Free Steinbeck’s Ghost by Lewis Buzbee Page B

library. There had to be famous writers living around here. The committee could sell tickets and raise money, and the more famous the writers, the more publicity for the library.
    At lunch he went to the computer lab and surfed the Net, where he found several writers he recognized who lived nearby. Laurence Yep, who wrote
Dragonwings
, lived in Pacific Grove, and Beverly Cleary, who wrote all the Henry Huggins and Ramona and Beezus books, she lived in Carmel. Travis loved both these writers. The one writer he couldn’t find was Ernest Oster. It was weird; there wasn’t a single mention of Oster or
Corral de Tierra
anywhere on the Internet. He assumed Oster lived near Salinas somewhere, if he was still alive.
    Travis wanted to fly into the library and heroically slap the list of writers in front of Miss Babb—he’d imagined this all day—but when he saw her, he knew the time wasn’t right. She looked like she’d been punched in the stomach.
    The mailing committee was scheduled to work in the library’s A/V room, a small office off the back corner of the main collection. One side of the room was stuffed with DVD players, CD players, reel- to- reel tape decks, and a bulky, old- fashioned 16mm film projector. The walls were crowded with shelves of DVDs, CDs, even record albums, the big black vinyl discs his parents used to listen to.
    Miss Babb was sitting at a small table, surrounded by boxes of envelopes, stacks of bright green flyers, pages of mailing labels. The other chairs were empty.
    “Oh, Travis,” Miss Babb said, looking up and forcing a smile. “Bad news. We’ve canceled the meeting. I tried calling, but you’d left already. I’m sorry.”
    The other four members of the mailing committee had called earlier that day. Everyone had a good “excuse.” Miss Babb said the word
excuse
as if it tasted sour.
    “You might as well get on home,” she told him. “We’ll reschedule, work up some new flyers.”
    “But I’m here. Can’t we just do it anyway? I mean, we have to, the big council meeting is right around the corner.”
    “That’s sweet, Travis. But we’ll never get through all these on our own. I think we’ll be okay without these fly-ers. Maybe I’m just too worked up about it all.”
    “No,” he said. “We have to do it. I know we can. Every little bit, right? It might take all night, but we can do it.” There was a huge difference between Travis’s normal life—school and home and all that—and his new, improved, and much weirder life—the library and everything around it. In this new, improved, and much weirder life, he had endless energy to work on anything. At home, his mom had to beg to get him to load the dishwasher or take out the trash. But at the library, he couldn’t wait to get started.
    “I can’t ask you to stay that late.”
    “You can ask my parents.”
    Travis called his mom at work. He always started with his mom. She was the stricter of his parents, and it sometimes seemed easiest going straight to the heart of it. He hated getting permission for something from his father, only to have his mom take it back.
    Miss Babb explained everything, promised to give Travis a ride home, ten o’clock at the very latest. Travis swore he’d done his homework already. And this was true, he’d done it at lunch, but he would have lied if he hadn’t. The library could not wait. Homework was important, sure. But the library, that needed to be taken care of now.
    “Okay, then,” Miss Babb said. “Dig in.”
    She thumbed one flyer from the stack, folded it into three parts, slid it into an envelope, licked the flap and sealed it, then peeled off a mailing label and attached it.
    Travis stood over her.
    “I bet we can do them all, every single one,” he said. “I’ve got a system.”
    “Oh, yeah?” she said. “What do you bet?”
    “Take- out sushi for dinner. You pay.”
    “Sushi?” she said, her head cocked to one side.
    “Heck, yes. I’ve been eating sushi since I