Is that her?
Is thathim?
I keep my gaze forward and my pace even. Let them talk. I can do nothing to stop them. Neither, even, can Kingston. Another uncontrollable force of nature: gravity, the wind, and campus gossip.
Gradually, the library rises before us, gray and grand as ever: the elegant archive, open to all.
My steps slow of their own accord.
If walking back into Emrys’s classroom felt like a dream, approaching the library is more like a nightmare. Or, no: a hallucination, a return to a vision of something that just can’t be anymore. I can’t reallybehere, can I? No, I’m imagining it. This is just my safe space. I’m on Jessie the therapist’s couch, holding the pulsing plastic pucks, eyes closed, soft clothes?—
A blast of cold air knifes through my scarf.
CALIBURN MEMORIAL LIBRARY, read the carved letters above the double archway. IN SCIENTIA IPSA PORTA.
A door into knowledge itself.
No, I think, watching a few pinprick snowflakes swirl over the doors.This is very, very real.
More students are traipsing by us, swiveling to look, murmuring. I turn just barely to the side and Kingston is standing an armslength away from me, waiting.
“Sorry,” I say, although why I’m apologizing I don’t know. “I’m…”
I can’t finish the sentence. Instead, I put one foot on the bottom step, feel the cold of the stone just start to seep through the sole of my boot, and push up.
One step.
Then another.
Then another.
Then the last one, and then I’m summiting onto the landing and walking to the broad wooden?—
Something rushes in front of me—someone.
Kingston.
To hold the door open.
“Thank you,” I say, too surprised to forget my manners.
Kingston nods.
Of course. Stupid chivalry. Stupid stand on ceremony. Stupid…stupid everything.
Inside, the air has the dry bite of old buildings in winter, all static electricity and ancient forced-heat systems, and the leafy, sawdust smell of old books.
So familiar it makes my heart hurt.
The ceiling of the main reading room swoops overhead as I step across the terracotta of the entryway, the massive iron chandeliers like distant stars, evenly constellated across the vault. It’s early enough for the tables to be populated, late enough that they’re not crammed elbow-to-elbow with students.
Good.
I find the books I need without much trouble. I don’t bother with the card catalog or asking a librarian, just jump directly into the stacks armed with the call numbers I’d taken down in the registrar’s office. I don’t even know that I care so much about maintaining any kind of course performance—since I doubt a waning GPA would warrant academic suspension for me, given everything—but the normalcy of it, the routine, of diligently finding the proper texts to read and settling in to study them, is nice. One little, ordinary, nice thing.
Ancien français: exercises de morphologie
Except that each time I pull down a book?—
