What You Hide

by Natalie D. Richards

  Gretchen’s voice floats from a location near the main entrance. “Sorry about that! Can’t shelve books without light, huh?”

  Whatever I thought I heard in the dark is gone, so I get to work. I tug the two carts into the first aisle. I follow the numbers, pushing books into their proper slots and moving on. It’s the kind of mindless task I like best these days.

  Twenty minutes later, I drag both empty carts to the front and check the clock. Ten minutes until the library opens. Gretchen jogs up, bright-eyed and grinning. The usual.

  “What’s shaking in the shelves?” she asks.

  “The travel guides were getting rowdy in the seven hundreds, but I warned them if they didn’t settle down—it’s withdrawn for them.”

  She laughs, so I haven’t lost my touch.

  “So what do you think?” she asks. “Can you staff the browsing room? Mostly, you’ll need to help people find DVDs.”

  “Sure. No problem.”

  “Do you remember how to give out the guest passes if they want to use a computer?”

  “I do.”

  “I think you and browsing are going to get along really well, Spencer.”

  Now she’s got me grinning. Honestly, I don’t think it’s drugs. It’s just her. I can make people laugh, but I don’t think I’ve ever smiled the way Gretchen does.

  Inside the browsing room, I hop up on the tall, rolling chair at the desk and wonder how this constitutes community service. I could be picking up trash on the side of the road. Technically, I could be on probation and suspended from hockey, but I’m not. It’s the cushiest version of a punishment I could have dreamed up.

  Mom thinks I’ve learned an important lesson. I think I got off too easy. Nothing new there, I guess.

  The library opens at 9:00 a.m. and patrons trickle in. A gentleman takes a newspaper to a leather chair in the corner. A woman who I often see walking her dog in the neighborhood brings in coffee and a laptop.

  I shift in my chair and resist the urge to spin. It’s not the kind of space that invites spinning. The room is like my grandparents’ house—all dark wood and leather in that way that makes me think of market reports and cocktails after dinner.

  I tip my head back to stare at the brass chandeliers hanging from the arched ceiling. There are six enormous skylights positioned around the room for light. I wonder how big of a check my dad would have had to write if I broke one of those.

  “Excuse me?”

  I jerk in my chair hard enough to topple off of it. Luckily, I land on my feet. I reach to steady myself, and knock three books off the tall desk. My visitor doesn’t laugh when I stoop to pick them up. She’s so quiet, I’m half convinced I conjured her like the footsteps in the dark—some kind of boredom-induced hallucination. But when I rise, she’s there. Waiting.

  I don’t recognize her, but she’s around my age. Maybe a year younger. Given her ridiculous red shoes and the obviously drugstore-dyed streaks in her hair, she wouldn’t blend into the crowd of manicured nails and straight-ironed hair at my high school.

  So she’s probably not from Fairview. A city school, maybe. Or a homeschooler. That would explain her being here on a school day. No one skips school to go to the library.

  “Can I help you?” I ask, because she still hasn’t said anything.

  “I’m not sure.” She looks reluctant, nodding toward the doorway that leads to the main lobby and the book stacks. “Is that lady a librarian?”

  I glance at Gretchen, who’s currently deeply in conversation with another patron.

  “She is, but she might be a minute. Are you looking for a DVD?”

  “No.” She hesitates again, shifting a heavy-looking blue backpack higher on her shoulder. “I need some information about alternative schooling.”

  I open up the library catalog to search. “Like homeschooling?”

  A laugh. “Definitely not.”

  “Vocational schools?”

  “No.” She frowns. “I’m looking for traditional high schools in an alternative setting. Like online schooling?”

  “Oh! Sure.” I fumble through a couple of internet searches, coming up dry. “I’m not finding much that looks legit—oh, wait. Are you interested in an online dog grooming certification?”

  The joke doesn’t just fall flat; it dies in bloody agony. She grimaces, like I offered a class killing puppies, not grooming them.

  “Hey, I’m probably searching wrong,” I say, extending a hand. “I’m Spencer. Not a librarian, a volunteer.”

  “Mallory,” she says, but she’s already glancing around, like she doesn’t know what to do with herself.

  “If you want, I’ll give you a guest pass for a laptop so you can try until Gretchen is done. You could search online schooling. Dog grooming. Jambalaya recipes. Whatever.”

  She still doesn’t smile, but she nods. “Okay. Thanks, that might help.”

  I watch her get settled to make sure the guest pass works. Then I watch her because I’m bored. Then I watch her because it’s either watch a cute girl with bad hair or an old guy who’s dozing off in the arts section of the paper. The options are far from mind-blowing.

  She types in machine-gun bursts, clicking no keys at all, and then clattering out what sounds like the entire Gettysburg Address in four seconds. When she uses the mouse, though, she’s feather soft. More banging on the keys. More gentle mouse sweeps and clicks.

  Ah, she’s found something.

  I can tell by the way she leans forward, wrapping her feet around the front legs of the chair. Like gravity might fail soon. Or maybe the monitor is trying to suck her in. I consider an ancient Poltergeist joke about staying away from the light, but resist.

  She fumbles with the back of the desk behind the computer, and I don’t know why. I don’t understand what she’s doing until it pops open. A hinged compartment. Like a tiny cabinet in the back of the desk. I’ve never seen it before, so I doubt there’s anything in there, and if there is, she probably doesn’t want it.

  But lo and behold, she’s got something. She pulls out a blue pen and starts jotting notes on one of the provided pieces of scrap paper. Unbelievable. There’s practically a secret compartment in that desk, and she found a working pen inside. It’s easier to find a hundred-dollar bill than a functional pen in here.

  As soon as I think it, she stops writing and shakes it. Shakes it again, trying to get the ink flowing. She bangs it on the desk then tries the writing-a-million-little-circles trick.

  I have to bite back a laugh when she gives up, dropping the pen in disgust. She unzips her monstrous blue backpack and snakes an arm inside. When she finally pulls it back out, I see the yellow barrel and pink eraser of a typical pencil.

  The second she presses the pencil to the paper, I hear the telltale snap of breaking graphite. I laugh, and her shoulders hunch. I’m sure she’ll laugh too, but she doesn’t. She looks like she’s about to cry.

  I yank my hands off the desk, a sudden burst of heat rushing up my neck. I turn away, eyes on my shoes even when I hear her get up.

  She’s probably leaving. Maybe she’ll tell Gretchen, and I’ll definitely catch hell if she does. Not that I don’t deserve it. I should have offered to help. I was raised to—

  Tap, tap, tap.

  The sound startles me, and my arm bumps the edge of the desk. The books I just picked up go flying again. I collect them from the floor with a sigh. When I’m upright, Mallory’s still there. Glaring at me.

  “I need to invest in glue,” I say, waving the books before I set them down. Finally, I remember myself. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

  “Bet you can guess,” she says.

  I grin and finally, finally she smiles. It makes her even cuter, though I’m not exactly sure why. Her lips are chapped, and close up I can see chunks of faded purple in her hair along with the streaks
of bleach. But her eyes are so wide and green that it’s hard not to stare into them.

  “I bet I have a pen or something around here,” I say, digging around the top drawer. I find several library pencils, which I tell her not to bother with because I’m convinced they’re shipped to the library dull to the point of being unusable. I find nothing else. Not in the first drawer, the second, or even the third. “Wow, this is ridiculous.”

  She laughs a little when I open a fourth drawer and come up dry. Finally, I lift my own keyboard in desperation and find a single, uncapped ballpoint pen. I hand it over with a flourish.

  She takes it. “I thought I was going to have to tap a vein and write in blood.”

  “If it came to that, I’d suggest a quick trip home for a pen. Bodily fluids are frowned upon in the library.”

  “Right.” She tugs at the hem of her jacket like she’s uncomfortable, then holds up the pen with a weak smile. “Thanks. For the pen.”

  “No problem,” I say, but her smile is gone. I don’t know exactly what I did, and I definitely don’t know how, but I pissed her off. She doesn’t look at me and abruptly sets down the pen I gave her. It sits at the edge of the desk, far from the computer and her bag.

  Gretchen relieves me ten minutes later, so I head back into circulation and grab another cart. I move faster than usual. The circulation manager, Ruby, notices and raises her eyebrows at me from where she’s checking in books. But I ignore her and head for the supply cabinet.

  This is a stupid idea, and I know it even before I unlock the supply cabinet and grab the box of pens from the second shelf. I also know it when I march back into the browsing room.

  Mallory isn’t there, but her blue backpack is still sitting by the chair. Gretchen is chatting merrily with the newspaper-reading gentleman I ignored. I should go.

  Screw it.

  I grab a Post-it and hurry so Gretchen doesn’t bust me out for offering half of our staff pens to a patron. Thankfully she’s still busy, so I scrawl a quick note.

  These better?

  Then I pop open the little hinged compartment and cram every single one of the pens inside. It shuts with a soft click and I press the sticky note to the top, leaving quickly.

  Just outside the browsing room, the bathroom door swings open. Mallory emerges, stopping short, and I give her a quick nod and keep walking. I don’t need to watch her find the pens. It already feels like a win.

  Ruby walks past me wearing latex gloves and holding bottles of cleaner. I assume she’s heading to clean a bathroom, but she turns into the stacks near the browsing room.

  I chuckle. “Wow. Do I even want to ask?”

  “Just a little barefoot cookbook browsing.”

  “What?”

  She doesn’t answer, so I follow her without being invited. She gestures to the floor, and the footprints are obvious. Dirty and narrow and definitely bare—five round toes and a high arch.

  “Of all the damn rules we have, is wearing shoes so difficult?”

  I swallow hard, staring at the tracks, because I was near the cookbooks this morning. And I heard footsteps. “Ruby, I thought I heard someone in here this morning. Someone barefoot.”

  She sprays and swipes the area with a wad of paper towels, not pausing when she replies. “Did you tell Gretchen?”

  “I…no.”

  “If you see them again, let us know, okay? Gotta wear shoes in the library.”

  “This was early. Before we opened.”

  “Then our cleaners missed something. That or we have a barefoot ghost checking out Crock-Pot recipes.”

  Mallory

  Thursday, November 9, 7:14 a.m.

  Four school days. That’s all it takes. Four days and I am no longer a student at Whitestone Memorial High School. I’m a Success Academy Scholar in the Success Online Academy Program.

  I wonder almost instantly if they couldn’t have come up with an R word that would have turned SOAP into the much more encouraging SOAR. I mean, why not Routine instead of Program? Or Regiment? Revolution maybe?

  Lana boots up her laptop, which takes a while. We’re sitting in her bedroom, which is, impossibly, smaller than mine, and for the last several nights has been my sleeping space too. It has not been an easy fit. Lana’s single bed takes up all but a narrow strip of wood floor, and a dresser and a nightstand are crammed into that strip. It’s practically a game of hopscotch to get out of here without hurting yourself, and getting comfortable on a flimsy sleeping bag in the space between her bed and the wall? Impossible.

  Still, I’m grateful that she’s been cool about me staying a few days. We told her mother, Maria, that my mom was out of town. I called my mom and told her Maria was working a lot and wanted Lana to have company, so it just made sense. One phone call and this whole house of cards will fall, but Lana’s mom is working nights for two weeks, and my mom likely won’t check in. She’s usually too focused on keeping Charlie happy, and right now, Charlie doesn’t seem too interested in keeping tabs on me.

  “So how does the school thing work?” Lana asks, brushing her hair. We’ll both head out in five minutes. I’ll walk with her until we hit the corner where her mom can’t see. Then I’ll switch and head another direction. Her mom has no idea I’m not at Whitestone. She’d flip if she knew.

  “It’s all online. There are a few live chats and lectures, but mostly I do it when I want.”

  “But aren’t you, like, a dropout now?”

  “No. I transferred to another school. The people at the online academy made it easy. Mom had to sign a few things, and I had to fill out an application, but once I was enrolled, everything was smooth sailing. I don’t even think it’ll be very different.”

  She looks at me like I’ve lost it. I don’t blame her, but I haven’t lost it. School via laptop is not the same as running from class to class and hanging out at our table at lunch, but I have to stay positive.

  Regular high school is not an option. Charlie works on the computers for the whole district, and we have only one high school anyway. He could turn up in any hallway and see me.

  “I can’t believe your mom went for this,” she says, typing her password.

  “I told her it was temporary. A break to chill things out in the house. She was leery about the online stuff, but you know she’s not much of a fighter. Especially since she’s pregnant.”

  “God, I know.” Lana frowns. “Can you imagine? She’s so old.”

  “She’s only thirty-four. A lot of women don’t even start having babies until after that.”

  She scoffs. “Not around here.”

  Lana pushes her laptop over to me. There’s a crack in the corner of the screen, and the Q is missing. But she’s sharing with me, and I’m grateful.

  “Thank you so much, Lana,” I say, and she scoffs at that too. I open a browser and navigate to the website they gave me, logging in without issue. I show her the home screen.

  “See? Easy peasy.”

  “I just don’t get why you have to leave school. I mean, you live in the district and—” She cuts herself off and tilts her head until her long dark hair slides over her shoulder, shadowing her face. Her eyes narrow as she pieces together the fragments I’ve given. “Oh my God. You convinced her to leave him, didn’t you?”

  Lana and I have known each other for a long time. Long enough for me to be honest.

  “I thought I did. He changed her mind.”

  “I hate that bastard. Why don’t you report him?”

  “There’s nothing to report him for. Believe me, I’ve checked. The school loves him. He’s got everyone there snowed into thinking he’s great.”

  “What about the police? Isn’t there something they can do?”

  “Like what? ‘He’s weirdly controlling, Officer,’” I say, pretending to place the complaint.

  She smirks. “Says the t
eenager who ran away.”

  “Exactly. You know how he is. It’s not only what he says.”

  “It’s the creepy stuff he doesn’t say,” she says with a wise nod. “He’s what I think a serial killer would be like, you know? Always calm and cold.”

  I swallow hard, because she’s right, and it’s exactly why he scares me. Three and a half years ago when they met, I would’ve said he seemed quiet, but decent. The quiet part is still true, but decent? Deranged might be a better word.

  A memory snaps into focus in my head: Charlie was reviewing a document on the computer, a notepad beside him. I stepped closer, a knot growing in my stomach, and saw a list of familiar names in his precise writing. Mom’s friends. My friends. Teachers. There were dates and tally marks. A couple of cryptic comments.

  Tracking our calls wasn’t the worst thing or the only thing he did, but it was the first time he scared me.

  “Wait, what about the steakhouse? He made your mom quit her job,” Lana says.

  “She went along with it. It’s not against the law to be an asshole husband. They can’t do anything to him unless he directly threatens or hurts us.”

  “Maybe he won’t, and it’ll never be worse than him being a freak.”

  His words come back to me. Maybe I won’t be so nice.

  “I think he’s capable of worse,” I say softly. “Something awful.”

  “I hate him.” She says it bitterly, but shakes it off fast. “So what do we do?”

  I smile because I love this about Lana. She’s so logical. When her father and brother were sent back to Venezuela last year, I was the angry one. I was ready to take to the streets, but Lana and Maria dove into paperwork and attorney websites. Lana told me she wasn’t going to whine when she could spend her time trying to do something that might make a difference. It’s still not over, but they’re getting closer.

  Which is why I need to learn from her lesson.

  “I’m going to wait it out,” I say. “Charlie thinks I’ll come back with my tail between my legs. When I don’t, Mom might change her mind. I think she’ll go when the baby comes. I just need to lay low until then. Mom’s due New Year’s Eve.”