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Both Titus and Quin put their arms around me. It felt good. It felt good to talk about her and it felt good that I had people who would be there for me. But pulling myself together, I took a deep breath and answered the question.
“The story my Grandmother read to me when my mother would say the most horrible things to me is, ‘The Velveteen Rabbit.’ I’m still not sure why. But, I’m also sure I didn’t tell either of you that. I don’t know if I’ve told anybody.”
“If that’s the book, then we should find it,” Titus said confidently.
“No,” I said doubting but delighted that he could know that.
“That’s the book, right?” Titus confirmed.
“Yeah.”
“Then that’s the book you need to find.”
I stared at him shocked that this could be happening. But leaving Quin, I entered the library and approached the front desk.
“Do you have a copy of the book, ‘The Velveteen Rabbit’?”
“I’ll check,” the dark-skinned girl said from behind the desk. “We do. There’s one copy and it should be on a shelf located on the third floor.”
The girl grabbed a slip of paper and wrote down the card catalog number. I took and stared at it still not believing this was happening.
Bounding up the stairs, I found where the book was supposed to be.
“It’s not here,” I said staring at Titus in a panic.
Titus just stared back with his cocky smirk and said, “I thought you were supposed to be good at this game.”
That got me. “Oh, it’s definitely on.”
Heading back to the desk, I told the librarian it wasn’t there.
“It’s definitely marked as checked in. So it’s in the library somewhere,” she said confirming on her computer. “If you’d like, I can help you check the re-shelving carts. There’s a good chance it’s on one of those.”
I looked back at Titus who watched me smugly.
“I bet there is. Don’t worry, I got it,” I told Titus’s co-conspirator.
For the next twenty minutes, I checked every cart with books I could find. Luckily, there weren’t many. The problem was that it wasn’t on any of them. I was about to declare Titus’s plan a bust when I glanced out past the fourth-floor balcony and noticed all the students at the study desks below.
I looked back at Titus. He knew I had him. Rushing down, I scanned every book on every desk until I saw another familiar face. This time it was Nero, Titus’s ex-roommate and best friend. He was also Quin’s soon-to-be brother-in-law. Nero smiled at me as I approached him.
“Nero, in a library reading? Now I know this is supposed to be a clue.”
“It’s not that weird,” Nero said in his rich, small-town Tennessee accent. Titus and Nero had grown up together. But unlike Titus, there was no mistaking where Nero was from.
“What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be getting ready for the NFL season?”
“We got a couple of days off so I decided to come in and visit my boyfriend if that’s okay with you.”
“No, that’s beautiful,” I said moved by how open he was about his feelings for a guy.
“And if you don’t mind, I would like to get back to my reading,” Nero said before conspicuously holding up his copy of, ‘The Velveteen Rabbit.’
I chuckled.
The night continued like that with clues, tears, and friendly faces until the last clue which simply said, “Now think about all of the things she was to you and you were to her, and let your sadness sail away.”
I held up the slip and turned to Titus.
