The Library of Lost Things

by Laura Taylor Namey

  I was standing behind Asher; he couldn’t see me nod at Marisol.

  Just tell him, Marisol had said.

  But she saw it all. Her lips parted in awe, then snapped shut like a clamshell.

  I shrugged. “Come on, it wasn’t that monumental. Not like I know anything different.”

  Asher swung around, smiling at me hesitantly. “Right. But all you’ve got going on at home is already more than enough. Then add in your father’s letter.”

  Asher’s words landed like a punch to my gut as Marisol stepped forward. “Your father? What’s he talking about?”

  Oh God.

  Helpless, I looked at Marisol, caught the hurt souring her features. I’d seen the way it clouded her face a dozen times before. But it was usually after a stupid boy or family drama, never from me.

  Asher paled. “I’m so sorry. I thought she knew.”

  “What letter?” Marisol demanded. “When?”

  “Before our birthdays. My father contacted Grandma with a letter for me.”

  “You...” Marisol paused, studying her ankle boots.

  “I was gonna—”

  “All that time. All your words, and not one to me about this.” She looked from my face to Asher, back to me again. In a swoosh, she picked up her coffee and hitched her bag onto her shoulder.

  “Marisol—”

  “Later. I need to go.”

  “Marisol, wait.”

  She didn’t. I watched her stride away, then covered my mouth with both hands, flinching when the doorbell clanged.

  Asher touched me for the first time since the alley. The wide span of his hands braced my arms. “I’m so, so sorry. When you said not to tell anyone, I had no idea that included Marisol. You said it was need-to-know, but I never thought for a second she hadn’t made the cut. I mean, you guys are... she’s...”

  I let out a shaky breath. “We are, and she is. You had every right to assume I would’ve told her.”

  “You didn’t, though.” Oh, I heard the rest, even though it stayed hidden behind his lips. But you told me.

  “It’s complicated. She’s the closest person in the world to me, but it’s my father, and I still...”

  His eyes were filled with a rumbling warmth. “Hey, stop.” His grip tightened over my shoulder bones. “You don’t have to explain. Not now.”

  My fingers toyed with the gold heart around my neck.

  “I feel horrible,” he said. “You trusted me, and I screwed it up.”

  “No, Asher,” I insisted. “I screwed it up.”

  He scrubbed one hand over his face, then shot a quick glance at his watch and swore. “I need to get back to the center.” Then right into my eyes, again. “I’m really sorry, Darcy. And I won’t insult you by saying it’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not okay.”

  After he left, I called Marisol three times. No answer. Finally, I sent a simple text message.

  Me: Word of the Day: Sorry

  * * *

  My world already felt bruised when I returned home after my shift. But I pushed through my front door to a sight that rubbed a bruise into a burn. “Mom?” I asked, spying her pacing the goat tunnel, hands gripping a small tub. All wrong. Totally wrong. She was supposed to be at work.

  Makeup streaked down her face, hair in tangles. She wasn’t opening and sorting through boxes tonight. She was rearranging them. “Difficult morning. Easier to tell work I was sick.”

  No—she’d missed her shift. This could not become a new habit. My eyes welled, heart twisting. Everything just hurt. Coming from Marisol and Yellow Feather, I barely had the energy to speak, let alone deal with her or the hoard right now.

  I fled to my bedroom and the comfort of my books. I didn’t register the item sitting on the floor at first—only the faint image of something tan in color and large in shape whisked across my peripheral vision. I dropped my belongings on my bed and turned.

  And there it was.

  Maybe I already knew.

  My skin iced over. I set my jaw, spearing my vision, and went to face the cardboard shipping box.

  To: Andrea Wells. From: Pottery Barn.

  To Andrea Wells from Pottery Barn and dropped, placed—hoarded—inside the one-and-only safe haven I had ever known. Even my book fortress hadn’t stopped her this time. Nothing could stop her.

  Tonight, it was me who sank to the ground. At once, I was thousands of pages of rage and fight. Every one I’d ever read.

  How dare she?

  Pottery Barn? She’d bought yet another item from a home decor store. But this disgusting place wasn’t a home; it was a warehouse, an overgrown shrine to past hurts.

  The psychologist made her promise. “Darcy needs her own space.”

  Oxygen fled my lungs. I was chapters teeming with legions of warriors, the blood of Crusades staining hot and red over my bookshelves. I wanted to open all the windows. I wanted to take these boxes, these...things, and cast them out into the street. Could our big city even absorb it all?

  “You have to establish clear boundaries and respect this one area, Andrea.”

  My fingers dug into worn carpet fibers, and I must have cried out some unknown noise, because my mother came to my doorway. Her face was blank, and I wondered how much of her was truly there.

  I pointed to the box. “Why?”

  She nodded. And nodded again, like all the nods were tracking and cataloging syllables this time. “I was repositioning things. I’m running out of space.” She moved to grab the box. “I’ll just—”

  “Stop,” I said.

  She flinched.

  “I give up.” I shook and shrugged. “I give up, Mom. You know what?” I held out my arms and knew that I had lost—and not because she’d violated my space with one box. It was because she’d ever thought she could.

  I surrender.

  “You win.” I swept my hand around. “Take it. Take the space you need, floor to ceiling. Have it all.” Have the rest of me. You already do.

  I quit counting seconds. I didn’t know how long it was before my mother finally moved, but not to my side. She walked, almost trancelike, wrapped her wool-covered arms around the box, and lifted it. “I shouldn’t have. I’ll just find another place,” she said, and left.

  I cupped my face, hanging my head low as tears leaked through my fingers. Marisol would know exactly what to say. Exactly what to do. She would come and bring me a smoothie and offer me colorful gum and hugs. She would tell stupid jokes or razz on my clothes or make up ridiculous word definitions. She would listen. I wanted—needed—my best friend, but I’d hurt her. Marisol needed time away from me to think after what I’d done.

  I stood and brushed sweaty palms on the jeans she’d picked out for me. I surveyed my whole room, wall to wall, shelf to shelf. All I had tonight was a bedroom full of books. One of them held my father.

  They had never looked so powerless.

  * * *

  Natalia letting me in the front door the next evening was a good sign. Natalia telling me where Marisol had fled with her sketchbook thirty minutes ago was a better one. After a quick stop at home, I was off.

  All day at school, I’d left my friend alone. Morning passed with no texts or locker visits. I ate lunch by myself under a tree by the quad, rehashing my mother’s shipping box and my gnawing guilt over Marisol and Asher in the bookstore. Asher—the thought of him clung to all the others, even though he’d missed his afternoon break at Yellow Feather. I didn’t see him my entire shift.

  Now, when Marisol looked up from her table at our usual Starbucks, I led with what I thought was the most effective word right then. Silence. I edged close enough to place the folded sheet of light blue stationery before her, taking a mental snapshot of my friend: messy topknot and Jefferson High sweatshirt. Lipstick-streaked coffee cup and the bird crumb remains of a chocolate muffin. Spiral-bound sketch of a faceless figure with angled arms and the penciled beginnings of a tank bodice.

  I let a paper father talk to her
first.

  While she read my letter, I ordered hot ginger tea, remembering something I’d seen online about the wonders of this root for upset stomachs. Mine had turned all of yesterday and today into the digestive version of a full bout of teary despair. Swirling and churning.

  “Darcy.”

  I dropped my honey packet and whirled around from the condiment station. Steamy remedy in hand, I approached her more slowly than I ever had in eight years. She clutched the letter, her eyes red and puffy with tears. “This is unreal.”

  “More than you know.”

  Marisol glanced left, then right. A group of college students had pooled at least four tables and were doing more laughing than studying. She quickly packed her belongings and nodded toward the door. “Come on.”

  The scene outside was no quieter, but my secrets melded into the bustling anonymity of University Avenue. Here, a hundred people could pass by, and maybe even look at two teens strolling with drinks and totes, but not see us at all.

  “What are you going to do?” Marisol asked after a few strides.

  “I haven’t gotten that far,” I admitted. “I’m still waiting for the day I wake up and see the spot where I’ve been hiding the letter and don’t think I’m in some fantasy world.”

  “Why?” Marisol breathed out a sigh. “Why not tell me?”

  “I had to let it sink in.”

  “No, that’s not why.”

  I sipped the spicy-sweet tea and barely avoided a loose chunk of concrete. “It’s too overwhelming.”

  “For sure, but that’s not why, either.”

  Damn. The only word I could think of. “Marisol, I—”

  She halted in front of a mattress shop. “Haven’t I been there for you, in every major life moment, for years?”

  “Every one.”

  “Since fourth grade, right? Since cupcakes?”

  “Every day.”

  “Haven’t I seen it all with you? Stuff no one should have to see or go through?” Her face and neck bloomed with blotchy red. “Haven’t I cleaned up dust and broken plates in your apartment, and stopped you from buying ugly shoes, and helped you pull off the makeup resale scheme of your life, and snapped eBay photos, and eleventy-billion other things?”

  “More,” I breathed. “Yes, Marisol, you’ve—”

  “Then why?”

  I spat it out like rotten food. “Because I couldn’t say it out loud. I couldn’t put it into words or give it any language. Saying it makes it real.” I plucked the letter from my bag, waving it around. “Keeping him in ink and paper makes him just another story.”

  Marisol’s posture wilted a bit. She trained her eyes onto the stream of traffic.

  I dashed the first tear from my cheek and sucked back the rest. “All I know are books. I read them over and over and dream and lose myself in them. But even I know they’re not...real.”

  “So you’re trapping him inside a story because it’s safer? And you can shelve him away like the rest of your books, and not deal with him or acknowledge him?”

  Of course she understood. “Yeah.”

  “But, Darcy, you did give your father words. Out loud. You told Asher.”

  “He’s not real, either,” I whispered.

  Make-believe. Just pretend.

  “He asked, and the words just slipped out,” I said. “They felt safe. But Asher’s only part of a legend in my world. He’s not really inside my story. My life.”

  Impossible boy, invisible girl.

  “But you are,” I told her. “The minute I tell you anything, it becomes part of my truth. I don’t know if I want my father there, too. Not yet.” I scrubbed my face. “Look, I know it’s dumb. I can’t hide from the letter or him forever. I have to make a choice.”

  “But you don’t have to rush it. Just don’t shelve him away anymore. Then you can decide how you really feel. What you really want to do. And talk to me, okay?”

  Marisol was right. She usually was. “I can do that. Promise.” I shivered audibly as a fall gust trailed us through an intersection.

  “Yeah, you can, but apparently you can’t remember the rule of November plus nighttime equals lightweight outerwear. It’s a good rule.”

  I felt myself smile for the first time in hours. “Your favorite kind of equation. And I left my hoodie at the bookstore.” We’d just reached the block where Yellow Feather lived. I gestured across the street at the historic building; lights were still on at Tops. “We’re going in. Mr. Winston’s gone, but Tess keeps an emergency key.”

  Less than five minutes later, we flicked on half the shop lights. Although I’d worked alone here many times, it was oddly thrilling to sneak in, promising Tess we’d leave no trace.

  Marisol swooned into one of the club chairs, arms and legs akimbo. “Never ever do I get to sit here.” She stretched and wiggled and then added, “Chunky gooey leather and supreme vintage style.” She exhaled ahhh and pulled an Asher by going coaster-less on the trunk table with her decaf cappuccino.

  I sat, too, even decadently folding my long limbs up onto the seat. “About that talking to you promise...”

  And then I did. I told her about my mom’s Pottery Barn box and what it meant, how that first sight of cardboard packaging had felt. Afterward, Marisol leaned across her chair and gave me a big sandwich hug. Like she had with one half of my drunk mother in my kitchen, she helped carry the weight of this, too.

  I remembered, then, why we were actually trespassing and sprang to my cubby behind the counter. I grabbed my hoodie and slipped on the black-and-white-striped cotton. But my eyes slipped across something else.

  Need a penny, take a penny.

  Have a penny, leave a penny.

  The little penny tray I saw every single shift held more than copper tonight. Metallic silver glinted from the top of the tarnished coins. I reached for an object that was definitely not there earlier when I’d traded books for bills and credit cards, over and over.

  My breath caught as I cupped the tiny silver acorn in the center of my palm.

  Twenty-Four

  Acorn

  “‘Now,’ said he, ‘shall I give you a kiss?’ And she replied with a slight primness, ‘If you please.’ She made herself rather cheap by inclining her face toward him, but he merely dropped an acorn button into her hand...”

  —J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan

  A charm. The stem of the acorn was a small, silver loop meant for a chain necklace or bracelet. My mind went everywhere, leaping into stories. Just one story, really. But it couldn’t be.

  Marisol was already at my side. “Why all the shaking? Something fishy in your tea?”

  “More like in the penny tray.” I held out the silver bauble hammered with intricately carved ridges and details.

  Marisol smiled. “That’s super cute. But what was it doing in there?”

  “I’m almost positive someone left it on purpose. But the only two people who work here are Mr. Winston and...me.” My legs quit, and I sank lower and lower until I was cross-legged on my boss’s prized area rug.

  Me. The acorn charm had to be for me. But that meant the kind of fairy tale that crashed into every reality I could name. Before I sorted that out, it was time to make something else all the way real.

  Marisol huffed. “And I guess we’re sitting now. Nope, no germs and grimy street goop to worry about. Everything’s normal.” She followed me down and snagged my gaze. “You’re giving me the jeebs, babe. Catch me up.”

  “I know,” I said through a tangled breath. “But first, I need to show you a book.” I stretched long and reached for my tote.

  “What’s new about books? Aren’t you always showing me some novel? Aren’t I always confiscating some novel?”

  I fished out the new-old Peter Pan and placed it into her hands.

  “I’ve seen you toting around Peter Pan a hundred times. Especially lately,” Marisol said.

  “You’ve only seen the outside. Open it.”

  She did and went slack-jawed
, just as I had when I’d first lifted the worn, dark green cover at the counter, so many weeks ago. “Whoa.” She turned the book every which way, pausing to read quotes and lists. Poems and crossed-out text.

  There, on the thick Persian carpet, I told her the whole story—beginning until now—of how closely I’d cherished the book and how the advice had guided me through awkward moments. The mysterious scribbler experienced so many emotions. She knew about the heart, too—how much it could love, fiercely and completely. And with one word, how it could shrivel into the smallest version of itself.

  Marisol read the “Paper Doll” poem. She smiled. “Oh, the feels. I can’t believe this book just found you.” She closed the cover and handed it back. “But what does it have to do with the acorn charm?”

  My own heart leaped. Shhh, easy now. “Besides you, only one other person knows I’ve been reading Peter Pan. Asher. We’ve discussed the story a few times, but never the acorn from Chapter Three.”

  “Asher? Wait, the acorn is from Peter Pan?”

  “Peter gives an acorn button to Wendy.” I lifted my face to meet hers. “After he asks if he can give her...a kiss.”

  It took Marisol a moment before realization bubbled around her in manic silence. She was all motion. Her skin flashed bright coral, hands gesturing wildly, waving and shaking my shoulders like I was a rag doll. She bounced up and down on the floor, silent movie screams splitting her face. She mouthed every expletive I knew.

  Finally, she dragged out her voice. “Asher Fleet is dropping major signals? Asher! See, I knew something was up.” She rattled her head. “But wait, I mean, do you even like—”

  “Stop,” I said, holding up both hands. “Don’t, Marisol. Not yet. I mean, what about London? As far as I know, she’s still in the picture, and it’s weird, and I have to find out more first.”

  She nodded, and I placed one palm over my heart, holding back the wild beating.

  Real beating shook the front of the store. We turned to see Tess yelling into the window glass. “Ladies!” She bent closer, spying us on the floor and shaking her head. “I don’t even want to know, but Wheel of Fortune is on in twenty minutes!”