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I fling some bed pillows, my off-kilter pulse ringing in my ears.
“The bookcase!”
Quickly, I charge for the bookcase, I throwStar Warsnovels on the ground. One by one, books I reread and reread, their spines lovingly worn—they meet the floorboards with a loudthump. Oxygen is hard to reach, caged inside me with an unfamiliar beast.
I chuck volumes ofNew Mutantsmy mom bought me when I was twelve, and they slam against the walls. Hot tears burn but don’t escape. A feral growl rumbles through my heaving body, and I hurl an armful ofDawn of Xcomicson the floor in a heavy heap.
“Keep going!” Kinney encourages.
I grip the dark brown bookcase and pull. I want the entire thing off its hinges, out of the wall. I want every single item on this shelf to meet a new distorted and battered position, to feel exactly how I feel.
I scream and rattle the bookcase, possessed with the rawest rage and pain. It hurts. It’s been hurting, and now it’s erupting outside of me.
With strength—strength I didn’t realize I have—the wide bookcase lets out a sudden creak and shifts forward. Collectibles and paperbacks begin to slide at me.
“Luna, not that!” Kinney shouts. “Push it back!”
I don’t.
I want this.
Comics pelt my head from the top shelves. A ceramic Spider-Man mug shatters at my bare feet.
“LUNA!” Kinney is standing further away, safe from the avalanche.
The bookcase weighs a million times more than I can brace, and as the entire wooden structure teeters forward, I want it to bury me. I want to live underneath the rubble of my childhood. Maybe it’ll be where you find me.
In this single solitary moment, I’m not scared of being crushed.
That should scare me, I think.
“LUNA!” Kinney shrieks in pure terror. Her voice jolts me.She’s watching.I try to push at the bookcase and support the weight for my sister. My arms tremble, tendons screaming in my forearms and shoulders.
It’s too heavy.
It’s coming down.
I am the creator of my own doom.
“Kin—” I start, but her name is torn out of my throat as someone barrels towards me.
Mom.
Her wide panicked eyes are on this impending demise, and quickly, she clutches the frame of the bookcase—the bookcase that’s at least three arm-spans wide. The bookcase that nearly swallows my entire wall. The bookcase that’s seconds from crushing me.
She tries to heave the thing upright.
“Go, Luna! Leave!” Mom yells at me. I’ve never heard her yell like that—with so much urgency and distress.
She can’t support the weight on her own either, so I stay and try to dig my feet in. Kinney is suddenly on my other side, using her back and shoulder blades to thrust the bookcase to its original position.
It’s at a fifty-degree angle.
It’s bearing on all three of us.
“We can’t,” I mutter, breath knotted inside me.
“We can,” our mom says through gritted teeth, trying her mightiest to upright what I’ve dislodged. Guilt nips at me. “On the count of three, we all push our hardest, okay? One, two,three.”
