It’s always seeping in through the vents, the plumbing stacks, and cracks in the plaster like carbon monoxide, here to asphyx-iate me in my sleep.

Sawyer

October 9

Dear Diary,

Don’t know why the doctor made me do this, or who I’m even supposed to be talking to. It’s too dark in the shed to even see what I’m writing. So there’s no way to make sense of what I’m thinking. The lantern only shows me the center of the page. What I wrote before doesn’t matter. What I write next won’t either.

“Sawyer! Sawyer! Sawyer!”

Have you ever heard your name called so much that you wanted to die?

Momma must hate me. Made the doctors release me from Hapeville before I could promise Tom I’d never try to kill myself again. So I don’t know if I will try again. She took me out of there a week ago because it embarrassed her to have a kid at a treatment center. I know from what Annie told me when we got home, when Momma was out of earshot: “Are you sure you’re okay? Because you know they wanted to keep you in there and Momma made ’em let you go.”

I pictured all Momma’s coworkers at the diner judging her for not being able to answer the question “How’s your son doing?”

This outhouse-turned-shed-turned-haven was where my dad kept his power tools. Momma hasn’t touched it since he ditched us last September. She always asks me if I tried to off myself because he left. I think she gives him too much power.

The pine trees are so long they sneak through the crescent at the top of the door. The wallpaper in my cell at the clinic felt just as three-dimensional and murky, and I guess it reminds me of there, that place that felt more like home than here. Something about a hospital gown, a public bed, a tall dark man named Tom talking to me twice a day. He had beautiful bones in his face.

“Sawyer! Sawyer! Sawyer!” You should hear my mom yelling right now.

No one past the forest will know she’s shouting. But it will annoy the shit out of my sister, who’s probably in her room, writing in her own diary or messaging her mean friends.

Momma always asks me if she’s a good mother. I don’t know what to tell her.

She only ever started cooking for me after I tried to hang myself. She makes more sandwiches than necessary and refrigerates them for the next day, so they aren’t as good when I eat them.

“SAWYER, are you out there? Please come inside and eat!”