“So you have two jobs tonight—draw a yearbook cover and call your aunt,” Vic ordered.
“Fine,” I said. “But a lot of people enter, and there are a lot of other good artists.”
“But you’re the best,” Vic said, her voice full of confidence.
I did enter the contest, along with half our class and lots of kids in the other fifth-grade classes, too.
I could remember the morning assembly perfectly, when the final three submissions were announced. My drawing made the cut, so I was called up to the stage and had to stand beside Pratik Bhatt and Trina Evans while our drawings were displayed one at a time on a huge screen. All three designs were good, but I definitely heard the audience ooh and aah the most over mine. I knew it didn’t matter, though. Trina was the most popular girl in the whole grade, and popularity always won. Pratik and I weren’t really even in the running. And the proud look on Trina’s face showed that she knew it. She had it in the bag.
But then it happened.
The principal announced that the committee had decided to change the procedure this year. There would be no voting. The winner had already been determined. Then the screen went wild crazy, flashing the three designs over and over while the principal crooned into her microphone, “And the winner is . . .”
The room got quiet, more silent than a fire drill.
The flashing stopped.
And then all that was left was the image of my drawing, bright and huge, a fox wearing a Foxfield T-shirt leaping toward a banner with the name of our school and the year printed on it in swirly 3D letters. The room went silent, then erupted in hoots and shouts and clapping. I’d won! I couldn’t believe it! A smile so wide it almost hurt spread across my face as I scanned the auditorium and tried to find Vic in the crowd.
“Congrats,” Pratik leaned over to tell me before he left the stage. “Your drawing really is the best.”
“Thanks,” I answered, still trying to process what had just happened. “Yours is really good, too.”
And then I saw Trina, her lips clamped together, a pink flush creeping up her cheeks as she stood stiffly in her brand-new dress, bought just for the occasion. Her smirk was long gone, replaced by something threatening and scary. She caught me looking at her and shot me a furious glare. Then she flipped her hair and walked offstage, back to her group of friends, all of them clearing a spot for her to sit next to them.
I shook the principal’s hand and started slowly back to my seat. Trina’s anger had stomped my happiness away. I guessed I could understand why she was so mad. It wasn’t fair that the year they decided to get rid of the voting was the same year Trina had a chance to be the cover designer. But it wasn’t my fault. Trina should have been mad at the committee, not at me.
But I wasn’t about to explain that to her.
Two years later, she still had it out for me. And without meaning to, I had given her the perfect chance to get even. And then some.
“I’m done with the kids’ books,” I told Sonia, pushing the empty cart back to her, “except this one needs a new label. It’s ripped.”
“Thanks, mami,” she said, then mentioned, “Some girls your age were in here yesterday.” She was working on the computer, making a record set of old magazines to discard.
I met her eyes.
“You were here,” she continued, “but seemed to be busy at the time.” It seemed like she was aware that I was only busy avoiding those girls.
“Lots of girls my age come in here,” I responded, trying to dodge.
“Actually, not true at all. The twelve-to-sixteen age group, boys and girls, is who we see the very least of in this building.”
Sonia knew everything about the library. She knew the history of the building, the titles in the collection, the delivery times for each magazine, the dates of upcoming events weeks in advance, and, unfortunately for me, the statistics of local library users.
I let out a sigh. “I probably didn’t know them.”
“You were hiding from them.” Sonia cut to the chase.
I winced.
Sonia stared at me, waiting.
“Maybe I was,” I admitted.
“Clearly not friends of yours,” Sonia stated next.
“Clearly,” I agreed. My cheeks began to flush and my stupid eyes began to water. I blinked furiously to fight back the tears.
Sonia took a long look at me, then turned back to the screen to continue working on her magazine record set.
“Makes sense,” she finally said. “They seemed bottom shelf to me.”
I couldn’t hide a smile at that, but it disappeared quickly as I relived what I’d overheard yesterday in my head: Trina, Izzy, and Amanda laughing about me.
“You look down,” Sonia said, little lines of worry squirming across her forehead.
I shrugged but didn’t deny it.
“How about our game? You wanna play?”
I looked around the room. The library had emptied out a bit while I was working in the children’s room.
“I dare you,” she challenged me, and she did this thing with her eyebrows so they moved up and down really quickly.
It made me laugh.
“Okay.” I grabbed a pencil and scrap paper and ran to the back room, wrote a few things down, then returned to Sonia with her first challenge. “How about The Best American Short Stories of the Century, call number 813.010805.”
Sonia had a photographic memory. She could tell you the exact location of a title in the stacks, whether it was an audiobook, a regular book, or a DVD. To pass time during slow hours, we made a game of testing her on it.
“Back room, third stack from the left, fourth shelf down in the middle,” she answered without even a pause to think.
She was right.
“Okay, how about The Omnivore’s Dilemma, call number 394.12.”
“Back room. Second stack from the right, middle shelf, third row from the top,” she answered quickly, then took a sip of coffee. Her mug said Book Lovers Never Go to Bed Alone.
“Right again!” I told her. “Wow, you’re good.”
“And the spine is a yellowy-gold,” Sonia added, and then winked at me.
My jaw dropped open, just a little bit. She was scary good.
July
Wally
It was Monday morning, bright and hot as the dickens, an expression Beverly taught me at the same time that she pointed out a Charles Dickens quote on Black Hat Guy’s chair: I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape. I hadn’t read any Charles Dickens yet, but I certainly could relate to feeling bent and broken.
The air-conditioning window units were churning full force when Wally arrived just a few minutes after opening.
“Good morning to you, and a good morning it is,” he announced, then stopped in his tracks to look around the building, studying the space as if seeing it for the very first time.
“Never been here on a Monday before,” he finally said. Then he released a loud, heavy breath and exclaimed, “Looks exactly the same!” He threw his head back and laughed, sounding a lot like a choking train slowly rolling into the station for repairs.
Wally coughed, cleared his throat, and asked, “Can you believe the Fourth of July had the nerve to fall on a Tuesday and mess with my schedule?”
“The nerve!” Sonia played along, then said, “It was bound to happen eventually. We’re truly sorry to be closed on your day.”
“Ah, well, I forgive you,” he raised his pointer finger above his head and finished, “this time!” He chuckled again, then went to his vase and took out the yellow carnation. I had wanted to pull it days ago. By last Thursday its petals were shriveled and browned at the edges; by Friday its entire flower face had folded over onto its stem.
“Can’t we put this thing out of its misery?” I had asked Sonia Friday afternoon, lifting it out of the glass jar.
“No, Jamie. It means a lot to Wally. Leave it for him to do.”
I plucked off one gr
ungy petal and dropped the flower back in. “All right,” I agreed.
“Just try not to look at it.” She shuddered.
Wally reached around the circulation desk and dropped the dead flower in our trash can, something he had never done before. He usually bagged his old flower and took it home with his new movie selections. He reached his doughy pink hand into his bag and came out with three white carnations this time instead of his usual one.
He slipped each of them into the jar.
“There you go now,” he said. “Could probably use some new water.”
“I’ll take care of it, Wally,” Sonia told him right away.
“I got three flowers today. A little different from my usual,” he said.
“What’s the occasion?”
“No occasion. No occasion at all, actually. Opposite of occasion,” he answered.
“Wally, that is a cryptic answer,” Sonia challenged him.
“Oh, I got canceled on, that’s all,” he answered, waving his hand to the side as if pushing away a bad thought.
“Oh no. Who canceled?”
“My kids.” Wally shrugged as he said it. “They were supposed to come over. We had a date and I got ’em both a flower, my boy and my girl, but then they couldn’t make it.”
“That’s disappointing. I’m sorry,” Sonia said, her voice softening. “Is everything okay?”
“Oh yeah, sure. Nothing like that. They’re just busy, you know? And it’s an hour drive each way for them, so—” He turned his head and coughed, and coughed.
And coughed.
I expected to see a piece of lung on the floor by the time he finished.
Sonia held her ground patiently, waiting for him to finish his phlegm attack. “It’s hard for them to get away,” he continued once he recovered. “They’ve got jobs and kids of their own, you know?”
“Ay, I know, Wally.” She nodded.
“So busy when you’re young,” Wally continued. “Too busy for dates with dear old dad.”
“Well, we are very happy to have all three of your beautiful flowers, Wally. They brighten up this whole room.” Sonia gave him a genuine smile, and the room really did seem to brighten up just then. It could have been the flowers, or it could have been Sonia’s smile.
Because Sonia was gorgeous.
Completely and totally gorgeous.
Sonia had the most stunningly silky black hair I’d ever seen in my whole life. My hair looked like wispy, dried-out straw next to hers, all thin and straight and lackluster brown next to her glossy midnight tresses. Her lips were painted the same shade of soft pink every day, popping against her tan skin. And her eyelashes were long. Seriously long. There were times I wondered about some of the people who came in to “browse the collection.” I suspected they were there just as much to snatch glimpses of Sonia.
Wally turned to me. “And how are you today, dear?” he asked, looking me square in the eyes.
“I’m good. I mean, I’m doing well today. Thanks for asking.” I noticed that he didn’t look well at all, though. Being stood up by his own kids must have really messed with him. His hair looked greasier than normal, his skin was patchy, and his eyes looked watery.
“Do you have some DVDs for me?” I asked.
“Of course, yeah, yeah. Got my flicks right here.” Wally reached back into his plastic bag and extracted five cases, all rubber-banded together. “Here you go, young lady. Here you go.”
“Thank you.” I walked them over to Sonia and she began scanning them in.
“You know what it’s like, then, too, being so young and busy?” Wally said to me. He couldn’t let it go, like he wanted someone to confirm for him that his grown children had had no choice but to cancel on him. He didn’t want to face that they might have just ditched him, plain and simple. “How old are you then? Fifteen?”
“I’m thirteen,” I said, flattered that he thought I was older. I probably just looked older because I was standing behind the counter. Context clues, my language arts teacher would say.
“Only thirteen?” Wally laughed at his guess, and his laugh morphed into a cough. He draped his whole forearm over the counter for support and coughed deep and long and with enough force to move furniture. It was a good thing the circulation desk was bolted to the floor.
Sonia’s eyebrows pinched together and she moved briskly to the watercooler to get him a drink. As I watched her go I saw one patron, an older woman in a long floral sundress, grimace at the sounds coming out of Wally.
Wally righted himself and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
“Thirteen, huh?” Wally stated again, absorbing this fact. “So you still live with your dear old dad?”
“I live with my mom. Just the two of us,” I explained.
“Oh, sorry, dear,” Wally apologized automatically.
“No, don’t be sorry,” I reassured him. “It’s great, just my mom and me. I love it that way.”
“You do?” he asked.
Sonia was back and paying attention now, I saw.
“Yes. It’s always been just the two of us. I don’t remember my dad at all. And my mom says that’s not a bad thing, considering.”
“Considering what?” Sonia was more than curious now.
“Considering we couldn’t squeeze him.”
“What’s that?” Sonia asked.
“We couldn’t squeeze him.” I smiled at the confusion spreading over Sonia’s face, and then explained, “That’s how my mom explained it to me when I was little, why she left him and why he let us go. We couldn’t make lemonade out of the lemon of him. We couldn’t squeeze out anything good or sweet.”
“Your mom compared your dad to a lemon?” Sonia asked.
“As a dad, yes, and a husband, yeah, because he was. She said he had his good points, like he’s the reason I’ve always been in the advanced math track at school, and he’s the reason I’m good at art, and why I have a dimple on just one side. But she said he didn’t have a single caretaking bone in his whole body. So as a dad—a lemon.”
“How about that,” Wally said, thinking it through.
“My mom said his one true goal in life revealed everything she needed to know about him.”
“And what was that goal?” Sonia asked.
“To make as much money as possible, doing the least amount of work possible.”
“Huh,” Wally grunted.
“She did meet him in a casino,” I added.
“Touché,” Sonia responded.
“Anyway, once she figured that out, she knew he wasn’t the kind of role model she wanted for me and he wasn’t the kind of guy she wanted to spend her life with, so she made the second-best decision of her life: leaving him.”
“And what was the first-best decision?” Sonia asked.
“Falling for him long enough to make me.” I smiled when I said that. I couldn’t not smile when I said it.
Sonia’s face broke into a smile, too.
“I think I really like your mom,” she told me.
Which made me smile even more. I liked that Sonia and my mom had the single-parent thing in common. Sonia had her son, Mateo, who was grown and beginning graduate school, and my mom had me.
“Well, I bet you and your mom watch movies together all the time,” Wally said.
“Sometimes we do,” I answered, not sure if that was going to make him feel bad or not. I balanced it with “But we live together, so it’s easy. We don’t have to drive an hour to get to each other. We just fit it in whenever it works out.”
“Ah, those good ole days,” Wally said out loud, even though it looked like he was taking a private trip in his mind back to the time when his kids were little and still lived with him. Then he snapped out of it and said, “All right then.”
He turned from me back to Sonia and said, “You better watch those child labor laws, this one’s only thirteen.” He pointed at me with his thick, swollen fingers and laughed again.
Please, I thought, don’t laugh. I didn�
�t want him to start coughing again, because of the sundress lady still searching the shelf and because the coughing fits seemed to get worse each time.
“I didn’t think you could work, actually, if you’re only thirteen. Legally, I mean,” Wally shared.
“Well, I don’t really work here. I, um . . . I . . . ,” I faltered. The familiar flush of pink heat started creeping up my neck to my cheeks.
“She’s a volunteer.” Sonia swooped in and saved me. “Have a sip, Wally. Your throat sounds dry.” She handed him the paper cup.
He swallowed the water in one gulp and dropped the cup into his plastic bag. “I’ll use that cup again at home. Thank you, dear,” he said to Sonia. “And good for you to volunteer.” Wally spoke to me now. “Didn’t know kids did that anymore.”
“We’re lucky to have her,” Sonia said, and winked at me. “Your movies are all checked in, Wally. You can go hunt for your new ones for the week.”
“Let me know if you need help finding anything,” I added. I had heard Sonia and Beverly and Lenny say this to patrons, but this was the first time I’d said it. I liked the way the words sounded coming out of my mouth. It sounded like I really could help somebody. Like I really could find a title Wally was looking for and take it to the checkout desk for him and send him on his way with exactly what he’d come to the library for.
I liked the idea of being able to help Wally, or any patron who needed help. The right way.
Because the last time I tried to help someone, I did it the wrong way.
The last time, I just took a book off the shelf, slipped it under my hoodie, and walked.
Straight to Trey’s backpack.
Lenny
On Wednesday, Lenny was crouched over Black Hat Guy in his quotes chair, his hand on the shoulder that may or may not have been shaking under the heavy sweatshirt. Black Hat Guy’s face was chalk white.
It must have been a really bad dream. I was upstairs in the loft, a smallish room that housed the fiction collection and a few study cubicles, when I heard the noise. There was quiet grumbling first, then louder groaning, and then a second later Black Hat Guy was full-on shouting while one leg jerked and kicked like he was trying to shake something off it, his eyes still shut in sleep the whole time.
A Kind of Paradise Page 4
