In Her Skin(16)

“What I mean is, I have loads of friends, but I haven’t had a friend like you since you’ve been gone.”

The words been gone instead of, say, were kidnapped are weird, and I will chew on that later. Now my eyes travel across your face: the wide-set eyes made wider by the middle hair part, the chin that tips up, the lips with their excessive softness. Are you beautiful, or are you strange-looking? Why can’t I decide? And what does a friend like you mean?

You register my silence. “Was that weird to say?”

Silence does work best with you! Now I am in control. “It’s fine. Show me what you want to show me.”

You sigh and curl your arm around mine, and we are back on the right track. It’s like I’m slipping into your mission, whatever that is, and though my whole life has been spent getting ready to go on missions—the stings, the scams—I’ve never been glad about it. The inside of your arm is cool, and touching you is making parts of me flame, and this has happened before, feeling pleasure when I should be repulsed, or at least, feel nothing. You lead me to a room called ART, a topsy-turvy room with long, empty tables and statues of nude Greeks and one clock that reads 10:58 over another clock that reads 8:53. Out of habit, I look for the adult: a librarian focuses hard on shuffling papers at her desk. Before she can register us, you pull me through this strange room to another, lined with iron balconies that lead to locked rooms with glass doors. The Koussevitzky Room is dim and medieval and the kind of place normally I would love to explore, but you drag me through another door. A sign tells me we are in the lobby for the RARE BOOKS AND MANUSCRIPTS DEPARTMENT, which sounds like a place Momma would have liked because rare means money. There is an adult here, too, but this librarian cares that we are here, because whatever is behind this door is worth something.

You drop my arm and at once I am cold.

The librarian shoves clear plastic glasses up her nose and smiles. She’s not much older than us, but in my world, this is a bad thing, because the older they are, the easier they are to con, and I have to remind myself that the only person I’m conning is you. And you want to show me something, which I’m getting excited about, because this place is nerd heaven. Something awesome hits me: maybe Vivi was smart, book smart, or else she wouldn’t have been friends with you, and this means I get to be book smart, too.

This is the role I was made for.

The young librarian holds the school ID that you passed her, but it’s not the red Parkman School ID that I stole. It is blue and white and says Lasell College, and the little face in the square is not Temple Lovecraft, though it’s close. The young librarian blinks behind her glasses and says it’s nice to see you again, but she doesn’t mean it, because she is bored with her job, and though this room is loaded with ancient books tied with string behind glass, it has to be hard, without daylight, and with the hum of wandering tourists who see books as objects and not ways to learn things. You slide out a superlight, superexpensive laptop and hand the librarian your backpack, too.

(I can’t help it. This is how I see things. Expensive, not expensive. Worth stealing, not worth stealing.)

Now you’re filling out a card to explain our purpose for going into the next room, and I want to know what that purpose is, but you’re done and the librarian is buzzing us into the next room, blue with artificial light. The light is awful but the smell is not: I breathe deeply. It is the smell of ancient things. Shouty signs read STAFF ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT and THIS AREA IS UNDER VIDEO SURVEILLANCE.

“Be very specific today ladies,” calls a woman beelining toward us, a Mad Hatter type, oddball, speedy. She is tall with a white buzz cut and is slightly scary but you are not scared. You smile and thank her and promise to be specific in your searches, as always. My eyes go to the other three people in the room, each at a different table, the way New Englanders sit. They each have one file folder and a laptop, except for an old man who writes by hand. One, a dreadlocked girl, is taking pictures. They are all lost in their work, and that looks nice to me; peaceful. You place your computer at the only empty table and walk away from it, a casualness only rich people have with expensive things, toward one of the big bureaus filled with drawers and topped with jars of scrap paper and stubby pencils. I am about to find out what “very specific” means. You pull open a drawer labeled DI–DY, filled with cards. It’s nicely old-fashioned. You scribble something onto a slip of paper, do the same at a second drawer, and return both slips to the lady, who disappears into the back room. A man comes out to take her place, and because I am a student of people patterns, I get it: we’re not allowed to be alone in this room. No one is. This room is full of valuable things, and I wonder how one would get away with stealing them, and something new hits me—shame—because these are not thoughts Vivi would have.

“What did you request?” I ask; a nice, normal question.

“The Poe and the Dickinson. For our project,” you say, the last part overloud, though the man who replaced the lady is not listening. I must seem dense to you, but that is fine, because Vivi’s brain would not go directly to cheat or even steal like mine does. We sit in the hum of the humidifier and quiet taps on keyboards and whooshes of a phone camera. The old man falls asleep on his arm and begins to snore. None are the sounds that I know and love: the hushed tones, the squish of wet boots, the phlegmy coughs you hear in this cold city.

When the replacement librarian takes a call at his desk, I whisper, “Why are we here?”