Chapter 20 #2
He shrugged, still juggling that huge white box. “I just went into the library stacks and . . . thought really hard about this place. I felt pretty dumb doing it, but I guess you could say it worked—I asked nicely, and it listened. The door just opened up between two sets of shelves.”
“No, I guessed that part—the Library issued you an invitation once; it clearly kept you on the list if you were willing to come back.” I swallowed. “I’m just—not sure why you’d want to come back.”
Beau’s tired eyes flickered. “I try to act like a gentleman, not just dress like one,” he said. “And I wasn’t even halfway back to my shop before I knew that a gentleman wouldn’t have left you here to defend this place alone.”
“I get why you left, Beau. The Board threatened your livelihood.” His business, his whole life, everything he’d worked for. Elizabeth had threatened my whole life and everything I’d worked for, and I’d folded on the spot.
“They threatened you too,” Beau said, reading my mind. “But you’re still here.”
I looked at my pages of scribbled notes, Dennis hovering ghostily with the coffee and cookies, the books fluttering.
They’d drawn closer to me over the hours, I realized.
“The Library Board convenes here in the morning for the annual meeting. I’m letting them in—I don’t really have a choice—and I’m going to defend the Library.
I don’t know if I can win, but I’m going to try. ”
“Some fights are worth starting,” Beau said. “Even if you think you’ll lose.”
I gave a wobbly smile and filled him in on everything—my confrontation with Elizabeth, the note in my mother’s name—before disjointedly hashing out my plan. It was sounding weaker every time I went through it. Beau just nodded. “How can I help?”
I nearly broke down crying. “Just—be here for me. Be here to see me through it, because no one ever does. Everything hard I’ve ever had to face, I end up facing alone.”
“Not today,” he said simply.
The words resonated through the air, through the Library, through my bones. Not today.
Beau had chosen the Astral Library. Beau had chosen me.
“So I have to ask . . .” He looked me over, my old jeans with the rip in the knee, my coffee-splashed T-shirt. “You aren’t wearing that to face the Library Board, are you?”
“I hadn’t gotten as far as my Board meeting ensemble, Beau,” I said, managing to sound wry when all I really wanted was to fall on his chest and blubber. “I don’t think it matters what I wear.”
“Oh, honey, no. They think you’re a loser, some spineless jellyfish who can be strong-armed into doing their dirty work for them?
Fuck that and fuck them. You show them something different, something they don’t expect, and they’ll sit down to that meeting feeling off-balance.
Show them you’re not a jellyfish or a loser. Walk in there as a goddamn queen.”
“And what would a queen wear to an annual board meeting?” I asked, eyeing the big white box in his arms.
He parked it on the floor and lifted the lid, releasing a waft of scented tissue paper. “I’ve got just the thing.”
The knock at the door, at what I presumed was nine o’clock sharp the following morning in the outside world, was every bit as officious and obnoxious as you’d expect a knock from the Library Board president to sound.
Not particularly patient, because mere mortals don’t keep Board presidents waiting.
I did. I waited till she knocked again, even less patiently, and then a third time, and then I gave Beau the nod.
Whatever Elizabeth and the cadre of suits at her back were expecting to see as the door flung open, it wasn’t Beau in his jeans and T-shirt, lounging against the carved doorjamb like an off-duty supermodel.
“’Sup, dipshits,” he said with his most devastating smile. “You must be the mouth-breathing asswipes trying to destroy this place.”
“You must be Mr. Sato-Jones . . .” Elizabeth looked him up and down. “Must say I’m disappointed. I hoped we’d made our position clear in our last communication.”
“Oh, are we being polite? Apologies, ma’am.” He swept her a bow worthy of the Prince Regent’s court. “Entrez, dipshits.”
He made Elizabeth step around him as she headed down the stairs—and I saw her blink behind her glasses when she saw me.
“The Belle dress,” Beau had said simply, unveiling his masterpiece. “If you’re an actress playing everyone’s favorite bookish Disney Princess, what do you wear to the premiere of a gritty feminist fairy-tale retelling but—”
“A book dress,” I finished, barely breathing as he lifted it out of its box.
A book dress—I couldn’t think of any other way to describe it.
Beau had unpicked the cover bindings from a dozen nineteenth-century books, bindings of soft jewel-like leather with faded gilt titles in French and Italian and Latin, and sewn the spines tightly onto a boned corset so the book spines fluted together out from the waist and upward around the breasts.
He’d laced it with ribbon bookmarks embroidered in quotes by everyone from Marcus Aurelius to Yeats to Beyoncé, and fashioned flowing sleeves out of tissue-thin gilt endpapers crumpled and distressed to the texture of silk gauze.
The big sumptuous skirt that touched the tops of my shoes was made of old book pages weathered to a color like mellow gold, fluted and fluttered to overlap together on a hooped backing so the printed page lines in more French and Italian and Latin rippled with my every movement like the books were about to take flight.
“Oh” was all I could say, drinking it in.
He’d taken a discarded trunkful of nineteenth-century volumes destined for a dumpster, picked them apart, and put them back together with lace and rattan, boning and ribbon, gold thread and silver thread and crystal beads as tiny as stars.
He’d taken a library and—with care and craft and genius—made it into a miracle.
“There’s no way a dress for a Hollywood actress will fit me,” I’d breathed, looking at the frothy page-turning confection of it, but it had.
The actress starring in Belle was no size-zero waif like most starlets; she was one of those body positivity types who snapped at journalists when they asked if she should really be shooting nude scenes at a size fourteen—still a lot smaller than me, but Beau had added a placket and some extra lacing to close the gap at my back.
He spent close to an hour stitching me into his masterpiece, recruiting Dennis and the rest of the library ghosts to pin this, hold that, fold here, fluff there, all of them fluttering around me like devoted minions reverently robing a queen for her council of war, and God damn, but I liked the feeling.
Beau finished the last stitch half an hour before the Board arrived, not saying a word when I finally looked at myself in the mirror.
He just gave the small, pleased, private nod of a creator who is very well satisfied with their work.
Elizabeth didn’t look quite so pleased. “Oh, Alix. Such a drama queen,” she said, giving a little laugh as she came down the stairs.
But I’d noticed the flicker behind those purple-framed glasses when she saw me standing cold and regal at the foot of the stairs, my shoulders rising out of those gilded book spines like a fortress, the vast flowing skirt making me look a foot taller than I was, my book page hem fluttering even as the entire Astral Library fluttered its books around me from floor to ceiling.
My hand rested on the big bronze globe. (You want to project power even in stillness, Beau had told me.
Take the ground out from under them immediately.
With the globe it’s very Queen Elizabeth I in the Armada portrait, just without the huge lace ruff like a dog collar because ruffs are not a good look even on a queen.) I did not move to greet my erstwhile boss when she descended the stairs.
I waited while she came to me, half a dozen suits trailing in her wake, and I stared her straight in the face.
I did not look like some spineless loser with thirty-six measly dollars in her checking account.
I did not look like a drama queen. I just looked like a queen—like I ruled this domain and everything in it.
“Elizabeth,” I said at last. “Board members.” Nodding to the men and women behind her, my face unsmiling. “As acting Librarian of the Astral Library, I formally pronounce that the annual meeting of the Library Board is now in session.”