“Maybe, but you’ll keep it in your head anyway, and eventually, you will value these words.”
“Really? I’ll value the words ‘feathers’ and ‘duck’?”
“Yes,” she said, and squeezed my hand once, then released it. “Someday. You will.”
“Someday,” I repeated, not even for a mini-second believing it.
“Now let’s order Chinese food. I’m starving.”
So, as I stood there looking at my reflection in the library staff mirror, it was clear that Sonia was right. I looked really bad. I looked like someone who was very alone. And I looked completely and entirely unprofessional. And that had to change.
I got to work. I combed every tangle out of my hair and parted it on the side, sweeping half behind my right ear. Because it was wet, it stayed there, as if it had been shellacked into place. I pinched my cheeks to get some color in them, a trick I learned from watching the movie Sense and Sensibility with my mom.
I decided right then to take Sonia’s advice to heart. I would come to the library from now on looking professional, like a real library employee. Like someone you could trust with a book.
I grabbed a paper towel and squeezed more water out of the ends of my hair. Then I took one last look at myself in the mirror. My shirt was still spotted with raindrops, but there was nothing I could do about that. Those would fade. My hair looked better. I promised myself right then, while staring at my reflection, that I would start getting more sleep, too.
And it was precisely then that I realized: I’d been so surprised to hear Black Hat Guy speak, when he stood patiently in the rain and held the door open for me, that I’d never even said, “Thank you.”
I had to do better. It was only the beginning of July, so I had plenty of time to improve. I would start fresh on Monday. I would be like Sonia, friendly and helpful. I would be nicely dressed with brushed hair.
And I would remember to say thank you.
Beverly
“I thought you might be up here,” Beverly said as she reached the top of the staircase to the loft. Because the library’s cleaning service budget had been cut in half, I had decided to dust the shelves, tables, and handrails every Monday morning to get the building ready for a busy week.
“I’m almost done wiping down the study cubicles,” I told her. “I already finished the shelves.”
“It really looks great up here, Jamie,” Beverly said, scanning the space, nodding her approval. “Just tip-top.”
“Thanks.” I went back to wiping.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like you to come downstairs, please. I have another job for you.”
“Sure,” I answered, and followed her down the steps.
She walked me to the returns cart behind the circulation desk. “I’d like you to work on these now.” She rested her hand on a stack of audiobook cases.
“Okay. Um, you want me to clean them?” I guessed.
“No. I want you to shelve them.” She handed me one from the pile.
“But I thought I wasn’t allowed to shelve adult stuff. You know,” I reminded her, “in case I make a mistake. You wanted me to only straighten up and shelf-read.”
“That was before. You’ve done an excellent job here the past few weeks, and I’m confident you can handle this new task.”
“Wow. Thanks.” I flushed a little. “Okay, so do these now?”
“Yes. And if you need any help or get stuck, just ask Sonia.”
Sonia turned then from the computer to wink at me. “The audiobooks are very straightforward, Jamie. It’s a good place to start.”
“Okay. Thank you,” I said again. I picked three from the cart and headed toward the audiobook wall.
“Jamie, push the whole cart there. You’ll go crazy walking back and forth.” Sonia rolled her eyes at me. “The carts are on wheels, remember?” She laughed at me then, but it was a non-mean, we’re-all-in-this-together, supportive laugh.
It wasn’t a that’s-the-pathetic-girl-who-wrote-the-love-letter laugh.
I knew exactly how that laugh sounded—I had heard it over and over at school.
I pushed the cart with more effort than I expected to need—it rolled like a deformed supermarket cart—and counted the items on it. There were nineteen audiobooks. This would take Sonia about three minutes, but it took me fifteen. As I read each call number and carefully searched for its spot on the shelf, I found myself almost having fun. Every item had its home, its own place to belong. It was just like Sonia said—everything made sense in the library. There was a language that was easy to understand and an order that was easy to follow inside these walls. My colossal mistake at school, my bad judgment, my humiliation all faded away while I worked, and all I felt was the nice satisfaction of putting things back in order, of making things right.
Beverly liked her library neat and precise and pinpoint accurate, and she was trusting me with that. She might as well have been handing me her newborn baby.
After I shelved all nineteen audiobooks, I stood back to admire my work. The wall looked full and organized and perfectly straight. Then I got paranoid that I might have made a mistake, so I shelf-read the entire wall. Again.
Shelf reading was pretty much the most un-fun and tedious job in the whole entire world. It meant reading the call numbers on the spine labels one at a time, to make sure they were all in the correct order. Call numbers could get pretty long and complicated, like 941.0081, 941.00812, 941.00821. After reading a dozen of those, your head started to spin and the numbers blurred, and before you knew it you couldn’t remember if two came before five or after, or if four was a number or a letter. It sounded stupid, but trust me, shelf reading could make even the most brainiac person bleary in a very short amount of time.
Pushing the empty cart back to the circ desk took me right past Beverly’s office. Her door was open a few inches, and in that small gap I caught her sitting at her desk, staring at something small she held in both hands. A gold chain, threaded around her pinkie finger, dangled down over her keyboard.
Her necklace.
She had taken it off and was gently rubbing a fingertip over the front, like rubbing a lamp to summon the genie inside. Then she opened it up. It was a locket! There was probably a photo of someone special inside. She gazed at it, quiet and still, so frozen in thought she looked like she was holding a pose, as if an artist were set up on the other side of her desk, scratching away on a canvas with pencil to catch her image.
Beverly took a sudden deep breath, snapped the locket shut, and clasped it back around her neck. She scanned the contents of her small, spare office, then directed her attention to her desk and adjusted the lamp, laptop, tissue box, and penholder so they all sat perfectly square on the tabletop. Before she could notice me spying on her, I quickly cast my eyes down to the cart in front of me and pushed it back to Sonia.
Who was in Beverly’s locket? She wasn’t married or divorced and didn’t have any kids, and she never mentioned any boyfriend or girlfriend. When Beverly opened that locket and peered inside so intensely, I saw myself, alone in my bedroom, opening the middle school yearbook to stare at Trey.
He was pictured with his homeroom on page twelve, sitting on a desk, staring right at the camera in his black Vincent van Gogh T-shirt. All the homeroom shots that year were the silly photos that the photographer always promised to take after getting a few good, serious ones. In those shots, there were always a few kids who still tried to give their best smile, a few who wouldn’t cooperate at all, and the rest who let loose: tongues out, eyes crossed, arms flailing, fingers up noses.
Trey wasn’t silly in the silly photo, though. He just focused on the camera, waited for the click, and then probably whipped his sketchbook out the moment the photographer was done so he could get back to whatever drawing he was working on. He was always drawing something.
His solo school portrait was on page twenty-eight. He wore a brown collared shirt, the brown matching the molten chocolaty shade of his eyes perfe
ctly, and he smiled softly at the camera. His eyelashes were the reach-out-and-grab-you kind like Sonia’s. I lost myself staring at that picture, pretending that his smile wasn’t for the photographer or for his mom, who told him to cooperate because she had to prepay, but was for me.
Just for me.
I guessed if I had a locket, that’s the picture I would keep inside, always with me, safe and tucked in right above my heart.
Maybe Beverly had a picture of her middle school crush in that locket and the reason she was a single, overworked, middle-aged librarian today was because she was still stuck on that one person.
That’s what Vic would say, at least, because she liked to tease me about Trey. It was an easy poke for her, since I couldn’t get her back.
“Fortunately for me, there isn’t a single specimen in our entire town that I find even remotely appealing,” she loved to tell me.
And it was true. She had never had a crush on anyone. Yet.
I wasn’t even sure how I could still like Trey so much after all the trouble my crush on him had caused me. Vic couldn’t help me understand it, either. She just said, “The heart wants what it wants,” and threw her arm around my shoulders, giving me a firm squeeze in support.
“You did not just say that to me,” I challenged her, narrowing my eyes.
She laughed and waved me off. “I heard it on this horrendous soap opera my mom watches.” And then she acted it out, lifting her hand to her brow and gazing off into the distance as she repeated, but this time in some made-up accent, “The heart wants what it wants.”
“Well, my heart wants to go back in time and redo a particular day,” I said.
“My heart wants a mega KitKat bar,” Vic said back.
So I would wear a photo of Trey in my locket and Vic would wear a photo of a candy bar.
As for what photo Beverly had hidden inside her locket, I had absolutely no idea.
Trina
When Sonia asked me to display the new stack of Biweekly newsletters in the reading room on Wednesday, I couldn’t help but notice one of the front-page headlines: Eleventh Annual World Culture Day a Success.
World Culture Day was a second-grade event in Foxfield, if you were in Mr. Harley’s class.
The article was about a month and a half late, of course, but sometimes the Biweekly did that—saved fluffy stories to print weeks later when news was slow. Apparently, Mr. Harley’s World Culture Day was still a highlight of the school year.
I looked over the article quickly and sighed, remembering.
I had Mr. Harley in second grade.
So did Vic.
And so did Trina.
If I had just raised my hand for Argentina or Thailand or Mexico, or really any other country at all for the World Culture project, maybe Trina wouldn’t hate me so much.
But no—I had to pick South Korea.
My first choice had been China, because the food at Jade Noodle Shop was my absolute favorite, but Nina Moore got China, and I ended up with South Korea.
Trina picked South Korea too, but Mr. Harley assigned her Russia instead.
Korea was an obvious choice for Trina since her older brother, Trey, had been adopted from Korea as a baby. I had no personal connection to Korea at all, so why did I pick it?
I’d have to blame Aunt Julie.
Aunt Julie had just taken my mom and me to a Korean restaurant for the very first time, and we loved everything about it: the wooden tables only ten inches off the ground, the square red pillows inviting us to sit snuggled side by side, the rectangular paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling, giving off a dim and cozy light. The waitresses wore traditional robes as they served us bowl after tiny bowl of precut food to mix in with our rice: vegetables of every texture and color, sauces, mushrooms, dumplings, egg.
The smell and taste of the delicious food were still fresh in my mind and on my tongue when Mr. Harley explained the project we were about to begin, so after I lost out on China, South Korea seemed like a good idea.
We had two weeks to prepare our displays, and I went all out. The day of the event I set up poster board with my own watercolor paintings of snow-covered mountains, wide fields of rice, and rocky land jutting into beautiful blue sea. I made another poster about fermented foods, with an ink drawing of a fermentation pot used to make kimchi, a traditional Korean food. I had paper menus from the Korean restaurant Aunt Julie had taken us to, and a tray of chopsticks people could practice using. I gave chopstick lessons throughout the morning, which I was only able to do because Aunt Julie had drilled me until I mastered the technique. She made me pick up dozens of raisins and drop them in a jar until my hand cramped and the sight of a raisin made my head spin.
But the best part of my display was the food, which Aunt Julie had helped me prepare. I had a vat of warm rice and lots of small dishes containing some of the key elements to bibimbap. Bibim means “mixed” and bap means “cooked rice,” which I explained while visitors made their own bowls of bibimbap, choosing from seasoned carrot, cucumber, shitake mushroom, radish, bean sprouts, and a red chili paste sauce to mix into their rice. I also had a regular soy sauce for people who didn’t like spicy.
My display was a hit because of the food.
Vic’s French table was also really popular because she had cheesy, warm samples of quiche Lorraine cut up on small plates for everyone to try.
Trina didn’t have a crowd.
Trina had a pretty set of Russian nesting dolls for people to play with and a whole book of postcards showing Moscow and Saint Petersburg and Russian architecture and landscapes, but the only food she had was borscht.
Borscht is a traditional Russian soup. It was a staple of the Russian diet, especially in the freezing-cold months, when it became the best way to warm up from the inside out. It was also bright red, and superthick, and suspiciously lumpy. It did not look appetizing. When Joey Tarquinio left his Guatemala table to look at the other displays and saw the huge bowl of borscht, he yelled, “Eww, blood! I’m not eating blood!”
Mr. Harley had a private talk with Joey then, and one of the teacher’s aides told Trina her soup looked delicious, but it was too late.
At the end of the event, as we were starting to clean up, I asked Trina if I could taste her borscht. (Aunt Julie hadn’t taken me to a Russian restaurant yet.)
Trina looked at me with a face hard as stone.
“You don’t know anything!” she shrieked at me, her eyes blazing. “You’re not even Korean!”
And I saw it—the rage in her.
She should have been mad at Joey for making fun of her soup.
Or at Mr. Harley for assigning her Russia instead of South Korea.
But no, she was mad at me.
I should have folded that day when we both raised our hand for the same country. I should have dropped my arm and let her have it. I should have walked away. But I was only in second grade, and I didn’t.
I shuddered at the memory and let out a long, deep breath, hard enough to push it away from me.
I fanned the newsletters out on the counter and read another headline: Mayor Investigates Need for Library. The article began: “With technology advances in today’s society and universal access to the internet, is a public library an effective and efficient use of taxpayers’ money? Mayor Trippley is currently—”
The bell jingled then, and I looked up to see a family walk in with two huge IKEA bags stuffed to the top with books to return. I neatly placed the Biweekly on top of the stack and made my way over to Sonia to help.
Shady
“It’s been three hours, so I’ll check the book drops again,” I called to Beverly later that day as I walked by her open office door.
“That would be great, Jamie. Thank you,” she responded without breaking the pace of her lightning-fast tapping on her keyboard.
I grabbed my water bottle and a library bag for the returned books and headed outside.
The bells clanged behind me as the library door closed
and I immediately felt the harsh temperature change from the air-conditioned building to the steamy midday heat. It was so humid out it felt like there was no air in the air.
I walked around the building to the book-drop containers in back, sipping my water slowly, feeling the trickle of cold slide down my throat.
As I approached the two containers, the one for audio materials on the left and the larger one for books on the right, I stopped at the sight of a small brown mound squeezed between the two that hadn’t been there at my last visit. It looked like the overused mophead from the library storage closet. As I got closer, it looked more like some old Halloween wig that had been abandoned outside, left to collect dirt and twigs and dust.
But then it moved.
I stepped closer and dropped to my knees, then leaned forward into the small space. And then I knew for sure.
“Hiya, sweetie,” I said softly. “It’s okay.”
A head popped out from under the mound so suddenly I jumped. Two orange-brown eyes peered at me, while a small black nose wiggled frantically as it gathered my scent. I made a loose fist and stretched it in front of the little dog’s face so it could get an easy whiff.
“Who are you, little guy?” I asked in a voice about two octaves higher than my regular one. Aunt Julie always said to use a voice that was high-pitched and soft with a new animal, and it seemed to be working. The little dog uncurled itself and stood, did a downward-dog-like yoga stretch, and then padded over to sniff me more completely.
The dog was dirty, and I quickly discovered that it was a he. His fur felt cool to the touch, despite the heat outside.
“You’re a smart one, huh? You found some nice shade between these bins.” I ran my hand down his bony back and then scratched lightly under his chin. My hand came away a dark gray, as if I had rubbed the inside of a chimney instead of a sweet little dog. “Cool as a cucumber and super filthy.”
He licked my hand. His tongue was dry and rough.
“Oh, sweetie, you need a drink.” I quickly uncapped my water bottle.
A Kind of Paradise Page 6