4
L’Enfant Terrible
Despite the fact that we’d been downsized a few years ago to makeroom 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 Ididused 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’tlovethat dynamic, but it was just a little social hierarchy rearing its ugly head. Only normal at this age.
“Why’d your mom name you Mildred, anyway?” Larkyn asked. “Did she, like, hate you or something?” The three girls giggled while Mildred frowned and crouched gingerly in Sable’s discarded yellow beanbag.
Now, Ireallydidn’t love that—
“And what are those books you’re always reading?” Sable asked, settling comfortably into Mildred’s chair. “The ones with the unicorns?”
The three girls waited with bated breath while Mildred looked down at her shoes.“The Magical Adventures of Oona the Unicorn,”she said quietly.
“Oh my God,” Sable cackled. “That sounds like it’s forbabies.”
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 socialevent. 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 saysocial 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... Iwouldsay, 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-oldLee, 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,pleasedrop 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 watchTwilight?” Everyone, it turned out. Literal pandemonium. (I filed away “MentionTwilight,” and it turns out, fifteen years later, it still works.) After the movie it was gossip and prank phone calls and Lee dragging out herPeoplemagazines 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 mebeforewe’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 forThe 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.
“Come on.” I stretched out a hand. “Let me show you.”
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!”
“Oona Battles the Monsters of the Rainbow Ravine.And it’s all yours—you can be the first to check it out.”
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.”
“You’re welcome. I want to hear all about it when you’re done.”I wish I could shield you and keep you this happy, I thought, then startled at my sudden melancholy turn.
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.
