“Chicken.”
The announcer nodded. “Absolutely. I absolutely am too chicken to try that.”
“Ed, Mama needs you,” Viviani interrupted.
Edouard stood and followed Viviani into the hallway. “What does Mama need?”
“What? Oh, nothing. I just had a question. Can I ask you something, Ed?”
“You just did.” Edouard sighed. “But you can ask me something else. If you don’t call me Ed.”
Viviani looked over both shoulders to see who might be nearby. Only a couple of patrons deep in their browsing. “Do you … believe in ghosts?”
Edouard stopped walking. Scratched his chin. “I haven’t decided. There’s plenty of empirical evidence to suggest they exist.”
Viviani shivered. Was that another cold spot? Edouard was the one person she was counting on to tell her ghosts were nothing but pure bunk! Not that she wanted Merit to be right about the unlikelihood of ghosts, of course, but the alternative meant there could be an actual ghost in her house. “What do you mean?”
He tapped his fingertips together, a sign that he was in deep thought. “Well, logically, I’d dismiss the idea outright. I mean, spirits wandering the earth after death? Certainly our spirits have better things to do!” He chuckled, and Viviani forced a weak smile to keep him talking.
“But if you look at the data: over a fifth of the population claims to have seen a ghost. That seems high, doesn’t it? Surely not all those people are unreasonable.”
Viviani’s ears began to ring. What was Edouard saying?
“And that’s nothing compared to the percentage of people who say they believe in ghosts. Almost half. I can’t imagine that much of the population believes in something that doesn’t exist.”
Viviani gulped. “So,” she whispered, “you do believe?”
Edouard shrugged. “I usually trust data.”
That did it. If Edouard—facts-are-everything, prove-it-to-me Edouard—thought ghosts might exist, then they absolutely, most certainly, positively did. This could was a definitely.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Public Libraries—United States,
Dewey Decimal 027.4
SEE ALSO: libraries & society; libraries & community; library users
Viviani marched through the next few days, feeling the glares of her classmates boring through her. She heard their whispered giggles as she passed: “She’s full of baloney” and “She told me she was even born “in the building. I bet that’s not true.” Eva would grab her hand and pull her through and past the whispers. It was just like walking through the unexplainable cold spots in the library, Viv felt.
Merit didn’t join in the gossip, Viviani noticed, but she was the reason people were talking about her. And Merit still didn’t believe Viv’s library adventures, either.
Every day, Viviani dashed home to do her chores, then lingered by the stamps and the Inverted Jenny. Viv would love to have Eva by her side in the afternoons, too, leading the way toward the warmer spots in the world, but Viv was still working off her workshop punishment, so … no Eva. Instead, Viv would look at the botched stamp and dream of flying around the world, upside down or right side up—it didn’t matter, as long as she went far and fast. Like Charles Lindbergh. And every day, Mr. Uh Hill in the terrible pea-soup coat was there, too.
Today, he asked, “How’s the story collecting going, Anne Shirley?”
Viviani wished her dress had pockets like the ones her brothers had in their breeches; she had nowhere to cram her balled fists. “Maybe story collecting isn’t as nifty as I thought it was.”
Mr. Hill looked taken aback. “Of course it is! I think it might be the very best type of collecting.”
Viviani shrugged. She didn’t feel like talking about her schoolyard troubles now. She came to the library to avoid that. “How’s the bad-luck collecting?”
“Going quite well, unfortunately.” Mr. Hill let out a rueful chuckle.
A passing librarian, Mr. Wilburforce, shushed them.
Viviani sighed. “Free shushing,” she shout-whispered to Mr. Hill. “Comes with the house.”
Mr. Hill spit out a laugh. He quickly turned it into a cough when Mr. Wilburforce eyed him again. “That could really get annoying.”
“Plenty of places to hide from those librarians, that’s for sure.”
“Yeah?” The man’s eyes sparkled, like he wanted in on the secret. “So where’s the best hiding spot in the building?”
Viviani’s heart leapt, for there was nothing she adored more than talking about the library. It felt good to be believed. “You wanna see it?”
“You bet.”
“Come on!” Viviani took off at a full run, her shoes slapping the marble floors, escorted out the door by Mr. Wilburforce’s shushes. Her fellow collector had to hustle to keep up. When they reached the stairs, Viviani slung one leg over the wooden banister and slid down. Such theatrics were sometimes worth the scowls from the librarians.
Mr. Hill jogged down the flight of stairs. “Just how many floors are there?” he asked, his breath coming in quick puffs.
“Four. Three and the basement. But half of the basement is off-limits.”
“Off-limits?”
“Yeah, where the furnace and my papa’s workshop are. No one’s allowed down there. Not even me.”
They slid and ran down two more flights, to the “in bounds” part of the basement, as Edouard liked to call it.
“The children’s room, the lunchroom, the newspapers, the bindery, the staff lockers, the Printing Office, the big bookstacks, and the library school,” Viviani rattled off. “All here in the basement. Come on, I’ll show you the best hiding spot.”
Mr. Hill followed Viviani into the room where the library school was housed, a large room with desks and shelves and one massive card catalog, at least ten feet tall.
“Okay, watch this,” Viviani said. She pulled out several of the long, skinny wooden drawers in a box pattern, as high as she could reach. The drawers were filled with slips of cardstock, each typed with book information, ready for the library students to learn shelving and weeding and the Dewey decimal system.
Viviani gripped one of the extended drawers and pulled herself aloft. She began to climb. As she did, she tucked in each drawer behind her with the toe of her boot, and she pulled out a drawer above her. Open drawer above, climb, close drawer below. Open drawer above, climb, close drawer below. She climbed to the top of that ten-foot chest of drawers like a spider, and because she closed the drawers behind her, no one could tell she’d been there.
When Viviani reached the top of the card catalog, she flipped onto the flat upper surface and lay down. “You can’t see me, can you?” she yelled to Mr. Hill.
She heard him chuckle from below. “Not at all! That’s amazing, Viviani!”
She peeked her head over the edge. “Getting down’s a little trickier.” Viviani performed the action in reverse, this time climbing down and pulling open the card catalog drawers using the tiny brass hooks on the front of each—a perfect fit for the toe of her boot.
When she was low enough, she hopped to the ground and dusted off her hands. Mr. Hill whistled, long and low. “Impressive!”
Viviani took a bow. “Want to see more of the library?”
“Sure!”
As the duo circled out of the library school room and down the corridor, they passed a heavy metal door. Mr. Hill pounded on it, and the hallway filled with a hollow, echoing sound, like thunder.
“What’s behind here?”
Viviani paused and could almost hear the drip drip drip sound on the other side of that door. Papa’s workshop was over there. The furnace. The machine room. The custodian closet. Big Red?
“I’m not allowed to go in there,” she said, hiding a shiver. Just standing this close to the spot where she’d seen the swishing shadow and felt pins and needles on her skin, made her heart skip to a faster beat. She leaned closer to Mr. Hill and whispered, “It’s haunted.”<
br />
Viviani glanced sidewise at him to gauge his reaction. He didn’t twitch. “Well, we shouldn’t stay long here, then. I’d prefer not to have a run-in with a ghost today, thank you very much.”
Viviani smiled. This fellow didn’t call her a liar for believing in ghosts.
“Want to see the roof?” Viviani asked.
“Absolutely.”
They jogged back upstairs. At the first-floor landing, Viviani said, “First floor! Maps, magazines, and microfilm! And oh! Mr. Eames! I’d almost forgotten!” She quickly flattened herself against the cool marble wall and scooted out of the security guard’s view. It was late afternoon, almost dinnertime, so Mr. Eames had just come on duty. One had to be ever mindful of the Master Thief point tally. John Jr. was now in the lead. Mr. Eames jangled and whistled on by, today sporting a bow tie festooned with holly leaves.
Mr. Hill grinned. “Don’t those security guards wake you up at night with all their stomping around?”
“Naw. We never hear them. I sometimes wonder if Mr. Eames doesn’t have a nap pallet laid out somewhere. We know his routine backward and forward. First floor, left turn, full circle, repeat. And he never takes the stairs. Always the elevator for that fellow. That over there is my brother Edouard.” Viviani pointed at an open book gripped by a set of fingers. “As you can see, he’s annoying,” Viviani teased.
Edouard slouched inside a wooden telephone booth, his sock feet propped far above his head, like an overturned turtle.
“Hello, Edouard!” Mr. Hill called.
“You’re annoying!” Edouard said, not even looking up from his book.
“This is Mr. Hill,” Viviani said. “He wants to see the roof.”
Edouard slammed his book shut and tossed it on the bench in the telephone booth. “I wanna come.”
The trio ran up the second flight of stairs. Here Viviani said, “Floor two! Mostly art here. Also, one of the biggest card catalogs. And, of course, my home. So, the boring stuff.”
Mr. Hill chuckled at that. “What time is lights-out?”
“Ten o’clock. Those iron front doors close shut boom! And then the building is all ours.”
“And then you have the place all to yourself? Lucky you!”
“Yes. Well, except for Mr. Eames, of course. Oh, and old Mr. Green.” Viviani shivered. “He’s the custodian. Cleans up after everyone leaves. You don’t want to mess with him.”
Mr. Hill nodded like he understood folks you don’t mess with.
“Fact,” Edouard said as they continued climbing. “The word librarian comes from the term custodian of a library.”
After the third flight of stairs, Viviani said, “Back where we started. This floor has the genealogy room and the fancy picture gallery and the American history room. And, of course, the Main Reading Room.”
They entered the main reading room through the grand double wooden doors. The gold inscription carved in wood above the doors greeted them: A good Booke is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life.
Viviani’s eyes gleamed a little brighter whenever she paused to read those words from the poet John Milton. The script was clean but the Ss looked more like Fs, which made the message feel ancient, important. Books were the life-blood of a master spirit—Viviani felt pretty sure that meant that books feed your soul. And stories gave a life beyond life. That was what Viviani loved most about stories—they made things more exciting, more simple, more straightforward than real life. In stories, there was a beginning, a middle, and an end. They happened Once Upon a Time and usually ended Happily Ever After. Stories helped make sense of big feelings and unexplainable things. Story life was so much more appealing than real life, where things were messy and complicated and people called you liar.
“I love this room,” Mr. Hill said. The trio stood for a moment taking in the glittering globe chandeliers, the deep, chocolate-brown plasterwork, the gold inlay, the soft green lighting. One could practically feel the stories changing hearts and opening minds within the walls of the reading room. Empathy in flight. If ever a place held magic, it was this place.
“Come on,” Viviani said. “This way to the roof.”
After one last flight of stairs, they reached the door to the roof at last. Viviani paused dramatically, then flung open the metal door with a loud “Ta-da!”
A burst of cold stung their eyes and noses. The pigeons flustered up inside their cages, spraying a cloud of feathers and dander.
Edouard scooped a few handfuls of seed from a nearby bucket and tossed it in their cages. Viviani joined him. “My brother John had the idea to trap pigeons so he can sell them. He built these contraptions out of old parts from my papa’s workshop. They look awful, but they work! He’s captured twelve so far. He says pigeons carried messages in the Great War, so he thinks he can get a pretty penny for them.”
“Sell pigeons in New York?” Mr. Hill said with a half smile. “There’s not exactly a shortage of them around here.”
“That’s what I said!” Viviani cried.
“Pigeons have excellent hearing,” Edouard said, peering into the birdcages. “They can detect storms and even volcano eruptions miles away.”
“Seems you kids have benefited quite well from living in a library.”
Viviani stepped to the edge of the building and swept her arm over the view: the green swath of Bryant Park, the red-tile rooftops and steeples hopping and dotting across Fifth to Sixth Avenue, from east to west. She turned to Forty-Second and Fortieth, north to south, all the way down to the gleaming white spire of the towering Woolworth Building in the distance. The sun was setting pink, turning the East River to her left and the Hudson on her right into pathways of sparkling diamonds. Lights and streets glittered like a universe—the whole New York City universe.
“Isn’t the view grand?” She turned to Mr. Hill in his terrible pea-soup coat.
He was spinning, taking in the entirety of the roof. “It is, Viviani. It is grand indeed. Thank you for showing me this.”
Viviani smiled. Even if her classmates didn’t always appreciate her home, some folks sure did.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Cameras,
Dewey Decimal 770
SEE ALSO: photography, photography—technique
It was show-and-tell day in Viviani’s class. Many of her classmates thought they were too old for show-and-tell, but Viviani still loved this day, for it was story-sharing at its core.
“And that’s the story of the Inverted Jenny,” Viviani said, snapping shut the book she’d borrowed from the library. It had a picture of the stamp inside. Viviani had a library card just like everyone else, but she rarely remembered to use it before borrowing a book, much to Miss O’Conner’s dismay.
“Wow,” Merit breathed from her desk. “So interesting. It’s valuable because it was a mistake.”
Viviani beamed and was, admittedly, a tiny bit surprised. “Exactly!”
“Thank you, Miss Fedeler,” her teacher said. Her classmates applauded. “Let’s see. Miss Mubarak. How about you go next?”
Merit strolled to the front of the class, clutching a small black box. She flipped a silver handle on the front of it, and out popped a lens and a tiny eyepiece.
“This is our camera,” Merit said proudly. The class all leaned forward in their seats, causing the desks and chairs to make a collective screech across the cold linoleum floor.
“Wow!”
“Wouldja lookit that!”
“Nifty!”
Viviani felt a surge of jealousy; only Merit had thought her stamp was all that nifty.
“My father bought it back in Giza so we could take pictures of my home before we left.”
Here, Viviani noticed a small pause in Merit’s story, a slight shake in her voice. But Merit swallowed and continued:
“I took pictures of our journey here. The ship, the water. I even have photographs of us at Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty!”
> The classmates oohed and aahed.
“But I don’t take many pictures, of course. It costs a lot of money to buy film and develop the photographs. Ten dollars per roll.”
Wow. That was gobs of money.
“How does it work?” Ruth O’Donnell shouted.
Miss Hutch cleared her throat. “Raise your hand if you have a question, please.”
Ruth shot her hand in the air and shouted, “How does it work?”
Merit laughed, and Viviani noticed how it changed her: her shoulders relaxed, her face lit up, her stance softened. Much like the stamp collector Mr. Smyth. Merit had found the hobby that made her melty.
“Well, you focus it here,” she said, pointing to the small lens. “And then you push this button here.” She turned the camera and showed the class the silver button on top. “The film goes in here.” She flipped the case and pointed to the back. “I want to be a newspaper photographer someday, like Christina Broom, who took a lot of photos of soldiers in Britain in the war.”
Jake Joseph shot his hand in the air, and Merit nodded at him. “Did you borrow that from your brother?”
Merit’s forehead crinkled. “No. I don’t have a brother.”
“But cameras are for boys. My Boy Scout manual has a section all about photography.”
Merit folded the accordion-like lens back into the hard-shell box and closed the case with a click. “I hardly think this camera knows if it’s a boy or a girl pushing the button.”
Viviani couldn’t help herself: she burst out laughing. Merit toed the floor with her boot and fought back a grin.
Sometimes a glimpse of sunshine makes itself known through the murky leaves and limbs of the dark forest. Sometimes a glimmer of friendship can be found in places where only animosity was seen before.
Miss Hutch cleared her throat. “That’s wonderful, Miss Mubarak. Thank you. Time for recess, kids. March, march, march.”
Viviani’s class stampeded outside. Some took up a ball and bat. Some played jacks or cards. Viviani wandered to the crowd surrounding Merit, where several friends were still asking about her camera. Viviani felt a small flicker inside, like maybe a spark of friendship. Merit understood the importance of the Inverted Jenny, too.
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