Rachel strides into the center of the stage in her rubber boots. “It’s a foggy night on the island kingdom of Tyre”—she glances down at her script, then back up—“and the writer Antonius Diogenes is leaving the archives. Look, here he comes now, tired and troubled, fretting over his dying niece, but wait until I show him the strange thing I have discovered among the tombs.” The satin billows, the organ plays, Rachel’s torch flickers, and Olivia marches into the light.

Seymour

Snow crystals catch in his eyelashes and he blinks them away. The backpack on his shoulder is a boulder, a continent. The big yellow owl eyes painted on the book drop box seem to track him as he passes.

Hood up, ear defenders on, Seymour ascends the five granite steps to the library’s porch. Taped to the inside of the glass on the entry door, in a child’s handwriting, a sign reads:

TOMORROW

ONE NITE ONLY

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND

There’s no one behind the welcome desk, no one at the chessboard. No one at the computer table, no one browsing magazines. The storm must be keeping everyone away.

The framed needlepoint behind the desk says, Questions Answered Here. The clock says one minute past five. On the computer monitors, three screen-saver spirals bore ever deeper.

Seymour walks to the southeast corner and kneels in the aisle between Languages and Linguistics. From a bottom shelf he removes English Made Easy and 501 English Verbs and Get Started in Dutch, wedges the backpack into the dusty space behind, and replaces the books.

When he stands, purple streaks cascade down his vision. His heart thuds in his ears, his knees tremble, his bladder aches, he can’t feel his feet, and he has tracked snow all the way down the row. But he has done it.

Now stroll out.

As he travels back through Nonfiction, everything seems to tilt uphill. His sneakers feel leaden, his muscles unwilling. Titles tumble past, Lost Languages and Empires of the Word and 7 Steps to Raising a Bilingual Child; he makes it past Social Sciences, Religion, the dictionaries; he’s reaching for the door when he feels a tap on his shoulder.

Don’t. Don’t stop. Don’t turn around.

But he does. A slim man with green earbuds in his ears stands in front of the welcome desk. His eyebrows are great thatches of black and his eyes are curious and the visible part of his T-shirt says I LIKE BIG and in his arms he cradles Seymour’s JanSport.

The man says something, but the earmuffs make him sound a thousand feet away, and Seymour’s heart is a sheet of paper crumpling, uncrumpling, crumpling again. The backpack cannot be here. The backpack needs to stay hidden in the southeast corner, as close as possible to Eden’s Gate Realty.