Free The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai Page A

was, so I pointed silently down the biography aisle. She disappeared where he had, and after I heard Ian’s high screech, I watched her drag him back to the stairs, pink fingernails around his shoulder. Ian’s voice echoed down the steps: “But Mom, you can’t be mad at me, because—
ow!
—because when I was hiding, I already repented! Mom, I already repented, you’re not allowed to get mad!”
    I should have paid more attention, then, to his sneakiness, his slipperiness, his tendency to hide. I also should have noticed, the next week, when he started asking about the janitor. He stood in front of my desk, his face studiedly bored, his voice a monotone.
    “Who cleans this stupid library?”
    “I’m sorry, Ian, I didn’t understand that.”
    “I said, who cleans the library.”
    “A very nice lady named Mrs. Macready comes and vacuums. She has white hair.”
    “Does she clean it every day?”
    “I have no idea. Probably not. More like every other.”
    “Does she clean it before you get here, or after you leave?”
    “Okay, I have some work to do.”
    “I thought your work was answering questions for kids.”
    “Yes, questions about books. Do you have a question about a book?”
    He picked up
Carry On, Mr. Bowditch
from the edge of my desk. “Yes. If I dropped this, and we waited for the janitor to clean it up, would she clean it up before the library opened, or after it closed?”
    “The answer is
you
would clean it up, because you made the mess.”
    He dropped the book on the floor and ran upstairs.
     

     

    I didn’t see him for ten days after that, which might have been a record. The next time he came in he brought me a plate of cookies, each covered in bright blue frosting with a splotch of green in the middle. He looked almost like his old self, walking on tiptoes to where I stood by the return cart. I had decided not to sit down in my desk chair for a week, to see if the rash would clear up. Sonya waved at me, pointed her daughter toward the puppets, and headed back upstairs.
    “Even though it’s still January, I made cookies for St. Patrick’s Day, because it’s the next good holiday! The blue is to represent the ocean, and the green is to represent Ireland! I food-colored the frosting, and my hands are still blue.” He put the cellophane-covered paper plate on the return cart and showed me his pale blue palms.
    “You look like a Smurf.”
    “A what? And also, I’m sorry about throwing your book.
And
, the reason I haven’t been here is I had my baptism, and we had a party, and I got about five thousand books.”
    I peeled back the cellophane and took out a cookie. “What did you get?”
    “I got some origami books, and then these five books from this series called Towards the Light. It’s about these kids at the end of the earth, and most people have risen to heaven, but these kids stay behind to try to get everyone else saved. They’re really for teenagers, but they’re easy.”
    “Huh. Are they any good?”
    “Yeah, they’re really fun. There’s a movie of them, too, but my mom thinks it might be too scary. She has to watch it first, to see. Do you have any here?”
    I was trying to swallow the cookie, which was somehow both dry and sticky at the same time. “You know, we don’t have a lot of kids’ fiction that’s religious. But we do have nonfiction books about religion.”
    “Oh, yeah. There’s the ones like the stupid Eyewitness book with the dumb India gods with all the arms. I already read them all. You should get Towards the Light.”
    I knew the kind of series Ian was talking about. One week when I was twelve and staying with a born-again neighbor, I read three books off her daughter’s bookshelf and found them tremendous fun, the closest thing I’d ever read to a romance novel or a crime thriller. The only one I can still remember started on a charter plane flying over Africa, with a “backslidden” Christian noticing that the pilot prayed before he ate his