Although, to be fair, I did not come to the library for this book. I came to the library for an entirely different book, a book that is hiding underneath this book in a very deliberate move that I will from here on in refer to as The Book Trick. This is the other book:
I am worried about what the librarian will say because my library is not a library where the librarians just love books so much that the only way they could continue to operate in this life was to share their love of books with others. No, this is a different breed of librarian.
And I use the term librarian loosely. This girl awaiting me might be 16. It's not like she went to school for this. She's a lie-brarian. Do you think in librarian school there is a class on how to moderate the face? When people like me check out books like this? Or when middle aged dudes check out books with Fabio covers? Regardless, this girl has not taken that or any librarian classes. She looks like she just read The Crucible because some commie-lovin' English teacher made her and she is pissed as hell. Like, ask her to name a Modernist writer, just one, and she's going to answer: Stephanie Meyer.
I am thinking that the sheer level of macho of the McCormac book [there's blood in the title! This dude wrote No Country For Old Men, muthafuckas! The jacket blurb name drops Faulkner. FAULKNER!] will cancel out the pair of feet kissing on the book I really came here to get.
Regardless, I have plans for what to do if The Book Trick doesn't work, if she laughs or scoffs or gives me that awful, questioning eyebrow raise. I have a nightmare of her waving the book around over her head. In this nightmare she also has a fast food microphone and it is hooked up to every speaker in the library, maybe in the world. But if any of these things happen or even look like they have a chance of happening, I have plans. The first being what my first plan for most things is: deny. How did that get there? I must've grabbed the wrong book by mistake. The end. The second is to say that I am volunteering for Big Brothers/Big Sisters and what are you doing for the community, hmm? Instead of being boring and playing basketball with them or slipping them drugs, I'm giving my Little Sister the gift of words. I suppose there is a third option, although it had not occurred to me at the time, and that is to tell the truth.
And the truth is this: my friend has just finished writing a Young Adult novel. She asked me, before I read it and give feedback that I familiarize myself a bit with the genre. This is only fair. And I want to support her to the best of my ability. Even if it means having, for the sake of my very male ego, to pull a Book Trick. What I haven't told her, what I haven't told anyone, is that this isn't my first time at the Book Trick Rodeo.
Back in fifth grade, I would check out these:
To cover up these:
I wanted to know about high school, okay? I was so sick of Goosebumps, and The Babysitters Club, I think we can all agree, just sucks. And I loved them both. In a way that I didn't love grade school. I wanted to live in Shadyside and Sweet Valley and not to live where I lived and I wanted these people, the Wakefield twins and the lucky few who survived the Fear Street sagas, to be my older siblings. When I was in first grade, I got in trouble for telling people I had an older brother and sister. No one ever saw them because they were in college. I really thought that if I said it enough it would come true, that I would get a big brother and a big sister. I didn't. And years of begging for foreign exchange students didn't get me anywhere, either. But these books got me somewhere. I loved them. And although I was always worried and would pull Book Trick after Book Trick without fail, the librarians would always smile and never say a word. And I am so grateful for that.
But here, now, in the present? I am next in line and I am terrified. I feel like everyone here is watching me and is ready to laugh and maybe take pictures to publish on every website on the entire internet. I feel like every single boy I have ever liked, boys who I've always prided myself on having better taste in books than, are lurking around the corner, waiting for me to be completely mortified. I am worried that I am going to be exposed for whatever I am, or am not, or be defined by what I doing, rather than who I am as a person and this is an issue, okay?! This is a dilemma and I don't know if I can survive it. And as I walk up to the counter, a counter that I will walk away from in under a minute without the lie-brarian ever seeing the cover of either of my books [are you kidding? She is flipping them over, she is scanning the back, she is not making small talk, and she is not doing anything more than the minimum she gets paid for] I realize that I haven't felt most of these things since high school. And I am ready, inside and out, to read the book I came here to get.
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