At the Library (short story)
At the library, there was a girl. Now, she was quite an ordinary girl. She would never have stood out in a crowd, for she was never in a crowd to stand out in. She never really raised her hand in class, for she was always too busy reading to raise her hand up to participate. She never would have been really remembered by many, because she simply just did not put any effort in being remembered, for she did not care. She cared about one thing, and one thing only- her books.
At the library, there was a girl, who had her nose in a copy of 1984 by George Orwell, who had drowned out the world around her. She was lost in the world of Oceania, entirely forgetting she was in the library in her small Illinois town, entirely forgetting that the library was closing in twenty minutes and she was supposed to be home about an hour and a half ago.
Yes, Serena Williamson was just an ordinary girl. She saw no flaws within herself, at least not that she was willing to admit to anybody. She had no desire to change herself like many girls her age did, because she saw no reason to care about her outwards appearance. She was pleased with herself and how she was, so why should she change? Because, she thought, as there was a tap on her shoulder. She enjoyed doing one simple thing, and one simple things only, and that was reading.
“Sweetheart? You do know that we’re closing in just a few minutes, correct?” Ms. Smith, the local librarian, asked her, a soft smile on the aging woman’s face. Ms. Smith and Serena had become quite close, and Serena could say with confidence that Ms. Smith was a rather good friend of hers. The two enjoyed similar authors and often gave each other recommendations on books to read. To Serena, it did not matter that Ms. Smith was an entire fifty years older than her.
“Oh, you are? Alright. I’m sorry, Ms. Smith, I lost track of time. I was supposed to be home at 6:30, and it’s almost 8. Thank you for letting me know,” the girl replied, placing the already checked out book into her burlap bag with a nod. “Will we be seeing you tomorrow?” The woman asked, watching closely as Serena glanced around the dimly-lit public library. Apart from her and the older lady, it was entirely empty. She had failed to notice this fact prior, as she had just been so engrossed in her book that she could just not care less about the world around her. The only world that mattered in that moment was the world Orwell had created in his book, and even now that she had been snapped out of that fictional reality, the book interested her far more than anything in this miserable world had to offer.
“I believe so, ma’am! I had better be heading off. See you tomorrow, hopefully.” Serena gave the lady a small smile before pushing open the door to the outdoors and walking into the street.
The walk to her house was only about twenty minutes, and it was gorgeous outside. Roughly 65 degrees with a gentle breeze, the weather was wonderful, with falling leaves in an array of colors scattering the pavement. The sunset was almost one straight out of an episode of The Joy of Painting, with an ombre of carnation pink, a tangerine orange, and an azure blue mixing and swirling together, wispy clouds dotting the picturesque scene. A cool breeze whipped some of Serena’s hair out of her face as she stepped on a leaf, the satisfying crunch ringing out throughout the area she was in. Serena just continued on walking, as she was too caught up in her book to care about one silly little leaf. The world around her was gorgeous, but she seemed not to notice, because this world was boring. This world was full of horrible people, and it was a horrible place. People had hurt her, and she could not trust them, but she knew of one thing that would never hurt her. Books had never truly caused the twelve-year-old harm. Sure, they had left her an emotional mess at two in the morning, a death in a book leaving her a sobbing heap on her bed, but they had never done her physical damage unless she were to get a papercut. She could confide her trust in a book, she could pour her heart and soul into reading a book, and the book could not complain. Mind you, the book could not complain because it was an inanimate object, but that was besides the point to Serena. Her point was that books could not damage her, and that books were her one true delight in life. She could always rely on an old favorite to be there for her during times of need, and she could trust that the books she had loved in the past would remain in her life for many years to come.
If only she would have looked up and appreciated the world around her, she might have realized how similar it was to a scene in one of the books she admired so much. She would have opened her eyes to the beauty of the world for just a moment, and maybe then she would have realized how blessed she truly was.
No, she was not blessed, she thought, as she walked into her suburban neighborhood, a nice neighborhood on a quiet area of town, about thirty miles off of Chicago. She hated the neighborhood she lived in, it was just too boring. Every mom in the suburb had a ‘I want to speak to your manager’ haircut, and most of the dads all had a beer gut, a barbeque grill they used twice a year, and made dad jokes. Every kid her age was either into sports or clubs, and ignored her at school, and so to her, this neighborhood was flawed. There was nothing interesting, there was nobody who stood out, nobody at all. Nobody in her neighborhood was anything like those in the books she read, and that disappointed her. As she walked past some of the houses, she was greeted with some ‘Hey, Serena!’s from the moms watering their gardens or some children playing, to which she didn’t hear. She didn’t hear anything except her own two feet shuffling against the pavement and the crisp turning of the pages of the novel she held tightly in her hands. She simply saw no reason to look up until she got to her doorstep, holding the book closed with one hand as to ensure she didn’t lose her page as she opened the unlocked door with the other. As she entered the house, her mother rushed over to her with a worried expression on her face.
“Where were you? You were supposed to be home two hours ago!” She said, watching as her daughter continued to walk towards the stairs up to her bedroom.
“At the Library,” Serena replied knowingly, as if it were stupid to assume she was anywhere else. Her parents could trust she wasn’t going to go out and do drugs, she was already addicted to books. At least books wouldn’t ruin her future, she rationalized to her parents constantly.
“You weren’t picking up your calls. Your father and I were so worried about you,” she added, following her daughter throughout the house. It was quite a large house, having three bedrooms and three bathrooms, and yet still it was not enough to satisfy Serena. It wasn’t the log cabin she wanted up in the mountains, where she could be alone and do nothing but read all day without anyone telling her she couldn’t, so it wasn’t good enough for her.
“I left my phone at home. I don’t see the point in bringing it, I never use it anyways,” Serena turned to face her mother, who was halfway up the stairs as opposed to Serena being at the top, just a few steps away from her room. As Serena walked that short distance to her door, her mother was at the top of the stairs, coming closer as she went into her room, her mother standing in the doorway in front of the open door. “Honey, what if you were kidnapped? You could have been hu-” The door interrupted her with a loud slam, for Serena had closed the door and locked it behind her. The moment the door was locked, the brown-haired girl took a bookmark from her desk and slid it into place in the book- she was on page 208, and that she would have remembered regardless of the thin slip of cardboard placed in her book, William Shakespeare’s eyes peeking over the top of the pages like he was playing lookout for something. She placed the gently-used copy of 1984 onto her desk with a sigh. There was just something about the day that felt off to her, now that she put her book down. Her math homework for the week had been done along with her language arts, as she had finished it Monday, so there was nothing in her life that was incomplete. Well, nothing except her book. She was about two-thirds of the way through with the novel, and she had been captivated by the concept since day one. Serena had only picked up the book on Sunday, and it was Thursday evening. She was quite disappointed in herself, as she easily could have (and should have) finished that book earlier. If she had it her way, she would never have left the Library, living there and doing nothing but reading the books presented in the library, and once she was done with everything that library had to offer, she’d move to another one, and read everything new in there. She would read it all, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, biographies, anything. As long as it had words, and seemed to be of even mild interest, she would read it just for the sake of reading it.
Serena sat on her bed, covering herself in the lavender comforter that was laid out on her bed, leaning up against the wall and bundling up in the fabric. She felt good while covered up in bed like that, but it was not as good as she wanted it to be. She would have been so much more satisfied if she were on a quest to slay a dragon right now, or if she was sitting in a tavern with a mug of cream soda (the one time she had tried beer, it tasted bad, and she vowed to never drink it again.) with a party of Orcs and knights, laughing and having a good time. Serena would not be stuck here, in her house, with her horrible parents, who just didn’t understand.
‘Go outside!’ they said, but every time she went outside, she got dirty.
‘Go play with your friends!’ they said, but she had no friends, because the kids at school hated her.
‘Stop reading a book!’ they told her, but books were her only solace in this miserable life she lived. Everything in her life was out to get her. Her parents, because they were abusive in their tendencies to get her to stop reading, the kids at school, as they were always getting up in her face about what she was reading, and her teachers, for they tried to get her to pay attention to material she already knew. There was nothing in her life that was good except for the books she confided in, and even then, her parents had stopped buying them when she went through a book a day and half of her room had ended up as bookshelves. They even tried to get her to sell some of them when the neighborhood had a garage sale a few months back, and to even insinuate the idea of getting rid of some of her precious books was simply just prepostreous! She couldn’t get rid of those books, she loved them. There was nobody who needed them more than she did, because her life was the worst of the worst.
She watched out her window as the sun finally dipped below the horizon, the sky fading into a midnight blue as stars started to come out. She could make out a few patterns, but no constellations, as it was too early and they had only just started to appear upon the backdrop of rich, deep blue. She looked at them, and saw imperfections. She saw a world she wished she wasn’t a part of, for the world she lived in was nothing but bad.
And so, as she sat there, she devised a plan. If this world was imperfect, then she would go to the only perfect place there was in this world. She would go to the library.
The library was her escape, after all. She would go to the one place that she felt safe, the one place that she was able to truly do whatever she wanted to do with no repercussions and nobody stopping her.
It was 10PM- her parents were both asleep, and with no annoying siblings or pets to wake them up if she left, sneaking out was going to be a breeze. Sure, she was supposed to be asleep, so she got out of bed and made a pillow formation of where her body would be, tucked it in all nice and neat, and set her copy of 1984 in her burlap tote bag, grabbing a flashlight from her closet and turned it on.
She wasn’t going to have any trouble getting to the library, because she knew the directions just as perfectly as she could recite several of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and she had an entire book of his sonnets she had memorized back in the third grade out of boredom on a rainy day. There would be no struggle in this plan, except maybe the temperature. Illinois at night tended to get rather chilly, and tonight was about 45 degrees. That was colder than she wanted to walk in, but she would do it for the books. A night of nothing but reading sounded great, and once it got lighter out she could just slip out of the library and walk home before she was supposed to get up, and when her mom came to wake her up, she could pretend she was sleeping all night! Yes, this was a foolproof plan.
Serena put on her shoes and a heavy-ish jacket, left her room, and tip-toed down the creaky stairs, careful not to wake her parents up, even if they were asleep halfway across the house. The front door was locked, so she turned the lock with a soft click, opened up the door, and left the house, closing the door softly. There was no door alarm to alert her parents, as they had never thought they needed one. They did live in a rather good area, and the crime rate was below the national average, and so they were not afraid of getting robbed. They had nothing much of interest, but they did have a happy family, or at least they thought they did. Serena’s mother was a caring woman who wished the best for her daughter, even if she was a little bit overbearing to some degree, and her father helped coach the football team at her elementary school, and some of the boys in her fifth-grade class were on the team.
Serena hated them both, and that was apparent, as she rejected any form of appreciation unless it was in the form of reading material. They did care about her, but she never had returned the feelings.
Serena took her flashlight out of her bag and started walking down the driveway, heading the same familiar route she always did during the days. The roads were quieter, and the lampposts lining the sidewalks she followed were illuminating the area around her enough so she could see her breath crystalizing every time she exhaled. It was gorgeous, but the child couldn’t care less. She wanted to get inside and to her safe haven as soon as possible. The wind had started to pick up, and Serena was regretting her decision on what jacket she took with her, as it wasn’t heavy enough to block out the chill that continually kept coming at her. She took a moment to pause under a streetlight, checking the time on the watch on her wrist- it was 10:15PM, she was supposed to be there soon. She looked back up, and a car had stopped in front of the lamp post she was standing at.
A man she recognized from being at the library rather often got out of the car and walked over to her. “Hey, what are you up to? It’s a little bit too late for someone your age to be out and about right now, not to mention it’s pretty chilly out here,” he asked, standing in between Serena and the red truck that was still on the road. “I’m walking to the library,” Serena explained, as if it were normal for a 12 year old girl to be walking to the library way past her bedtime. “You might get hurt if you do. Do you want me to take you there? It’s only a five minute drive and it’s on my way home, it’s no trouble at all,” the man offered, and Serena thought about how cold it was, and really, it would only be five minutes. She would much prefer a five minute drive over a ten minute walk, so she agreed. After all, he was a familiar face, and she did need to get to the library, so she got in the passenger seat of his truck.
“The body of twelve-year-old Serena Williamson, a native here in town, has finally been found. After two months of searching, the body, located in the suburb of Whispering Woods, the body was found in the yard of thirty six-year-old James Baker, who lives just three houses down from Serena’s family. She was reported missing on the 18th of September and finally has been found. According to the autopsy report, the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head, and there were numerous bruises found on the body of the victim, as well as recent scars and evidence of sexual assault. Baker is currently in the Cook County jail with no bond, and could potentially face life in prison for murder, sexual assault, and kidnapping,” The reporter stated, reading off of the paper he had been given. “Baker explained that the victim was attempting to walk to the library late at night, and he offered her a ride, taking her instead to a warehouse out in Chicago and leaving her there with some of his friends, who have yet to be identified. Baker kept the girl in custody for two months until she attempted to run away, to which he then killed her and buried her in his yard. Channel 14 sends out their condolences to the family.”