Authors: Mae McCall
All libraries prohibit loud noises, but this one took that
rule to the extreme. Nothing above a whisper was allowed, ever. There would be
no dropped books, no squeaky cart wheels, no stepladders scraping across the
slate floor—because, if any of this happened, Ms. Shale would react in one of
three ways: 1. Immediately take cover under her desk, which, strangely, was
made of thick steel and heavy as a horse; 2. Hit an alarm signaling instant
evacuation of the library’s main floors; or 3. Jump onto a table and scream
“Come and get me, fuckers!” as a cattle prod slid from her sleeve down to her
hand. Any of these was disconcerting, to say the least, especially to the
younger students having story time in the back rooms.
As a library intern, Cleo was expected to run drills based
on all three scenarios: If Shale takes cover, Cleo takes cover. If the alarm
sounds, herd the story groups down the back stairs. If the cattle prod comes out….Well,
technically, Cleo was supposed to grab a weapon of her own and cover Shale’s
six o’clock, but really, she would just yell “Yep, all clear back here!” on her
way out the door.
Cleo learned to be very, very quiet. And there wasn’t much
to do, since Fall semester hadn’t yet begun. There were a few mishaps at first,
but Cleo had the bright idea to use a “safe word” system—Basically, if Cleo
made a noise that could set off Ms. Shale, she would quickly yell “Sapphire!”
to indicate that all was well. This worked great, until August brought back the
rest of the student body.
16
It was the first day of class. Everyone had gone to the
morning “Welcome Back!” assembly, and then on to the appropriate classrooms.
After her math class, Cleo trudged to the library, brainstorming on the way
about how to find Jackson’s files. She clocked in, sprayed WD-40 on the wheels
of her cart, and started putting books back on the shelves just as larger
groups of students started flowing in. As she wheeled around the end of one
aisle, she wondered, not for the first time, where Jackson even was. She hadn’t
seen him in weeks. If he was gone, was there even a point to her looking for
those files? As she pondered this, Cleo reached up to restore a thick volume to
its rightful home. She was just a little too short, and the book suddenly
flipped backward, bouncing hard on her metal cart and then to the floor. She
immediately yelled “Sapphire!” as loudly as she could, and bent to pick up the
book and straighten the creases out of its pages. Unfortunately, when a room is
full of people engaged in whispered conversations, sound doesn’t travel in
quite the same way, so when Cleo yelled her safe word, what the students heard
was “Fire!”, and they immediately began to panic.
In the ensuing chaos, two students were zapped by Ms. Shale,
four chairs were broken, and Cleo was left moaning on the floor, clutching her
ankle. She spent the rest of the afternoon in the infirmary.
Ms. Halifax, the nurse, diagnosed it as a sprain and
carefully wrapped Cleo’s ankle with a stretchy bandage. As the woman smiled
reassuringly, and somewhat crookedly, Cleo noticed that there were faint burn
scars on the left half of her face. “You’ll be back to normal in about two
weeks,” said Ms. Halifax. She gave Cleo a pair of metal crutches and went to
the next room to attend to the students who had been zapped with Shale’s cattle
prod.
Cleo was furious. How was she supposed to break in to any
place with crutches and a bum foot? This was definitely going to put a damper
on her plans, especially when she learned that Ms. Adams was leaving for a trip
and would be out of the office for the next week. If not for the sprain, it
would have been perfect timing. And where the hell was Jackson? Cleo fumed as
she hobbled back to her building, and laboriously hopped up nine flights of
stairs to her room, her curses echoing in the stairwell the entire way up. Her
mood was so foul by the time she unlocked her room that she didn’t even scream
when she saw Jackson stretched out on her bed.
She was two minutes into a really good rant when she noticed
that he wasn’t moving. Hobbling closer, she saw that his eyes were closed and
his face was ashen. She moved closer, until her nose was almost touching his
cheek, and mentally counted to ten. “Great, another dead one,” she muttered
before heaving a sigh worthy of one who has a heavy burden to bear. “I wonder
how many feet it is to the trash chute?” she added as she started untucking the
edges of her bedding. Before wrapping the body, she decided to check his
pockets for candy and cash. As she reached for the inner pocket of his suit
jacket, his hand suddenly clamped around her arm. She was close enough to count
his eyelashes as they fluttered in confusion. He raised his head slightly, realized
that it was her, and then let go of her arm and let his head drop back to the
pillow. “Oh, it’s you,” he said hoarsely before coughing slightly. And then his
eyes closed, and he was once again sleeping like the dead. His hat was slightly
crushed, so she carefully pulled it free and reshaped it before running her
fingertips experimentally over his buzzed hair.
He stayed that way, not moving, for two incredibly boring
hours. Cleo tried waking him up, but finally her own exhaustion manifested
itself, and she crawled onto the bare mattress of one of the vacant beds in the
room and fell asleep. It was the pins and needles in her injured foot that woke
her up. Jackson was watching her from a supine position. “Are you okay?” he
asked, his gravelly voice barely travelling the distance between them. “Why do
you have a bandage?”
Cleo yawned and tried to sit up, frantically massaging her
calf when the pins and needles intensified. “Sonofabitch!” she muttered as her
pain receptors simultaneously fired. She looked at him and replied, “It’s a
freaking sprain, and it’s freaking ruining my freaking life right now. What’s
wrong with you? I thought you were dead when I came in.”
He smiled slightly and raised one hand, covered in a thick
bandage that she hadn’t seen before. “It looks like we could form a new club,”
he said wryly. He gingerly let the hand rest on his chest. “Shouldn’t you prop
that up on a pillow or something?”
“Well, I would, but some asshole is lying on it,” she said
sarcastically. This time, he actually chuckled, and she realized that she had
secretly been worried about him. She reached for one crutch and half hopped,
half walked to the chair that was closest to her bed, awkwardly falling into a seated
position and simultaneously letting the metal crutch fall and bounce loudly on
the floor. She smiled. “I like to remind the downstairs girls that I’m here
sometimes,” she said. Jackson laughed again, but closed his eyes as if it
pained him to do so.
“Seriously, what’s wrong with you?” asked Cleo. It took him
a long time to answer, but finally he replied, “Believe it or not, sometimes I
make really stupid decisions.” He smiled at her snort of derision before
continuing, “Let’s just say that I took a little trip to see if some friends
were still mad at me, and they are.” He closed his eyes, and she thought he had
fallen back asleep, but after several seconds, he continued, “I don’t suppose
you found those files while I was gone?”
“No,” grumbled Cleo. “All I have is a nutjob boss and a
sprained ankle, and Adams is going out of town for a whole week, but there’s no
way I can do the job while she’s gone because of this thing.” She gestured at
her bandage and scowled.
Jackson groaned. “Great, if she’s leaving, then that means
I’m leaving, too.” He started to sit up, but gasped with pain. “Could you help
me? I think I’ve got a couple broken ribs,” he said through clenched teeth.
Cleo scooted her chair closer to the bed and put the knee of
her bad leg on it for support. She reached under Jackson’s arm and grabbed a
handful of his jacket before pulling as hard as she could. It took a few tries,
but they finally got him upright and propped against the wall. Cleo noticed two
burgundy splotches on his gauze and asked, “What happened to your hand?”
He glanced down with a rueful expression. “Stupidity. That’s
really all I can say.” She climbed onto the bed beside him and mimicked his
posture, back against the wall, with her feet stretched out. “Well, it’s not surprising,”
she said. “You are one of the stupidest people I know.”
They sat companionably, sometimes chatting, sometimes
silent, until Jackson felt strong enough to get up and walk. They both felt
defeated by the knowledge that the perfect opportunity was going to laugh at
them and wave on its way out the door. With Cleo’s injury, and Jackson’s upcoming absence, there was nothing they could do about the files for the near
future.
And that’s exactly how it happened. Jackson accompanied Ms.
Adams out of town. Blue was left in charge of the school. Cleo learned how to push
a book cart while hopping on one foot.
***
Even after the traveling couple returned, and Cleo’s ankle
had healed, there were no opportunities to look for the files. High school
classes were harder, and there were twice as many assignments, and Cleo found
that, despite her desire to be done with this place, it was not in her nature
to be a bad student. So, she did her homework, and impressed her teachers, and,
for the most part, made excellent grades. Between schoolwork and library duty,
she had very little free time before dark. After dark, she was hesitant to
venture out, as Blue had started taking evening walks around the building, and
had no discernible pattern to her path or schedule. It was far too risky.
Anyway, Cleo had decided that the best way to plan her heist would be to wait
until she was assigned to the Admin offices for her work rotation.
Unfortunately, her next job was landscaping, which gave her no reason
whatsoever to enter the building.
And Mrs. Rjoriak, her supervisor, watched her like a hawk.
Even if she was pruning back rose bushes for the winter, right in front of Main
Hall, there was no possibility of slipping away for a little minor snooping.
Cleo was also admittedly distracted by the growing suspicion that Rjoriak was
really a man. After all, she had spent enough time in Santo’s company to learn
that lipstick and eyeshadow, if imperfectly applied, will never permanently
distract the observer’s eye from the bulge of an Adam’s apple.
So, for the month of November, Cleo shoveled mulch and
spread fertilizer and pruned bushes and planted bulbs. (If she was mechanical
in her movements and distracted from her tasks, it didn’t really matter. The
bloom the following spring would turn out to be the best ever. After all, she
was the daughter of a world famous botanist. She could judge soil pH from
thirty yards away, just by sniffing the wind.)
The month of December was a non-work month for all students.
Exams happened during the first ten days, and then students were sent home for
the holidays. This time, Vera and the head gardener came to collect Cleo, who
spent the entire drive home sulking about the realization that she actually
kind of missed Jackson.
17
Christmastime in the St. James household was, to put it
mildly, weird. Since Darwin had devoted much of his life to the study of other
cultures, he felt it would be rude to stick to a purely American tradition for
the holidays. Therefore, the house would be decorated with menorahs for
Hanukkah, fruit for Kwanza, a traditional German Christmas tree, figures of
African gift-giving spirits, and dragons (for the Chinese New Year, even though
that didn’t technically happen until many weeks later). For the entire month of
December, every evening meal was representative of a particular nation’s
traditional spread. They ate turkey and potatoes. They ate strange jiggly
puddings and chilled squash soup, caterpillars and boiled eyes, various jellied
organ meats, or curried rice and hard boiled eggs. On Christmas day, they would
exchange gifts and sit down to a luncheon of lamb—representative of the “lamb
of God,” which Cleo always thought was supremely creepy, since they were eating
it—with parsnip puree, honeyed greens, and crème brulee. Toward the end of the
holiday season, Darwin would choreograph a few native dances, and in January they
would gather the servants and parade through the house under a beautiful red
and gold Chinese dragon, its silks fluttering as they ran. Since Cleo had to be
back at school by January 6
th
, they had to condense a bit to fit it
all in.
It was exhausting. When Cleo got back to school, she
immediately went to bed and slept until 9am the next day. She was grateful for
her new Christmas coat when she learned that one of the duties of the winter
Landscaping rotation was to shovel snow from all of the walkways so that
students and teachers could safely traverse campus. As soon as Rjoriak noticed
that Cleo was actually using the straight edge of her snow shovel to make
checkerboards in the snow and then play tic tac toe with herself, she was
instantly dismissed from shovel duty and banished to the manure shed to
“organize” the contents. It actually made for a pleasant morning, since her
nose was already stopped up from the cold and she couldn’t smell much of
anything. It may have been a giant pile of shit, but at least it was warm.
Plus, the solitude was refreshing. She played tic tac toe in the massive brown
pile with the edge of a trowel.
***
Once classes were once again underway, Cleo began to notice
a change in the relationship between Jackson and Ms. Adams. Occasionally, she
would catch them arguing behind one of the buildings. Jackson’s demeanor
shifted more and more towards desperation, and Virginia looked like the cat that
got the cream. Cleo didn’t know what was in the file that Jackson wanted so
badly, but she actually started to
want
to get it for him. It looked
like he needed to get away, and he had told her the file was the key.
But she also knew that it would be much easier if she had
access to the offices, and if she bided her time, she was just a month away
from being transferred to her final work study rotation in Main Hall. Jackson
was just going to have to wait.
Cleo had also started paying more attention to the teachers
and staff at the school. At least a dozen instructors had strange scars. Some
were from burns, like the nurse’s; others were jagged red lines. Once, when
Cleo was hiding in the shadows of the indoor pool, she saw the beautiful
dark-skinned lady who taught Farsi emerge from the deep end, having just
completed a set of laps. When she turned to pick up her towel, Cleo could see a
series of very thin, white scars all over the woman’s back. She couldn’t be
sure, but they looked like Arabic characters or something. There were other
defects, too. The physics teacher walked with a limp. The French instructor
once, very briefly, removed her enigmatic little round sunglasses to reveal
that one eye was totally milk-white. If you really paid attention, the place
was crawling with imperfections of one sort or another. Cleo wondered if Jackson
was hiding any old wounds under his stylish suits.
***
On the first day of March, after a heated argument with her
math teacher (really, insisting that trigonometry is used by
everyone
in
real life after high school is just stupid), Cleo stomped up the steps of Main
Hall for her first day of work in Administration. She could picture it now:
Blue handing her a giant ring of keys and taking her on a tour of the secret
back corridors….
What Blue really did was say, “Quit gawking. I’ve got work
for you to do,” before leading Cleo to a small desk in an alcove off of the
foyer and pointing at a giant stack of papers. “I need you to punch holes along
the left margin. Then I need you to sort them alphabetically. No singing,
whistling, snacking, finger-snapping, or table kicking. Don’t leave until I
give you permission.” And then the woman was gone.
“Bitch,” muttered Cleo as she sat in the wooden chair and
dropped her bag in the floor.
“Excuse me?” said Blue from behind Cleo’s left shoulder.
Cleo jumped and looked at Blue, to her left, and then at the doorway, through
which Blue had just vanished, to her right. Where the hell had the woman
materialized from?
“I said “I itch”.” Cleo smiled angelically. “You know—with
excitement. I mean, hole-punches are great, but nothing turns a girl on like
alphabetical sorting.”
“I’ll be watching you,” said Blue, before she glided through
the doorway once again. Cleo looked at the direction Blue had taken, and then
looked over her shoulder at what appeared to be walnut paneling.
Interesting
,
she thought, and then she applied herself to diffusing trigonometry-related
rage via energetic use of the three-hole punch.
When Blue reappeared to check on Cleo, the work was long
finished. Cleo had made stacks of pages, on top of the desk and on the floor
along the baseboard, representing each letter of the alphabet. The punched
holes were perfectly aligned. Unfortunately, boredom had set in almost an hour
ago, and the top pages of the K, L, and M stacks were now covered in doodles of
cowboys on whales, lassoing sharks and sailboats while hang-gliding Indians
fired arrows from the sky. Blue was not amused, especially when Cleo said in
her own defense, “Well, you told me not to leave, so I didn’t. And, you told me
you’d be watching, so I took your lack of interference as a silent endorsement
of my art.”
The next day, she stapled. Hundreds of pages. And still, she
didn’t even get a glimpse into the offices, or the corridors beyond. When Blue
found her trying to perfect a new technique of jumping from the top of the desk
onto the stapler, which was pre-loaded with pages on the floor, Cleo was
dismissed for the day. Jackson was looking at a men’s magazine with his shoes
off when she got to her room.
She wrinkled her nose. “Eww! Your feet smell like dead
fish.” (This wasn’t true. Jackson always smelled good.)
“Where’s my file, Cleo?” The
GQ
slid to the floor as Jackson stood up and stretched.
Cleo tossed her bag on one of the empty beds and put her
hands on her hips. “Listen, you’re going to have to be patient. I haven’t even
been past the entryway yet.”
Exasperated, Jackson grunted and began massaging his
temples. “Alright, we just need to figure out a way to get you past those
doors,” he said. He started pacing the room.
“I don’t know what the rush is anymore,” said Cleo. “Rumor
has it that you and Virginia are getting married, so now you don’t really need
to leave.”
His laugh was bitter. “Really? Right, of course. Because the
gossip of teenage girls is always perfectly accurate.”
She plopped down on her bed and propped her chin on her
hands. “It seems to me that if you marry her you could just ask for the file. I
mean, you’d be her husband. She’d have to give you a key to wherever all her
secret stuff is.”
This time, he really laughed. “You don’t know Virginia,” he said. “And trust me, I need to get away from this place more than ever now.
You’ve got to help me, Cleo. I need that file.”
They brainstormed for an hour, and then Jackson had to
leave. He was having dinner with Ms. Adams, and she tended to throw things if
he was late. Sharp things.