way it did, so I deserved to wear the brace another night.