Free Flight by Neil Hetzner Page B

the rise of the net had made most
small libraries obsolete, a few, mostly those with hefty
endowments, remained open. Of those survivors, many were more
museums that repositories for accessible or pertinent knowledge. On
a whim, Prissi climbed the stairs. After spending an embarrassing
minute explaining to the tiny, bright blue eyed, balding woman
sitting on a high scarred wooden stool that she, Prissi Langue,
was, indeed, a Dutton student, she had accepted the
librarian/docent/guard’s declaratory judgment that, indeed, a
Dutton student in the Waterville library was a rarity. After
circling round the chipped green marble half-moon desk, which both
protected the past and, Prissi guessed, defended the old woman
against the present, the teener began to explore. Twisting her head
so that she could read the vertical titles and tentatively touching
a dulled rainbow of book spines, Prissi meandered through the
stacks.
    In a dark corner on the second floor, next to
a door marked STAIRS, fitted into a corner in an L-shaped bookcase,
Prissi found the mother-lode. A fancy, but faded sign, declared
Romance. Prissi’s first reaction was a snort that reverberated
throughout the empty library, but, ten minutes later, she was
sighing and crying. The bookcase contained hundreds of books that
told the story of improbable women falling impossibly in love with
implausible men. And, while it was not always love at first sight
between the covers of the books, it had been love at first sight
for Prissi. She loved the women from the pre-winger era who had
enough flesh that it could quiver. She swooned over the men too
dumb to know that they shouldn’t be driving fast cars with
deleterious eco effects. She adored the fact that many of the
stories took place in a place long gone—a dry, bustling wealthy,
hyper-kinetic Manhattan, a romantic island filled with sex and sin.
Almost everything she read, she loved, but the books that she most
loved were those written in the 1950s when all the characters had
names like her own and her friends. She found story after story
where Jacks and Joes, Nancys and Marys, Pauls and Marks, Cathys
and, yes, twice, even Priscillas fell in deep, tortured, twisted,
weepy, wounded love.
    That dusty corner of the Waterville Library
became Prissi’s haven. When she had free time or, even when she
didn’t, but needed a respite—from friends, teachers, or, most
often, her feelings—Prissi she would run down the hill to the
library for her CRN fix.
    As Prissi slumped in her perch and watched
the celestial sheep crowd one another like a fox was about, she
thought of what had happened twenty-four hours before. After the
last False Paths lecture and her conversation with Dr. Smarkzy,
Prissi had run back to her room, changed clothes, and spent twenty
minutes flying lazy figure eights over Dutton’s golf course and
soccer fields before winging her way to the village. After checking
to see if anyone was watching before attempting a maneuver that
could result in losing her flight license, Prissi executed a doubly
foolish, given Saturdays’ shoulder injury, perfect one-knee
betrothal landing on the library’s cracked asphalt parking lot.
Prissi was smoothing her feathers when Joe Fflowers exploded out of
the library’s dismal, dinged metal and scratched glass entrance. He
started when he saw Prissi, stuttered, and stopped.
    After several minutes of mis-meshed verbal
gears grinding through Saturday’s traitorous events, including a
stuttery apology by Prissi, the two teenerz finally found their
usual edgy comfortability. They talked and talked, as if they
hadn’t seen each other for ages…or, as if they expected that they
wouldn’t see each other again. Goals, god, games, and music. Love,
lust, loss, and movies. Family, fear, faith, failure, food…and the
future.
    When it was time to go back to campus, Prissi
started to walk alongside Joe, but he held her shoulder and, then,
turned her so her back was against the shelves