But here? That makes me weird. “Weird” would also have been a good adjective to describe me.
If Mrs. Radcliffe had chosen my word for me, she’d have gone with “indebted.” Track A has a tutoring credit, one of those requirements Pooh was so skeptical about, like we have to take history and we have to take English and we have to take math. We have to tutor. Since it’s after school, you’d think they couldn’t make us, but you’d be wrong. Some of us get out of it because there’s football practice (never mind it’s only touch because no one here wants to risk a head injury, and it’s only intrasquad because there’s no one else to play). Some of us get out of it because we have after-school jobs (never mind after-school jobs are discouraged in Bourne where there aren’t even enough jobs for the adults). There aren’t many of us left after that, but the rest of Track A tutors a few days a week after school, in pairs. So at least Petra and I get to do it together. It’s not that I don’t get how many birds this kills—the kids who need job experience get job experience; the kids who need extra help get extra help; the kids who need occupying and distracting after school get occupied and distracted—but even free labor is only worth the cost if you know what you’re doing. And none of us do.
When Mrs. Radcliffe explained that first week that it was Track A who would staff the tutoring center after school, there was a lot of whining and moaning and protesting and complaining until she cut us off by hissing, “You are the lucky ones. This is the least you can do,” and stood before us, arms crossed, daring us to disagree. We would have, vehemently, for Bourne is nothing if not a study in how it’s not that simple, but there is no arguing with overworked, underpaid guidance counselors, and we accepted our lot just like everyone else.
Today when Petra and I walk into the tutoring room five minutes after the last bell, Nellie Long is sitting at her desk, gazing at the ceiling with a huge smile on her face as if there’s something wondrous up there. (I check. There’s not.) But I ruin her good mood as soon as I suggest we get to work.
“I don’t want to read Lord of the Flies.” She scowls at me like I assigned the book.
“Why not?”
“It has nothing to do with my life.”
“It seems like it’s just about boys,” I concede, “but really it’s about the human condition.”
She looks at me blankly. “I am not a fly,” she says.
“Or a lord,” Petra adds from across the room. I glare at her.
“How about your history essay?” I offer Nellie.
She sighs and agrees to this reluctantly, hands me her essay, watches the worry accrue on my face as I read. “See, what I’m trying to say,” she explains, “is that even though World War II happened thousands of years ago, it’s still relevant now.”
“Okay,” I say. “How?”
“How?”
“How is World War II still impacting our lives today?”
“Obviously because”—her expression suggests maybe I’m the one who needs tutoring—“I have to write this big report about it.”
Kyle M. and Kyle R. are wrestling on the floor instead of letting Petra help them with geometry. Petra is doing her nails. When Mrs. Radcliffe shoots her a dirty look, Petra says, “I’m not getting in the middle of that. I’m a pacifist.” When I shoot her a dirty look, she raises her eyebrows and says, “Trade you?”
I look at Nellie’s essay. She’s written “World War Too” a dozen times already, and she’s only got three paragraphs.
“Deal.”
The Kyles are likelier to pay attention to me than Petra anyway because they want to get in good with my sister. They like Mirabel. Everyone likes Mirabel, but them more than most. They’ve had a crush on her since we were little, though it would take a lot more than being nice to me at tutoring for her to be interested in either one of them.
I stand over the Kyle-ball and try to be as fierce as possible though I am small and they are huge, though I am one and they seem many, though I am standing still and they are rolling around like drunk puppies.
“Liar,” Kyle R. spits.
“You’re the liar,” Kyle M. retorts.
“Liar,” Kyle R. says back. Limited vocabulary. They should study with Petra and me. Actually, I guess that’s what tutoring is, but it doesn’t seem to be working.
“I saw it.”
“You didn’t.”
“My dad saw it.”
“Then he’s a liar too.”
Petra rolls her eyes at me. I smile at her. She smiles back.
“Go for it,” she tells me, because sometimes the only way out is wading over to the other side.
“What did you and your father see?” I ask Kyle M.
They stop, part, and sit up, panting, still drunk puppies.
“Moving truck,” he wheezes. “We both saw it. Down by the library. A moving truck.”
* * *
Petra’s mother does not leave her house. It might be that what happened broke something in her brain, or it might be that what happened honed something in her brain so that she realized she was safer inside, but in any case, it’s been five years since she went outdoors. She used to leave on Sunday mornings to go to church, but she’s Sikh, and though Pastor Jeff did his best, she felt she could do just as well on her own at home. She’s perfectly loving and involved in her daughter’s life, but only in her house.
Petra’s father lives in New Jersey but works in New York, which he calls “the city,” as if there’s only one. This sounds glamorous, and might be for all I know, but Petra reports that he lives in a dark one-bedroom apartment with a view of a parking lot, spends hours commuting on a train that smells like summer feet, and then does other people’s taxes all day for not even enough money to be able to afford to get an apartment large and non-gross enough that his only child could at least visit more often.
Since Petra’s mother only lives in her house and Petra’s father only lives in New Jersey, they bought Petra a car. It is older than we are, at least fifty percent mold, and also smells like summer feet, but it is better than my car which is a bicycle.
After tutoring, I climb into the passenger seat, and with absolutely no discussion, Petra heads toward the library.
If I could have one wish for Bourne, it wouldn’t be enough. It would be too hard to choose. But in the running would definitely be a coffee shop. Maybe it would change everything, having a warm, bustly place to sit and chitchat wittily in oversized cushy chairs and make smart observations about the world going fascinatingly by, someplace to get a part-time job, know all the regulars, find yourself the recipient of all the good gossip, and save some money so you can leave one day.
But we don’t have a coffee shop.
We have a donut shop. Ham Roland’s imaginative name for the place was Donut Shop, but the sign he ordered arrived with a typo. They told him they’d redo it or he could have a refund, so he got his money back and kept the sign as is, and now we go to the Do Not Shop sometimes after tutoring. But it’s not the same.
We have a pizza place, but even though I have nothing to compare it to, I still know it isn’t very good. I wave at Lena behind the counter as we drive by, but she doesn’t look up from her book. We have a hardware store and a laundromat, a diner, a drugstore, a grocery, and a church. Donna’s Nursery and the bar and the Fitwit.
Downtown Bourne was modest even before. That was part of its charm I think: compact and cozy and cobblestoned (this was before so many of its citizens needed wheels). There was never a coffee shop, but there used to be other kinds of shops—knickknacks, knitting supplies, candy—plus an ice cream place and a couple cafés. Those storefronts are still there, waiting patiently, hopefully. Emptily. What’s left full is threadbare and torn maybe, but still kicking.
At the far end of downtown, the stores peter out and then the asphalt does. The church is the last thing before there’s nothing. It’s got peeling wood siding, a giant white spire, an oddly short red door that must have been put in before the whole building w
as finished or even planned out all the way because it’s nowhere near center. It’s hard to decide if those long-ago Bourners were so eager and enthusiastic they put the door in first, or more like too clueless to realize you don’t need a door if you don’t have walls yet, but it’s nicer to think of them as just that welcoming.
Petra steers onto the gravel, lets the clutch out with the car still in gear, and stalls to a stop. In front of us is the bridge: stone, weathered and impressive, bearing in iron the name of its benefactors, Grove—the old wealthy family who used to own half of Bourne back when Bourne used to have old wealthy families—and its construction date, 1904, to remind you they built this thing without computers, cordless drills, even a pocket calculator. It spans what we call the ravine, which makes it sound like the kind of place teens wreck their cars trying to leap over when they’re drunk or at least like some kind of picturesque valley with sheer cliffs and dramatic waterfalls. It’s not that. It’s more like a ditch, a greenbelt maybe if you’re feeling generous, with a tangle of vines, thorns, and dead brush. And there, on the other side, is the library.
The library is beautiful but closed now, empty like the storefronts, pretty and vacant like cheerleaders on TV. The building kind of matches the bridge—worn and majestic—and makes you think there must have been a time before. It has a giant stained-glass window like a church, but this one shows people with books: a couple reading on a tandem bike, a bunch of people reading under a tree with books dangling from its branches, a family—mom, dad, and three little kids—all reading on a picnic; even the dog is holding an open book in its paw. It’s a building you would call noble, even historic, but it’s been closed for over two years now, dark and shuttered, its hedge brown and crumbling, weeds commando-crawling up from the banks of the ravine and threatening to consume the place completely.
At least that’s how it was last week. Now suddenly it’s different—except nothing is ever different in Bourne—and even though I’m seeing it, I still don’t believe it. This is why people have reported construction equipment but no construction, delivery vans but no deliveries. The library is on the far side and the opposite shore of a mostly empty town, and since it’s closed, no one comes here anymore, but now we can see that we’ve missed something. The weeds have been hacked away; the desiccated hedge is gone like it was never there. Fresh dirt you can actually smell, dark and damp, surrounds the front walkway and harbors something new and green and blooming. Every light is on, every door ajar. The library looks open, in use, alive. In the parking lot, two enormous moving vans idle like teenagers. We watch out the windshield and cannot say a word, but eventually we have not said a word for long enough that Petra’s engine has cooled, and she climbs out of the car and onto the hood. I follow. The hood is still warm through my shorts as is Petra’s leg where it presses against mine—it’s a very small car—but I can’t stop shaking.
“You’re bouncing,” Petra complains.
“Your car’s bouncing.”
“Because you’re bouncing it.”
“I’m shivering,” I admit.
“It’s ninety degrees out here.”
“I’m algid.”
She turns to look at me. “Have you been doing SAT prep without me?”
“Only a little.”
“Does ‘algid’ mean crazy?”
“‘Algid’ means cold.”
“You’re not algid”—we are sweating against each other—“but you might be crazy.”
“Pusillanimous,” I offer.
“‘Pusillanimous’ means fearful. I’ve known you for sixteen years. You’re not fearful. Timorous maybe.”
Shit. “I forget ‘timorous.’”
“That was in last week’s flash cards. Do them again.”
“I will,” I promise. This is my pact with Petra. We will get into college. We will get out of Bourne.
“Afraid,” she supplies.
“How is that different from fearful?”
“You’re not afraid as a personality trait. It’s just weird as shit what’s happening over there right now.”
We’re quiet, watching. We can just make out people moving inside. “I think ‘pusillanimous’ and ‘timorous’ might mean the same thing,” I say.
“Maybe.”
Petra grasps my hand in hers, and I slowly stop shaking. We watch a little longer, but there’s nothing much to see. We can’t tell how many people there are or anything about them. We can’t imagine who they might be, and we really can’t imagine what it might mean that they’re here.
“Heteroclitic,” I say finally.
“What?”
“Week before last,” I remind her. “Weird as shit.”
We lean back against the windshield and shift our hips away from the wiper blades and watch in silence as our lives change forever.
Two
There is no right way to systematize the arrangement of books. Some people like Dewey decimal classification, but that is usually nostalgia because that is how their childhood library was organized. Some people like the Library of Congress classification system, but that is usually elitism because that is what academic libraries use. And that is only if you want to organize by subject. You could alphabetize by author’s last name or first name. You could alphabetize titles or even keywords. You could arrange books by color, and that would be nice because if it was a rainy day you could go to the green section and get a rainy book. I bet Melvil Dewey never even thought of that.
I do not have a system though because I do not need one. Once I put a book somewhere, I remember where that somewhere is. And also because to have a system you need to have a large storage apparatus—usually bookshelves—which I do not.
Instead I have books under my bed, under Mab’s and Mirabel’s beds, under Mama’s, on our bedside tables, under our kitchen and coffee tables, on our countertops and next to our sinks, though you have to be careful because books, like huskies, do not like to be wet. I have piled books on the sides of the stairs because our stairs are thirty-four inches wide, and you only need fourteen inches to walk up. Mama bakes a lot, so I cannot put books in the oven, but she says you cannot bake in a microwave, and she does not trust the microwave anyway, so I put books in it and just take them out and hold them if someone wants to heat something up and Mama is not home to object. They are on top of the kitchen cabinets, between the blankets in the upstairs hall closet, in the spaces beneath the sinks between the water pipes and the walls, under the sofa, inside the fireplace, on the corner of the porch it does not rain on. They fill the unfinished attic and the even less finished crawl space. They are stacked tightly around the chimney, which is good because that means they could also help hold up the house if there is an earthquake or mudslide.
My mother keeps all the law books in her room.
Mr. Beechman told us all about how taxes work the year we were doing percents in math. Instead of each individual paying for her own teacher and her own school, her own roads and her own sidewalks, her own books and her own wars, each individual pays taxes on her home, land, income, investments, and holdings, and that money goes to the government, and then the government buys one teacher and one school and one road and one sidewalk and one library, and everyone shares. The government hosts a war, and everyone just comes to that. This is called efficiency, and it means you cannot have your own war. You can only join someone else’s.
This is also why the library is at my house instead of at the library.
The residents of Bourne do not have investments and holdings. We do have homes and lands, but they are not worth any money. Some Bourners do not even have jobs because lots of our stores closed and most of our restaurants too. We still have a pizza place, and it is called Bourne’s Best Pizza which is technically true but not that impressive since it would be just as accurate to call it Bourne’s Worst Pizza since it is also Bourne’s Only Pizza. A lot of people worked at the places that closed, and now they do not have jobs.
And of course all the plan
t workers. Most of them are unemployed. Or dead. (“And/or dead” is more accurate. Some are both.)
Eventually, we did not have enough money to have a library, but the library building is Historically Significant (which means more than when it is just historically significant which no one cares about), so they left it right where it was—or, to be more accurate, where it still is—but with nothing inside. They tried to sell the books, but there is a very small market for used library books. What they could, they sold, and donated the money to Mr. Bergoff’s scholarship he set up in memory of his wife. The rest, Mrs. Watson, the former librarian, gave to me.
Now I am the librarian.
I take this job very seriously. I take all jobs very seriously, but this is more important than other jobs because Bourne citizens are stupider than other citizens—I am not being mean; this is just a true fact—and the way to get less stupid is to read more books. You might argue we need books more than we need extra ramps.
That is what I did argue.
That is how I convinced Mrs. Watson to give me all the books.
Straight after school I go home and wait for anyone who might come. Maybe they will want a good mystery to occupy their mind if their body is not working well. Maybe they will want a memoir by someone else who overcame odds. Maybe they will want a book about computers so they can get a better job. There are not a lot of jobs in Bourne, but if you knew computers, you could work somewhere else.
When the doorbell rings today, the person ringing it is Pastor Jeff. The person ringing it is often Pastor Jeff. As I have said—and as should be obvious—stupid people need to read books in order to get smarter, but unfortunately people who like books are usually smart already, and stupid people do not read. Maybe this is tragic irony, or maybe cause and effect. I do not know. What I do know is that Pastor Jeff is not stupid. But sometimes he makes stupid book requests.
“I need a book about how to sew wheelchair and walker parts,” he says when I answer the door.
“I have no books about how to sew wheelchair and walker parts,” I regret to tell him.
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