Free No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July

out of the apartment with Kate following.
    I could not let her leave the building. I ran down the hall and threw myself on her. She shook me off; I locked my arms around her knees. I was sobbing and wailing, but not like a cartoon of someone sobbing and wailing—this was really happening. If she left, I would become mute, like those children who have witnessed horrible atrocities. No one would understand me but those children. Pip was prying my fingers off her shins. Kate knelt to help her, and I was repulsed by the touch of her pudding-like skin, I wanted to puncture it, I lunged at her chest. Pip took this moment to scuttle down the stairs, and somehow Kate was behind her. I was holding Kate’s cardigan. I ran after them, watched them hurry into Kate’s car. Before they pulled away, I shut my eyes and hurled myself onto the sidewalk. I lay there. This was my last hope—that Pip would take pity on me. I heard their car idling. I listened to the traffic and the sound of pedestrians walking carefully around me. I could almost hear Kate and Pip arguing in the car, Pip wanting to get out and help me, Kate urging them to leave. I pressed my cheek against the pavement in prayer. High heels clicked toward me and stopped; an elderly woman’s voice asked if I was okay. I whispered that I was fine and silently begged her to move on. But the woman was persistent, so finally I opened my eyes to tell her to go. Kate’s car was gone.
    I pulled the phone into the bed and slept for three days. At intervals I would open my eyes long enough to remember and then I’d drop back into unconsciousness. In dreams I knew I was tunneling toward her—if I could only dig deep enough, I would find her. The tunnels narrowed as I crawled through them, until they became impossibly knotted strands of hair that I could only tear at.
    On the afternoon of the third day, the phone rang. I pulled it up from the loamy depths of the bed. I wanted her to know, from the moment she heard my voice, that I was dying. I delivered a salutation so craven, so wretched, that it fell through language like pebbles. Hello.
    It was Mr. Hilderbrand, the landlord. In some bizarre, alternative, science-fiction reality, the rent was due. It was just one month ago that we had lifted Leanne’s dirty slip. I hung up the phone and looked around the room. My post was still standing in the kitchen, tactfully silent. A dangerously tall table-like structure wobbled in the middle of the room. It was the first square foot of the upstairs. I crawled underneath it and imagined Pip and Kate eating dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Berryman. It was the kind of scenario Pip had often described. We could not walk past a fancy house without her presuming its owners would want her to live with them if only they knew she was available. She saw herself as a charming street urchin, a pet for wealthy mothers. It was a scam. There was nothing in the world that was not a con, suddenly I understood this. Nothing really mattered, and nothing could be lost.
    I went to the bathroom and threw handfuls of water on my face, and it was easy. In fact, I could do anything. I took off the jeans and T-shirt I had been sleeping in. Naked, I crouched on the floor and sliced the legs off my pants with a box cutter. I put them on and they were itty-bitty. Itty-bitty teeny-tiny. I sawed through the T-shirt, leaving IF YOU LOVE JAZZ on the floor. HONK barely covered my small breasts, but hey. Hey, I was leaving the apartment. I was walking down the hall, and there was a small basket of old apples in front of the neighbor’s door with a sign that said, FOR MY NEIGHBORS PLEASE TAKE ONE . And hey, I was starving. I took an apple and the door swung open. I had never really seen this neighbor, but now I could see that she was a junkie. An old junkie. And she was wearing a sweater that I knew she had found in the hallway. It was Kate’s cardigan. She told me to take another one, and then she asked for a hug. I hugged her hard