The Measure(17)

“Well, I’ll let you get back to work,” Amie said. “I’m going to stop by the bookstore and see if any inspiration strikes. Say hi to Maura for me.”



Amie stepped into the bookshop near her apartment, the bell chiming as she entered. The small television mounted overhead was playing an interview with one of the newest presidential candidates, Anthony Rollins, a smooth-talking, good-looking congressman from Virginia who was no doubt pontificating about why he should be the man to shepherd the country through such alien times. Amie was still upset that the shop owner had installed the television last year. She came to the bookstore for relief from the endless news cycle, the stresses of the world outside.

She tried to ignore the man on the bright screen above her and slipped past the table of popular titles up front, where The Iliad and The Odyssey had both taken up residence in recent weeks, thanks to renewed interest in Greek mythology and the Fates, alongside a cluster of self-help books and meditations on mortality by doctors, philosophers, and theologians. The Five People You Meet in Heaven was a bestseller again.

Once she was in the main room, surrounded by the tall wooden shelves and the familiar scent of thousands of pages, Amie felt herself relax. There were few places where she felt more contented than a bookstore. She had a sometimes overwhelming tendency to disappear into her daydreams, so Amie took comfort in being surrounded by the equally prolific dreams of others, preserved forever in print.

When she and Nina were younger, their mother would often take them to the local bookshop after school, where the owner didn’t mind if they spent an hour reading on the carpet before even making a purchase. By then Amie was already pulled toward fantasy and romance, while Nina preferred factual biographies of women like Marie Curie or Amelia Earhart (though her unsolved disappearance troubled Nina for weeks). As they read together, Nina developed a habit of pridefully pointing out any typos she found in a published book, which never failed to annoy Amie. She always wished that her sister could just let go and lose herself in the story.

As they grew up, Amie and Nina even founded a tradition of passing along the books they were reading, as soon as they were finished. It was originally Amie’s suggestion, a balm for her fears that as the two of them aged, and their lives started to diverge—Nina came out as gay, then they both headed off to separate colleges—their newfound differences might threaten their closeness. For the five years they spent living apart, both sisters sent each other dozens of paperbacks through the mail, complete with sticky notes on favorite passages and inside jokes scribbled in the margins. Nina made fun of Amie’s blubbering when she received her copy of Never Let Me Go, the last pages wrinkled with tears, and Amie griped at Nina for sending Outliers with a distracting amount of highlighted sections.

In the bookstore, Amie paused at the section for dystopian fiction, where she had come across The Giver back in January and, flooded by fond memories of her own fifth-grade book club, decided to assign it in class—before everything changed that spring. One spot over, The Handmaid’s Tale sat snugly beside The Hunger Games, two books she remembered reading rapturously as a teenager. On more than one occasion, she had lain in her bed past midnight, unable to sleep, envisioning herself as a tribute in the Games, fending her way through a dark, dense forest grown inside her mind.

At least the future they had been doled seemed more promising than those on the shelves in front of Amie, in which women’s bodies were stripped solely to their reproductive capacities and children murdered each other on television at the government’s behest. Each novel seemed to imagine a world bleaker than the last. If those were the alternatives, Amie thought, perhaps they should feel lucky that the strings were all they got.

But Amie wondered, as she did almost every day, if she was making the wrong decision by refusing to open her box and rejecting the knowledge that had given so many of her friends and colleagues—nearly all of whom had long strings—an unprecedented peace of mind, the greatest gift they could ask for. Even Nina, whose thoughts were so often consumed with worry about Maura, had admitted to Amie that she couldn’t help but feel relieved when she saw her own long string.

But Amie’s mind was constantly in motion, depicting herself in different scenarios. She had vividly imagined every possible outcome—a long string, a short string, a length in the middle, she once even conjured an empty box—and she reasoned that the safest choice was simply shoving the chest to the back of her closet, behind a salt-stained pair of winter boots that she only wore during snowstorms.



On Monday morning, Amie arrived at school, armed with two dozen copies of Tuck Everlasting.

“Excuse me, Miss Wilson?”

Amie turned around to see one of the school’s custodians pulling a folded piece of yellow loose-leaf from his pocket. “I found this on the floor of your classroom as I was cleaning up last night, and I didn’t know if I should throw it away or put it somewhere. I’m guessing one of your students wrote it?”

“Oh, thank you.” Amie took the sheet of paper, a miniature rendering of the Manhattan skyline drawn on the back. She glanced at the names mentioned in the note inside. None were her students.

“Where did you say you found this?”

“Just lying under one of the chairs, near the bookshelf.”

“I guess it might belong to someone,” she said. “Thank you for saving it.”