A library is a place that you can spend time without spending money. Spend time, yes, but not the night. Or, the night, certainly, so long as you’re studying. Who will know? I am free, the library is free, the books are free, and here we are, me all tired my head on my text.

Before I go further: I didn’t plan to live in Randall Library. And I’m not living here, exactly. It’s just weekdays sometimes, when they’re open all night.

College is not what I expected, is the thing. Full of students who lift their confident hands, recite impossible answers while I cower question reconsider,

Do I fit here?

Each time I walk into class, I repeat to myself, I won’t be the poor kid who can’t make it, who

fails her class

gets her scholarship revoked

has to go back home.

I should be at the library anyway; it’s not so odd of me to spend the night.

Just, I’m rarely studying here. I’m acting something out: physics textbook open, I Am Charlotte Simmons open on top. The textbook doesn’t help much anyway.

Keep to yourself just the right amount, is the key. The café girl gives me a muffin or two at closing time: dinner. There is plenty this way, if you pay attention: free pizza info sessions (I know everything about our clubs); showers at the gym; t-shirts at basketball games. You can get by.

Libraries aren’t really alphabetized anymore. I knew, of course, but the library at my high school was so little, it was all alphabetized.

Technically I live with my aunt, over on 10th. Somehow I got in, my father cried, and she offered me her green couch rent-free. It’s kind, but I know it’s a lot for her, my uncle, my fat baby cousin.

So, I make myself scarce.

Whatever I do, I can’t ask my parents for more. I am here, everything they hoped for me. I refuse not to succeed. Still

Overnight, I sleep in my chair,

xeroxed pages strewn, cheek on open textbook beside open Americanah, as if I would absorb the details of

physics through my skin.

Under the late late

quiet

returns that dream of black holes. Yes, there are two holes in the world, one where I used to live and another that I am just on the edge of tripping into. I am perfectly balanced, if torn to bits more and more between them slowly. If I move, I’ll die.

My alarm goes off at 6am.

No one notices me as long as I move around, find different corners. Sometimes other kids fall asleep here, especially once midterms start.

Zones to avoid: the café; brightly lit study rooms; the bathrooms, which are cleaned evenings; Fiction. No one spends the night in Fiction.

Vigilantly, in the freshly-clean bathroom, I wash my face and underarms, pull a new shirt from my bag.

Yes, so long as I don’t move much, I can stay perfectly balanced here.