→ I would love to go!
→ Ugh…I’m sorry, I have previous plans.
The waitress brings me a cup of hot tea, and I take the string on the end of the bag and absently begin dunking it into the hot water. Of course I’ll choose the previous plans—young Ron Swanson is waiting for me, and I never go back on a promise.
Even in a video game.
Though every time I try to get into the world of the game, these blokes in the booth beside me keep distracting me. They’re rude, crowding into too small a booth, their plates half-empty, half-strewn across the floor.
When the waitress brings me my plate of cheesy chips—fries, whatever—she gives them a disapproving glare before she refills my glass of water and leaves for the other side of the diner again.
I don’t much blame her.
“And her friends actually think they can beat me,” one of the guys says, lounging back in the booth. He picks up a chip and tosses it back down on his plate. “They’re not even worth my time.”
“Quinn’s buttons are pretty cute, though,” one of his friends, a stout brown-skinned bloke, says as he licks his fingers. He had previously demolished a bacon cheeseburger with excellent technique. Darien would have been proud.
“Yeah, like anyone’ll vote for someone because of buttons.” He scoffs and rolls his eyes. “I’ve got a whole YouTube audience dying to see me dance with Rosie and you know what, I’m going to. Because who better deserves it?”
Rosie? I can’t imagine that there are many people named Rosie in this small town, and not many who are around our age. Well, isn’t this interesting. I never imagined her going to some backwater high-school dance with a bloke like this—
“To be fair,” another one of his friends, a girl with short blond hair, points out, “you never actually asked her.”
…I stand corrected.
He scoffs. “Who else does she have to go with? I’m doing her a favor.”
“She’s ungrateful,” the first friend agrees. They all seem to do nothing but agree. Do any of them have minds of their own, or are they all just robots?
“And you can do so much better,” adds his other friend.
I snort—I can’t help it—and eat another chip.
The one in the snap-back cap must’ve heard me, because he turns to look at me over his shoulder. “You think something’s funny?”
She’s the one who can do better, I want to reply, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why. I don’t know this girl, but hearing them talk about her like…like…like she should be grateful for that sort of attention, really makes me uncharacteristically upset.
If they can’t see that she’s beautiful, the way her fringe cuts across her brows, the brush of freckles across her nose, the way she sighs in the library, running her fingers along the bindings of the books, when she thinks no one’s watching—
Stop it.
“Yo,” the guy says, turning around in his booth. “Do I know you? You look familiar.”
Shit.
I adopt my best American accent to reply, “I’ve got that face,” before I put a five on the table for the waitress, abandoning half of my plate of chips—fries—and slide off my barstool. Better I leave before I say anything I’ll regret, which will perhaps be just everything.
The walk back to the house is short, and when I let myself in Sansa is curled up on the couch with Elias. They’re watching that karaoke show again, and Elias doesn’t notice that I’ve returned yet.
So I creep back into the hall and follow it down into the library. I don’t quite understand why I feel so secretive, as if this place is private. As if I’m not supposed to be here.
Perhaps I’m not.
The library is dark, and more than a little unsettling, before I turn on one of the lamps on the end table. Orange-yellow light floods the room. There are stacks of books everywhere, piled haphazardly in a system I can’t begin to fathom. The wingback chair sits against the bookshelf still, her footprints in the red leather cushions.
She’d only managed to get a few of the books down, it seems.
It really is bad foresight that Elias didn’t even give her a step stool, but then I remember that I’m supposed to be helping her organize the library. I would have been said step stool, apparently.
On the balcony, she had laughed and said she didn’t mind being short. “Besides, it makes reaching upper cabinets a game of parkour.”
“I’d reach them for you, if you’d ask.”
“Would I have to ask?”
“No.”
With a sigh, I push the wingback chair to the side and reach for the books. I take them down, two at a time, and pile them up on the chair where she can see them tomorrow. Then I turn off the lights again and close the door, as if I was never there.
I DUMP MY BOOKBAG DOWN at the threshold of the library and run my fingers along the spines of the books like I do every weekday, saying hello to them. Nothing quite takes my breath away like the library every time I walk in. It’s the slant of the sun coming through the two large windows. It’s the way the light flickers off the motes of dust that drift through the room. It’s the smell of old paperbacks, filling every shelf like hundreds of secret stories from a galaxy far, far away, beckoning me to settle into every page, explore every planet, fall in love over and over again with Carmindor and Amara and Euci and Zorine and, yes, even Ambrose Sond.
Everything is as I left it, like time stops between my visits. There is nothing here but space, and words, and magic. A certain kind of impossible magic, where words people have written years and years ago exist still.
As I round one side of the library, I pause when I notice the books stacked in the wingback chair—the same ones I’d been trying to reach yesterday when Vance walked in and startled me.
I guess things move after all.
I flip open the iPad on the desk and begin my work—I go in order, systematically finding the next book in the series and noting how damaged it is. Some books are rare enough that it doesn’t matter how damaged they are—as long as they’re legible and still in one piece, they go into the system.
A knock on the door startles me out of my work, and Mr. Rodriguez pokes his head into the library. “I’m heading out for a bit to grab some groceries for dinner. Ravioli good for tonight?”
“You don’t have to feed me—”
“I know, but you’ve been doing such a good job, and I always make too much.”
“Well, if you put it that way—I can eat my weight in ravioli. Also, thanks. You know, for the help.”