A long table in the center held an assortment of reference books and a vase of flowers the staff took turns replacing every week. I replaced them most often. Control issues present and accounted for.
The rare books room sat toward the back behind a locked glass door, and I still felt lucky every time I keyed in my code. I had wanted a job like this for years.
Graduate school had been a strategic decision. I’d specialized in preservation and archival studies, early ritual texts, and marginalia—the parts of books most people ignored. I liked work that rewarded attention and punished carelessness. It felt fair in a way people rarely were.
I’d finished the doctoral coursework, and done the comprehensive exams, too. I knew how to dismantle an argument in three languages. My unfinished dissertation was still hovering in my Dropbox likean accusation.
And despite being at the top of my class, with multiple internships doing this exact work under my belt by the time I graduated, I had spent the last three months convincing myself I had gotten the job by accident, or as a diversity hire to fill the slot of Awkward Woman Who Knows Too Much.
Books had always been an escape for me. In them, around them, I could be anyone. I had chased that feeling all the way through graduate school and into this room, choosing work that let me disappear into other people’s voices without being corrected for how I took up space.
The lunchtime rush that occasionally filled the library had already cleared out. Only two soaked stragglers lingered in the stacks, dripping enough water to justify hazard pay, but they were keeping to themselves and didn’t seem to need any help, so I pushed the cart of returns, reached the first aisle, and froze at the crooked display at the endcap.
My eye twitched. That was new. I blamed the rain.
My hands corrected it before my brain approved the decision.
“Straight lines build trust,” I whispered.
Goddamn it. I winced. Was that too loud? Probably. Did anyone hear that? I didn’t think so. Did I sound unhinged? Yes.
But I could not be deterred by minor setbacks. I cracked my knuckles, ready to start Mission: Find The Missing Book. Secondary mission: Pretend I wasn’t thinking about how a certain tall patron would sound when I called to tell him I found it.
I failed at the second mission immediately.
“Focus,” I muttered as I marched toward the reference section.
When I was looking for something, my brain did that thing where everything else blurred out—including time, hunger, responsibility, and the concept of self-preservation. Very helpful. Very concerning. Specialists called it ADHD task hyperfixation. I called it neuroticism.
This was the version of me people could tolerate. Efficient. Quiet. Useful. No opinions. No needs. Just results.
I started alphabetizing and indexing my emotional state the way I always did when my brain began to work against me.
A: Anxiety, ignore.
C: Creativity, stalled.
L: Loneliness, deal with later.
M: Mental stability, undefined.
That was healthy. Definitely.
My therapist would have had thoughts—so would my parents. Luckily for me, I no longer spoke to any of them. The latter estrangement was healthy; the former was… not.
I pulled up the Dewey code on the old desktop, the fans rattling like the computer was holding on for dear life, then headed down the aisle.
I started with the places that title could have ended up if someone saw the Spanish and panicked. Adjacent classifications. “Foreign language” catchalls. The well-meaning mistakes that caused permanent damage.
“Okay,Recopilación de Linajes de DragonesNotables de este Milenio,” I whispered to myself. “Should be right between… ah, yes.”
I reached for the shelf and immediately spotted a spine that looked promising:Compendio de dragones notables, by Brenardo León Mullijano.
My heart rate kicked up as I opened it.
I stared at the extremely detailed instruction manual for dragon subclasses from Dungeons & Dragons, complete with charts—many charts.
“Oh my god!” I snapped it shut and—without thinking—yeeted it down the aisle.
