Evil Librarian

by Michelle Knudsen

Leticia jumps in with her best Cynthia impression. “Oh, you guys, I can’t stand it, he’s so amazing, he’s so beautiful, I love him so much. He is a god who walks among men. I want to kiss him and marry him and have his sexy little babies.” She falls backward into Diane’s arms. Diane fans her with her math notebook.

  I feel my face go red. It’s an exaggeration, obviously, but it’s pretty spot-on all the same.

  “Well, yes, okay. I will not pretend that the talking has not been kind of awesome.” My mouth stretches up into a grin before I can help it. “It was the hallway tackle that did it, I think. He couldn’t ignore me so much after that.”

  “So?” Leticia sits up. “Has there been kissing? Has there been more than kissing?”

  “No,” I sigh. They raise their eyebrows at me in unison. “No! Not yet, anyway.”

  “But there might be kissing?”

  “God, I hope so.” Once we get past the whole demon-killing thing. “I did — I did get to see his bedroom.”

  “What?!” they exclaim in unison.

  “Nothing happened. It was just to talk about stuff for the show.” I’m still grinning, though, and they are not satisfied. I look back and forth between them, meeting their eyes in turn. “But. I think maybe he kind of likes me a little.”

  Diane punches her fists up into the air in victory and Leticia raises the water bottle in a toasting gesture. For a second, I let myself forget everything else and just enjoy the moment. It’s so nice to just be here with my friends, talking about boys. Especially, of course, this boy. My grin stretches wider, thinking about him. He does still make me all swoony. I do want to have his sexy little babies. And he does kind of like me a little. He must. It’s not just the demon thing making him hang around. He started talking to me before that, after all. Right?

  I wait for my brain to respond with a resounding, assured Right! but it is strangely silent on the matter.

  He did start talking to me, I remind my brain. Remember? He ran after me because he didn’t want me to be mad. Of course, there is liking, and there is liking. Maybe he was just being friendly. Maybe he just wants to be friends.

  “He probably just wants to be friends,” I say out loud. I’m not grinning anymore.

  “None of that,” Leticia says. “I am pretty sure boys do not bring girls up to their bedrooms when they just want to be friends. Confidence, please, dearest!”

  “But —”

  Diane cuts me off. “L is right. Even if Mr. Halsey has not yet attempted to get smoochy, I guarantee he has thought about it. You’ll see. You just keep being your adorable, charming self, and he will soon be unable to help himself.”

  I try to believe them. I am probably just being dumb. He obviously kind of likes me. Right? Obviously.

  All too soon the period is over, and we go our separate ways. Diane turns back to point a stern finger at me and says, “Keep us posted!” I nod obligingly and try to muster up the minimum necessary motivation to convince my feet to take me to my precalc classroom. Math is fun! I tell myself gamely. Even if Mr. Hoffmeister is sometimes a little creepy. But not in an evil librarian kind of way, so that’s something, at least. Mr. Hoffmeister is missing most of a finger on his left hand, and sometimes he uses his finger stub to point out incorrect answers in your work. Which is sort of a good motivator to get the right answer, I guess. Unless you enjoy seeing the stub, which some kids clearly do. Some kids have issues.

  I trudge wearily up the stairs, still chanting, Math is fun! Math is fun! to myself inside my head. Halfway across the landing I am suddenly shoved back hard and fast against the wall. Before I can regain my bearings I hear his voice, low and dark and angry and cold and directly in front of me.

  “Do you think this is a game?”

  I am staring into the handsome and terrifying face of Mr. Gabriel. My stomach clenches so hard that for a second I am certain that I am about to throw up all over his crisp button-down shirt of the day. Faintly, through the vertical blue and white stripes on the fabric, I can see that he’s wearing a LOVE YOUR LIBRARY T-shirt underneath.

  “What?” I whisper, still fighting with my recently eaten lunch.

  “Was I unclear in my stated desire for you to stay the fuck out of my way?” His words are short and clipped, like little missiles fired at close range. He doesn’t yell, but the soft, quiet rage is worse, somehow. His fingers dig deeply into my upper arms. I stare desperately around, but for some reason, even though the halls were crowded with students a second ago, there is no one else in the stairwell.

  He smiles humorlessly. “Nope, it’s just you and me, dear Cynthia. You and me and sometimes your beloved Sweeney but it had better end there, it had better stay that way, do you understand? If you send one more teacher sniffing around, you are going to be very, very sorry. And if you make me kill Sweeney Todd before the show goes up, so help me, I swear I will make your death as long and difficult and painful and all-around horrible as I possibly, possibly can.”

  His last sentence barely registers. Oh, God. Oh, Signor De Luca.

  I struggle to find my voice. “What did you do?”

  His bright eyes hold mine like a bear trap. No swirly black holes, just clear and focused fury. “I did what I had to do. And it’s your fault.” He gives me a little shake, and my head smacks painfully against the wall. “Got that, Cynthia? Your fault. He’d be alive right now if you hadn’t opened your roachy little mouth. I don’t want to be wasting my time and energy on damage control, but you left me no choice.”

  Something is screaming inside me. Oh, God. He can’t really mean that he’s killed him. He can’t. Please.

  My eyes are trying to look around again, for help, for sanity, for escape, but the librarian places a finger under my chin and forces my head up, makes me meet his eyes.

  “That nice man is dead now, because of you. Think about that the next time you are tempted to interfere.”

  Hot tears are squeezing out of the corners of my eyes. “You’re lying,” I whisper.

  “Am I?”

  He’s not. Somehow, without a doubt, I know that he’s not. Oh, God. I close my eyes, letting the scalding tears force their way out however they can. He takes his hands from me, and I slide down to the floor. I don’t look up, but I can picture him there, standing over me.

  “Don’t be late to class, now,” he says in a completely different voice. And then I hear him jog lightly down the steps and away. I don’t get up. I don’t go to math. I sit there weeping helpless tears for Signor De Luca. And for Annie, and for myself.

  As soon as I can pull myself together enough, I text Ryan: 911 SOUTH STAIRWAY. I don’t know how long it takes him to come; time has gone away for me. Everything has gone away for me. Suddenly Ryan is just there, kneeling in front of me and asking me what happened.

  “He killed him.” I look up at Ryan, meet his eyes, desperate for him to convince me that this isn’t true, to tell me he just saw De Luca in the hallway, that the librarian was lying. “He threw me against the wall and he said that De Luca was dead and that it’s my fault.”

  Ryan sinks the rest of the way to the floor. “Oh, God.”

  “It can’t be true. It can’t be.”

  “Do you think he was lying?”

  Yes. Yes. Yes. He had to be. It can’t be true. “No.”

  After a moment, Ryan says, “We should find out. For sure.”

  He’s probably right. Even though I’m already sure.

  We go to Signor De Luca’s classroom. There’s a sub sitting at his desk. I’ve had her before; she’s nice, kind of young and doesn’t care if you do homework or read or whatever as long as you’re quiet. But right now I hate her for being there, hate her for robbing me of my last shred of secret hope that Mr. Gabriel was lying after all.

  The bell rings for the end of the period as we’re standing there. Students stream out around us. The sub is packing up her stuff.

  “Is Signor De Luca out today?” I ask her, trying to make it sound like a regular qu
estion, like nothing, like his life doesn’t depend upon the answer. “I thought I saw him earlier.”

  “He had to leave early,” she says. “Some emergency, I think.” She looks up then and seems to realize that maybe she wasn’t supposed to share that. “Or — I don’t really know, actually. I just know that he had to leave early. I’m sure he’ll be back tomorrow.”

  She smiles at us nervously and heads out, leaving us in the empty room.

  We cut the rest of the day. Ryan drives us over to Signor De Luca’s house. We ring the bell, knock on the door. We go into the yard and sit on the back porch until dark. There’s a cat flap in the back door, and eventually the gray cat slips out through it and twines around our legs, meowing. Her soft, hopeful, hungry presence twists my heart in agony. Knowing that De Luca is never coming home to give her dinner, knowing that she will never know what happened to him, why he suddenly abandoned her, is suddenly more than I can bear. I scoop her up and sob into her fur for as long as she lets me. Ryan sits silently beside me, his own tears leaking out from under his tightly closed eyes.

  The next morning I go to Italian, still trying to hope that Signor De Luca will be there, scowling and pissed that we didn’t come to see him at the end of the school day like we’d arranged. But of course, that’s not what happens. Another sub stands in the front of the room. He informs us that “Mr. De Luca” has had to leave school due to a family emergency, and he is not expected back for the remainder of the year. This guy — Mr. Hubbard — will be covering until a long-term replacement can be found. I want to smack him. He doesn’t even make us call him signore.

  Annie is not here. I am half relieved, half sorry. But both halves wish I could see her face right now, see what her reaction would be to this news. Does she know what really happened? Did she know beforehand? Could she have stopped it? Did she try?

  Did she want to stop it?

  Did she help to kill him?

  Ryan looks as defeated and miserable as I feel. But seconds after our shared hopeless glance, my text alert flashes silently at me from under my notebook. NO GIVING UP. CAN’T GIVE UP, OK? NO MATTER WHAT.

  I want to type a lot of things back to him. But I can’t seem to put the words together, and anyway, I know he already gets it. He’s there, too. And it doesn’t matter, because he’s right. We can’t give up. So I just say: OK.

  He reads it, nods, puts his phone away. We pretend to pay attention to Mr. Hubbard, who is trying to figure out how to continue Signor De Luca’s lesson plans when he does not himself actually speak Italian. Inside, I am trying to make myself not give up. To imagine that there is something else we can try, to remind myself that the librarian killing De Luca only makes it that much more obvious that we have to figure out some way to stop him. Because he is fucking killing people.

  You can’t just let that stuff go.

  It’s just also perfectly clear that we can’t try to get anyone else to help us. And the idea of the two of us alone against Mr. Gabriel is — I don’t even know what it is. There aren’t words for what it is. Well, okay, ridiculous is one possible word, and also crazy, and terrifying, and maybe insanely stupid, although that’s two words, of course.

  We trudge onward through the day, trying to not draw attention to ourselves, to not give Mr. Gabriel the slightest reason to suspect that we are up to anything else. It is not hard to appear hopeless and done. I skip lunch, because I don’t think I can handle trying to seem normal to Leticia and Diane. When they see that something is wrong, they will not let it go until they make me tell them. Which obviously I can’t.

  I hole up backstage in the auditorium instead, in theory to distract myself with figuring out Sweeney’s chair, but even the show doesn’t seem important now. I just sit in a corner on the sawdust-sprinkled floor, waiting for the bell to ring, so time can move forward, so the day can eventually end. My thoughts are endless circling prophecies of doom. There’s no way we can fight him. There’s nothing we can do. It’s ridiculous to try. I know we still have to try, that we can’t just roll over and give up. But.

  I glance up to check the clock and see Annie standing there.

  “Hey,” she says.

  “Hey,” I say back, autopilot. I’m afraid to move, to blink, to do anything that might reveal her to be some apparition of my own imagination. But she doesn’t vanish. She’s really here.

  After a second she takes a step closer. “I hate fighting with you,” she says quietly.

  My breath catches. “Me too,” I whisper.

  She looks at me for a second, looks away, looks back. Takes a breath. “I know you don’t like what’s going on with Mr. Gabriel,” she says finally. “I just wish I could make you understand.”

  I think very carefully about what to say here. “I want to understand. I’m just — just worried about you. About — what’s going on. You get that, right?”

  She nods. “I know. But that’s only because you don’t understand. I know how it must seem to you. But for me, it’s —” She shakes her head, as if even she can’t quite grasp what it is for her. “I finally know what it’s like to be in love, Cyn. If you could only know how he makes me feel — so alive, and real, and . . . and essential, all these things I never was before. . . .”

  “Annie —”

  “I know you think I’m being crazy. That it’s not really love, or whatever —”

  I want to bite my tongue, but I can’t. “It’s not really love. Can’t you see what he is? Do you know what he’s done? What he’s doing?”

  I wait for her to explode, but she doesn’t. She looks at me, and she seems really there and lucid and of sound mind and all the rest. “You think I don’t know that he’s not just a man?” For a moment her face is as open as I’ve seen it in days . . . and, I think, a little scared. But only for a moment. “I know he’s more than that. Better than that. And — and I’m better. He’s making me better. Isn’t that what love does? Lifts you up, makes you more than you were?”

  “He’s not —” But she’s not listening. Not hearing. Can’t. Won’t. Her eyes are going sparkly and twinkly and a little loony. So much for lucid and present and sound.

  “I’m going to be special like he is, Cyn. Special enough that we can be together forever. He told me. I just need to . . . There are things that need to happen, things he needs to do, that he needs me to do, and then he’s going to take me away from all of this. From everything. So I can be with him always.”

  I curl my fingers into fists against the floor, my nails digging into my palms, forcing myself to sit there, feigning calm, and not get up and grab her and try to shake some sense into her. “Annie. Are you really here? I mean, are you really in there, hearing yourself? It’s not love if he’s making you do things. And he’s not special. He’s psychotic. A monster. Literally. A. Mon. Ster. He’s killing people. He killed Principal Morse and Signor De Luca! And he plans to kill pretty much everybody! Do you understand? This is the guy you want to run away with?”

  Her eye twitches, and I see in her face again, clear as day, that she does know, and that she won’t let herself acknowledge it. She shakes her head again, as if it’s just so sad that I’m so blind to the truth. “You just don’t get it. You can’t. You can’t know how he makes me feel. It’s like how you say Ryan makes you feel, only times about a million. And he wants me, Cyn. We want each other, and I’m going to go with him. That’s all I want, forever and ever.”

  She blinks, and then she looks at me again, hard and straight and determined. Like she’s fighting that part of her that won’t see, but not nearly hard enough. “I know he’s not a regular person. I know he’s not . . . not human. I know he’s going to take me somewhere that’s not . . . here. That there will have to be some sacrifices.” Her face goes a little wistful. “Do you remember when we used to be all obsessed with the Greek gods and goddesses in junior high? I feel like Persephone. He’s stealing me away to the underworld, except I’m glad to go.”


  “He’s not Hades, Annie. He’s not some Disney version of the lord of the underworld, all misunderstood and maligned yet secretly good-hearted and just in need of someone to love. He’s a demon. He kills people. He likes killing people. He sucks out their souls and kills them, and he’s going to do that to the whole entire school. How can you just shrug that part off? Don’t you care? Don’t you care that he’s going to kill all your friends? Including, I might add, me?”

  She keeps her eyes on mine. “That’s not true. I know you believe that, but it’s not true. He may be a demon, if you want to use that word, but he’s not evil. He’s not a killer. He’s not a monster. He’s just different from us.”

  “Sure. He’s different from us in the same way that serial killers are different from kindergarten teachers. The way that rabid bears are different from gerbils. He is a monster, Annie. I think you know that he is.”

  She sighs, looks down. “I know you’re trying to make me mad, but it’s not going to work. It’s not your fault that you don’t understand. If you could hear the way he talks to me, the things he says . . .” Her sad resignation vanishes suddenly and she smiles dreamily at a spot somewhere above my head. “He writes me love poems, Cyn. He e-mails them to me at night so I can read them and feel close to him when we have to be apart. They’re so beautiful. No one who was truly evil could write the things he does.” After another moment in which I continue to stare at her in silent horrified and somewhat nauseated disbelief (love poems?), she meets my eyes again, but there’s no connection there. “I just want you to know that I forgive you, Cyn. Whatever happens, okay? You’re still my best friend.”

  She’s killing me. She’s right there, and I should be able to reach her, to make her see what’s happening.

  “What about your family?” I ask, grasping at straws now. “You’re just going to leave them? You’re just going to leave everything and everyone who cares about you?”

  “Yes!” She says this with such unexpected vehemence that I actually jerk backward against the wall. “Who am I here, Cyn? Nice little Annie, who gets good grades and takes care of all the little kids who show up at her house and smiles at everyone and does what she’s told and doesn’t make any trouble but who never actually has a life of her own. Where’s my adventure, Cyn? Where’s my secret crush, my rule-breaking, my fiery passion, my hope for a future that holds some sort of something, that doesn’t just lead back to the same life I’ve always had, where nothing ever changes and I’m never allowed to . . .” She breaks off, nearly in tears, then starts again. “Am I supposed to become my mother, with a house full of kids and a boring husband and endless loads of laundry and cooking and PTA meetings forever? Or am I supposed to go to college and grad school and get some all-consuming job that sucks my life away before it’s even started? I have a chance for . . . for everything. To be alive in a way I will never get to be here. To be loved and wanted for who I really am, inside, the person no one ever sees behind the nice good girl I’ve had to be all the time, always . . .”