Evan felt his stomach rumble. He looked down at the clock. Classes had run a little late, and now he was letting himself get distracted. He could have been doing just about anything right now. Just about anyone. Hell, if skipping eating until nine was his plan from the beginning, he could have been an established name on the football team, or joined up with ROTC and gotten his tuition reduced.
But this was an exception. After all, what was a tuition reduction compared to getting his entire tuition covered? And of course, the connection that he could make… he let out a breath. The whole thing meant that he had to make special allowances. That was why he let the distraction dig in, and let himself focus on the task in front of him.
He'd already hit two different libraries today. That made six between the day before and today. If class hadn't run late he might have made it all eight today. Short of going into the city, he was running out of options. And those would have to all come at once, because the city was a twenty minute drive all by itself. Compared to the way that suburbs packed them in, it represented an entire library out and an entire library back.
He let out a breath and slid into the right-hand lane, flicked the signal. Turned into the driveway.
The place was small, and from the outside, it looked shabby. He parked, stepped out. The sun was already starting to get low on the horizon. When he stepped inside he could hear a crowd of kids talking. There was a woman's voice over them, but they were making it hard to make out except that it was female and it was being drowned out almost completely.
He smiled at the old woman behind the counter. She was sixty if she was a day, but he felt her eyes on him as he came in. Right before he turned away he thought that he saw her wink at him. He kept the chuckle to himself and turned to regard the rest of the building. He let out a breath and looked around.
He found the kids, who were exactly as noisy as they sounded from the door, sitting in a group in the back corner of the little place. The building looked like it hadn't been updated since the woman behind the counter had come in. Maybe she was the last one to push for a renovation and actually get the board to listen to her, he thought. Still, someone needed to talk to these guys about it because it was an embarrassment.
Then he turned, and as he got closer, recognized the voice a little better. When he saw her it only confirmed what he'd thought. He was staring right at Dana, who had a children's book open on her lap and was reading out loud. The kids didn't seem to be listening. Their mothers–they were all mothers, with only a couple of fathers there along with their wives–were watching patiently, as if the entire thing were a performance aimed at the adults rather than the children.
Dana didn't see him right away; her eyes were on the book. She had a good reading voice, he thought. She had good cadence, and made the whole thing a lot more interesting than the kids in the audience had any right to hear. She was too good for them. A few at the front, though, seemed to be paying attention. He kept those three in the back of his mind as he crossed his arms and leaned against a heavy wooden shelf.
The place had a smell of books. He liked it. He never liked libraries before. Then again, his experiences had never been particularly good before. Now he'd gotten interested looks from both the librarians at some point, and one of them he could almost agree to enjoying.
When she looked up to survey the crowd, her expression was frustrated. So she kept her eyes on the front of it and smiled at them, and only flicked her eyes up a moment. And in that moment, she took in the whole crowd, and noticed the man standing behind the rest of the listeners.
Her eyes met his for the space of a heartbeat. For that moment her expression shifted, like she'd been hit by a pang of surprise and maybe just a little bit of alarm. Then she hid it well, looked back at the kids, and forced that smile onto her face. It was a nice smile, but it was fake, and even Evan knew that. Still, he thought, it was better than nothing.
He walked away. The sound of her voice, and the chaos of the kids who had no interest in hearing anyone read poetry to them but had been put there by parents who didn't seem to care what their childrens' interests were, echoed through the building.
He walked over to the shelves. Looked through them idly. A voice came through the speakers. "The library will be closing in fifteen minutes," it said. "Please make your approach to the checkout desk."
He recognized the book from the photo on the Wikipedia page, pulled it off the shelf. Looked over it. IT didn't seem that unusual. That had been a word they kept using in one article he'd skimmed. 'Unusual.' Unorthodox, unconventional… but it was just a book, as far as he could tell. He tucked it under an arm.
Dana's voice had faded at some point. The kids had started dispersing. He started towards the back. The librarian–junior librarian, he guessed–had a short stack of books under her arm, and she was headed the same place he was: the front. Evan smiled at her.
"You've got a very good reading voice, when you're not getting frustrated with assholes."
Her tone was back to the flat one that she had used with him since he'd met her the first time. "Well, I suppose that's going to be the closest you'll get to anything else, so I'm glad you enjoyed it."
"I read a little of your book."
"My book?" She raised an eyebrow.
Evan held the book up.
"Yeah? Sure you did."
"It was so interesting," he lied, in his best honest voice. Evan had never been a bad liar. At least, nobody had thought so enough to say it to his face.
Apparently there was a first time for everything. "Sure. You don't have to pretend, you know. You can just tell me you want into my pants."
"Will that work?"
"No. Neither will lying." She gave him a sharp look before adding, "Idiot."