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Vampirism: (n) 1. The condition of being a vampire, marked by the need to ingest blood and extreme vulnerability to sunlight. 2. The act of preying upon others for financial or emotional gain. 3. A gigantic pain in the butt.
I’ve always been a glass-half-full kind of girl.
The irritated look from Gary, the barrel-chested bartender at Shenanigans, told me that, one, I’d said that out loud, and, two, he just didn’t care. But at that point, I was the only person sitting at the pseudo-sports bar on a Wednesday afternoon, and I didn’t have the cognitive control required to stop talking. So he had no choice but to listen.
I picked up the remnants of my fourth (fifth? sixth?) electric lemonade. It glowed blue against the neon lights of Shenanigans’
insistently cheerful decor, casting a green shadow on Gary’s yellow-and-white-striped polo shirt. “See this glass? This morning, I would have said this glass isn’t half empty. It’s half full. And I was used to that. My whole life has been half full. Half -full family, half-full personal life, half-full career. But I settled for it. I was used to it. Did I already say that I was used to it?”
Gary, a gone-to-seed high-school football player with a gut like a deflated balloon, gave me a stern look over the pilsner he was polishing. “Are you done with that?”
I drained the watered-down vodka and blue liqueur from my glass, wincing as the alcohol hit the potato skins in my belly.
Both threatened to make an encore appearance.
I steadied myself on the ring-stained maple bar and squinted through the icy remains of the glass. “And now, my career is gone. Gone, gone, gone. Completely empty. Like this glass.”
Gary replaced said glass with another drink, pretended to wave at someone in the main dining room, and left me to fend for myself. I pressed my forehead to the cool wood of the bar, cringing as I remembered the smug, cat-that-devoured-the-canary tone Mrs. Stubblefield used to say, “Jane, I need to speak to you privately.”
For the rest of my life, those words would echo through my head like something out of Carrie.
With a loud “ahem,” Mrs. Stubblefield motioned for me to leave my display of Amelia Bedelia books and come into her office.
Actually, all she did was quirk her eyebrows. But the woman had a phobia about tweezers. When she was surprised/angry/curious, it looked as if a big gray moth was taking flight. Quirking her brows was practically sign language.
My joyless Hun of a supervisor only spoke to people privately when they were in serious trouble. Generally, she enjoyed chastising in public in order to (a) show the staff just how badly she could embarrass us if she wanted to and (b) show the public how put-upon she was by her rotten, incompetent employees.
Mrs. Stubblefield had never been a fan of mine. We got off on the wrong foot when I made fun of the Mother Goose hat she wore for Toddler Story Hour. I was four.
She was the type of librarian who has “Reading is supposed to be educational, not fun” tattooed somewhere. She refused to order DVDs or video games that might attract “the wrong crowd.” (Translation: teenagers.) She allowed the library to stock
“questionable” books such as The Catcher in the Rye and the Harry Potter series but tracked who read them. She kept those names in a file marked “Potential Troublemakers.”
“Close the door, Jane,” she said, squeezing into her desk chair. Mrs. Stubblefield was about one cheek too large for it but refused to order another one. A petty part of me enjoyed her discomfort while I prepared for a lecture on appropriate displays for Banned Books Week or why we really don’t need to stock audiobooks on CD.
“As you know, Jane, the county commission cut our operating budget by twenty percent for the next fiscal year, ” Mrs.
Stubblefield said. “That leaves us with less money for new selections and new programs.”
“I’d be willing to give up Puppet Time Theater on Thursdays,” I offered. I secretly hated Cowboy Bob and his puppets.
I have puppet issues.
“I’m afraid it’s more serious than that, Jane,” Mrs. Stubblefield said, her eyes flitting to the glass door behind me. “We have to reduce our salary expenses as well. I’m afraid we can’t afford a director of juvenile services anymore. We’re going to have to let you go.”
Maybe some of you saw that coming, but I didn’t. I got my master’s degree in library science knowing I would come back to “my” library, even if it meant working with Mrs. Stubblefield. I ’m the one who established the library’s book club for new mothers who desperately needed to leave the house on Thursday nights for a little adult conversation. I ’m also the reason a small portion of the Hollow’s female population now knows that Sense and Sensibility was a book before it was a movie. I’m the one who insisted we start doing background checks on our Story Time guests, which is why Jiggles the Clown was no longer welcome on the premises. I’m the one who spent two weeks on my knees ripping out the thirty -three-year-old carpet in the children’s reading room. Me. So, after hearing that my services were no longer needed, I had no response other than “Huh?!”
“I’m sorry, Jane, but we have no other choice. We must be careful stewards of the taxpayers ’ money,” Mrs. Stubblefield said, shaking her head in mock regret. She was trying to look sympathetic, but her eyebrows were this close to doing the samba.
“Ida is retiring next month, ” I said of the ancient returns manager. “Can’t we save the money through eliminating her position?”
Clearly, Mrs. Stubblefield had not expected me to argue, which proved that she never paid attention when I spoke. Her eyebrows beat twice, which I took as code for “Just leave quietly.”
“I don’t understand,” I continued.
“My performance reviews have been nothing but positive. Juvenile circulation has increased thirty-two percent since I was hired. I work weekends and nights when everyone else is too busy or sick. This place is my whole…What the hell are you looking at?”
