Jeremy was about an inch shorter than me, and he was viciously competitive—Napoleon
complex, I surmised. I had beaten him at poker once, and he had accused me of cheating—I gave
him his two dollars back. When we broke up, he left with the same look of frustration that
Skylar had had the night before, but no bumps on his head—that I knew of. At least I got to
keep the job. But I would definitely have to remember to take the creepy, but vacant, archive
stairs next time.
Luckily, I had the fourth floor all to myself, which was encouraging, but nothing new. Sometimes
weeks would go by before someone other than me walked through the rows of the fourth-floor book
stacks. Mathematics and obsolete statistics were not the most riveting of subjects. I spent my
days alone, flipping through damp pages to the hum of the dingy lights that were encased in the
thick cement walls.
I set my bag down on the butcher’s block of a table that looked like it could have been an
antique, but had been scratched, engraved, and penned beyond repair. Apparently, Stacey H. was
here, Jessica & Naomi were BFFs 4Eva, and someone wished K.P. a gruesome death.
I yawned one of those tear-inducing yawns and picked up where I had left off a few weeks ago,
before exams had taken over my life. My workstation: a computer and an oversized scanner that
took up half the table.
I grabbed the next book on the shelf, opened it to the first page, and placed it face down on
the scanner. I typed the book’s title, author, and publication date in the computer and pressed
the green scan button. The lime green light sped from one side of the scanner to the other, and
my work day had officially started.
It was a boring and mindless job, scanning each book one page at a time; but all things
considered, it was a pretty sweet gig for a student. Of the few students who had been hired, one
per floor to do this same job, most spent their paid hours either napping on the bottom of an
empty shelf or making out behind the book carts, which Jeremy was probably doing by now. There
was no adult supervision of the almost adult students. The first week I had started working
there, I got in trouble with the other students for scanning the books too quickly—apparently
this not only made the rest of them look bad but meant that the electronic library project would
get done faster, taking jobs away from poverty-stricken students. I certainly didn’t want to be
responsible for that, so I slowed down and used my free time to study and catch up on my
homework. Like I said, it was a sweet gig.
But with school being out, I didn’t have any homework to do, and it was way too quiet to sleep.
I could have brought a book to read, but my eyes were stinging from sleeplessness. With nothing
but my brain waves to distract me, I had to break the golden rule, and I started feverishly
scanning books.
How do you know when you’re There, I contemplated between the 800 pages of Algorithms: an
Annotated History. Do you just get up one morning, pour yourself a glass of juice without
breaking it, come to take a bite of your nicely grilled bagel and … boom! There is right there,
staring you in the face—that moment when you realize you have everything that you’ve worked
for, waited for, and you finally find yourself utterly fulfilled. What happens after that? Do
you go into the new world of “What Else Is There,” or do you finish your bagel and live
happily ever after? My There was not what I thought it would be.
For some people—most people—their ultimate goal had a dollar sign attached to it. They’d work
their whole lives to build their There money. Me, I was the oddball; the biggest secret that I
had kept from everyone in my new life was the fact that I came from money, a lot of it. I came
from a world of privilege and excess—of a house full of people who were paid to be nice to me,
of being forced to go to stupid private schools where I had to wear the stupid uniforms and go
to the stupid parties. Burt was in his sixties, Isabelle in her fifties, and they were still
working on their There money.
I was embarrassed by the fact that my parents had money. This was only exacerbated when I
listened to my roommates make fun of the kids with money, the ones that paid for parking spots,
the ones that bought five-dollar coffees. Somehow I knew that normal people wouldn’t understand
my decision to leave it all behind. Some days, like today, I even questioned it myself.
I could normally scan up to three books a day without getting into trouble. Today, I was on a
roll and did over a weeks’ worth of work. Thankfully, it made the day fly by—I would have to
figure out how to hide the evidence later.
When my paid workday ended, I rolled my cart filled with evidence to the furthest end of the
room, behind the last bookshelf, and trudged home. Then I did what I should have done first
thing that morning: I climbed under the covers and hid.