Chapter 1 #3
“I’m afraid we don’t have any more hours for you this week, Alix.” Elizabeth’s voice through my phone was apologetic; I could hear her tapping on her keyboard as she looked through the library schedule. “Sorry about that.”
I sighed, hovering at the T-stop stairs just outside The Bump ’n’ Grind. Shelving book returns at the Boston Public Library was the nicest of my jobs, but it paid the worst and gave me the fewest hours. “Anything next week?”
“Afraid not.” Elizabeth was one of those rare bureaucrats who sounded honestly sorry rather than robotically bland if she had to tell you no, and I tried to muster a smile in my voice for my boss at the BPL as I gave her my well-thank-you-for-checking.
Definitely the coolest of my bosses: thirty-five-ish with funky purple-framed glasses and a full sleeve of flower-vine tattoos, looking about as far as you could get from the stereotypical gray-bunned, cardigan-wearing librarian who shushed people, thank God.
“I can give you four hours the following Tuesday, though,” she added with some more clicking.
“One of the other pages has a baby shower to host and needs to go shopping—I was going to sub in Vicky but if you want the hours I can swap you two around. Will that help?”
My mind computed four hours at $17.19 an hour.
That plus the cash from Beau’s data entry might be enough to get my roommates off my back about my share of the rent.
“I’ll take the four hours,” I told my boss, wondering in the back of my mind if I was ever going to get to the stage in life where a) my friends were having baby showers, and b) I could afford to buy presents for my friends who were having baby showers.
Hell, if I was ever going to get to a stage in my life where I had friends.
If my life were a book—some gritty award-winning lit-fic about former foster-care kids who make good—I’d have an inseparable pack who had my back through thick and thin, but real life wasn’t like that.
Ordinary kids I’d gone to school with wrinkled their noses at the ones who were in homes, and I’d moved around too much to bond with anyone else in the system alongside me.
I had work friends now, sure, but with the kind of crap jobs that were all I could get, coworkers were always coming and going—and it’s hard to keep up the closer kind of friendship when you’re always working flat out to make ends meet.
Besides, friends are just more people who let you down. Who needs that?
“If any more pages drop out on me, I’ll put you in for the extra hours,” Elizabeth said, sounding encouraging. “You know we always have last-minute cancellations. Things will work out, you’ll see.”
Easy to say when you have a degree, a job, and more than forty bucks in the bank, I managed not to reply.
Because she was practically vibrating encouragement down the phone at me, I muttered a quick “Thanks” and hung up, massaging my jaw again before I could resume grinding my teeth.
I really, really needed that dentist appointment.
Thumping down the stairs to the T station, I hopped on the next car, knowing I should head home, wishing I could head to the library instead even though I didn’t have any hours scheduled.
It was just about my favorite place in the world, and I’d visited my share of libraries since I started getting ditched at the local branch at age five.
A library is the one place a harried mom headed off on a lunch date with the latest guy who isn’t keen on the whole kid thing can park her child for a couple of hours, without needing to make some kind of purchase.
I started ditching myself in libraries as a foster kid, because even the worst roach-infested library branch was better than sitting around a shared basement room wondering if my latest foster sister was going to set my hair on fire because she was bored.
At eighteen, libraries were the best place to cruise want ads and submit online job applications.
And when I found the Reading Room of the Boston Public Library, I felt a thrum of angelic song in my bones.
The old part of the BPL was beautiful, from the Italianate garden at its center to the great double staircase guarded by a pair of majestic stone lions to the Abbey Room with its murals of Galahad questing for the Holy Grail .
. . but the Reading Room was something really special.
A huge, barrel-vaulted room with an endless stretch of tall windows like a cathedral, a double row of long tables where laptops and research books were stacked between lamps with green glass shades like a scatter of emeralds, marble busts and book-lined niches on the wall facing the endless windows.
You could sit at any of those tables, get out your book, and read as long as you liked, the only sound in the vaulted space the susurrus of laptop keys and the rustle of pages.
For me it had been home since about the age of twelve, when I’d been plowing my way steadily through my sixth foster home and all the adventures of Camp Half-Blood, Alanna of Tortall, and Westeros (sure, I was too young for all the sex and gore, but who was around to care?).
Fantasy. That was where I always wanted to live, since I first crawled between the pages of Voyage of the Dawn Treader at age eight.
I never wanted to star in some dystopian teen hellscape; I never wanted Pemberley and Mr. Darcy—what I wanted was ESCAPE, all caps, not just back in time but off to another world, preferably one where women rode dragons and flame-roasted the men who told them to smile.
I wanted second breakfast in Tolkien’s Middle Earth; I wanted L.
Frank Baum’s Yellow Brick Road under my feet and C.
S. Lewis’s lamppost lighting my way through snowy forests.
I wanted gunpowder-scented winds in my hair as I walked the decks of Jeannie Lin’s Chinese junks; I wanted to challenge a queen to single combat on G.
R. Macallister’s desert sands; I wanted to make the earth tremble alongside N.
K. Jemisin’s rage-filled orogenes. I wanted to hatch one of George R.
R. Martin’s dragon eggs, only I wouldn’t get dragged down to my doom—I’d ride off into the sunset in a flash of emerald-green wings, and the only thought in my head wouldn’t be Card declined. It would be Fly, fly, FLY.
I pulled out my battered copy of Dawn Treader—the third book in the Narnia series, my security-blanket book, the one I still dove into whenever the world’s dice rolled me a bad day—and stared at it blankly.
My head ached, I was grinding my teeth again, I’d just lost the steadiest of my jobs, and I’d be lucky if tonight’s dinner was anything more than a bowl of instant ramen.
I put my head down on the tattered paperback, fighting my stupid useless tears as the T rumbled along, and mumbled, “Fly, fly, fly.”
But every time I checked, my feet in their leaking pleather boots were still ground-bound.