Chapter One
Each morning, my routine was the same, I put on my best blue dress and white apron, visited the bakery, did my shopping in the open market, and wished for more than a provincial life in Galt, California.
Oh, wait… no, that’s Belle from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.
I got confused because I’ve always got my nose in a book.
As a librarian and a bona fide bibliophile, I often did that whole walking-down-the-street-while-reading thing, and yes, people swerved around me and moved things to mitigate the disasters I caused by my inattention.
It made me a sketchy pedestrian but a damn good librarian.
Only recently, I’d begun to wonder if there was more out there for me to do than just taking care of books…
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Books need care. But so do people.
I find myself torn.
As I kid, I believed librarians were incognito superheroes. If it weren’t for the librarians at my local library growing up, I wouldn’t have had an outlet for my insatiable curiosity. I wouldn’t have made my place in the world. I wouldn’t have found my tribe.
I’d gone to high school with people who would never have graduated without the library tutoring programs or gotten college scholarships without application assistance.
Some literally wouldn’t have survived.
Now that I was a librarian, I tried to live up to my ideal, but the world had changed.
Maybe I’d been so busy reading in those days I didn’t notice the guys using the computers for porn. Or that people curled up under the tables to sleep off hangovers or got their grind on in the stacks.
Did they always let their kids run wild, pulling handfuls of books off the shelves and dropping them on the floor for no apparent reason? It was so much nicer reshelving a book if it had been lovingly read.
The family bathrooms were gender neutral now—one of the changes I heartily approved of.
We kept them locked, though—another necessary change.
We didn’t want anyone actually starting a family in them.
Look, nobody wanted to judge who got the key, but we had to look people over and decide if they’d use the bathroom for nature calls or some other, sketchier purpose. Only we were actually human, not real superheroes with x-ray vision and mind reading capabilities, and that meant we sometimes gave the key to people who shouldn’t have had it.
“Hey,” I banged on the door after hearing a thud. “You okay in there?”
No answer.
“Hey, in the bathroom? You okay?”
Nothing.
“I’m coming in.” I took out my keys and opened the door, because yeah, I’ve got a master key. “Don’t like it? Guess what? Your privacy in the library bathroom is not guaranteed, and if you don’t answer me… Aw, shit. Suzanne!” I shouted to my boss at the front desk. “Call 911!”
“What is it now?” she called angrily.
“Overdose. I’m administering naloxone.” I wear a belt bag at work, which is the source of a great deal of trolling—until someone needs a Band-Aid, a pair of tweezers, a sewing kit, or an opioid antagonist.
The young man on the floor lay face down. There was a smear of blood on the toilet and a small splatter on the floor. He’d tied off with a canvas belt. A tiny hypodermic needle stuck out of his arm at an odd angle.
He had obviously been living rough but wasn’t filthy. He must have bathed regularly enough. He’d probably asked for the key politely. My colleague Keith was a soft touch. He still hoped people were basically good whereas I still wished they were.
I’d prepared for this kind of thing, so it was with a certain sangfroid that I gloved up, removed the needle, and shoved the hair out of his face to administer the nasal spray that might save his life. Might. No guarantee.
I’d paid for the drug out of my own pocket.
I was prepared to use more than one dose, if necessary, to save this stranger’s life.
I was not prepared for the stranger to be Thuong Harper.
Nothing could have prepared me to see Thuong like that.
Chapter Two
Something beyond the awkward chair I sat in woke me. My first thought was a question: Had I fallen asleep at work?
I opened my eyes and remembered I was in the hospital, sitting in the ER waiting room for word on Thuong Harper, a boy I knew—a boy I’d once tutored—who had overdosed in my goddamn library.
What the hell had happened to him?
How had he gone from the smart, confident kid who’d hung out daily in my parents’ comic shop to this… this human wreckage. How had he washed up in my library’s bathroom with a needle stuck in his arm?
It’s not like I’d never been down this road before. You don’t live through the twenty-first century—even in Galt, a countrified little California town near Sacramento—without seeing the effects of the drug crisis. Between heroin and meth, I’d lost five friends from my relatively small high school. Others I knew bounced in and out of rehab.
We’d had a close call when I was an RA in the Porter College dorms in Santa Cruz. I’d had to administer naloxone and call EMS for a student back then—one I’d tried unsuccessfully to help over the course of two roller coaster years. I’d learned a lot back then.
Everybody was chasing something they couldn’t find or running from something they didn’t want to feel. And I found myself on the front lines of a war without training, or equipment, or even a good reason to be there.
Here again I recognized the victim before I administered the drug. Thuong’s was a face that haunted me anyway, one of the many who for whatever reason didn’t seem happy at home but blossomed under the warmth of my parents’ affection. He was a kid who often enough ended up doing his homework at the card tables in the game room on weekdays because he said he could concentrate better there than at his house.
He’d liked math and science and hated creative writing. At one point, he got in a little over his head with calculus and asked me for help. I was home from school on break and started helping him out, both in person and online.
How did Thuong end up here?
Didn’t matter. It wasn’t my circus, except for dumb luck. I wondered if Thuong would even remember me. I was certain he’d at least remember the shop, and my parents, who were going to be fucking devastated if they found out a kid they’d nurtured had nearly OD’d in my library.
I wondered if I should tell them. This would probably end up in the newspaper, tucked into the back with stories like, “Improper storage of gasoline ignites shed fire” and “Church trunk-or-treating cancelled over fears of Satanic interference.” Okay, I made that one up. My church does trunk-or-treating, and so far, Satan hasn’t shown up once.
I didn’t have any illusions that I’d saved Thuong’s life. At best I bought him time. He didn’t know me anymore, and he would probably resent my interference.
So why was I still sitting in the ER three hours later, waiting for news of his progress? Because if I didn’t see for myself, I’d never know if there was anything else I could have done. Because if I didn’t do everything I could, Thuong’s story would end up in the obituaries, and I’d never know if the funeral I’d attend with my parents could have been prevented.