Your sister,

Quinn

It’s been three days since I put the box on Cora’s doorstep, and I still haven’t heard anything from her.

The last bell of the day rings, and I jolt toward the library. As I scramble to get there before anyone spots me, I imagine the scene being narrated by one of those voices from the boring documentaries we sometimes watch at school. The kind of voice that speaks in a stiff and funny-sounding way, like: Quinn McCauley races down the tiled halls in the hopes that none of her classmates will notice her before she has once again disappeared from view.

“Hi, Quinn,” Mrs. Euclid greets me as I walk into the library.

Before last year, I hardly ever went to the school library. Maybe because I’ve never thought of myself as a great reader or Language Arts student. Whenever I get one of my writing assignments back, there’s so much red on it, circling all the things I did wrong, that it looks like it’s bleeding. I mean, I think I have okay ideas. But I’m never able to get them down without lots of spelling and grammar mistakes or something else wrong.

I lose track of my thoughts a lot. I have so many of them that by the time it comes to write them down, it ends up coming out all wrong, and my teachers start to think I don’t have any thoughts at all.

I’m also never able to memorize facts from books, so I sometimes do badly on reading quizzes. I mean, I could tell you why I liked the book. Or why I didn’t. Or how I felt about the characters. But my teachers always want to know things like what color glasses the main character wore, and those are the types of details that slip my mind. Those are also the type of details my brain forgets when I get nervous. And I’m always nervous during quizzes.

Anyway, I didn’t think the library was for me. I figured it was only for kids like Cora who are really good at school.

But after last November, I started coming in here all the time. And when school started back up this year, I found myself here again. I’ve figured out that I kinda love the library. The long line of shelves, the quiet hum of the ceiling fan, and the smell. The library totally smells a certain way. Kind of musty, but also welcoming. It smells like a place where you can belong.

I sit down at a table in the back, and Mrs. Euclid pushes a cart of books toward me.

“We just got a book in that I think you’ll like.”

“Really?”

Mrs. Euclid smiles, and I notice her bright-colored purple lipstick. Mrs. Euclid is Black and wears her hair in long box braids that almost reach her waist. Today she has on earrings shaped like BB-8 and her shoes are ballet flats that look like mice. Mrs. Euclid always has the best shoes.