Free The Weight of Zero by Karen Fortunati

everybody entering the room this Saturday afternoon. Octogenarian Gary, one of my fellow volunteers, gave a wobbly thumbs-up when he spotted me from behind the circulation desk.
    Flipping open his laptop, Michael logs on to the library’s Wi-Fi. He glances at his phone to read a new text. “My mom said it’s no problem to drive you home.”
    I smile politely. But inside I’m furious with Mom.
    Michael jogged up to the Accord as Mom and I pulled up to the curb, and before I could shut the door behind me, Mom had already called out hello to him. Michael bent down to speak with her through the passenger-side window.
    “I’m sorry for changing the time today,” he said. That was his text to me last night, the one that woke me up and saved me and my troops from discovery. He had texted that he had to meet at two today and not one-thirty, like we originally planned. “I can give Catherine a ride home if you’re leaving for work,” he told Mom, unknowingly touching a live wire.
    A short battle between Mom and me had erupted this morning, with Mom wanting to call Aunt D to pick me up from the library and me begging to walk the two miles home.
    Ignoring the terms of the treaty we had agreed upon (I could walk but needed to text her every five seconds), Mom jumped on Michael’s offer to drive me home. “Oh, that would be great! Thanks, Michael. And please tell your mom I appreciate it,” she said, not even checking with me to see if that was okay, if I wanted to drive home with Michael and his mother—which I definitely did not. I turned my back on her and started up the steps. I heard her yell, “Cath, hon, I’ll be home around seven. See you then!”
    I didn’t turn around. Instead I hurried up the stone steps away from her.
    Michael had bounded up the steps in front of me, stopping in front of the ornately carved door more fitting for a church than a library. He smiled at me, the sun catching and highlighting the chocolate-brown of his eyes.
    “You even run gracefully,” he said.
    This threw me. “What are you talking about?”
    “You run like this.” Michael stuck both arms out perpendicular to his body, his long fingers pointing up to the sky, and flapped. He resembled a turkey, a not very graceful one, and a laugh burst out of me.
    “Can you still do those turns? The ones where you spin on one leg and the other leg twirls you around?” he asked.
    “A fouetté turn?”
    “Uh…I don’t know. Why don’t you do one here?”
    I laughed again. “Here? On top of the library steps? I don’t think so.”
    “Well, that’s my goal, then,” Michael said, pulling open the door. “To get you to do a
fwetay
turn for me.”
    “Good luck with that,” I said, still laughing at the image of me doing one in front of the library’s double doors. What if Riley or Dr. McCallum drove by at that very instant? Jesus.
    Now Michael opens a Word document on his laptop. “Here’s our list of primary and secondary sources so far. I thought you could take a look at them, see if they’re good. And then maybe we can check out what they have in the history section downstairs.”
    “Sounds good.” I can’t in good conscience let this guy do all the work. It doesn’t feel right anymore. Even if the odds of me seeing this project completed are basically nil. So instead of just eyeballing the sites and sources, I grab a couple of sheets of paper and a pen from my bag.
    “Is this where you work?” Michael asks, picking up a sheet of my scrap paper with the embossed letterhead. The thick, expensive paper is from Mom’s law firm. The printers not only got the zip and area codes wrong but also made gross errors in spelling—“The Law Offices of Hefferman & Schletz” morphed into the cheesier “Hosserman & Schlitz.” Mom rescued the boxes of rejected stationery dumped next to the office garbage cans and brought them home. We use this whenever we can to conserve my school loose-leaf.
    I nod in response to Michael’s