Chapter Sixteen
Everywhere she looked, there were . . . children.
Were there even this many children in Halikarnassus? Were they being bussed in for some secret library-destroying project? Had Hal sicced them on poor Liam?
This was a terrible day to bring Gran back to the library. Not that Joanna had brought her. It was more like Joanna was being held hostage and forced to drive Gran’s boat while Gran complained that if she didn’t leave the house, she was either going to die of cabin fever or kill Joanna. So, really, this was a lifesaving mission. For both of them.
Except who were all these children?
Joanna hovered near Gran, even though Gran hated hovering. The woman had refused a wheelchair and was hobbling around on a walking cast with a cane. At least she had a weapon she could use to defend herself, should the mini-hordes become too unruly.
“Aren’t they just precious?” Gran asked Joanna. Joanna assumed it was rhetorical. They were not precious. They were loud. Ear-piercing. And Joanna used to be a rock star. She should know from ear-piercing.
“Why’re there so many of them?”
“Peggy!”
As if this day couldn’t get any worse, there was the literal man of her dreams, standing in front of them in jeans and a T-shirt that said SPLISH SPLASH READ.
He looked good in blue.
Not that she cared.
Although there was a big part of her that wanted to jump in his arms so they could pick up where they’d left off last night. Probably not appropriate in front of all these children.
Joanna stepped back as Liam leaned in to give Peggy a hug, which seemed very unprofessional to her. Because Joanna Green was definitely the arbiter of professional behavior.
“I’m so glad you’re up and moving,” he told Gran.
“I’m glad you’re wearing pants,” Joanna muttered.
“Sorry?”
“Nothing. Hi, Liam.”
“Hey, Joanna. Peggy, can I get you a chair or something? It’s a little chaotic here today.”
“Oh, pish, I’m fine. I just came to browse the new books.”
“Oh! Great! I thought of the perfect book for you this morning when I was shelving. Let me grab it for you. Atticus! Walk, please!” Liam’s excellent customer service was interrupted by a moppet torpedo who threatened Gran’s stability.
“Maybe I should sit down,” Gran said, and of course she did. She did what Liam said. He’d only caused her to break her leg with his hotness. What her own granddaughter suggested didn’t mean anything at all.
Liam shooed a set of twins out of the nearest comfy chair and ushered Gran into it. Joanna stood by, bouncing on her heels. Maybe she could go, since Gran was being so well taken care of. Except she sort of wanted to see the book Liam picked out for Gran. Also, she was trying to be a good granddaughter. Abandoning Gran in this chaos was probably not a great move.
“Who are all these kids?”
“Joanna,” Gran scolded.
“School’s out and summer reading begins today,” Liam explained. “We’re having a big party. Well, Toni is having a big party. I’m just helping.”
“Oh, summer reading! Joanna, you used to love that.”
Great. Next thing she knew, Gran would pull out pictures of her naked in a bathtub.
Actually, Joanna had a few recent ones of those. Huh. Full circle and stuff.
“Yeah,” she said noncommittally as a child wailed in her ear.
“I should get back,” Liam said. “Toni has a bunch of volunteers, but . . .”
“Mr. Liam!”
“Oof,” he grunted, as his abdomen was struck by several flying children. “Yes, I should go.”
“Liam! There you are.”
“Toni? What’s wrong?”
The children’s librarian looked . . . well, she looked frazzled. There was no more polite way to say it, even with Joanna’s new personality.
“Bouncing Bob isn’t coming.”
“What?”
“Who?”
“Bouncing Bob, the guy who’s supposed to sing goofy but educational songs to entertain all these hooligans,” Toni explained.
“Why isn’t he coming? He signed a contract,” Liam said. His face looked hard and serious. Joanna hadn’t thought his face was capable of it. Must be his Director Face.
“He had a heart attack.”
“Oh.”
“He’s not dead. Just in the hospital.”
“And we’re just finding out now?”
“Well, he is in the hospital.”
“Joanna is a musician,” Gran said from her comfortable chair.
Oh no. No no no no no no no. Joanna was a musician, sure, but she’d given up on music. And even if she hadn’t, she didn’t know any goofy but educational songs. All the songs she knew were about sex and heartbreak. Which could be educational, she thought, but probably not what Toni had in mind.
“Yes! Joanna!” Toni exclaimed, looking at Joanna as if she was the second coming of Bouncing Bob.
“I don’t have a guitar,” Joanna said, relieved to have found an excuse in her back pocket.
“I have one. It’s pretty crappy. I usually just use it for storytime.”
“Joanna learned to play on a pretty crappy guitar,” Gran said, helpfully.
“I don’t know any songs that are rated G.”
“Can you just make something up?”
“You used to make up songs all the time,” Gran said. Really, really helpful. “Remember that one you used to sing to Doris’s cat? How did it go? ‘Where’d you get such a fluffy fluffy butt, fluffy fluffy butt, fluffy fluffy butt—’”
“I remember! Jeez, Granny,” she said, sounding nothing at all like a petulant child. Maybe she should stamp her feet and throw herself on the floor, go full-on temper tantrum.
“Toni, she’s not prepared. Can’t you just play?” Liam, bless him, jumped in to her defense.
Except why did he think she couldn’t do it? She could totally do it. She grew up improvising fluffy dog butt songs.
“They didn’t come here to see me,” Toni said desperately.
“Well, we’re not going to be able to pretend that Joanna is Bouncing Bob.”
“Who’s going to corral the volunteers and sign the kids up and prepare the snacks and . . .”
“I can do that,” Liam said.
“Then who’s going to watch the rest of the library? Please, Liam, don’t make a stressed-out pregnant woman cry.”
Liam turned to Joanna. “Are you sure this is okay?”
Joanna didn’t remember agreeing to do anything, so she wasn’t quite sure what Liam wanted her to confirm.
“Joanna,” Toni said, looking desperately into Joanna’s eyes. “Joanna. I hate to use the hormonal card twice in one conversation, but I am very pregnant and very stressed and I need someone to sing stupid songs to these kids. At this point, I don’t care what you sing, as long as you don’t curse. Please. I’m begging you. Don’t make a pregnant woman get on her knees and beg.”
“Oh, you don’t have to beg,” Gran said from her comfortable chair where she was not being asked to suddenly play songs she didn’t know in front of a crowd of hyped-up kids.
Toni looked at Joanna beseechingly.
Gran looked at her hopefully.
Liam looked at her like he was getting ready to tell Toni that her beseeching looks weren’t going to work.
Joanna took a deep breath.
“Fine. I’ll do it.”
* * *
Liam hadn’t thought Joanna could sing.
He still wasn’t quite sure.
Bouncing Bob was supposed to come with his own PA system, so he and Toni set Joanna up with the crappy one they used for author talks and board meetings, the one that he was currently writing a grant for the money to replace.
It didn’t do much to amplify her voice. This might have been a good thing.
Except that the kids were getting restless. It was still pouring rain outside, so the only place for them to burn off that last-day-of-school energy was by bouncing along to Bob, or, in this case, Miss Joanna and her Magical Guitar.
One thing that did not help was that the first thing Joanna said when she got up to the mic was, “This guitar isn’t magical, you guys.”
Maybe she still had anxiety about performing. Her meltdown had been pretty spectacular—or so he’d heard. He still hadn’t watched the video, no matter how sorely he’d been tempted.
It felt a little different now, watching the breaker-upper struggle with a crowd of unruly children.
He was tempted to step in. Toni, who was supposed to be working on all the other stuff she needed to do, was standing at the back of the room, nervously biting her fingernails. That wasn’t a good sign. Liam half expected her to run up on stage and rip the guitar out of Joanna’s hands.
If she didn’t, he might.
“You suck!”
The crowd was definitely getting restless, as evidenced by the fact that one of the older boys was being heartily shushed by his mother. But the heckle seemed to do something to Joanna. It was like she woke up from her nervous stupor. All it took was someone to tell her she sucked, and she came alive.
“Hey, guys,” she said into the mic, and her voice sounded clear and strong.
“Uh-oh,” said Peggy, who had hobbled up next to him.
He was distracted by getting Peggy a chair, so he didn’t quite hear what Joanna said next, but it must have been hilarious because every kid in the audience was cracking up. The parents, not so much. He was definitely going to get angry e-mails about this.
“How many of you have a dog?”
About half of the kids raised their hands.
“Yeah, me too. Well, it’s my gran’s dog, but she’s pretty cute. How many of you sing songs to your dog?”
Pretty much the same hands stayed up.
“Here’s a little song for my gran’s dog. It’s all about my favorite part of her, her fluffy butt.”
The eyes of a good portion of the parents in the audience went wide—apparently “butt” was not a very nice word—but the kids were suddenly rapt. A grown-up singing about dog butts. This, they could get into.
The song . . . well, it wasn’t terrible. Certainly it wasn’t any worse than the greatest hits of Bunny Slippers. It was maybe even a little more intelligent. It used metaphors and clever rhyme schemes, and lots and lots of repetition of the phrase “fluffy butt.” With every rousing chorus, more of the kids joined in, and soon the entire library was singing its devotion to Starr’s fluffy butt.
“Well, that’s the only song I know that’s not about making out,” Joanna said.
“Eww!” said every preadolescent in the crowd. Liam caught Toni’s look of abject horror. She, too, could imagine the angry parental e-mails.
A little girl in the front of the crowd said something Liam couldn’t hear and Joanna said, “Oh, really? You wanna come up here and sing it?” Then the girl was taking the one step up to the stage while Joanna fiddled with the fragile mic stand so it was kid-height.
Liam couldn’t hear most of what was so song-worthy about the little girl’s cat—he had to show someone how to use the copier—but what he could hear sounded remarkably like Starr’s Fluffy Butt song. Which was good, he supposed, since Joanna already knew that one.
Then Mrs. Altman needed help printing out pictures of Whitney Houston (again) and he helped Mr. Johnson find a Jack Reacher book he hadn’t read yet, and before he knew it, the hour had practically passed and there was still raucous music coming from the children’s room. So either Joanna was still playing on the stage or the PA system had been taken over by the audience.
He poked his head around the corner. It was both. The stage was full of kids, so many that there were barely any left in the audience. The grown-ups were close to the stage, too, clapping along. He saw Trina up front, waving her hands along with the beat.
Joanna was there somewhere, he was sure. He could hear the guitar, barely, over the din of little voices. Then the sea of stage children parted, and Joanna emerged, leaning into the crappy acoustic guitar while her fingers flew over the strings. Liam couldn’t help the smile that crossed his face or the bob that dipped his head. Even on a barely-in-tune piece of junk, on a stage covered with children she professed to dislike, she was wailing.
Then she threw her head back, raised the guitar above her head, and howled. The kids howled with her. He was definitely going to get some angry e-mails about the ruckus, but he didn’t care. The kids were having a great time, and he’d bet none of them would ever forget the time they were rock stars at the library. Then Joanna let her guitar down, grabbed the mic, and shouted, “Don’t forget to read!” and he could have kissed her.
Instead, he just girded the circulation desk for the onslaught of checkouts to Halikarnassus’s newest batch of budding rock stars.