I grasp the door handles and pull, firmly ignoring the twinge of anxious disappointment I feel when they swing open instead of turning out to be safely locked and unopenable. I step inside, and the sound of my shoes against the floor tiles seems way too loud in the silence. Every other row of overhead lights has been turned off in here, too, throwing everything into half shadow and making the far corners of the room seem dark and threatening. There’s a light on in the back office, though. But maybe they just leave that on for the janitors. It doesn’t mean that anyone is actually here.
I clear my throat awkwardly. “Hello?” I call out.
Mr. Gabriel materializes in the office doorway and I nearly jump out of my skin, a tiny cutoff scream escaping me before I can stop it.
“Cynthia!” he says, smiling. “I didn’t expect to see you here at this hour. What can I do for you?”
I ignore my pounding, racing heart and make myself take another step forward. “I was looking for Annie. I thought she might have come back after eighth period. But she’s — I guess she’s not here. I’m sorry I bothered you.”
“Not at all, not at all.” He comes forward and rests his arms on the circulation desk. One of the lights illuminates his face as he does, and I have to acknowledge that he really is amazingly attractive. “Annie was here earlier, but she left a little while ago.” His smile turns slightly apologetic, then brightens again. “She’s a lovely girl, isn’t she? Finding good library monitors is harder than you might think, you know. And being new to the school, I find that it makes my job so much easier when I have students I can rely on. You two seem to be very good friends. I’m glad to have met you both.”
We watch each other, and I am struck again by how young he looks, and how not-young he seems. “You sound so much older than you look,” I say without thinking, then realize how inappropriate a thing that was to say out loud. My face floods with heat. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean —”
He chuckles and makes a small dismissive gesture with one hand. “It’s all right, Cynthia. Actually, I’m glad to hear it. I get a little flak sometimes for my, ah, youthful appearance. From teachers and students both. I guess I make an effort to at least sound like I’m old enough to be doing what I’m doing.”
He smiles again, and I find myself smiling back. Maybe that’s all I’ve been feeling — the reason behind his seeming out-of-placeness. It must be hard for him, looking the way he does. I wonder if anyone takes him seriously without him having to prove himself first. You always hear older people wishing they could keep looking young, but I guess there’s a limit to how young. Especially if you work in a high school.
“Is this your first library job?” I ask, moving up a little closer to the desk.
“Oh, I’ve been around,” he says, his smile twisting a little. I realize maybe that’s not an okay thing for me to be asking about, either. Are adults weird about their job histories? Or maybe it’s simply none of my business. I don’t even know why I’m still here. I hadn’t been planning to stay. I had been about to leave, once he said Annie had gone home. But I feel all right just standing here, talking to him. Why did I think he was so creepy? He’s not at all creepy. I feel bad for even thinking that about him. He’s nice. Just a little awkward, maybe. It’s not like I don’t understand awkward.
I take another step, and then I’m close enough to lean my own arms on the circulation desk across from him. That’s better, I realize. Kind of relaxing. It’s nice in the library. Quiet. And there’s something very interesting about Mr. Gabriel. And he really is very attractive. He’s no Ryan Halsey, but —
Thinking of Ryan distracts me for a moment, and suddenly I feel like Mr. Gabriel is a little too close, right there on the other side of the desk. What was I saying? Was he saying something? I’m confused, like I just missed part of the conversation. Mr. Gabriel is looking at me intently.
“I — I should go, I guess,” I tell him. “I only came by to look for Annie.” He doesn’t say anything, and I feel like more explanation is required. “I was still here because of rehearsal. Fall musical. We’re doing Sweeney Todd.”
“Ah,” he says, looking genuinely interested. “The demon barber of Fleet Street! I’ve always loved that one.”
I see a flicker in the corner of my eye and turn my head to catch it. Nothing’s there. Of course not. Except then one of the shadows by the computers moves.
My breath catches.
“Cynthia?”
“Is that —?” I look back at him. “I thought I saw —” What? I have no idea what I thought I saw. “Something moved, over by the computers.”
“Hmm.” He peers in the direction I indicate. “I don’t see anything.”
I look again, and this time I’m sure I see the shadow of something skitter across one of the tables. “Right there! You didn’t see it?” He had been looking right at it. “Maybe — maybe it was a mouse or something.”
He looks at me. “I certainly hope not. Bad for the books, you know. And I’m sure I haven’t seen any evidence of mice. But I’ll mention it to the janitorial staff, though. Ask them to keep an eye out.”
“Yeah, okay.” Somehow this plan feels inadequate. I don’t know what else I expect him to do, though. Or why I’m so concerned about possible library mice.
Another flicker, this time on the other side, near the closest row of bookshelves. I whip my head around, but again there’s no sign of the source of motion. What . . .?
“Another mouse?” He sounds amused. I don’t think it’s funny, though.
I glance up to meet his eyes again, and now I remember why I thought he was creepy. Because he is creepy. He’s just standing there, staring at me with those intense eyes, a little half smile on his face. Waiting, watching, something. For what? What is he doing? Why is he even here this late in the day? And why I am still here with him, dammit?
I push back from the desk, clutching my bag. “I should go,” I say.
“All right,” he says genially. His hand twitches slightly on the desk, and I step back in sudden terror that he might try to touch me again.
I take two steps backward before I can make myself turn around. I don’t like having my back to him. I want to run for the doors, but I resist. I walk calmly. Well, I pretend to walk calmly. My heart is hammering inside me, and I’m afraid to let my gaze stray from where I have it firmly fixed on the doors. I don’t want to see anything else from the corner of my eye. That last shadow was very large. I do not think there is any way it could have been a mouse.
I reach the doors, which has seemed to take entirely too long, and with great relief I place one hand out to push them open. They give an inch and then catch.
Locked.
I stare at them. I give them another tentative push. Then a stronger one. A slightly panicked one. Why are they locked? How can they be locked when they weren’t before?
“Oh.” I hear Mr. Gabriel’s soft voice from the desk behind me. “Let me get that for you.”
I don’t turn around. I can’t seem to make myself turn around. I keep staring at the doors, silently begging them to open on their own, as I listen to his footsteps slowly approach. At his final step, the one that brings him right up behind me, I feel all the hair on the back of my neck and arms stand at prickly attention.
“Here,” he says, and he places one hand on my arm to gently move me aside. There is one of those strange sparks, one of those I-want-to-pretend-it-is-static-electricity-but-I-know-it’s-really-not sensations, and I cannot help it, I turn to look at his hand on my skin and then up at his face, which is too close, again, looking back at me.
He doesn’t look away as he turns the key in the lock. His eyes are dark and strange and he still seems to be looking for something in my own eyes, something he does not appear to be finding. I hear the doors click open, but I cannot seem to move. Run! Run away! My whole body is in agreement regarding this proposed course of action. But nothing happens, not even when Mr. Gabriel’s eyes finally
release me. He steps back and pushes open the left-hand door. I stare longingly at the portal to freedom, still not quite able to walk through it.
“Good night, Cynthia. I’m sure I’ll see you again soon.”
“Yes,” I whisper. And then I can move, and I am gone, through the doorway and down the hall, as fast as I can go. I imagine I hear Mr. Gabriel’s soft laughter floating after me.
I don’t love walking home by myself at night, but compared to the library, the dark streets feel perfectly safe and nonthreatening. The little squares of light in the windows of the houses I pass all seem to call out their absolute normalcy, proclaiming themselves evidence of the nice regular world of homework and dinner and shadows that are only where they belong and do not move all on their own in strange and frightening ways.
I stopped running when I got a block away from the school, and I refuse to start again, not even to jog up the steps to my house. Once inside, with the door firmly closed and locked behind me, I am finally able to breathe again.
“Cyn? That you?” My dad’s voice, calling over the sound of the TV.
“Yeah,” I call back. I walk down the hall and peek into the den. “Where’s Mom?”
“Still at the office.” He’s flipping through various news shows he’s recorded, catching up on whatever seems important to catch up on. He’s obsessive about staying informed. About some things, anyway. He glances over at me, smiles distractedly. “There’s Chinese food in the fridge. I wasn’t sure when you were coming home.”
“I had Sweeney Todd tonight,” I remind him, as I remind him every time, but he’s already back in information-land, soaking it all in from every source he can find. I head to the kitchen to heat myself up some dinner.
Armed with a heaping plate of chicken lo mein and sautéed string beans, I head up to my room to call Annie. Her little brother answers, and it takes me several tries to convince him to go tell her she has a phone call. I don’t know why she lets him answer her phone in the first place.
“I don’t let him,” she says when I ask her this directly, after a long wait during which it sounds like Peter is kicking the phone across the floor as he moves from room to room. “He just takes it when I’m not looking, and I usually don’t even realize until somebody calls.”
“Well, make him stop. It’s annoying.”
She sighs. “I’ll try. Sometimes it’s easier to just let him do stuff like this. You’d understand if you had brothers and sisters. Some things just aren’t worth the fight.”
“Hmph.” I know I’m being unreasonably grouchy, but I still haven’t quite recovered from the librarian thing. It seems silly now, the way I got so freaked out over a couple of spooky shadows, but I still can’t quite shake the feeling of being scared and trapped. I take a bite of lo mein while I think about how to try to talk to Annie about it.
“Chinese food?” she asks.
I swallow hastily. “How can you always tell?”
“I don’t know. It sounds different from when you’re eating other things. Plus, it’s like a fifty-fifty chance most nights, isn’t it? Your mom working late again?”
“Yeah. Big case, I guess.”
“Hmm.”
We’re both quiet for a minute. “I stopped by the library after rehearsal,” I say finally. “I had a feeling you might still be around.”
“Oh, you probably just missed me! I was tagging books for Mr. G. We got to talking and I hung around later than I’d planned to. How was rehearsal? Did you see your secret love?”
I hesitate, torn. I want to talk to her about Mr. Gabriel, about how weird and creepy he is and how worried I am about the way she has become so infatuated with him. But I’m afraid she’ll only get defensive about it again, and I don’t want to make her mad at me. And I really, really want to tell her about Ryan.
So I let it go. For now.
I tell her about how I slammed into him in the hallway, leaving out the detail that I had been running to see her, and she goes smoothly from yelling at me for not telling her about it during study hall to commiserating about the humiliation of it while still pointing out the not-so-slight upside of having been in full bodily contact with him for at least several seconds. That’s my Annie, always right there with me.
“I know, I can’t believe I didn’t tell you earlier,” I say, setting my plate down beside me. “I guess the Billy and Kelly show kind of took over my head for a little while.”
“Yeah, although, you know that’s crazy — you have to stop letting them get to you.”
“Yeah, well, whatever. Listen, I still haven’t told you the other upside from the whole Ryan tackling thing!” I relate the post-rehearsal conversation, line by line, with moment-to-moment descriptions of his facial expressions and my thoughts and internal physical reactions, repeating sections as requested, and I can tell that Annie is literally jumping around on the other side of the phone as she squeals excitement for me.
“Oh, my God, Cyn! You guys are, like, talking! For real! Finally!”
I can’t help grinning, her enthusiasm on my behalf making me even more excited about everything. “And all I had to do was knock him down in the hallway. Who knew?”
We discuss what I should wear tomorrow in order to look my best for Italian, and how I should say hello when I see him, and whether I should make myself not stare at him quite so much as usual if I can possibly help it. By the time we hang up I can hardly remember what my library freak-out was really all about. I bring my dishes downstairs and then return to my room to start trying on potential clothing items for tomorrow’s Ryan-ready ensemble.
Annie texts me in the morning to say she’s going early to the library to “do some stuff” for Mr. Gabriel, and so she’ll just see me in Italian. I am somewhat disappointed that she won’t be here to approve my outfit before we head to school, but I guess it was considerate of her not to show up half an hour early again. She doesn’t need my permission, after all. Of course she can go early to school if she wants to. It’s not like there’s some law that says we have to walk together every day. Except, we always have, unless one of us is sick or on vacation. She’s certainly never ditched me for a librarian before.
I hear how whiny my thoughts are becoming and force myself to cut it out. Annie has always been there for me, one hundred percent, and it’s incredibly selfish of me to want to keep her all to myself when she’s got something else she wants to do. I can pretend it’s only that I’m worried about this librarian thing, and I am worried . . . but that’s not what’s bothering me now. It’s that she’s putting something else first, someone else before me. And that’s not okay. Is this how I’d be if she had a boyfriend? Selfish and self-centered? But he’s not a boyfriend, my brain reminds me. He’s the librarian. The very creepy librarian. Okay, yes, it’s weird and wrong and I still need to talk to her about it. But I can do that later, and I can certainly walk to school all by myself like a big girl.
I pass by the library between homeroom and first period, and without quite meaning to I drift over to the double doors to peek inside as I go by. There are several students lingering in there, or maybe they’re early for a class session. But something looks off to me. I stand there, trying to figure out what it is. Three girls are sitting at one of the long tables, but they’re not really doing anything — just sitting there. One has her elbows on the table and her head leaning forward against her hands, as though she is really tired, or maybe has a headache or is upset about something. The other two are sort of staring into space, one with her head tilted a little to one side.
Mr. Gabriel is standing near the circulation desk, and a small group of students surrounds him. They all appear to be listening raptly to whatever he is saying, and as he speaks he reaches out to touch first one, then another, moving his hands from arms to shoulders and even once to pat some guy on the head. No — not just some guy. I squint to make sure I am seeing this correctly. Richie Donovan, a senior on the football team and a huge, foulmouthed kid who is
infamous for his temper getting him into trouble in class. I’ve seen him swat teachers’ hands away for daring to touch his notebook without permission; I cannot quite believe I have just witnessed him allowing the librarian to pat him on the head like a small dog.
As I continue to stand there staring, perplexed, Mr. Gabriel shifts position slightly and his eyes meet mine through the glass of the library door windows. His expression doesn’t change, but there is something different in his eyes themselves. He knows, I think senselessly. I don’t even know what I mean by that. Knows what?
That I know. That I know he’s up to something.
I pull back from the window, turning aside and away, pressing my back against the wall beside the door, suddenly afraid. And then I feel an immediate temptation to look again, to keep trying to puzzle out what exactly he’s doing or saying, but I am filled with the certainty that if I look back through the window he will be right there on the other side, pressed up against the glass like that gremlin thing from that old Twilight Zone episode with William Shatner and the plane, and I can’t bring myself to do it. Instead I start to edge away, reminding myself that I should be hurrying toward Italian so I can say hello to Ryan now that we’re all friendly and everything and see Annie and not just keep standing here feeling scared and alone. The doors swing open and I almost scream, but it’s only the students finally filing out into the hall. They walk slowly, not speaking, apparently all lost in thought. I take off before the last of them emerges, just in case Mr. Gabriel is following them out.
I make it to Italian about two seconds after the bell rings, and Signor De Luca gives me a reproachful look as I slide into my seat. I mouth the word “sorry” at him and busy myself with taking out my notebook. When I next glance up, Ryan is looking back at me. He gives me a dead-on replica of the De Luca Look of Lateness and I have to bite my fist to keep from laughing out loud. It’s better than the hello I’d been imagining would have been, way better, like a million times better. When Ryan winks at me and turns back around, I look over at Annie to make sure she has witnessed this exhilarating exchange, but she isn’t looking back at me. She’s just sitting there, staring into space.
Evil Librarian Page 4