by Nibedita Sen
Your eight-year-old self is already halfway out the window. Eyes round with fear.
“Wait,” you shout, but even in this instant, you know it’s not enough. You’re too far gone.
The kid at the window startles, slips. Falls. Disappears from view.
You hear the impact. The sound is louder, harsher, than you remember. Oh god, you’ve made things worse, haven’t you?
You slump against the door. Suddenly, the years of working and struggling and fighting hit you in one devastating wave of emotion. All this effort and you’re still out of your league. The house is playing by its own rules while you’re trying to learn the game. You’ve been busy looking for constants while everything is flickering. Always changing.
You refuse to look out the window. Instead, you pull out your creased and battered research notes from your backpack. The working title is “The Birdhouse Project.” It’s the best apology you have.
So, you’re going to walk down the steps, out of the house, back to your original universe, and try again. And again and again and again if necessary. You’ve come too far to relent now.
This is how the house traps its visitors, isn’t it? Devours them, really. You don’t care. This house is not going to stop you. It can’t.
And yet.
You hear a faint… something. Like a hiccup. You hear it again. It’s coming from the room on the left side of the hall, across from you.
You step away from the door, close it gently. You cross the hall and press your ear against the door. There it is again. A soft cry.
Wait. You know that voice.
You throw open the door.
• • •
Your little brother is sitting under the open window in the white, blank room. His eyes are red and snot’s running down his chin. You’re pretty sure your mouth is hanging open. You wanted to run over and hug him, but instead say: “Hi Avery.”
He stares at you, startled just as you. God, you really are an idiot. You spent the last ten years of your life studying multiverse theories and yet you didn’t allow yourself to believe that there’s at least one universe where Avery manages to cross the street and follow you into the haunted house.
Your kid brother who’s afraid of heights.
“Who are you?” he asks.
“Guess,” you say.
He studies you. Your cane, your leg braces, your face as you lean against the open door. His eyes widen.
“You’re right, Birdhouse,” you say.
“Whoa,” he breathes.
Your knees are shaking, but this time, not from fear. Avery wipes his eyes and gets to his feet. “I got lost,” he says, twisting his hands.
“Me too.” You smile. He gives you a tentative smile back.
You consider the possibilities. You could stay here, in this universe. Or take Avery back to yours. If you do, could you really bring yourself to come back to this haunted house and risk abandoning him again? If you can’t, you’d be giving up your guarantee of making a breakthrough in parallel universe research. All that work.
And yet, your kid brother is right in front of you. Whole.
“Touché, house,” you say softly.
“What’s that mean?” Avery wrinkles his nose and you laugh.
“Come on, Birdhouse,” you say. “I have a way out.”
And you hold open the door.
A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies
by Alix E. Harrow
GEORGE, JC—THE RUNAWAY PRINCE—J FIC GEO 1994
You’d think it would make us happy when a kid checks out the same book a zillion times in a row, but actually it just keeps us up at night.
The Runaway Prince is one of those low-budget young adult fantasies from the mid-nineties, before J.K. Rowling arrived to tell everyone that magic was cool, printed on brittle yellow paper. It’s about a lonely boy who runs away and discovers a Magical Portal into another world where he has Medieval Adventures, but honestly there are so many typos most people give up before he even finds the portal.
Not this kid, though. He pulled it off the shelf and sat cross-legged in the juvenile fiction section with his grimy red backpack clutched to his chest. He didn’t move for hours. Other patrons were forced to double-back in the aisle, shooting suspicious, you-don’t-belong-here looks behind them as if wondering what a skinny black teenager was really up to while pretending to read a fantasy book. He ignored them.
The books above him rustled and quivered; that kind of attention flatters them.
He took The Runaway Prince home and renewed it twice online, at which point a gray pop-up box that looks like an emissary from 1995 tells you, “the renewal limit for this item has been reached.” You can almost feel the disapproving eyes of a librarian glaring at you through the screen.
(There have only ever been two kinds of librarians in the history of the world: the prudish, bitter ones with lipstick running into the cracks around their lips who believe the books are their personal property and patrons are dangerous delinquents come to steal them; and witches).
Our late fee is 25 cents per day or a can of non-perishable food during the summer food drive. By the time the boy finally slid The Runaway Prince into the return slot, he owed $4.75. I didn’t have to swipe his card to know; any good librarian (of the second kind) ought to be able to tell you the exact dollar amount of a patron’s bill just by the angle of their shoulders.
“What’d you think?” I used my this-is-a-secret-between-us-pals voice, which works on teenagers about sixteen percent of the time.
He shrugged. It has a lower success rate with black teenagers, because this is the rural South and they aren’t stupid enough to trust thirty-something white ladies no matter how many tattoos we have.
“Didn’t finish it, huh?” I knew he’d finished it at least four times by the warm, well-oiled feel of the pages.
“Yeah, I did.” His eyes flicked up. They were smoke-colored and long-lashed, with an achy, faraway expression, as if he knew there was something gleaming and forbidden just beneath the dull surfaces of things that he could never quite touch. They were the kinds of eyes that had belonged to sorcerers or soothsayers, in different times. “The ending sucked.”
In the end, the Runaway Prince leaves Medieval Adventureland and closes the portal behind him before returning home to his family. It was supposed to be a happy ending.
Which kind of tells you all you need to know about this kid’s life, doesn’t it?
He left without checking anything else out.
• • •
GARRISON, ALLEN B—THE TAVALARRIAN CHRONICLES—v. I-XVI—F GAR 1976
LEGUIN, URSULA K—A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA—J FIC LEG 1968
He returned four days later, sloping past a bright blue display titled THIS SUMMER, DIVE INTO READING! (who knows where they were supposed to swim; Ulysses County’s lone public pool had been filled with cement in the sixties rather than desegregate).
Because I am a librarian of the second sort, I almost always know what kind of book a person wants. It’s like a very particular smell rising off them which is instantly recognizable as Murder mystery or Political biography or Something kind of trashy but ultimately life-affirming, preferably with lesbians.
I do my best to give people the books they need most. In grad school, they called it “ensuring readers have access to texts/materials that are engaging and emotionally rewarding,” and in my other kind of schooling, they called it “divining the unfilled spaces in their souls and filling them with stories and starshine,” but it comes to the same thing.
I don’t bother with the people who have call numbers scribbled on their palms and titles rattling around in their skulls like bingo cards. They don’t need me. And you really can’t do anything for the people who only read Award-Winning Literature, who wear elbow patches and equate the popularity of Twilight with the death of the American intellect; their hearts are too closed-up for the new or secret or undiscovered.
So, it’s only a certain kind of patron I pay attention to. The kind that let their eyes feather across the titles like trailing fingertips, heads cocked, with book-hunger rising off them like heatwaves from July pavement. The books bask in it, of course, even the really hopeless cases that haven’t been checked out since 1958 (there aren’t many of these; me and Agnes take turns carting home outdated astronomy textbooks that still think Pluto is a planet and cookbooks that call for lard, just to keep their spirits up). I choose one or two books and let their spines gleam and glimmer in the twilit stacks. People reach towards them without quite knowing why.
The boy with the red backpack wasn’t an experienced aisle-wanderer. He prowled, moving too quickly to read the titles, hands hanging empty and uncertain at his sides. The sewing and pattern books (646.2) noted that his jeans were unlaundered and too small, and the neck of his t-shirt was stained grayish-yellow. The cookbooks (641.5) diagnosed a diet of frozen waffles and gas-station pizza. They tssked to themselves.
I sat at the circulation desk, running returns beneath the blinky red scanner light, and breathed him in. I was expecting something like generic Arthurian retelling or maybe teen romance with sword-fighting, but instead I found a howling, clamoring mess of need.
He smelled of a thousand secret worlds, of rabbit-holes and hidden doorways and platforms nine-and-three-quarters, of Wonderland and Oz and Narnia, of anyplace-but-here. He smelled of yearning.
God save me from the yearners. The insatiable, the inconsolable, the ones who chafe and claw against the edges of the world. No book can save them.
(That’s a lie. There are Books potent enough to save any mortal soul: books of witchery, augury, alchemy; books with wand-wood in their spines and moon-dust on their pages; books older than stones and wily as dragons. We give people the books they need most, except when we don’t.)
I sent him a 70s sword-and-sorcery series because it was total junk food and he needed fattening up, and because I hoped sixteen volumes might act as a sort of ballast and keep his keening soul from rising away into the ether. I let LeGuin shimmer at him, too, because he reminded me a bit of Ged (feral; full of longing).
I ignored The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, jostling importantly on its shelf; this was a kid who wanted to go through the wardrobe and never, ever come back.
• • •
GRAYSON, DR BERNARD—WHEN NOTHING MATTERS ANYMORE: A SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR DEPRESSED TEENS—616.84 GRA 2002
Once you make it past book four of the Tavalarrian Chronicles, you’re committed at least through book fourteen when the true Sword of Tavalar is revealed and the young farm-boy ascends to his rightful throne. The boy with the red backpack showed up every week or so all summer for the next installment.
I snuck in a few others (all pretty old, all pretty white; our branch director is one of those pinch-lipped Baptists who thinks fantasy books teach kids about Devil worship, so roughly 90% of my collection requests are mysteriously denied): A Wrinkle in Time came back with the furtive, jammed-in-a-backpack scent that meant he liked it but thought it was too young for him; Watership Down was offended because he never got past the first ten pages, but I guess footnotes about rabbit-math aren’t for everyone; and The Golden Compass had the flashlight-smell of 3:00 a.m. on its final chapter and was unbearably smug about it. I’d just gotten an inter-library-loaned copy of Akata Witch—when he stopped coming.
Our display (GET READ-Y FOR SCHOOL!) was filled with SAT prep kits and over-sized yellow For Dummies books. Agnes had cut out blobby construction-paper leaves and taped them to the front doors. Lots of kids stop hanging around the library when school starts up, with all its clubs and teams.
I worried anyway. I could feel the Book I hadn’t given him like a wrong note or a missing tooth, a magnetic absence. Just when I was seriously considering calling Ulysses County High School with a made-up story about an un-returned CD, he came back.
For the first time, there was someone else with him: A squat white woman with a plastic name-tag and the kind of squareish perm you can only get in Southern beauty salons with faded glamor-shots in the windows. The boy trailed behind her looking thin and pressed, like a flower crushed between dictionary pages. I wondered how badly you had to fuck up to get assigned a school counselor after hours, until I read her name-tag: Department of Community-Based Services, Division of Protection and Permanency, Child Caseworker (II).
Oh. A foster kid.
The woman marched him through the nonfiction stacks (the travel guides sighed as she passed, muttering about overwork and recommending vacations to sunny, faraway beaches) and stopped in the 616s. “Here, why don’t we have a look at these?”
Predictable, sullen silence from the boy.
A person who works with foster kids sixty hours a week is unfazed by sullenness. She slid titles off the shelf and stacked them in the boy’s arms. “We talked about this, remember? We decided you might like to read something practical, something helpful?”
Dealing with Depression (616.81 WHI 1998). Beating the Blues: Five Steps to Feeling Normal Again! (616.822 TRE 2011). Chicken Soup for the Depressed Soul (616.9 CAN). The books greeted him in soothing, syrupy voices.
The boy stayed silent. “Look. I know you’d rather read about dragons and, uh, elves,” oh, Tolkien, you have so much to account for, “but sometimes we’ve got to face our problems head-on, rather than running away from them.”
What bullshit. I was in the back room running scratched DVDs through the disc repair machine, so the only person to hear me swear was Agnes. She gave me her patented over-the-glasses shame-on-you look which, when properly deployed, can reduce noisy patrons to piles of ash or pillars of salt (Agnes is a librarian of the second kind, too).
But seriously. Anyone could see that kid needed to run and keep running until he shed his own skin, until he clawed out of the choking darkness and unfurled his wings, precious and prisming in the light of some other world.
His caseworker was one of those people who say the word “escapism” as if it’s a moral failing, a regrettable hobby, a mental-health diagnosis. As if escape is not, in itself, one of the highest order of magics they’ll ever see in their miserable mortal lives, right up there with true love and prophetic dreams and fireflies blinking in synchrony on a June evening.
The boy and his keeper were winding back through the aisles toward the front desk. The boy’s shoulders were curled inward, as if he chafed against invisible walls on either side.
As he passed the juvenile fiction section, a cheap paperback flung itself off the return cart and thudded into his kneecap. He picked it up and rubbed his thumb softly over the title. The Runaway Prince purred at him.
He smiled. I thanked the library cart, silently.
There was a long, familiar sigh behind me. I turned to see Agnes watching me from the circulation desk, aquamarine nails tapping the cover of a Grisham novel, eyes crimped with pity. Oh honey, not another one, they said.
I turned back to my stack of DVDs, unsmiling, thinking things like what do you know about it and this one is different and oh shit.
• • •
DUMAS, ALEXANDRE—THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO—F DUM 1974
The boy returned at ten-thirty on a Tuesday morning. It’s official library policy to report truants to the high school, because the school board felt we were becoming “a haven for unsupervised and illicit teenage activity.” I happen to think that’s exactly what libraries should aspire to be, and suggested we get it engraved on a plaque for the front door, but then I was asked to be serious or leave the proceedings, and anyway we’re supposed to report kids who skip school to play League of Legends on our computers or skulk in the graphic novel section.
I watched the boy prowling the shelves—muscles strung wire-tight over his bones, soul writhing and clawing like a caged creature—and did not reach for the phone. Agnes, still wearing her oh honey expression, declined to reprimand me.
I sent him home with The Count of Monte Cristo,
partly because it requires your full attention and a flow chart to keep track of the plot and the kid needed distracting, but mostly because of what Edmund says on the second-to-last page: “…all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,—‘Wait and hope.’”
But people can’t keep waiting and hoping forever.
They fracture, they unravel, they crack open; they do something desperate and stupid and then you see their high school senior photo printed in the Ulysses Gazette, grainy and oversized, and you spend the next five years thinking: if only I’d given her the right book.
• • •
ROWLING, JK—HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE—J FIC ROW 1998
ROWLING, JK—HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS—J FIC ROW 1999
ROWLING, JK—HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN—J FIC ROW 1999
Every librarian has Books she never lends to anyone.
I’m not talking about first editions of Alice in Wonderland or Dutch translations of Winnie-the-Pooh; I’m talking about Books so powerful and potent, so full of susurrating seduction, that only librarians of the second sort even know they exist.
Each of us has her own system for keeping them hidden. The most venerable libraries (the ones with oak paneling and vaulted ceilings and Beauty and the Beast-style ladders) have secret rooms behind fireplaces or bookcases, which you can only enter by tugging on a certain title on the shelf. Sainte-Geneviève in Paris is supposed to have vast catacombs beneath it guarded by librarians so ancient and desiccated they’ve become human-shaped books, paper-skinned and ink-blooded. In Timbuktu, I head they hired wizard-smiths to make great wrought-iron gates that only permit passage to the pure of heart.
In the Maysville branch of the Ulysses County Library system, we have a locked roll-top desk in the Special Collections room with a sign on it that says, “This is an Antique! Please Ask for Assistance.”
We only have a dozen or so Books, anyhow, and god knows where they came from or how they ended up here. A Witch’s Guide to Seeking Righteous Vengeance, with its slender steel pages and arsenic ink. A Witch’s Guide to Falling in Love for the First Time, for Readers at Every Stage of Life!, which smells like starlight and the summer you were seventeen. A Witch’s Guide to Uncanny Baking contains over thirty full-color photographs to ensorcell your friends and afflict your adversaries. A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies has no words in it at all, but only pages and pages of maps: hand-drawn Middle Earth knock-offs with unpronounceable names; medieval tapestry-maps showing tiny ships sailing off the edge of the world; topographical maps of Machu Picchu; 1970s Rand McNally street maps of Istanbul.