Chapter 4

4

L’Enfant Terrible

Despite the fact that we’d been downsized a few years ago to make room for the trendier engineering lab, and were now squished into a shoebox-sized hobbit hole that smelled faintly of mothballs and could barely contain our impressive beanbag collection, there was no place on earth I loved more than the Barton Springs Elementary school library. We’d gotten a new shipment of books in this morning, so I’d arrived early to put together a Cool New Reads display splattered with a metric ton of glitter. I’d learned a lot of important lessons in my five years as an assistant librarian, and one of them was that the rate at which my students picked up books was directly proportional to the amount of sparkle I used in advertising said books. Humans developed their shiny-object fetishes at an early age.

I was hot glue gunning to my heart’s content—while avoiding any thoughts, whatsoever, about my disastrous attempt at a one-night stand this past weekend—when I heard the telltale sounds of students arriving, aka the trampling of a small herd of elephants. I shifted so I could spy them through a gap in the bookshelf. Not only was it important that I, as their educator, keep an eye on them, but I genuinely loved the sight of students curling up and getting lost in a book. When I was a kid, books were my life—or, as Lee would joke, my entire personality. True, I did once walk home from the library with a pile of books stacked so high I couldn’t see and beelined straight into a tree. And I did used to request my family call me by the names of my favorite novel heroines (which I still maintain was an adorable quirk, despite my family’s insistence otherwise). It’s just as far back as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by other people, but terrified by how hard they can be to navigate. Books presented the perfect solution: you could follow friends on scores of adventures without having to worry about saying the wrong thing.

The group of students who’d filed into the library slung their backpacks down and flopped onto the beanbag chairs I’d carefully arranged into a circle—a tight circle, since what used to be our Beanbag Corner had turned, post-downsize, into our Beanbag Cranny. I recognized the girls immediately: Sable, Larkyn, Brynlee, and—surprisingly—Mildred. Sable, Larkyn, and Brynlee were popular sixth graders, with Sable as the ringleader, but Mildred was a shy girl who spent an inordinate amount of time in the library alone. A kindred spirit, you might say. My heart warmed to see her taken in by the cool kids.

Sable punched her yellow beanbag chair and frowned. “This one’s flat.” She looked at Mildred. “Yours is better.”

Mildred sprang from her chair. “You can have it.”

Okay, I didn’t love that dynamic, but it was just a little social hierarchy rearing its ugly head. Only normal at this age.

Now, I really didn’t love that—

The three girls waited with bated breath while Mildred looked down at her shoes. “The Magical Adventures of Oona the Unicorn,” she said quietly.

The other girls laughed. Unbidden, a memory came back from my own sixth grade year, sharp as the day it happened. In the Stone household, turning twelve brought an exciting milestone: it meant you were old enough to host a big sleepover for your birthday, as many friends as you wanted to invite, with all the pizza and candy you could eat. Before twelve, our parents allowed Lee and me to have a single friend over at a time, but this was the big leagues, a social event. So many girls came to Lee’s twelfth birthday party that my parents had to set up a tent in the backyard for overflow. And there’d been shenanigans of epic proportions, clearly, because for weeks after, our high school–aged neighbor had turned red and fled in the opposite direction whenever he saw Lee. Of course, I wasn’t privy to those shenanigans, since as Lee’s little sister, I’d been shooed out of her bedroom the moment it was time for the real juicy stuff to begin.

But finally, my turn had come: the big 1-2. Like Lee, I was going to invite every single girl in my class, even the ones I’d never talked to out of shyness. Who didn’t love a sleepover? Armed with this cultural capital, twelve was going to be the year I turned it all around. I even talked my mom into buying the fancy invitations with gold foil flowers. They went out in the mail and a whole week went by while I anxiously awaited RSVPs. Eventually it occurred to me that I could just ask my classmates if they’d gotten them, so one day I steeled my nerves and hurried after a group of girls on the way back from the cafeteria, trying to work out the best way to insert myself. Before I could get up the courage to slip into stride with anyone, I heard my name. Kristen Clock, the coolest girl in sixth grade—of all people—was talking about me. Of course, because it’s just how these things go, she was in the middle of complaining that her mom was forcing her to go to my birthday party even though I was a dork who only liked to read. The comment stopped me in my tracks, leaving me stock-still while the girls continued on ahead. But I still heard Kristen’s right-hand girl, Gloria Rodrigo, say, “She’ll probably make us, like, work on homework or something. This is going to be the first sleepover we actually want to sleep through.” That zinger got a laugh from everyone, which, no surprise, because it was a pretty good one. I’d probably have appreciated it more if it hadn’t shot like an arrow through my heart.

Obviously, as any rational person would do, I went home and told my mom in no uncertain terms to cancel my party. Unfortunately, she was an expert at wrestling the truth out of me, and soon I’d spilled the whole story. To my horror, she refused to cancel—instead, she got on the phone with Kristen’s and Gloria’s mothers, and before I could say social pariah, Kristen, Gloria, and every other girl in my grade had been handed an edict by their mothers to attend my birthday. I’d never wished to contract sudden and incurable consumption more ardently.

But, modern infrastructure being what it is, I caught not even a wisp of the vapors that had felled my favorite Victorian heroines. So the night came, the girls arrived, and it was awkward... I would say, if I was employing my gift for understatement. To lean on my talent for painfully accurate description, it was a humiliating living nightmare. There was pizza, ice cream, and a mountain of candy, but I was too nervous to eat. There were brand-new board games stacked on the coffee table, waiting for us to play them, but I was too afraid to suggest one lest someone find my choice boring. I was, in fact, too afraid to do anything but stare anxiously across the room as Kristen and Gloria sat in a corner and whispered. Then, like a miracle, I saw Lee walking down the hall—funny, confident, sixteen-year-old Lee, who’d kissed a boy and seen an R-rated movie and owned a cell phone. I’d scrambled after her so fast you would’ve thought Kristen had lit my butt on fire, and begged Lee to please, please drop her plans and come attend a twelve-year-old’s birthday party.

I must’ve looked pretty desperate, because she actually called her best friends, Claire and Simon, and told them their double date was off, then strode into the living room, shook out her long, shiny brown hair, and said, “Who wants to watch Twilight?” Everyone, it turned out. Literal pandemonium. (I filed away “Mention Twilight,” and it turns out, fifteen years later, it still works.) After the movie it was gossip and prank phone calls and Lee dragging out her People magazines so the girls could point out their celebrity crushes, none of which were activities I would’ve thought of on my own.

Lee was older and worldly and they loved her. I watched it all unfold, grateful to be spared the spotlight but also, if I’m completely honest, a little bit sad. That’s when it first occurred to me: whatever that magic thing was that made some people magnetic, the je ne sais quoi Lee had—I didn’t have it. But chin up, no big deal. Not everyone gets sprinkled with fairy dust. It was simply good to know where you fell on the scale so you could adjust accordingly, perhaps become a more accommodating person to make up for your lack of pizazz, which I’d been trying to do since roughly the age of twelve.

All that said, it still wasn’t the greatest boost to the old ego to finally attempt to seduce a man and have him practically trip over his own two feet trying to flee me. Though I suppose it was good Logan had his abrupt change of heart about me before we’d slept together.

But back to the children. I set down my hot glue gun and swept into the Beanbag Cranny, radiating my best Ms. Honey vibes. “Good morning, girls, lovely to see you. Sable, Larkyn, and Brynlee, I heard Ms. Redfield is putting out the sign-up sheet for The Wizard of Oz. You’d better run to the cafeteria if you don’t want to end up playing a flying monkey.” I resisted the urge to say something sarcastically scolding to them about their behavior, even though they probably wouldn’t register the full meaning until years later, when it finally clicked and delivered a delayed moral lesson from a source they could no longer remember, thereby making it the perfect crime. No, there was hope for these girls yet. Even Kristen—I mean, Sable. “Mildred, would you stay behind a minute?”

As predicted, the girls rushed off at the flying monkey threat. But Mildred kept still, her gaze locked on her shoes. I crouched in front of her. “Hey. Guess what? I have something for you.”

Her head rose, eyes wide behind her pink glasses.

I led Mildred to my Cool New Reads crafting station, then bent over and reached into the box of books. “I ordered this just for you.”

She dropped my hand and seized the book, holding it reverently. “The new one!”

Mildred’s eyes sparkled as she cracked open the stiff spine. “I’m going to read the entire thing right now.” She spun on her heels and started to charge toward the beanbags—then spun back, looking sheepish. “Thank you, Ms. Stone.”

The squishiest beanbag chair had just claimed Mildred as its latest victim, sucking her like quicksand so her little legs were all I could see, when the double door to the library flew open and Gia burst in.

Gia Russo was one of my two closest friends—not just at Barton Springs, but in general. That was a fact I’d almost let slip one Monday when Gia and Muriel Lopez, my other friend, asked what fun things I’d gotten up to with my “hip young crew” that weekend, and I’d started to scoff at the idea that I had a hip young crew—until I saw the alarm on their faces. Apparently, it was unusual not to have friends outside of work, or friends your own age, as opposed to those roughly two or three times it. But Gia, a fifth grade teacher, and Muriel, the other librarian, were both wonderful and the other founding members of our three-person romance book club, which met every Wednesday during lunch in the teacher’s lounge. Gia was fifty-eight and small-boned, with short-cropped black hair, ears lined with silver studs, and a personality she liked to call “aggressively Italian.”

All thoughts of the weekend flew from my mind. “Twenty percent? But we’re already on a shoestring budget. They’ve cut every year. Where else can they pull money from?”

Gia sank onto the desk. “Everyone says they’re going to cut jobs. Or pay. Or both.”

My heart sank. Since I’d started at Barton Springs five years ago, Texas’s dwindling education budget had been a source of endless anxiety, especially for educators like me who worked in the arts and humanities, where the heaviest budget bludgeonings always occurred. When I was hired, Barton Springs’s library had been housed in its own sprawling building and there’d been three of us: me, Muriel, and Dawn Kowalski. But budget cuts that first year had gotten us booted to our current tiny cave, and even worse, they’d cost Dawn her job. Each year, as the budget cuts came for more of us—the speech therapist, then the music teacher, then the arts teacher—classroom sizes ballooned and more of the supply budget was pushed onto our shoulders. (I was, for example, paying for all of my own glitter.) Everyone was so scared of being let go that no one dared complain, except to the Texas Educators Association, our advocates to lawmakers. And to each other.

A terrible thought occurred to me: “We’re the only school left in the district with two librarians.”

Gia’s forehead creased in a frown. “At our size, we should have at least three. But you’re right. I’m worried for you and Muriel.”

And here I’d spent the last year trying to talk myself into asking for the promotion to full librarian Muriel swore I deserved. Forget a promotion; what if I lost my job? If they had to choose between Muriel and me, I’d be toast. Muriel had years of experience and a master of library sciences under her belt, and I was only a lowly BA-educated assistant librarian.

Gia patted my back. “Well,” I sighed. “At least you’re safe.” Gia taught math, the one language we’d all be speaking a thousand years from now when countries ceased to exist and the aliens descended.

As if on cue, the double door burst open once again, and Gia and I jumped. “You’ll never believe this,” Muriel boomed, arriving in a veritable storm of swirling scarves despite the early September heat. She always dressed like she was about to make a star turn as a Hooverville bag lady in a school production of Annie. Despite that, she was sharp as a tack at sixty-eight.

Muriel’s expression changed to one of wonder. “Honey, you’re a star! You really haven’t seen?”

I squinted. Was Muriel suffering heatstroke from all those layers? “What are you talking about?”

She unlocked her phone and thrust it at me. Gia and I both leaned over. She had some website pulled up, the logo spelling out The Watcher on the Hill in big block letters. I frowned at Muriel in confusion.

I thumbed down and shrieked.

There, in vivid color and crisp resolution, was a picture of me in Logan’s arms outside the Fleur de Lis. I’d forgotten until this moment that his shirt had been unbuttoned thanks to our mad dash out of the burning hotel, and—God help me—I was struck anew by how good-looking he was, the commanding way he held his shoulders, his confidence telegraphing clearly through the image. It didn’t hurt that he was carrying me cradled to him with ease, or that my arms were wrapped around his neck like he was my personal lord and savior. Whoever took the picture must’ve caught us right after we’d burst out of the staircase onto the street. Between my plunging red dress—made even more provocative by being hiked up my thighs—Logan’s bare chest, our tangled limbs, and the way we were looking at each other, like we’d just rolled out of bed or were maybe on our way back into one, the picture screamed sex. No, worse—intimacy.

Dread filled my stomach like a lead balloon. I was so distracted by the picture that it took me several shocked seconds before I realized there was obviously an accompanying headline.

Hovering over us, Muriel got impatient with the time it was taking me to process and swiped down. And oh, God. There was an entire article. She read it out loud: “‘Upstart Democratic gubernatorial candidate Logan Arthur snapped barely dressed and holding on for dear life to a scantily clad mystery woman outside the Fleur de Lis in the wee hours of Sunday morning.’” Muriel paused to grin lasciviously at me, clearly ignorant of the fact that my entire world had just turned upside down.

Logan was a gubernatorial candidate? As in, a person running against Grover Mane to become the next governor of Texas? I’d thought he was a run-of-the-mill investment banker or lawyer. How was a man as blunt and hotheaded as him a politician? And how had I not recognized him? As soon as I thought it, I knew the answer. The truth was, besides paying attention whenever Lee called to vent about being surrounded by useless, backstabbing lawmakers, I didn’t follow politics all that much...in fact, in a secret I would take to my grave, sometimes when Lee started waxing on about policy change my eyes sort of just...glazed over. I hadn’t, in all honesty, been paying much attention to the state elections.

Lee was right: being an uninformed public citizen really had come back to bite me in the ass.

Muriel barreled on: “‘Apparently, the powers that be have a rollicking sense of humor—or they’re rooting for Grover Mane—because Arthur and his paramour were caught in a state of undress thanks to a freak lightning strike that started a fire in the upper levels of the hotel. Although rumors of Arthur’s playboy past have dogged his candidacy (as they once did, coincidentally, to the now-married Governor Mane), Arthur’s team has repeatedly assured high-profile backers the rumors are unfounded.’”

One night. One measly, should’ve-been-private night out, to accomplish a private goal, and now I was Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter. What if my students’ parents saw this? What if Principal Zimmerman saw it and decided firing me was the easiest way to cut the budget? This was a disaster.

It hit me that Muriel and Gia were both uncharacteristically quiet, so I broke my thousand-yard stare-off with the phone to glance at them. They were both gaping.

Gia hit me on the shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell us you had a boyfriend?”

My cell phone buzzed violently, interrupting the barrage. “Oh, thank God,” I said, and leaped across the desk to seize the lifeline. Then I looked at the screen. Blocked Number. That couldn’t be good. But it was either Door Number One—the Muriel and Gia Inquisition Experience—or whatever mystery lay behind Door Number Two. I decided to take my chances.

I waved Muriel and Gia silent. “Hello?”