Ex Libris

by Paula Guran

  Karl is snoring. Jeremy could go up on the roof and look at stars, except he’s already packed up his telescope. He could try to wake up Elizabeth and they could go up on the roof, but Talis is down there. He and Talis could go sit on the roof, but he doesn’t want to kiss Talis on the roof. He makes a solemn oath to only ever kiss Elizabeth on the roof.

  He picks up his phone. Maybe he can call his phone booth and complain just a little and not wake Karl up. His dad is going to freak out about the phone bill. All these calls to Nevada. It’s 4:00 a.m. Jeremy’s plan is not to go to sleep at all. His friends are lame.

  The phone rings and rings and rings and then someone picks up. Jeremy recognizes the silence on the other end. “Everybody came over and fell asleep,” he whispers. “That’s why I’m whispering. I don’t even think they care that I’m leaving. And my feet hurt. Remember how I was going to dress up as a Forbidden Book? Platform shoes aren’t comfortable. Karl thinks I did it on purpose, to be even taller than him than usual. And I forgot that I was wearing lipstick and I kissed Talis and got lipstick all over her face, so it’s a good thing everyone was asleep because otherwise someone would have seen. And my dad says that he won’t shoplift at all while Mom and I are gone, but you can’t trust him. And that fake-fur upholstery sheds like—”

  “Jeremy,” that strangely familiar, sweet-and-rusty door-hinge voice says softly. “Shut up, Jeremy. I need your help.”

  “Wow!” Jeremy says, not in a whisper. “Wow, wow, wow! Is this Fox? Are you really Fox? Is this a joke? Are you real? Are you dead? What are you doing in my phone booth?”

  “You know who I am,” Fox says, and Jeremy knows with all his heart that it’s really Fox. “I need you to do something for me.”

  “What?” Jeremy says. Karl, on the bed, laughs in his sleep as if the idea of Jeremy doing something is funny to him. “What could I do?”

  “I need you to steal three books,” Fox says. “From a library in a place called Iowa.”

  “I know Iowa,” Jeremy says. “I mean, I’ve never been there, but it’s a real place. I could go there.”

  “I’m going to tell you the books you need to steal,” Fox says. “Author, title, and the jewelly festival number—”

  “Dewey Decimal,” Jeremy says. “It’s actually called the Dewey Decimal number in real libraries.”

  “Real,” Fox says, sounding amused. “You need to write this all down and also how to get to the library. You need to steal the three books and bring them to me. It’s very important.”

  “Is it dangerous?” Jeremy says. “Are the Forbidden Books up to something? Are the Forbidden Books real, too? What if I get caught stealing?”

  “It’s not dangerous to you,” Fox says. “Just don’t get caught. Remember the episode of The Library when I was the little old lady with the beehive and I stole the Bishop of Tweedle’s false teeth while he was reading the banns for the wedding of Faithful Margaret and Sir Petronella the Younger? Remember how he didn’t even notice?”

  “I’ve never seen that episode,” Jeremy says, although as far as he knows he’s never missed a single episode of The Library. He’s never even heard of Sir Petronella.

  “Oh,” Fox says. “Maybe that’s a flashback in a later episode or something. That’s a great episode. We’re depending on you, Jeremy. You have got to steal these books. They contain dreadful secrets. I can’t say the titles out loud. I’m going to spell them instead.”

  So Jeremy gets a pad of paper and Fox spells out the titles of each book twice. (They aren’t titles that can be written down here. It’s safer not to even think about some books.) “Can I ask you something?” Jeremy says. “Can I tell anybody about this? Not Amy. But could I tell Karl or Elizabeth? Or Talis? Can I tell my mom? If I woke up Karl right now, would you talk to him for a minute?”

  “I don’t have a lot of time,” Fox says. “I have to go now. Please don’t tell anyone, Jeremy. I’m sorry.”

  “Is it the Forbidden Books?” Jeremy says again. What would Fox think if she saw the costume he’s still wearing, all except for the platform heels? “Do you think I shouldn’t trust my friends? But I’ve known them my whole life!”

  Fox makes a noise, a kind of pained whuff.

  “What is it?” Jeremy says. “Are you okay?”

  “I have to go,” Fox says. “Nobody can know about this. Don’t give anybody this number. Don’t tell anyone about your phone booth. Or me. Promise, Germ?”

  “Only if you promise you won’t call me Germ,” Jeremy says, feeling really stupid. “I hate when people call me that. Call me Mars instead.”

  “Mars,” Fox says, and it sounds exotic and strange and brave, as if Jeremy has just become a new person, a person named after a whole planet, a person who kisses girls and talks to Foxes.

  “I’ve never stolen anything,” Jeremy says.

  But Fox has hung up.

  Maybe out there, somewhere, is someone who enjoys having to say good-bye, but it isn’t anyone that Jeremy knows. All of his friends are grumpy and red-eyed, although not from crying. From lack of sleep. From too much television. There are still faint red stains around Talis’s mouth and if everyone weren’t so tired, they would realize it’s Jeremy’s lipstick. Karl gives Jeremy a handful of quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. “For the slot machines,” Karl says. “If you win anything, you can keep a third of what you win.”

  “Half,” Jeremy says, automatically.

  “Fine,” Karl says. “It’s all from your dad’s sofas, anyway. Just one more thing. Stop getting taller. Don’t get taller while you’re gone. Okay.” He hugs Jeremy hard: so hard that it’s almost like getting punched again. No wonder Talis threw the boa constrictor at Karl.

  Talis and Elizabeth both hug Jeremy good-bye. Talis looks even more mysterious now that he’s sat with her under a disco ball and made out. Later on, Jeremy will discover that Talis has left her sword under the blue fur couch and he’ll wonder if she left it on purpose.

  Talis doesn’t say anything and Amy, of course, doesn’t shut up, not even when she kisses him. It feels weird to be kissed by someone who goes right on talking while they kiss you and yet it shouldn’t be a surprise that Amy kisses him. He imagines that later Amy and Talis and Elizabeth will all compare notes.

  Elizabeth says, “I promise I’ll tape every episode of The Library while you’re gone so we can all watch them together when you get back. I promise I’ll call you in Vegas, no matter what time it is there, when there’s a new episode.”

  Her hair is a mess and her breath is faintly sour. Jeremy wishes he could tell her how beautiful she looks. “I’ll write bad poetry and send it to you,” he says.

  Jeremy’s mother is looking hideously cheerful as she goes in and out of the house, making sure that she hasn’t left anything behind. She loves long car trips. It doesn’t bother her one bit that she and her son are abandoning their entire lives. She passes Jeremy a folder full of maps. “You’re in charge of not getting lost,” she says. “Put these somewhere safe.”

  Jeremy says, “I found a library online that I want to go visit. Out in Iowa. They have a corn mosaic on the façade of the building, with a lot of naked goddesses and gods dancing around in a field of corn. Someone wants to take it down. Can we go see it first?”

  “Sure,” his mother says.

  Jeremy’s father has filled a whole grocery bag with sandwiches. His hair is drooping and he looks even more like an axe murderer than usual. If this were a movie, you’d think that Jeremy and his mother were escaping in the nick of time. “You take care of your mother,” he says to Jeremy.

  “Sure,” Jeremy says. “You take care of yourself.”

  His dad sags. “You take care of yourself, too.” So it’s settled. They’re all supposed to take care of themselves. Why can’t they stay home and take care of each other, until Jeremy is good and ready to go off to college? “I’ve got another bag of sandwiches in the kitchen,” his dad says. “I should go get them.”

  “Wai
t,” Jeremy says. “I have to ask you something before we take off. Suppose I had to steal something. I mean, I don’t have to steal anything, of course, and I know stealing is wrong, even when you do it, and I would never steal anything. But what if I did? How do you do it? How do you do it and not get caught?”

  His father shrugs. He’s probably wondering if Jeremy is really his son. Gordon Mars inherited his mutant, long-fingered, ambidextrous hands from a long line of shoplifters and money launderers and petty criminals. They’re all deeply ashamed of Jeremy’s father. Gordon Mars had a gift and he threw it away to become a writer. “I don’t know,” he says. He picks up Jeremy’s hand and looks at it as if he’s never noticed before that Jeremy had something hanging off the end of his wrist. “You just do it. You do it like you’re not really doing anything at all. You do it while you’re thinking about something else and you forget that you’re doing it.”

  “Oh, Jeremy says, taking his hand back. “I’m not planning on stealing anything. I was just curious.”

  His father looks at him. “Take care of yourself,” he says again, as if he really means it, and hugs Jeremy hard.

  Then he goes and gets the sandwiches (so many sandwiches that Jeremy and his mother will eat sandwiches for the first three days, and still have to throw half of them away). Everyone waves. Jeremy and his mother climb in the van. Jeremy’s mother turns on the CD player. Bob Dylan is singing about monkeys. His mother loves Bob Dylan. They drive away.

  Do you know how, sometimes, during a commercial break in your favorite television shows, your best friend calls and wants to talk about one of her boyfriends, and when you try to hang up, she starts crying and you try to cheer her up and end up missing about half of the episode? And so when you go to work the next day, you have to get the guy who sits next to you to explain what happened? That’s the good thing about a book. You can mark your place in a book. But this isn’t really a book. It’s a television show.

  In one episode of The Library, an adolescent boy drives across the country with his mother. They have to change a tire. The boy practices taking things out of his mother’s purse and putting them back again. He steals a sixteen-ounce bottle of Coke from one convenience market and leaves it at another convenience market. The boy and his mother stop at a lot of libraries, and the boy keeps a blog, but he skips the bit about the library in Iowa. He writes in his blog about what he’s reading, but he doesn’t read the books he stole in Iowa, because Fox told him not to, and because he has to hide them from his mother. Well, he reads just a few pages. Skims, really. He hides them under the blue-fur sofa. They go camping in Utah, and the boy sets up his telescope. He sees three shooting stars and a coyote. He never sees anyone who looks like a Forbidden Book, although he sees a transvestite go into the woman’s rest room at a rest stop in Indiana. He calls a phone booth just outside Las Vegas twice, but no one ever answers. He has short conversations with his father. He wonders what his father is up to. He wishes he could tell his father about Fox and the books. Once the boy’s mother finds a giant spider the size of an Oreo in their tent. She starts laughing hysterically. She takes a picture of it with her digital camera, and the boy puts the picture on his blog. Sometimes the boy asks questions and his mother talks about her parents. Once she cries. The boy doesn’t know what to say. They talk about their favorite episodes of The Library and the episodes that they really hated, and the mother asks if the boy thinks Fox is really dead. He says he doesn’t think so.

  Once a man tries to break into the van while they are sleeping in it. But then he goes away. Maybe the painting of the woman with the peeling knife is protecting them.

  But you’ve seen this episode before.

  It’s Cinco de Mayo. It’s almost seven o’clock at night, and the sun is beginning to go down. Jeremy and his mother are in the desert and Las Vegas is somewhere in front of them. Every time they pass a driver coming the other way, Jeremy tries to figure out if that person has just won or lost a lot of money. Everything is flat and sort of tilted here, except off in the distance, where the land goes up abruptly, as if someone has started to fold up a map. Somewhere around here is the Grand Canyon, which must have been a surprise when people first saw it.

  Jeremy’s mother says, “Are you sure we have to do this first? Couldn’t we go find your phone booth later?”

  “Can we do it now?” Jeremy says. “I said I was going to do it on my blog. It’s like a quest that I have to complete.”

  “Okay,” his mother says. “It should be around here somewhere. It’s supposed to be four point five miles after the turnoff, and here’s the turnoff.”

  It isn’t hard to find the phone booth. There isn’t much else around. Jeremy should feel excited when he sees it, but it’s a disappointment, really. He’s seen phone booths before. He was expecting something to be different. Mostly he just feels tired of road trips and tired of roads and just tired, tired, tired. He looks around to see if Fox is somewhere nearby, but there’s just a hiker off in the distance. Some kid.

  “Okay, Germ,” his mother says. “Make this quick.”

  “I need to get my backpack out of the back,” Jeremy says.

  “Do you want me to come too?” his mother says.

  “No,” Jeremy says. “This is kind of personal.”

  His mother looks like she’s trying not to laugh. “Just hurry up. I have to pee.”

  When Jeremy gets to the phone booth, he turns around. His mother has the light on in the van. It looks like she’s singing along to the radio. His mother has a terrible voice.

  When he steps inside the phone booth, it isn’t magical. The phone booth smells rank, as if an animal has been living in it. The windows are smudgy. He takes the stolen books out of his backpack and puts them in the little shelf where someone has stolen a phone book. Then he waits. Maybe Fox is going to call him. Maybe he’s supposed to wait until she calls. But she doesn’t call. He feels lonely. There’s no one he can tell about this. He feels like an idiot and he also feels kind of proud. Because he did it. He drove cross-country with his mother and saved an imaginary person.

  “So how’s your phone booth?” his mother says.

  “Great!” he says, and they’re both silent again. Las Vegas is in front of them and then all around them and everything is lit up like they’re inside a pinball game. All of the trees look fake. Like someone read too much Dr. Seuss and got ideas. People are walking up and down the sidewalks. Some of them look normal. Others look like they just escaped from a fancy-dress ball at a lunatic asylum. Jeremy hopes they’ve just won lots of money and that’s why they look so startled, so strange. Or maybe they’re all vampires.

  “Left,” he tells his mother. “Go left here. Look out for the vampires on the crosswalk. And then it’s an immediate right.” Four times his mother let him drive the van: once in Utah, twice in South Dakota, once in Pennsylvania. The van smells like old burger wrappers and fake fur, and it doesn’t help that Jeremy’s gotten used to the smell. The woman in the painting has had a pained expression on her face for the last few nights, and the disco ball has lost some of its pieces of mirror because Jeremy kept knocking his head on it in the morning. Jeremy and his mother haven’t showered in three days.

  Here is the wedding chapel, in front of them, at the end of a long driveway. Electric purple light shines on a sign that spells out Hell’s Bells. There’s a wrought-iron fence and a yard full of trees dripping Spanish moss. Under the trees, tombstones and miniature mausoleums.

  “Do you think those are real?” his mother says. She sounds slightly worried.

  “‘Harry East, Recently Deceased,’” Jeremy says. “No, I don’t.”

  There’s a hearse in the driveway with a little plaque on the back. Recently Buried Married. The chapel is a Victorian house with a bell tower. Perhaps it’s full of bats. Or giant spiders. Jeremy’s father would love this place. His mother is going to hate it.

  Someone stands at the threshold of the chapel, door open, looking out at them. Bu
t as Jeremy and his mother get out of the van, he turns and goes inside and shuts the door. “Look out,” his mother says. “They’ve probably gone to put the boiling oil in the microwave.”

  She rings the doorbell determinedly. Instead of ringing, there’s a recording of a crow. Caw, caw, caw. All the lights in the Victorian house go out. Then they turn on again. The door swings open and Jeremy tightens his grip on his backpack, just in case. “Good evening, Madam. Young man,” a man says and Jeremy looks up and up and up. The man at the door has to lower his head to look out. His hands are large as toaster ovens. He looks like he’s wearing Chihuahua coffins on his feet. Two realistic-looking bolts stick out on either side of his head. He wears green pancake makeup, glittery green eye shadow, and his lashes are as long and thick and green as AstroTurf. “We weren’t expecting you so soon.”

  “We should have called ahead,” Jeremy’s mother says. “I’m real sorry.”

  “Great costume,” Jeremy says.

  The Frankenstein curls his lip in a somber way. “Thank you,” he says. “Call me Miss Thing, please.”

  “I’m Jeremy,” Jeremy says. “This is my mother.”

  “Oh please,” Miss Thing says. Even his wink is somber. “You tease me. She isn’t old enough to be your mother.”

  “Oh please, yourself,” Jeremy’s mother says.

  “Quick, the two of you,” someone yells from somewhere inside Hell’s Bells. “While you zthtand there gabbing, the devil ithz prowling around like a lion, looking for a way to get in. Are you juthzt going to zthtand there and hold the door wide open for him?”

  So they all step inside. “Is that Jeremy Marthz at lathzt?” the voice says. “Earth to Marthz, Earth to Marthz. Marthzzz, Jeremy Marthzzz, there’thz zthomeone on the phone for Jeremy Marthz. She’thz called three timethz in the lathzt ten minutethz, Jeremy Marthzzzz.”

  It’s Fox, Jeremy knows. Of course, it’s Fox! She’s in the phone booth. She’s got the books and she’s going to tell me that I saved whatever it is that I was saving. He walks toward the buzzing voice while Miss Thing and his mother go back out to the van.