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I didn’t jump and I hated that. She should have startled me. I had been alone, and I knew I had been alone as it was one of the few senses I trusted. I’d always been able to feel whenever someone entered the same space as me. It wasn’t just the footsteps but the change in the air, the shift in the room itself, that alerted me to their presence long before anyone ever talked to me. Yet that hadn’t happened with Edie.

One second the aisle had been empty and the next she was there, standing at the end with her hands folded over a gray rectangular box about the size of a board game. She wore her usual green and yellow cardigan and her hair was pinned back the same way it always was. She looked perfectly normal, yet I couldn’t help remembering the feeling of her staring at me from under that broken streetlight.

The back of my neck prickled again and I shivered slightly.

“Hi, Ms. Mercer,” I replied quietly. We were in a library after all.

Her gaze seemed to take everything in with one sweep as she took a single step toward me. She cataloged everything from the new sleeve on my shirt to the books that sat open around me and in my lap. It was a small pause, the kind adults thought other people wouldn’t notice. But I’d learned to read pauses the way I read upside down utility bills across the table from my parents, and this one made my stomach clench.

“I thought I might find you back here,” she said quickly, trying to cover up the pause.

“You always seem to know where I hide.”

“I suppose I do.” She smiled but it didn’t reach her eyes and seemed to catch on one corner of her mouth leaving it uneven. “How’s Davey?”

“Hospital let him go two days ago. Just suffered from some smoke inhalation. Mrs. Walker says he wants to be a firefighter now.”

“That sounds about right.”

“He wanted to be a worm last week, so I’m not sure it’s set in stone just yet,” I said, trying to remain pleasant but desperately curious about the gray box she was holding. It didn’t look like anything I’d seen in the library before and there was something about her grip on it that said it was important but not fragile.

“And how are you?” she asked, her smile slowly sinking until it vanished off her face completely.

It was the same polite question everyone had been asking me for days now, and I always said the same thing, “I’m fine.”

She nodded as though I’d told her the truth and it made that uneasy feeling that had been wriggling up and down my spine even stronger. “I would like to talk to you about something. It’s…a scholarship assessment.”

It took a moment for her words to make it through my brain since it was the last thing I’d expected her to say. Scholarships were for students that were able to do extracurricular activities, whose guidance counselors knew their names, who were able to get recommendation letters from people who mattered, and get good grades, I spent too much of my time working to qualify for anything like that. I must have just stared at her because she raised her eyebrows at me.

“If you have time?”

“There has never once been a scholarship that’s been looking for me,” I hedged.

“There may be one now.”

“That’s suspiciously convenient.” My fingers tightened around the cuffs of my shirt.

“Yes, it is, isn’t it?” She spoke softly as though she was scared to voice the words.

That was what stopped me from denying her outright though. People didn’t like admitting when something sounded suspicious or too good to be true. They preferred to think of themselves as special or that it was an opportunity.

Ms. Mercer looked down at the gray box and her fingers tightened slightly around it. “Would you come to the reading room for a moment?”

I should have said no, I knew that in my bones, but this was Ms. Mercer. She had been saving books for me behind the counter that she knew I’d enjoy since I was just a kid. She had never once charged me a late fee or given me a hard time for being in the library all day in summer when most people believed kids should be playing outside. She had cared for me and that kindness meant something.

The trouble was that kindness often hid a trap. Still, I nodded and pushed to my feet, quickly gathering up my books before putting them back where they belonged and following her to the reading room.

The first thing that was odd was that the reading room had been cleared out. All of the community pamphlets and clutter that advertised tax help, GED classes, babysitting services, the knitting circle that met on Thursdays, and any other myriad of things were gone from the table and bulletin board. The entire room was empty except for the table and two chairs.

The second thing that was odd was how the chairs were positioned. They were facing each other. Ms. Mercer was a beside-you kind of a person, always had been. She would lean over the page, turn a book so that the person she was talking to could read it more clearly, and she never put a table between herself and someone else.

She set the gray box down in the middle of the table and gestured for me to take a seat opposite her. “There is a school,” she began as she sat as well. “Very old. Very private. Very selective. They have a fund for students that come out of unusual circumstances. From outside its usual families.”

“Outside as in poor?”

“Outside as in not previously known to the school.”

That sounded like a gilded cage if ever I heard about one, I couldn’t exactly say that though so I asked, “And they have you find such students?”