I’d sought her out in the library a couple times before, but every time I’d actually seen her sitting at a table studying, I’d been too much of a coward to approach, worried about anything and everything happening. But now that I knew nothing would happen, I wanted to see her. Something had definitely been bothering her in art class, and I had to make sure she was okay.
As luck would have it, I caught sight of her entering the library when I was still a few buildings away. Her back was to me as she skipped up the steps. She looked like she was in a hurry, so I picked up my pace to catch her. But when I entered, she was nowhere in sight.
I checked out a couple of the tables I’d seen her sitting at in the past, but they were all occupied by others. She had to be somewhere in the building, but the library was a big place with lots of private nooks and crannies for secluded studying.
I had an entire hour to kill, so I just kept looking. When I came to an area that was rarely inhabited, I turned down a row of bookshelves and saw her sitting on the floor at the end, against the wall with her knees drawn up to her chest and her head bowed, her hair covering her face.
There was something “wounded animal”-like about the way she was sitting. Charging forward with concern seemed like a bad idea. So...as I crept closer, I whispered. “Zoey?”
Her head flew up, and she stared at me from wide, tearstained eyes.
My heart cracked. I’d never seen her cry before, and she looked so lost and alone. I wanted to yank her into my arms and cradle her close just as much as I wanted to hunt down whoever had hurt her and pulverize them.
“What’s wrong?” I eased to my knees next to her.
“Nothing.” She eyed me warily but didn’t skitter away.
I arched an eyebrow, letting her know it was definitely not nothing.
She blew out a breath and stared forward, wiping frantically at her cheeks. “It’s really...nothing,” she repeated. “It’s stupid.”
Situating myself so I was sitting beside her on the floor with my knees bent up and the shadows covering us in our little nook, I waited until she stopped trying to pat her face back into order before I said, “It’s not stupid to you.”
She glanced at me. “But it’s probably stupid to you.”
“I still want to hear about it.”
After shaking her head, she hugged her knees tighter and went back to staring straight ahead as if I wasn’t beside her.
Knowing she wasn’t going to instigate our talk, I cleared my throat. “When I was little, I hated it when my mom drank. She was nicer when she was sober, hit me less, treated me as an actual human being. It was when she had alcohol in her that everything went bad. So I went to the library and did all kinds of research about how to stop drinking. I came up with a, I don’t know, a kind of step-by-step program to help her quit. I drew up a bunch of posters and graphs and spent nearly a month to create this little presentation to help her, because everything I read said alcoholism was a disease. I thought she’d thank me if she saw how much work I’d gone through to help save her.”
“What’d she do?” Zoey whispered, her eyes wide with worry as she glanced at me.
“She got mad.” I watched a new tear glisten on Zoey’s cheek, and I wanted to wipe it away. “She threw a beer bottle at me and yelled at me for being such a freak. Then she chased me until she caught me in my bedroom. She hit me until I passed out, and...I don’t remember anything else after that.”
Zoey shuddered and hugged herself. “I kind of prefer passing out during a beating. I don’t like remembering...or feeling it.”
I reached over slowly and unpeeled her fingers off her forearm from where she was hugging herself, then I squeezed her hand gently. “Will you please tell me why you’re so upset? I know what it feels like to think something’s important, only to find out someone else thinks it’s stupid. I promise I won’t think any less of you. I just want to help.”
She lowered her face and sniffed. “We had open critique in my writing class today.”
I pulled her hand against my chest and squeezed it a little bit harder. She didn’t have to tell me she’d gotten some bad comments about her story. She wouldn’t be sitting here, sobbing, if it’d gone okay.
I didn’t say anything, just stroked the knuckles on her hand and waited for her to talk. A minute later, she sniffed again, blew out a shuddery breath, and wiped at her cheek with the back of her free hand. “Not one person liked it. It was stupid, silly, immature. The teacher went into a big long tirade about the differences between true literature and...and...whatever drivel I’d written. Talking animals are bad. Stories with no connection to the human condition are worthless—”
“Now wait a second,” I butted in, frowning. “The Silver Belt had all kinds of connections to deeper things. And the frog in that was the funniest character in the entire story.”