Bookish and the Beast

She sits quietly, twirling a lock of wet hair around her finger. What kind of game is she playing? Her father was clearly ready to write a check, so why didn’t she let him? And why does Elias think that her helping me with that stupid library will cover the cost of that book?

I’m not so self-absorbed as to think that she’s staying because she wants to get close to me—I’m not stupid. The tabloids have been the opposite of kind, having all but set my career on fire. And anyone who comes near me gets the same treatment. My manager said that I should lay low for a while, advised my stepfather to put me somewhere where I can’t get into trouble. Let the rumors die down before the release of Starfield: Resonance—or else my reputation might bleed into the movie.

And my stepfather’s business.

But I can’t think of another reason why she would agree to sacrifice her afternoons to come to a library of all places. I clench my teeth and feel a muscle twitch in my jaw.

I don’t like her.

After a moment she turns to me and says, “My name is…” but I’m already halfway up the stairs, and gone. I don’t need to know her name. I don’t need to get to know her.

It’s best if I don’t.

WHEN DAD AND I FINALLY make it back to the apartment, he tugs his tie loose and heads to the liquor cabinet and the bottle of bourbon at the top. “Well, that was an interesting evening,” he says with a sigh. “And interesting people. Isn’t that boy—?”

“Vance Reigns,” I reply, dumping my bookbag down at the kitchen table. Even though I finished my calculus homework during lunch today, I still need to start on that essay for my college application, and that English report due next week—my life feels like a never-ending stream of to-do lists.

“Vance Reigns, Vance Reigns…” Dad mutters, pouring himself a drink. “Doesn’t he play Sond?”

“Bingo.”

Though he did seem familiar for moment before I took a splash in the pool, but it’s probably my imagination. He has been trending a lot on social media recently, after all—and never for anything good.

“Well, it seems you’ll be getting to know him rather well these next few weeks,” Dad says as he grabs the plethora of menus from the counter and slides into a chair opposite of me at the table. “Mr. Rodriguez and I talked it out, and as long as you sign an NDA and don’t, you know, write about your experiences on a very public forum, it should be quite the experience. Since you got fired from the grocery store,” he adds in a deadpan voice.

I give a start. “How did you…?”

“Annie called me at work,” he replies. “Told me that you got fired.”

“I quit, actually,” I reply nobly.

He sighs and waves the menus at me, deciding to drop the argument. Which means he isn’t that upset with me. “What do you want to eat?”

“I’m not really hungry,” I mumble in reply, taking out my laptop from my bag, and I open it up to the Word document, and the title, WHY I SHOULD BE CONSIDERED FOR NYU. The rest is still, unsurprisingly, blank.

Because honestly? I am not all that remarkable. I’m just known as the girl whose mom died last year, and I don’t want to write about that. I don’t want to remember how the hospital smelled so sterile, and how Mom’s hand was so cold, and her breath so shallow. I don’t want to remember the last words she said to me (“Be good, Rosebud”), and I don’t want to remember that I had to leave the room. I don’t want to remember walking to the soda machine at the end of the hallway and getting an Orange Crush when I asked for a Diet Coke.

I don’t want to remember the slow walk back to her room. Dad standing at the door. Tears dripping down his face. The Orange Crush forgotten on the ground. The swell of grief that seemed to root all the way down into my toes.

No, no, no.

The moment that changed my life was the moment that ruined it, and I’m sure no college wants to read about that.

I wave my hand at the menus. “You pick.”

He sighs, raking his hands through his gelled hair to dishevel it. It’s somewhere in the range of silver, the sides darker to fit his natural color. When he started going gray a few years ago, his barber convinced him to just go full silver, so he now dyes it. He hasn’t gone back since. He says it makes him feel cool, and honestly the silver hair makes it easier to spot him in a crowd. Dad used to be in a punk band in the ’90s. There are a few pictures floating around of him on the dark web, but the less people who know that my dad used to tour with the likes of Green Day, the better.

He scrunches his nose and says, “How about sushi? From Inakaya?”

“Whatever you’d like,” I reply with a wave.

“Two Californias and a salmon?”

“And a few spring rolls?”

“Spring rolls it is.” He pulls his cell phone out of his back pocket and calls in the order. The restaurant knows us by name, we order out so often. It’s also the only sushi place in town that has remotely fresh fish. When you’re in backwater nowhere, it’s hard to find anything that isn’t flash-frozen fast food.

Then he downs the rest of his drink, and as he sets his empty glass on the table he asks, “So what was it like?”

I glance up from the mesmerizing blinking cursor. “What was what like?”

“The book. You know, before it took a dive.”

The book.

The Starfield extended-universe books have been out of print for a number of years, but you can still find one floating around at a used bookshop, dog-eared and spine-broken. Mom had a whole collection of them. They were her pride and joy.

I smiled softly. “It smelled like old pages.”

He gave a wistful sigh. “They all do.”

As he says this, a thought occurs to me, and I sit up a little straighter. “Wait a minute, do you think Mom’s books are in that library?”

“Oh, no,” he replies, rocking his glass of bourbon from side to side. “Remember, we sold all of hers to some collector in LA. I doubt those are hers. But it was a good thought.”

My heart sinks down into the pit of my stomach. “Yeah. That would’ve been impossible, I guess.”

“The world’s filled with impossible things, Rosebud,” he replies after a moment, and gives a shrug. “Maybe I’m wrong.”

But we both highly doubt that.

As I try to find something to write about—the only moment that changed my life is the one moment I don’t want to ever think about again—Dad goes to change out of his work clothes. He’s been trying to get the director of the library to make their work attire more flexible for years, but alas his campaigning has been for naught so far, so he stands at the circulation desk every day in pressed trousers, a button-down, and a bright neon tie, and tries not to look too grim-lovely. (The director also tried to get him to take the gauges out of his ears, but while you can take the punk out of the band, you can’t take the punk out of the punk.)

I’m just about done with my homework when the delivery guy knocks on our door and Dad answers it in his neon-orange gym shorts and a MOTION CITY SOUNDTRACK T-shirt. Dad fist-bumps the delivery guy, Wes, and they talk for a moment about his first semester at the local tech college, before Wes heads on his way. Dad takes the bag of sushi and tips him. “Thanks, man. Safe driving!”

Then he closes the door, and sometimes I have to wonder how he’s so friendly to literally everyone he meets. It’s second nature to him, as easy as breathing. I can barely talk to one person without slipping up and blurting out things I’ll later send myself into a panic spiral over.

Dad holds up his bounty as he parades it into the kitchen. “Dinner has arrived! It makes miso happy.”

I stare at him. “Dad.”

“I know, I know,” he replies dramatically, and he sits down opposite me again. I close my laptop—it’s wishful thinking that I’ll be able to write that essay tonight—and shove it to the far side of the table. He begins to unpack the food from the bag. “I’m soy awesome you can’t stand it.”

“DAD.”

“I’m on a roll.”

I begin to melt under the table.

He smiles and hands me a pair of chopsticks. “Okay, okay. But you gotta let me have a little fun sometimes. Some people would kill for my pun skills.”

“Yeah, they’re to die for.”

He jabs a chopstick at me. “A-ha! See! Aren’t they fun?”

“Whatever.” I tear open a packet of soy sauce and pool it in a corner of the plastic sushi tray. Dad takes out the spring rolls, putting one on his plate and giving another to me.

He slides the last one to the third seat at the table, and there is a quiet moment.

“Hey, Dad?”

“Yeah?” He pulls out a pair of cheap chopsticks.

“I love you.”

He smiles. “I love you too…and dim sum.”

“Ugh.” I roll my eyes and throw a chopstick at him. It clatters across the table, but he catches it before it rolls off and hands it back to me in a truce.

THE ROOM IS TOO BRIGHT because for some godforsaken reason all of the curtains have been pushed back, and it makes my headache sharper. Who in the bloody hell opened them? The culprit soon becomes clear. Elias stands to the side of my bed, waiting patiently. I snarl against the light and press the palms of my hands against my eye sockets.