I Hear You Calling In the Dead of Night

Chapter 9: Secrets in the Library Stacks

~Oh, I feel overjoyed when you listen to my words.  I see them sinking in. Oh, I see them crawling underneath your skin...~

I hear you calling in the dead of night

The thing is - just because Harry's on a newfound crusade for change doesn't mean that he doesn't occasionally slip back into old routines. Sometimes, when his skin feels tight, when the halls are overcrowded with unfamiliar faces, he just wants something comfortable and familiar and easy. Sometimes, he just wants his disabled toilet stall, with its decrepit plumbing and rude graffiti and lingering smell of damp.

And he doesn't think of it as slipping backwards so much as it is revisiting a place where he's experienced sporadic moments of intense happiness and sadness. He used to think of the past as an aggregate of missed opportunities, a constellation of times he hadn't taken a risk or gone outside his comfort zone, but now he realizes those times weren't for nothing. They were his becoming. His past shaped him. For Harry, change wasn't about becoming someone he wasn't; it was about becoming the person he ought to have been – the person he might have already been had he not been derailed as a child.

Besides, it's not like there's a lot to do. It's a rainy Tuesday in late October - the perfect sort of weather to stay inside and cozy up with a book. Louis is absent and Zayn is helping the drama department with set design during lunch and entering the noisy, overheated canteen is just about as appealing as entering a gladiator ring full of starved lions. Harry just wants to eat his sandwich and read another chapter of Everything is Illuminated in peace.

Only, the day he chooses to hide out is the day someone else has the same idea. Upon entering the toilets, Harry can hear the sound of someone crying behind the closed door of his usual stall and it gives him pause. His immediate instinct is to run because he doesn't like dealing with this sort of thing - wading through other people's emotional baggage is a bit like trying to navigate a ship through narrow straits choked with ice-burgs of indeterminable depth. He never knows just what will sink him.

But the thing about changing is that it's about facing your fears head-on and not just hiding from things you'd rather not deal with. And when Harry glances down at his book, there's a post-it note from Alma stuck to the cover that says: "You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness" and it seems sort of apt in the moment.

Harry takes a deep, fortifying breath and knocks. The person on the other side sucks back a syrupy sniffle. "Go away," a girl answers in a wrecked, trembling voice.

Harry puts his hand tentatively on the cool metal door. "Uh, you do know this is the boy's loo, right?"

"Harry?" the girl sputters and Harry startles back from the door because he'd know that voice anywhere. But what's Eleanor doing in the boy's loo? Harry doesn't know what happened after Louis left his house on Sunday – Fizzy took a turn for the worse and Louis has been at the hospital with his family – he sent Harry one or two texts about his sister, but didn't mention what happened with Eleanor. Not that it's any of his business.

"Are you okay?" he asks tentatively.

"Just leave me alone. Don't you think you've done enough?"

"I haven't done anything," Harry firmly insists, slinging his backpack up onto the window ledge and hauling himself up after it. The window glass is cold against his back through his thin jumper. The radiator lets out a gargled hiss, steam fogging his glasses. Harry takes them off and rubs at the lenses with his sleeve. (He would have worn contacts but he'd been up all night working on his short story and hadn't had time to put them in the morning.)