Ex Libris

by Paula Guran

  “And this whole book thing. The whole shoplifting thing, how my dad steals things, it figures that he went and stole my life. It isn’t just me being melodramatic, to say that. That’s exactly what he did! Did I tell you that once he stole a ferret from a pet store because he felt bad for it, and then he let it loose in our house and it turned out that it was pregnant? There was this woman who came to interview Dad and she sat down on one of the—”

  Someone knocks on his bedroom door. “Jeremy,” his mother says. “Is Karl here? Am I interrupting?”

  “No,” Jeremy says, and hangs up the phone. He’s gotten into the habit of calling his phone booth every day. When he calls, it rings and rings and then it stops ringing, as if someone has picked up. There’s just silence on the other end, no squeaky pretend-Fox voice, but it’s a peaceful, interested silence. Jeremy complains about all the things there are to complain about, and the silent person on the other end listens and listens. Maybe it is Fox standing there in his phone booth and listening patiently. He wonders what incarnation of Fox is listening. One thing about Fox: she’s never sorry for herself. She’s always too busy. If it were really Fox, she’d hang up on him.

  Jeremy opens his door. “I was on the phone,” he says. His mother comes in and sits down on his bed. She’s wearing one of his father’s old flannel shirts. “So have you packed?”

  Jeremy shrugs. “I guess,” he says. “Why did you cry when you saw what Dad did to the van? Don’t you like it?”

  “It’s that damn painting,” his mother says. “It was the first nice thing he ever gave me. We should have spent the money on health insurance and a new roof and groceries and instead he bought a painting. So I got angry. I left him. I took the painting and I moved into a hotel and I stayed there for a few days. I was going to sell the painting, but instead I fell in love with it, so I came home and apologized for running away. I got pregnant with you and I used to get hungry and dream that someone was going to give me a beautiful apple, like the one she’s holding. When I told your father, he said he didn’t trust her, that she was holding out the apple like that as a trick and if you went to take it from her, she’d stab you with the peeling knife. He says that she’s a tough old broad and she’ll take care of us while we’re on the road.”

  “Do we really have to go?” Jeremy says. “If we go to Las Vegas I might get into trouble. I might start using drugs or gambling or something.”

  “Oh, Germ. You try so hard to be a good kid,” his mother says. “You try so hard to be normal. Sometimes I’d like to be normal, too. Maybe Vegas will be good for us. Are these the books that you’re bringing?”

  Jeremy shrugs. “Not all of them. I can’t decide which ones I should take and which ones I can leave. It feels like whatever I leave behind, I’m leaving behind for good.”

  “That’s silly,” his mother says. “We’re coming back. I promise. Your father and I will work things out. If you leave something behind that you need, he can mail it to you. Do you think there are slot machines in the libraries in Las Vegas? I talked to a woman at the Hell’s Bells chapel and there’s something called The Arts and Lovecraft Library where they keep Cleo’s special collection of horror novels and gothic romances and fake copies of The Necronomicon. You go in and out through a secret, swinging-bookcase door. People get married in it. There’s a Dr. Frankenstein’s LoveLab, the Masque of the Red Death Ballroom, and also something just called The Crypt. Oh yeah, and there’s also The Vampire’s Patio and The Black Lagoon Grotto, where you can get married by moonlight.”

  “You hate all this stuff,” Jeremy says.

  “It’s not my cup of tea,” his mother says. “When does everyone show up tonight?”

  “Around eight,” Jeremy says. “Are you going to get dressed up?”

  “I don’t have to dress up,” his mother says. “I’m a librarian, remember?”

  Jeremy’s father’s office is above the garage. In theory, no one is meant to interrupt him while he’s working, but in practice Jeremy’s father loves nothing better than to be interrupted, as long as the person who interrupts brings him something to eat. When Jeremy and his mother are gone, who will bring Jeremy’s father food? Jeremy hardens his heart.

  The floor is covered with books and bolts and samples of upholstering fabrics. Jeremy’s father is lying facedown on the floor with his feet propped up on a bolt of fabric, which means that he is thinking and also that his back hurts. He claims to think best when he is on the verge of falling asleep.

  “I brought you a bowl of Froot Loops,” Jeremy says.

  His father rolls over and looks up. “Thanks,” he says. “What time is it? Is everyone here? Is that your costume? Is that my tuxedo jacket?”

  “It’s five-ish. Nobody’s here yet. Do you like it?” Jeremy says. He’s dressed as a Forbidden Book. His father’s jacket is too big, but he still feels very elegant. Very sinister. His mother lent him the lipstick and the feathers and the platform heels.

  “It’s interesting,” his father allows. “And a little frightening.”

  Jeremy feels obscurely pleased, even though he knows that his father is more amused than frightened. “Everyone else will probably come as Fox or Prince Wing. Except for Karl. He’s coming as Ptolemy Krill. He even wrote some really bad poetry. I wanted to ask you something, before we leave tomorrow.”

  “Shoot,” his father says.

  “Did you really get rid of the novel with me in it?”

  “No,” his father says. “It felt unlucky. Unlucky to keep it, unlucky not to keep it. I don’t know what to do with it.”

  Jeremy says, “I’m glad you didn’t get rid of it.”

  “It’s not any good, you know,” his father says. “Which makes all this even worse. At first it was because I was bored with giant spiders. It was going to be something funny to show you. But then I wrote that you had a brain tumor and it wasn’t funny anymore. I figured I could save you—I’m the author, after all—but you got sicker and sicker. You were going through a rebellious phase. You were sneaking out of the house a lot and you hit your mother. You were a real jerk. But it turned out you had a brain tumor and that was making you behave strangely.”

  “Can I ask another question?” Jeremy says. “You know how you like to steal things? You know how you’re really, really good at it?”

  “Yeah,” says his father.

  “Could you not steal things for a while, if I asked you to?” Jeremy says. “Mom isn’t going to be around to pay for the books and stuff that you steal. I don’t want you to end up in jail because we went to Las Vegas.”

  His father closes his eyes as if he hopes Jeremy will forget that he asked a question, and go away.

  Jeremy says nothing.

  “All right,” his father says finally. “I won’t shoplift anything until you get home again.”

  Jeremy’s mother runs around taking photos of everyone. Talis and Elizabeth have both showed up as Fox, although Talis is dead Fox. She carries her fake fur ears and tail around in a little see-through plastic purse and she also has a sword, which she leaves in the umbrella stand in the kitchen. Jeremy and Talis haven’t talked much since she had a dream about him and since he told her that he’s going to Las Vegas. She didn’t say anything about that. Which is perfectly normal for Talis.

  Karl makes an excellent Ptolemy Krill. Jeremy’s Forbidden Book disguise is admired.

  Amy’s Faithful Margaret costume is almost as good as anything Faithful Margaret wears on TV. There are even special effects: Amy has rigged up her hair with red ribbons and wire and spray color and egg whites so that it looks as if it’s on fire, and there are tiny papier-mâché golems in it, making horrible faces. She dances a polka with Jeremy’s father. Faithful Margaret is mad for polka dancing.

  No one has dressed up as Prince Wing.

  They watch the episode with the possessed chicken and they watch the episode with the Salt Wife and they watch the episode where Prince Wing and Faithful Margaret fall under a spell and swa
p bodies and have sex for the first time. They watch the episode where Fox saves Prince Wing’s life for the first time.

  Jeremy’s father makes chocolate/mango/espresso milk shakes for everyone. None of Jeremy’s friends, except for Elizabeth, know about the novel. Everyone thinks Jeremy and his mother are just having an adventure. Everyone thinks Jeremy will be back at the end of the summer.

  “I wonder how they find the actors,” Elizabeth says. “They aren’t real actors. They must be regular people. But you’d think that somewhere there would be someone who knows them. That somebody online would say, hey, that’s my sister! Or that’s the kid I went to school with who threw up in P.E. You know, sometimes someone says something like that or sometimes someone pretends that they know something about The Library, but it always turns out to be a hoax. Just somebody wanting to be somebody.”

  “What about the guy who’s writing it?” Karl says.

  Talis says, “Who says it’s a guy?” and Amy says, “Yeah, Karl, why do you always assume it’s a guy writing it?”

  “Maybe nobody’s writing it,” Elizabeth says. “Maybe it’s magic or it’s broadcast from outer space. Maybe it’s real. Wouldn’t that be cool?”

  “No,” Jeremy says. “Because then Fox would really be dead. That would suck.”

  “I don’t care,” Elizabeth says. “I wish it were real, anyway. Maybe it all really happened somewhere, like King Arthur or Robin Hood, and this is just one version of how it happened. Like a magical After School Special.”

  “Even if it isn’t real,” Amy says, “parts of it could be real. Like maybe the World-Tree Library is real. Or maybe The Library is made up, but Fox is based on somebody that the writer knew. Writers do that all the time, right? Jeremy, I think your dad should write a book about me. I could be eaten by giant spiders. Or have sex with giant spiders and have spider babies. I think that would be so great.”

  So Amy does have psychic abilities, after all, although hopefully she will never know this. When Jeremy tests his own potential psychic abilities, he can almost sense his father, hovering somewhere just outside the living room, listening to this conversation and maybe even taking notes. Which is what writers do. But Jeremy isn’t really psychic. It’s just that lurking and hovering and appearing suddenly when you weren’t expecting him are what his father does, just like shoplifting and cooking. Jeremy prays to all the dark gods that he never receives the gift of knowing what people are thinking. It’s a dark road and it ends up with you trapped on late night television in front of an invisible audience of depressed insomniacs wearing hats made out of tinfoil and they all want to pay you nine-ninety-nine per minute to hear you describe in minute, terrible detail what their deceased cat is thinking about, right now. What kind of future is that? He wants to go to Mars. And when will Elizabeth kiss him again? You can’t just kiss someone twice and then never kiss them again. He tries not to think about Elizabeth and kissing, just in case Amy reads his mind. He realizes that he’s been staring at Talis’s breasts, glares instead at Elizabeth, who is watching TV. Meanwhile, Karl is glaring at him.

  On television, Fox is dancing in the Invisible Nightclub with Faithful Margaret, whose hair is about to catch fire again. The Norns are playing their screechy cover of “Come On, Eileen.” The Norns only know two songs: “Come On, Eileen,” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” They don’t play real instruments. They play squeaky dog toys and also a bathtub, which is enchanted, although nobody knows who by, or why, or what it was enchanted for.

  “If you had to chose one,” Jeremy says, “invisibility or the ability to fly, which would you choose?”

  Everybody looks at him. “Only perverts would want to be invisible,” Elizabeth says.

  “You’d have to be naked if you were invisible,” Karl says. “Because otherwise people would see your clothes.”

  “If you could fly, you’d have to wear thermal underwear because it’s cold up there. So it just depends on whether you like to wear long underwear or no underwear at all,” Amy says.

  It’s the kind of conversation that they have all the time. It makes Jeremy feel homesick even though he hasn’t left yet.

  “Maybe I’ll go make brownies,” Jeremy says. “Elizabeth, do you want to help me make brownies?”

  “Shhh,” Elizabeth says. “This is a good part.”

  On television, Fox and Faithful Margaret are making out. The Faithful part is kind of a joke.

  Jeremy’s parents go to bed at one. By three, Amy and Elizabeth are passed out on the couch and Karl has gone upstairs to check his e-mail on Jeremy’s iBook. On TV, wolves are roaming the tundra of The Free People’s World-Tree Library’s fortieth floor. Snow is falling heavily and librarians are burning books to keep warm, but only the most dull and improving works of literature.

  Jeremy isn’t sure where Talis has gone, so he goes to look for her. She hasn’t gone far. She’s on the landing, looking at the space on the wall where Alice Mars’s painting should be hanging. Talis is carrying her sword with her, and her little plastic purse. In the bathroom off the landing, the singing toilet is still singing away in German. “We’re taking the painting with us,” Jeremy says. “My dad insisted, just in case he accidentally burns down the house while we’re gone. Do you want to go see it? I was going to show everybody, but everybody’s asleep right now.”

  “Sure,” Talis says.

  So Jeremy gets a flashlight and takes her out to the garage and shows her the van. She climbs right inside and sits down on one of the blue-fur couches. She looks around and he wonders what she’s thinking. He wonders if the toilet song is stuck in her head.

  “My dad did all of this,” Jeremy says. He turns on the flashlight and shines it on the disco ball. Light spatters off in anxious, slippery orbits. Jeremy shows Talis how his father has hung up the painting. It looks truly wrong in the van, as if someone demented put it there. Especially with the light reflecting off the disco ball. The woman in the painting looks confused and embarrassed as if Jeremy’s father has accidentally canceled out her protective powers. Maybe the disco ball is her Kryptonite.

  “So remember how you had a dream about me?” Jeremy says. Talis nods. “I think I had a dream about you, that you were Fox.”

  Talis opens up her arms, encompassing her costume, her sword, her plastic purse with poor Fox’s ears and tail inside.

  “There was something you wanted me to do,” Jeremy says. “I was supposed to save you, somehow.”

  Talis just looks at him.

  “How come you never talk?” Jeremy says. All of this is irritating. How he used to feel normal around Elizabeth, like friends, and now everything is peculiar and uncomfortable. How he used to enjoy feeling uncomfortable around Talis, and now, suddenly, he doesn’t. This must be what sex is about. Stop thinking about sex, he thinks.

  Talis opens her mouth and closes it again. Then she says, “I don’t know. Amy talks so much. You all talk a lot. Somebody has to be the person who doesn’t. The person who listens.”

  “Oh,” Jeremy says. “I thought maybe you had a tragic secret. Like maybe you used to stutter.” Except secrets can’t have secrets, they just are.

  “Nope,” Talis says. “It’s like being invisible, you know. Not talking. I like it.”

  “But you’re not invisible,” Jeremy says. “Not to me. Not to Karl. Karl really likes you. Did you hit him with a boa constrictor on purpose?”

  But Talis says, “I wish you weren’t leaving.” The disco ball spins and spins. It makes Jeremy feel kind of carsick and also as if he has sparkly, disco leprosy. He doesn’t say anything back to Talis, just to see how it feels. Except maybe that’s rude. Or maybe it’s rude the way everybody always talks and doesn’t leave any space for Talis to say anything.

  “At least you get to miss school,” Talis says, at last.

  “Yeah,” he says. He leaves another space, but Talis doesn’t say anything this time. “We’re going to stop at all these museums and things on the way across the coun
try. I’m supposed to keep a blog for school and describe stuff in it. I’m going to make a lot of stuff up. So it will be like Creative Writing and not so much like homework.”

  “You should make a list of all the towns with weird names you drive through,” Talis says. “Town of Horseheads. That’s a real place.”

  “Plantagenet,” Jeremy says. “That’s a real place too. I had something really weird to tell you.”

  Talis waits, like she always does.

  Jeremy says, “I called my phone booth, the one that I inherited, and someone answered. She sounded just like Fox when she talked. They told me to call back later. So I’ve called a few more times, but I don’t ever get her.”

  “Fox isn’t a real person,” Talis says. “The Library is just TV.” But she sounds uncertain. That’s the thing about The Library. Nobody knows for sure. Everyone who watches it wishes and hopes that it’s not just acting. That it’s magic, real magic.

  “I know,” Jeremy says.

  “I wish Fox was real,” Fox-Talis says.

  They’ve been sitting in the van for a long time. If Karl looks for them and can’t find them, he’s going to think that they’ve been making out. He’ll kill Jeremy. Once Karl tried to strangle another kid for accidentally peeing on his shoes. Jeremy might as well kiss Talis. So he does, even though she’s still holding her sword. She doesn’t hit him with it. It’s dark and he has his eyes closed and he can almost imagine that he’s kissing Elizabeth.

  Karl has fallen asleep on Jeremy’s bed. Talis is downstairs, fast-forwarding through the episode where some librarians drink too much Euphoria and decide to abolish Story Hour. Not just the practice of having a Story Hour, but the whole Hour. Amy and Elizabeth are still sacked out on the couch. It’s weird to watch Amy sleep. She doesn’t talk in her sleep.