The only other task on her To Do list was account checking. Once a year, each department was required to go through student and educator accounts for overdue materials and unpaid fees. One of the other Reference employees had already gone through the accounts and created a list of missing books. Quincy just needed to physically confirm each book was, in fact, MIA and hadn’t been misfiled or returned and mistakenly left on the user account. This was the job she dreaded most. Not that she minded looking through books, but trying to find books that could be anywhere, but probably weren’t, was a headache she didn’t need. She almost always had one of her own - she didn’t need the extra help.
Chapter 4
Quincy
As easy and relaxing as her job usually was, 10-hour shifts could really drag along on slow days. By 4:00 she had her list of chores done and her mind was starting to spin again. It had been blessedly still while she was cataloging the new books and making a pass through the user accounts but now that she was finished, she could feel the rumble, like a tornado forming. Or rather, reforming. Looking for something, anything, to do, she was seriously debating pulling out the ancient vacuum sweeper that resided in the maintenance closet and making a run over the floor. It’s not like it needed it all that badly but desperate times and all that. The carpet was old and a good vacuum might help perk it up a bit. There wasn’t a single person on her floor so the noise wouldn’t be a bother and if she caved to her more compulsive desires, she could be extra thorough and move all the chairs out of the way. That would take quite a bit of extra time, considering just how many tables and chairs there were scattered throughout the aisles. Yes, she thought with grim satisfaction. That’s exactly what she would do.
Twenty minutes later, she was finished with an extremely thorough cleaning of the carpet, which really looked no better, and back in the exact same spot she’d started. That hadn’t taken nearly as long as she’d thought, nor had it done as much to quiet the crazy as she’d hoped, which was now starting to spin towards manic. She reached under the counter of her desk and pulled out the book she’d finished last night. Emergency Field Medicine for Combat Situations wasn’t a book the typical reader might enjoy but she’d flown through it in less than a week. It had covered everything from how to plug sucking chest wounds to performing an emergency tracheotomy in the field. She’d found it fascinating. But she knew if she was going to get a couple hours of sleep tonight, she’d better find something else before she went home. She usually waited a little longer to wander over to the subject department but since there was no one here anyway, she figured there was no reason not to stretch her legs.
She had been staring at the same page for roughly 8 minutes. Again. She had picked up two different books on her walkabout through the library, a classic novel and a how-to guide for criminology majors on the vast and varied techniques employed in criminal interrogation. She had read Persuasion several times before. She had read all of Jane Austen’s novels, of course, but Persuasion, although considered one of Austen’s lesser works, was her favorite and never failed to pull her in. There was just something about poor Anne Elliot. Ignored and overlooked in her own home. Treated like an inconvenience at the best of times, an unwanted burden at the worst. It wasn’t like Quincy could relate to that specifically - she didn’t exactly have a home or a family to treat her ill. But she certainly understood how it felt to be invisible and, in that way, Anne was a comrade-in-arms. But regardless, old faithful had let her down and she’d moved on to Interrogation Techniques: A Psychological Study. But even the methodical rhythm of overly-dry reading material wasn’t cutting it. Very rarely did opening a book not take up her entire focus but all she could think about today was, ironically, the frisbee game on the quad. Or, more precisely, the man playing the frisbee game with a bunch of boys on the quad. She had been worried she’d obsess over Professor Michaels’s unexpected request but it just seemed so bizarre the more she thought about it. Not the professor. The guy on the quad. He had to have been in his 30s. That was old, even by grad student standards. He could’ve been a professor, she supposed. But did professors spend off-hours playing Ultimate Frisbee with their students? Maybe. It did seem like that would be an activity frowned upon by the school. She had read a couple of law books a year or two back that discussed liability issues in different settings and she was positive the school wouldn’t want to take the fall for an employee causing bodily harm to a student. Maybe he was a brother or cousin of one of the kids? A possibility. There had been a couple of boys that looked similar enough to be family. Not that a resemblance was necessary. Sharing a genetic pool didn’t always mean sharing physical traits. And there hadn’t been a single kid there that had the same build. He had been tall, several inches over 6 feet if she were guessing. And he was built strong, but not in that bodybuilding-meathead kind of way. He was lanky but solid, like he spent a lot of his free time playing basketball or soccer or, well, Ultimate Frisbee. So maybe it did kind of make sense. And then there was the hair. Brother needed a haircut, to be sure. Didn’t all those curls get in the way as he was jumping over benches and diving around overgrown schoolboys? It was completely ridiculous. At the very least, he should try running a comb through it now and again. It had a windblown, rakish look that would’ve been perfectly at home on the beach. Maybe barefoot. And carrying a surfboard. The blue eyes sure didn’t do anything to take away from the surfer dude look, either. So then, he was an athlete of some kind. Not for the school - not at his age. Coach maybe? And why on Earth was she thinking so hard about this guy? She was on a college campus. Hot guys were everywhere. Was “hot” a bit of an overstatement? She mulled it over. No, it really wasn’t.
She sighed and slammed the book shut in frustration. Why couldn’t she stop? Why couldn’t she just stop thinking? Not just about this guy, when she had more important things to be over-analyzing, like her test grade and imminent meeting with Professor Michaels. Why did she have so much trouble shutting her brain off at all? Was this normal? She had never heard anyone else mention it in passing. No, “How was your night?” “Oh, you know, another night staring at the ceiling, pondering the cyclic nature of physics and how random it really seems, in the grand scheme of things, for Einstein to have discovered relativity.” She felt like she was on the merry-go-round she’d seen jogging past the playground on the square, spinning around and around and around, kicking up rocks and tossing people around like an afterthought. Stupid brain…
The hand on her shoulder startled her out of her own head and back to the present. She reacted instinctively, dropping her book and pushing away from the unexpected touch, coming out of her chair prepared to run or fight, whichever option was smartest. Brandon from the Circulation desk was staring at her in shock, seemingly unsure of how to proceed in the presence of the queen of overreaction. Quincy made a concerted effort to slow her breathing, knowing from experience that once she got her heart rate back down, her fight or flight reflex would relax and she could try to act normal. She closed her eyes, took one more deep breath in and out, then opened her eyes.
“I’m so sorry. I must’ve been totally spacing to jump like that.” She attempted to laugh it off and aimed an only slightly strained smile in Brandon’s direction. “So what’s up?” To his credit, he seemed to shake off the shock fairly quickly.
“I didn’t mean to scare you. I just wanted to say hi,” he said awkwardly. He glanced away and cleared his throat before meeting her eyes again. “You looked a little distracted.”
Quincy stared. Brandon was a newish hire and a bit of a mystery. He had started a couple weeks ago but, unlike a lot of the newbies, he didn’t seem to be trying to fit in or make friends. He was always on the outskirts of the crowd, watching, listening, but never really joining in. She had heard a few of the others talking about him, referring to him as The Creeper, and a lurker, but she had never really gotten that impression from the guy. Sure, he didn’t seem interested in making friends. And, okay, maybe sometimes he was kind of abr
upt when dealing with people. But it seemed more subconscious than deliberate. Like he was severely lacking in social skills but didn’t know how to fix it. He seemed, well, a bit like her actually. Always watching and waiting, weighing people’s actions and words for underlying meaning, ready to react if her spidey sense tingled, conspiracies around every corner, and so on. If her co-workers were gossiping about Brandon, heaven only knew what they were saying about her. Which was why she was confused. She hadn’t seen him ever wander the library, on a break or otherwise. And she had never noticed him start a conversation with anyone. The fact that he had just done both was a little disconcerting.
“Oh. Um. Yeah, just lost in thought, I guess.” She smiled at him, attempting some warmth this time. “I hope Peggy didn’t notice.”
“Nah,” he said. “Peggy had a meeting in the admin building. She said she’d be gone for a couple hours at least.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and dropped his eyes. “So, uh, what time are you off? I was thinking of hitting the taco truck down on the south quad for dinner. Want to join?”
He was shuffling his feet and still not looking at her. Quincy’s heart rate spiked for the second time in less than five minutes. No matter how hard she tried to keep people at bay, now and again some stalwart soul would brave the battlements and attempt to breach her walls. She had learned early on that it was better to shut it down, hard if she had to, before it really even got started.
“You know, I think I’ll just head home. I have some things I need to take care of tonight. But enjoy.”
He finally looked up. “What kind of things?” he asked.
Well, that was annoying. Poor social skills aside, you don’t call people on that excuse. Everyone knew that. It was just rude. And now she had to think up something on the fly because really, what was she going to say? That she was planning to head home and plot another escape route out of town that she could access in a speedy and efficient fashion should the need ever arise? Or that she was going to research towns in the northwest so she would have a couple of predetermined destinations in mind? That wasn’t going to work. So instead, she went with old faithful - the fake boyfriend, every single girl’s best defensive weapon.
“He’s in the military so we don’t get to see each other very often. That’s why we plan these little Skype dates. And I would never miss one. But I’ll tell him you said hello.”
She tacked on the end for extra insurance. Very few men wanted to run the risk of offending a military guy by making a move on his girl. And it must’ve hit its mark because Brandon went from normal to pale to tomato red in the time it took her to finish talking.
“I didn’t know. Sorry.” He started backing away, like he was sorry he had ever come over in the first place. “Have a good time, or night, or, uh, talk. Have a good talk.”
He turned tail and fled back to Circulations. Quincy stared after him, kind of unsure where that had even come from. Brandon had never paid her any more attention than he did anyone else and even though she’d blown him off, that reaction seemed a little...off.
“Man, O’Connell,” said Clara, who happened to be casually strolling past, no doubt having seen Brandon make his move and hoping to get a good show. “You lay the beat down hard girl.” She gave a smirk, condescension and snark all rolled into one tidy package. “Boyfriend? Sure.” And she was gone, probably to share the inside scoop with the rest of her posse.
Chapter 5
“‘Many are the strange chances of the world,’ said Mithrandir, ‘and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the wise falter’.” J.R.R. Tolkien
The girl does not believe in chance. It has been her experience that chance is never chance. But she’s not wrong.
It never really is, is it?
* * *
Quincy
The seconds slowly but inevitably ticked away until it was finally 8:00. The day had stayed pretty quiet, her only real challenge involving helping an overwhelmed freshman who was well into panic mode and quickly progressing toward full breakdown find one more reference from an online healthcare database. And then getting her some serious caffeine to stave off the adrenaline crash sure to follow. But otherwise, her duties had remained light and the afternoon and evening had crawled by.
She shut down her computer and rolled the chair back under the desk, pausing to swing her bag up onto her shoulders, and made a final walk-through of the floor, checking to make sure there weren’t any stragglers she had missed and straightening the few newspapers and books that were out of place on the aisle display. As she walked down the stairs, she could see the others doing final checks of their areas, too, herding slow-moving students and difficult-to-remove faculty out of their sections so they could close down and head out. Quincy was lucky that the Reference department seldom had visitors that needed to be chased off. Yes, occasionally it was a popular place to study, but that was usually restricted to high-anxiety points in the semester. The other departments had cozier settings that invited students to sprawl out and stay for awhile. Which was great, until the library closed. Chasing students, who tended to stay up until the early hours of the morning, out of their nests when their night was just getting started could be a daunting challenge. As she walked through Literature, she nodded at Clara and Mitchell, who both smirked as she went by, and gave a little wave to Brandon, just to keep it from being weird. He was currently being held prisoner by a professor who appeared to be lecturing him on the various aspects of customer service and describing, in great detail, how the Circulation department was lacking in each and every one. Sounded like the poor guy wasn’t going to be grabbing that dinner any time soon. She ducked her head and smiled, relieved to not have to walk out with him.
The sky was dark and clear, with a not-quite-full moon hanging low overhead. She hadn’t wanted to have dinner with Brandon but she’d been thinking about tacos ever since he’d mentioned them. And a coke. Nothing beat Mexican food and a good, strong coke. The southwest quad had an assortment of food trucks that stayed open late to accommodate student hours so she headed that way. It really did look like he was going to be stuck with the professor for a while, so she was probably safe to swing by the truck and then head home. She could watch a couple of sitcom reruns as she ate and then settle down with Interrogation Techniques and pray for a few solid hours of sleep.
There were only a few people hanging around the food pavilion when she got there and a blessedly short line in front of the taco truck. She put in her order, relieved to see there were still a couple of tacos wrapped and ready to go. Sometimes, after a long night, supplies ran pretty low and you got what you got.
“Got here just in time kid,” Taco Guy said. “I’m down to my last two and about to hang it up for the night.” He dumped the tacos into a to-go bag with some salsa and napkins and pushed it and her drink across the plywood that doubled as his counter. “It’s on the house.” Quincy had already pulled a $5 out of her bag but the guy shook his head. “Last tacos of the night are always cold. Trust me, you’re doing me a favor.” Then he smiled. “Have a good night kid.”
“Thanks,” she shot at his retreating back. She avoided having dinner with Brandon and still got her meal for free? She was coming up aces tonight. She turned to go, making a mental note to come back sometime this week and leave a big tip, when a voice spoke up right beside her. She jerked, startled to hear someone so close. Inside the circle of food trucks were several benches and picnic tables so people could sit and eat. Since it was night, very few of them were occupied. Only one, in fact. A guy sat on a table to her right, eating a taco. Not his first, judging by the wrappers crumpled up beside him.
“Wish I had been a few minutes later. I had to pay for all mine.”
It was dark but the food pavilion had lights scattered around to make it more livable. The guy sat on the top of the table, one leg propped up on the bench, the other stretched out towards the ground, turned to watch the late nighters come and go. He took another bite and grinn
ed.
“One of the kids on my team today told me the tacos here were the best. He wasn’t wrong.”
She wouldn’t have thought he’d recognize her. Not after just one glance, hours ago. She recognized him, of course. She had spent the last several hours obsessing over him, after all. If the long, lanky legs hadn’t given him away, all that blonde messy hair would have.
“In my experience, kids usually know where the best food is.” she said.
She noted his use of the word kids. She had been right. He was older. But as he sat there, crunching on his tacos like he didn’t have a care in the world, he seemed younger somehow. She glanced around. It really was dark outside their little circle of lights. There was no one else around except for the Taco King and the rest of the food truck royalty and they were all shutting down for the night.
“Got one of each there, do you?” she asked mildly, motioning toward the pile of used wrappers beside him.
“If you’re going to figure out which is the best, you’ve got to try them all,” he said in a matter-of-fact way. He pushed the trash to the side and waved her over. “Come on. Sit down and eat your two tiny tacos. I won’t bite.”
Oh, that smile. A smile that said he was cute and he knew it. A smile that was no doubt used to getting its own way. A smile that was nothing but trouble. And yet, she found herself moving towards him. She didn’t want to give him total satisfaction, though, so she walked around the table and took a seat on the opposite side, forcing him to turn if he wanted to talk to her. He grinned, got up, and plopped down on the bench facing her.
“So, which one?” she asked, taking a bite of one of her own tacos.
Shattered Highways Page 4