In Summertime Saga

The library smelled like old paper and carpet cleaner and the building itself, old wood and old air. It was a small place. One story, brick front, a sign out front that said SUMMERVILLE PUBLIC LIBRARY in letters that were probably white once and were now a yellow that had given up. The door had a bell on it, the kind that actually rings when you push it open, and it rang, and the sound carried through the whole building because there was nothing else to compete with it.

I'd come for a French textbook. Bissette had mentioned it during class, something about a dictionary that would help with the homework she was going to start assigning, and the school didn't have copies. The library did. According to Bissette, anyway, who'd said it with the tone of a woman who had made this speech to every new student for years and knew the library's inventory better than her own dresser.

The front desk was directly inside the door, a long wooden counter with a computer that looked like it ran Windows 98 and a rubber stamp and an ink pad and a stack of returns in a wire basket. Behind the counter, a woman was organizing books on a cart, her back half-turned, humming. The humming was low and tuneless, the autopilot hum of someone alone in a quiet room who doesn't know they're doing it.

She turned when the bell rang. Straightened up. Smiled.

Jane Nox. Auburn hair with straight bangs cut across her forehead, the rest pulled back in a bun that had a pencil stuck through it. Green eyes behind slim glasses. A green blouse, fitted, and a pencil skirt, and low heels that clicked on the floor when she stepped toward the counter. She was pretty in a way that was easy to miss if you weren't paying attention. Late twenties, slim, the posture of someone who spent all day standing and had made peace with it. Jenny's best friend, according to the game, which was a fact that didn't make sense to me because Jenny was a tornado of indifference and this woman was already smiling at a stranger like she'd been hoping someone would walk in.

"Hi there. Can I help you find something?"

Her voice was quiet. Library-quiet, the volume of someone who'd calibrated their voice to the room and never turned it up.

"I need a French dictionary. For Ms. Bissette's class."

"The Dictionnaire Français. Of course." She didn't check the computer. Didn't look at a catalog. She came around the counter and walked toward a shelf on the left wall and her heels clicked on the hardwood and then she was pulling a book off a shelf at eye level without hesitating. Navy blue cover, worn edges, a spine cracked from use. She brought it back to the counter and set it down.

"This is the one she recommends. It's a bit old, but it's comprehensive." She opened the front cover and checked the card pocket inside. "Last borrowed in... March. You'd think more students would use it."

"Maybe they don't take French seriously."

"Maybe." She smiled again. The smile was warm without being pushy. It sat on her face like it belonged there. "Do you have a library card?"

"No."

"Let me make you one. Name?"

I gave it. She wrote it on a small card, stamped it with the rubber stamp on the counter, and slid it across to me. The card was simple. My name, a number, SUMMERVILLE PUBLIC LIBRARY across the top in the same faded font as the sign outside. She stamped the book's card too and put it in a box behind the counter.

"Due in two weeks. You can renew once if you need more time." She pushed her glasses up her nose with one finger. "New student?"

"Relatively."

"Well. Welcome to Summerville." She said it like she meant it. "The library's open until six on weekdays, four on Saturdays. Closed Sundays. We have study tables in the back if you need a quiet place to work, and there's a computer room through that door." She pointed to a door on the right wall. "The computers are slow, but they work."

"Better than mine."

"Oh?"

"Mine's broken."

"That's too bad. Well, these are always available. Nobody really uses them except during midterms." She went back to organizing the return cart, sliding books into place with a precision that was almost musical, each one slotting without adjustment. "Is Ms. Bissette still assigning the translation exercises from Chapter Four?"

"Haven't gotten that far yet."

"You will. She loves Chapter Four." Jane's mouth twitched at one corner. "The vocabulary section is about romantic relationships. She makes everyone conjugate 'to desire' in all six forms."

I looked at her. She looked at me. Her mouth was still twitched and her green eyes had a sharpness behind the glasses that the soft voice didn't advertise.

"Sounds educational."

"Very." She slid the last book into place on the cart and pushed it aside. "Let me know if you need anything else."

"Thanks."

"Come back anytime."

I picked up the French dictionary and started toward the door. Then I stopped. The library had that pull that good quiet places have where leaving feels like a waste. I walked along the stacks instead, running my fingers along the spines. Fiction on the left wall, nonfiction on the right, reference in the back. The shelves were full but organized. No dust. Jane kept the place clean and the books in order and the whole room felt like one person's project. Jane's project.

A reading nook was tucked into the corner by the window. Two chairs, a lamp, a side table with a plant that was alive, which put it ahead of every other plant I'd seen in this town. Afternoon light came through the window and made a warm square on the carpet.

I turned toward the exit and stopped. Through a doorway to the back room, past the stacks, there was a table. The table was surrounded by books. Stacked books, piled books, books standing upright like little walls, books open face-down on top of other books. It looked like someone had tried to build a fort and run out of bricks and used literature instead. Behind the stacks, visible through a gap between two towers of paperbacks, was the top of a head. Brown hair. A low ponytail.

The head didn't move. Whoever was back there was reading, deep in it, and the book fortress was doing its job because I couldn't see anything else. Just hair and the faint sound of a page turning.

I knew that hair. I knew that ponytail. I'd seen it in the school cafeteria over a wall of exactly the same kind. Mia Potter built reading fortresses everywhere she went, and this one was bigger and more elaborate than the cafeteria version because she had more room and more material and nobody here was going to bother her.

I didn't go over. I didn't have a reason to. She was reading. I was holding a French dictionary. We were strangers in a library and walking over to introduce myself to a girl who'd specifically built a barrier between herself and other humans would be the opposite of what a person with social awareness would do.

But I knew her route. I knew her mother. I knew about the butterfly tattoo and the study sessions and the quiet rebellion happening inside that ponytail and the Catholic guilt that was going to take years of therapy or one very specific sequence of events to undo. I knew she whispered when she came and I was standing in a library holding a dictionary thinking about it and I needed to leave.

"Have a good afternoon," Jane said from behind the counter.

"You too."

The bell rang again on the way out. The afternoon sun was bright after the dim library and I stood on the sidewalk and blinked and the French dictionary was heavy in my hand.

I'd come back. In a town where every woman was a route and every location was a quest hub, the library was just a room with books and a woman who smiled when you walked in.

I walked home. The dictionary was heavier than it looked or my arms were weaker than I thought, which was the same thing, and I shifted it to my other hand and kept walking. A kid on a bicycle passed me going the other direction, no helmet, standing on the pedals. The afternoon was warm. The sidewalk had a crack where a tree root had pushed the concrete up and someone had spray-painted a smiley face on it.

At home, I put the dictionary on my desk next to the broken PC. The PC was still broken. I still didn't have two hundred dollars to fix it. I still didn't have any dollars.

Tony's Pizzeria. That was next. Delivery job, minimum wage, tips. The game's money pipeline started there and I needed it started because money was the gateway to everything else in this town. The gym was free and the park was free but the Muay Thai cost panties and the PC cost repairs and Debbie's mortgage cost a quarter of a million dollars and I was standing in a bedroom with a French dictionary and zero in my wallet.

I opened the dictionary. Flipped to a random page. The French word for debt was dette. The French word for money was argent. The French word for help was aide.

I closed the dictionary. I'd go to Tony's tomorrow.

The house was quiet. Debbie was at the store. Jenny's door was closed and music was playing behind it, something with bass that vibrated the wall between our rooms. The orange cat was on the stairs again, sprawled across the third step, and I stepped over it.

I sat at my desk and stared at the broken PC and thought about money.