In Her Skin(15)

Mrs. Lovecraft flashes tight palms. “Hold on. I’m not sure about you two going alone—on the train alone—together.”

My cheeks pink just thinking about it.

“You can’t keep Vivi bubble-wrapped forever, Mother,” you say with an edge that would have sent Momma looking for a belt.

Mrs. Lovecraft licks her lips and becomes very still. You cock your head and stare her down. Finally, Mrs. Lovecraft says, “Well, I suppose it can’t hurt. Here, you’ll need this.” She tears through her purse and fumbles with her wallet zipper, digs out a twenty and hands it to me.

“What’s this for?” I say, because libraries are free.

“You can’t go out without money, silly,” she says.

In a flash we are gone, you with a pack on your back and me tagging along in the hoodie you tossed me, clutching the insides of my pockets and my unnecessary twenty. You walk like you mean it, leaving the smell of clean hair in your wake. I hope that Vivi, after being held captive and abused, would walk like I already walk out of habit. Street people cave their chests and keep chins tucked, unless confronted, which is when they fill themselves with air and take up space. I don’t get the sense that Vivi ever took up much space in her life, so I shape myself into my usual comma and drag along.

We stop at a light and I catch up. “Thanks for taking me,” I say.

You pull one earbud out and stare.

“I said thanks for taking me along,” I repeat.

“Of course.” You fumble with the earbud and pop it back in. “I wasn’t going to leave you alone with her.”

You confuse me. Your mother is kind, and you ought to know how lucky you are to have her and this and you leave me off balance in a way that sets my chest on fire.

“I feel like a tagalong here. It’s not as though I have homework.”

I can’t tell if you can hear me or not. I try again.

“I mean, I guess they’ll be sending me to school again sometime soon. It’s just, no one’s talked about it yet, and it’s, like, still the school year.”

More walking.

I try one more time before we duck into the subway station. “We don’t have to be best friends again.”

You pluck both earbuds out and pause, your whole face rearranging in thought. It takes you almost a minute to return to me.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” you say. “We absolutely have to be friends again.”

*

Clean clothes and a sparkly companion aren’t going to help me if Brown Tooth is working. And she’s always working—unlike you, whose sunken backpack contains no precalculus book, something your mother didn’t notice but I did, and when do you study, anyway, to keep up all that sparkle?

At the main entrance, the iron lanterns have spikes meant for stabbing things, and the wind on the library plaza beats us back. I pull the hoodie around me as we are swept inside with a rush of tourists taking pictures of the white marble plaques, and I want to warn them it’s too much to take in, I’ve tried and it is dizzying, and you are gone. I look for you up the stairs; no tight back, no swinging hair. I look to the security guard, but he looks into his phone. I look to the massive sculpted lions on the first landing, but they are bored. I imagined we would go to Bates Hall, the place where I first found you tucked into a carrel with your same old book. I still imagine this.

I climb the marble stairs.

“Vivi!” you call over the tinny roar. You are below, at the start of a hall that leads to the bathrooms. You wave and I fight against the crowd. When I reach you, you look confused.

“Where were you going?” you ask.

Vivi would not know this place, would not remember it. A nine-year-old girl does not go to the public library. Unless she did. Maybe you and Vivi came here as kids: you lived a short T-stop away.

“I just figured we’d go where everyone else was going,” I say brightly.

“But not where I was going,” you say.

“No,” I say cautiously.

The corners of your lips turn up, a hint of mocking. “Then you have changed.”

You spin abruptly and I follow you down a hall where the gold fades. Thankfully, this is not Brown Tooth’s beat, this is no one’s beat, and the hall is empty. After several turns we arrive at a bronze elevator.

“I want to show you something,” you say, hitting the up button.

The ancient elevator is slow to come, and our broken reflections shimmer back at us. When it does arrive it is confusing, with a button labeled STACK SIDE and other buttons, and I can hear pistons and gaskets as it moves, and this steampunk-y elevator is why I love my library, but I try not to let love relax me. You punch Three with the side of your fist and hold the rail. The ride is slow and jerky and I feel sick, but maybe that’s fear. We exit the elevator and my legs wobble.

A sign says RARE BOOKS LOBBY AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, with an arrow.

“This is where you go to work on precalculus?” I ask.

“Something like that,” you say, smiling.

We stop at a window facing the empty courtyard below, a pretty place where people with money eat in warm weather. You exhale sharply, fixed on getting what you want to say right.

“I’m going to be honest. At first, I didn’t know how I felt about getting you back.”

“I figured.”