Chapter Ten
I’m sifting through the Rubbermaid bins filled with books, questioning if I should really get rid of them. It’s three a.m. I can’t sleep.
What if I regret getting rid of these books? What if I want to read them again someday? I change a lot. I have no idea who I’ll be in a year, or five, and what I’ll want to read in a few years. I could be a totally different person. I could love these books. I could hate everything I’ve kept.
I sit down and look around the cluttered room. I don’t feel well. I put my hand to my forehead.
I wonder what it feels like to have an aneurysm.
Maybe I should get rid of every single book in this house and start fresh. Maybe we have too many books. Maybe that’s the problem.
No. What am I thinking? What about Joy? Maybe my mom is right.
Maybe my problem is that I think about myself too much.
I obsess about what I want. What I feel.
What works for me. A lot of these books don’t even belong to me.
This isn’t just my library. We collected most of what we have here together.
I keep seeing Ben’s face on the inside of my eyelids. I hope he didn’t know it was happening. I don’t think he’d want to know it was happening.
Why am I organizing these books anyway? I won’t read all these books again. I haven’t even read many of them. What am I amassing these for? What am I going to do with them? What’s the point?
“Someone just emailed me photos of myself,” Mordecai says.
“That’s nice,” I reply mindlessly. We’re both working in the back. I just returned from the bathroom, where I spent the last twenty minutes crying. I didn’t sleep last night.
I keep picturing Ben collapsing without warning. His dad finding out. The funeral. Ben’s body in a casket. In the ground.
I was able to compose myself and return to the desk, but I feel drained. Not just because I’m tired, I’m also dehydrated. I think I’ve cried all the liquid out of my body. I’m a prune of a person, just clacking at a keyboard, devoid of moisture, a dry husk, incapable of forming tears.
I want to distract myself. I try to focus on planning our human library program.
It will be open to the public, but I’m also working with a teacher from a college in Pert City to invite her class of sociology students.
The professor assigned a project dependent upon their participation in the program.
I’m advertising that we’ll have food, which I find also helps ensure attendance.
I need to coordinate more with the “books.” Each human book comes prepared with a story to share.
The “borrower” will ask the “book” questions, and they’ll chat for fifteen minutes.
The program is meant to bridge divides and combat prejudice by facilitating conversation between people from different backgrounds.
So far, we have a firefighter, a person living with HIV, a person living without stable housing, a Muslim woman, a veteran, a cancer survivor, an ex-convict, a man who is blind, an Indigenous person from the Anishinaabe people, and a palliative care nurse.
“No,” Mordecai says. “It’s not nice. They sent me pretransition photos of myself.”
“What?” I look up from my computer.
He turns his monitor toward me.
The email is titled I KNOW YOUR SECRET, and old photos of Mordecai are attached. The photos depict him as a child, wearing dresses. One is of him as a teenager. He’s at the beach building a sandcastle in a green tankini.
It’s not a secret that Mordecai is trans. He worked here before he started transitioning, and he often mentions that he’s trans. In fact, I’ve seen most of these photos before because Mordecai has shared them himself on social media. He often posts his old childhood pictures.
I get up and stand behind his chair. “Can you show me who sent it?”
He closes the photos so I can see the metadata in the email.
My mouth opens involuntarily. It’s from EaglesNest88@.
He says, “Who the hell is EaglesNest88? This is unnerving. And as if they ‘know my secret.’ Give me a break. This one is my profile picture on all my social media!”
It’s of him at about seven, wearing comically large glasses. His hair is in pigtails and he’s sticking out his tongue.
“This is supposed to be threatening, isn’t it?” he says. “You know who I bet it’s from, one of those protestors. They were hollering at me on my way to work the other day. The man who threatened to spit on me, screaming ‘groomer.’ I bet it’s him. What should we do? Should we call Brenda?”
“Make sure he keeps the email,” Brenda says. “Please don’t delete it. We need to keep a record of everything. I’ll talk to the police right away. Is he upset? How’s he doing?”
He’s standing beside me listening. He mouths, I’m fine.
“He’s fine,” I say.
“Okay. Please remind him we offer counseling services as part of the employee assistance program,” she says.
“I’ll let him know.”
“Thank you, Darcy. While I have you, I want to mention that we’ve scheduled that community forum to review our policies next Monday. It’s posted on our website.”
“Good to know. I didn’t see. Thank you.”
“No problem. I’ll see you there. Thanks for letting me know about this.”
“Yeah, no problem. Sounds good. Bye.”
When I hang up, Mordecai snorts. “As if I need counseling services because of an asinine email. How fragile does Brenda think I am?”
I frown. “It wouldn’t make you fragile—”
“I’m fine,” he assures me. “I’m outraged by the gall of whoever this is.
If anything, it’s ridiculous. I do think this email is intended to be harassment, but is it criminal?
And would the cops care? I bet nothing’s going to come of Brenda calling them.
They did zilch after the protestors threatened us and blocked the library from patrons.
The cops aren’t going to care about someone sending me pictures of myself if they don’t even care about that. ”
I rub my eyes. “You’re probably right.”
He lowers his voice and leans closer to me. “And you know what? Between you and me, I’d rather take it into my own hands anyway.”
I furrow my brow. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m going to find out who emailed me this, and I’ll deal with them myself.”
I squint at him. Is he secretly involved in some back-alley, vigilante justice?
I glance around us to check if anyone is eavesdropping. Ahmad and Doris, who are both pages, are working nearby. They’re sorting returned books, chatting to each other. I don’t think they’re listening.
“How?” I whisper. “What do you mean?”
He says, “I mean I’ll find out who sent this myself.”
“And then what? What will you do once you find out?”
He shrugs. “I’ll decide what to do next once I know. Maybe I’ll confront them. Maybe I’ll publicly expose them.”
We look at each other for a moment.
I like to follow rules. I appreciate protocol, established steps, clear guidelines, and order. I’m starting to recognize, however, that sometimes our established processes don’t work, and deviation is necessary.
I say, “That’s not a terrible approach.”
He smirks. “Will you help me?”
I glance at Ahmad and Doris. They’re inspecting a large book that appears to be damaged.
I say, “Yeah, I’ll help you, but I need to confess something first.”
“What?”
Very quietly I say, “EaglesNest88 emailed me too.”
“What?” he says, way too loudly.
Ahmad and Doris both look at us. Mordecai says, “Sorry! I just got excited about something!”
I smile at them awkwardly.
They both turn back to the damaged book.
I whisper, “It happened last week. It was similarly vague and threatening. I’d accidentally posted a naked photo of myself on Instagram not long ago, and they somehow got their hands on it.”
He gasps. “Did you tell Brenda?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t want her to see or know about the photo. Plus, I don’t think she can do anything. I’m of the same mind as you. I don’t think Brenda or the cops are any more positioned to deal with it than I am.”
“Than we are,” he corrects me. “We’re going to get to the bottom of this together.”
Mordecai and I are now sitting at a desk, scrolling through Declan Turner’s Facebook profile.
“He’s the prime suspect,” Mordecai says.
“But how would he get our photos?” I ask.
Mordecai is manning the mouse. He says, “And why does he post so many pictures of grass? Oh wow, and all the photos he’s posted of himself are hazy selfies taken from an extremely low angle.
I feel like I’m in his lap. Gross. Did he rub Vaseline on his lens before taking these?
And he’s not smiling in a single picture. What’s his problem?”
He scrolls down. Declan has posted to his own wall several times, seemingly attempting to enter queries in the search bar.
LIBERTY LATELY
SHERYL ESTEVEZ
SHERYL ESTEVEZ
He’s also posted a review for an HVAC company to his own wall. It says: LET ME START BY SAYING THESE GUYS ARE TOTAL SCAMMERS. I’D SOONER HIRE A DONKEY TO SERVICE MY AC. STRONGLY RECOMMEND IF YOU WANT TO WASTE YOUR TIME AND MONEY.
I snort. “He really doesn’t seem like he’s capable of breaking into our social media. I know it doesn’t take a genius, but—”
“Yeah, this is a man who should really join us for Tech Literacy Tuesdays. There’s no way he’s breaking into our private accounts. But maybe it’s one of his buddies?”
He opens up Declan’s friend list and begins to scroll.
“Some of these people do look familiar. I think they were at the protest,” Mordecai says.
I hear a ding from my computer. I get up to check it. It’s an email from the bird patron. It says, CAN I ASK QUESTIONS THAT AREN’T ABOUT BIRDS?
I squint, wondering what’s prompted this turn in their interests. It’s hard to tell over email, but I sense a subtle, ominous shift in their tone.
I hit reply and type, YES, OF COURSE, YOU CAN ASK ANYTHING.