Dido.
Suddenly, I felt secure with a happiness I had never expected to have known, a gentle glowing happiness which burnt inside me like a clear steady flame.
But it was a library book, and it had to go back.
âWell, good, then. You do it this time. But give heranother five minutes or so to stare at the screen.â
Mrs. Greely looked up. âWhat? Oh, sure. Another five minutes.â
And you couldnât steal a book from the library because that would be very wrong. Everybody knew stealing a book from the library was wrong, no matter how much you wanted it. No matter how much you loved books and loved being around books and loved this book more than any other.
âMy goodness, what is that girl looking at?â Ms. Charles went on. âShe almost looks like sheâs going to cry.â
But of course, if no one in the library was watching because the librarian was helping someone with the card catalog, thumbing through those stiff rectangular cards . . . and in those days, there were no metal strips. No security systems. No alarmsâit was easy.
âYou know, Fran,â Mrs. Greely said, holding up the book to her colleague, âI didnât even know we had this book in our library.â
âWhat is it?â
â A Candle in Her Room , by Ruth M. Arthur. I have the same exact book at home, isnât that amazing?â And whenshe said that, the top of her head tingled the smallest bit. Was it shame? Or excitement? She didnât know. âI read it as a little girl. I loved it so much, I read it to my campers when I was a counselor at 4-H, and I had both my girls read it when they were young.â
âOh, really? Did they like it too?â Ms. Charles asked, but kept one eye on the clock. âNearly five minutes.â
Mrs. Greely stopped babbling on about the book. It was silly, after all. It was just a book. The girl on the computer was clearly cryingânot sobbing so that anyone noticed, only a steady stream of tears was rolling down her face, almost invisible.
But she must have read the thirty-minute maximum sign. The girl stood up, pushed back her chair carefully, then leaned forward and pressed the sign-off button on the keyboard.
âI hope sheâs okay,â Mrs. Greely said, watching as the girl headed back toward the biographies.
âWho?â Ms. Charles said. âItâs so noisy in here, I canât hear myself think.â
THE CRUCIBLE
----
âAre you okay?â
Elizabeth looked up from where she was sitting, cross-legged, on the carpeted floor behind the nonfiction stacks, Biography/SPâTS. Funny, she didnât know Ethan that well, even though theyâd been in the same class since kindergarten. They probably had never spoken directly to each other, not once before.
âNo,â she heard herself saying. She was feeling one of those kinds of moments when nothing seems entirely real. How had she gone from being so thrilled, seeing her poem in the anthology, to humiliating herself in front of Miss Robinson, to sitting with Freida at the wedding, to feeling the ground fall out from under her when shecame across the person2person page with her picture.
It took Elizabeth a long time to even comprehend what was going on.
She saw the photo.
That was her face, at least it looked like it was. But that wasnât her name. It was a mean name. It wasnât true, was it? The horror of it slowly began pressing in on her lungs and heart. Her breathing quickened but her air supply diminished. Before she could read the profile of this unknown but familiar face, Elizabeth scrolled down to the posted comments. There werenât that many, but there were enough, all from different names with odd person2person profile photos, famous athletes, to dogs, to movie stars.
No one seemed real but they all had something to say about Smelly-Girl. She felt her mind lifting out of her body until she was nearly watching herself at
Landon Dixon, Giselle Renarde, Beverly Langland