I want to preface this by saying that what happened that night was not their fault. If anything, it was my fault for being there at all, and for being so dang squishable.
I was on the third floor looking for the young adult reader books. The ones with kissing in them. I was going alphabetically by author, because I don’t understand Dewey or his decimal system, and frankly, I don’t think I ever will. So I did it the hard way. But I was just getting so confused (who is Proust?) so I sat down for a moment to have a rest. Luckily, I had brought a snack with me, which was ants on a log which is peanut butter on celery with little raisins. The raisins are the ants, and the celery is the log. The peanut butter is just for brown.
Then, all of a sudden, some rabble rousers showed up out of nowhere. I don’t know if they saw me there or not. They kept yelling, “ha ha, wouldn’t it be so funny if we squished her,” “little squishy book girl” and “squish her squish her.” But I’m not coming at it with the full context so it’s possible they were talking about someone else. And sure, they made direct eye contact with me as they turned the big library wheels to move the shelves together. Big wheels, like a bank vault, or a big bus. And yeah, I did say “ah wait let me out,” and they said “no, we are going to squish you.” But who knows what they meant? Historical memory is so complicated.
I did a good deed before the squishing, though. Some other kids also happened to be in the same aisle, a ways down. They were weaker than me, and some of them were children. When the squishing started, they were terrified, but I held the stacks apart with my own strength as long as I possibly could until they could escape. I looked REALLY hot. But my strength gave out. I reached out from between the shelves, grasping at life even as Holes flattened my arm and Paper Towns dug into my side. With my final breath, I told them that if I didn’t make it, that they should tell my story.
I did end up making it though, so now I’m writing this.
I didn’t get out unscathed, though. I got real squished in there. Like, real squished. It was even more ironic because the book I had been looking for was Flat Stanley. And suddenly I understood exactly how Stanley felt.
Flat.
Anyways now I’m 2D which is cool because I can slip under doors and I don’t need to type in my room code.
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