The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

“Hey,” whines a voice behind me. “You done yet?”


I glance behind us and find a pimply kid with a mom haircut looking balefully at me. He’s holding a spiral notebook.

“Not quite,” I say to him. “Sorry.” I realize he can’t see the girl in my arms. I must look pretty weird standing here, cradling nothing.

The kid gives me a sketchy look and goes away.

“Hey,” I whisper into her hair. “It’s okay.”

She breaks away from me, wiping her nose on the back of her wrist. She nods.

“Newspapers,” she says, not meeting my eyes.

“Let me just do one other thing,” I say, turning back to the computer terminal. To be honest I haven’t used the library for much of anything except checking out DVDs of documentaries that aren’t available for streaming. They made all the freshmen do this library orientation thing at UW last year, but I wasn’t paying much attention. All I wanted to do was watch movies. And make movies. And watch the movies I made.

I pull up the library home page, and type Annie’s last name into the BobCat book search engine thing.

A few books come up by some other guy who’s dead, who seems like he was one of those old society gentlemen who sat on lots of committees. But they’re all from the twentieth century. Well after Annie’s time. I shiver, as that thought passes through me. That even times long ago are after her time.

At the end of the list of stuff by the guy, there’s an entry that just says “Ephemera.” It’s in Special Collections. Sixth floor. On the reference table there’s a stack of Xeroxed pages with maps to all the call numbers.

“Annie?” I ask.

“Hmm?” she says, peering over my shoulder.

“What’s ephemera? Do you know?” I’m embarrassed that I don’t know. But, heck. I don’t.

“Ummm.” She furrows her brows. “I think it just means miscellaneous things. Things that exist? But nearly didn’t? Like the noun form of ephemeral.”

“Huh,” I say. “So—it looks like the library has a box of random stuff that might belong to your family. Unless there’s lots of other Van Sinderens out there.”

“Really? I don’t know any,” she reflects. “But then, I’m discovering there’s a lot in the world that I don’t know.”

We exchange dry smiles.

“Want to go see what’s in the box? Maybe your cameo’s in there!” I suggest.

At this idea, her eyes brighten. “You think?”

“I don’t know. Why not?”

“How do we find it?”

I pull out one of the library call number maps, draw a circle around the area that we want, and write the box’s call number down in the margin.

“I guess we just go . . . ask for it,” I say.

Annie bounces on her toes, like she does when she’s excited. Knowing she’s excited makes my heart rate trip faster. I love seeing her look hopeful and happy. It makes me excited, too. Now I’m really hoping we find it.

At least, I think I hope we find it.

We ride the elevator to the sixth floor in silence, none of the other students taking notice of the strange girl in the tattered antique dress standing in their midst, eyes glued to the dinging numbers in the elevator overhead just like all of ours.