Free Runt by Nora Raleigh Baskin Page B

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.
    â€œWell, good, then. You do it this time. But give heranother five minutes or so to stare at the screen.”
    Mrs. Greely looked up. “What? Oh, sure. Another five minutes.”
    And you couldn’t 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.
    â€œMy goodness, what is that girl looking at?” Ms. Charles went on. “She almost looks like she’s going to cry.”
    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 alarms—it was easy.
    â€œYou know, Fran,” Mrs. Greely said, holding up the book to her colleague, “I didn’t even know we had this book in our library.”
    â€œWhat is it?”
    â€œ A Candle in Her Room , by Ruth M. Arthur. I have the same exact book at home, isn’t that amazing?” And whenshe said that, the top of her head tingled the smallest bit. Was it shame? Or excitement? She didn’t know. “I 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€œOh, really? Did they like it too?” Ms. Charles asked, but kept one eye on the clock. “Nearly five minutes.”
    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 crying—not 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.
    â€œI hope she’s okay,” Mrs. Greely said, watching as the girl headed back toward the biographies.
    â€œWho?” Ms. Charles said. “It’s so noisy in here, I can’t hear myself think.”

THE CRUCIBLE
----
    â€œAre you okay?”
    Elizabeth looked up from where she was sitting, cross-legged, on the carpeted floor behind the nonfiction stacks, Biography/SP–TS. Funny, she didn’t know Ethan that well, even though they’d been in the same class since kindergarten. They probably had never spoken directly to each other, not once before.
    â€œNo,” 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 wasn’t her name. It was a mean name. It wasn’t 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 weren’t 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