Page 52 of What You Wish For

“Ah,” I said, as if I’d forgotten the very place that I was in charge of. “Of course.”

Duncan opened the door for me, looking impatient.

When Max and Babette had renovated the building thirty years before, they’d been dead split over putting the library down on the lower level, near the entrance, so that kids had to walk right past it to get in and out of the building—or on the higher level, so it had views to the ocean and felt like a tree house. In the end, they compromised and did…both. The main entrance to the library was down low, off thecourtyard, but they’d busted a hole in the ceiling and built a staircase to the room directly above it, making it two stories tall.

When I’d arrived, Babette had helped me paint the stair risers like a stack of giant books, and it was the first thing you saw when you walked in.

It was exactly what a library should be, in my view. Whimsical. Inviting. Infused with possibility. Not to mention sunny, comfortable, and homey. I wanted kids to come in and out all the time. I wanted the doors to be open from the moment the first kid arrived on campus in the morning until the very last kid left.

I kept a collection of crazy pens in a cup on my desk to entice the kids to come see me: pens with troll hair, and googly eyes, and pom-poms. One pen had an hourglass embedded in it, one looked like a syringe filled with blue liquid, and one was shaped like a very realistic bone. I had pens in the shapes of feather quills, and pens with bendy mermaid tails, and pens that told fortunes like a Magic 8 Ball. I had sloth pens, unicorn pens, and pens with pom-poms.

I had other toys on my desk, too—a fancy kaleidoscope, a Newton’s cradle, a set of magnetic sculpture balls, and a collection of spinning tops. I had a Rubik’s Cube, too, although it didn’t work as well as it used to since one of the first-graders had decided to solve it by peeling off and rearranging the stickers.

All to make the circulation desk feel like fun.

All to let the kids know they were safe with me.

I wanted to make sure that if kids felt an impulse at any moment to pop by the library, there’d be nothing to stop them. It was the best way I knew to turn them into readers: to catch those little sparks when they happened and turn them into flames.

I loved my job, is what I’m saying.

The second floor was like a magical land. We kept reference books, how-tos, and nonfiction downstairs—but upstairs was all fiction. From picture books to chapter books, that floor was all about getting lost in imaginary worlds. We had reading nooks tucked around every corner, beanbag chairs all around, and even a big reading “nest” that the kidscould climb into like baby birds, fashioned out of wood and papier-mâché. We had a tunnel made out of books. We had a loft by the window where the kids could climb up and read next to a view of the Gulf.

It was bright. It was whimsical. It was special. And it was mine.

I didn’t want Duncan telling me it was a fire hazard.

But I went in with him anyway. What choice did I have?

The first thing he saw as we stepped in were the book-spine stairs.

“Cool stairs,” he said, seeming to forget his no-praise policy.

It was the first nice thing he’d said all afternoon. “Thank you,” I said. “Babette and I painted them.”

That got his attention. He met my eyes for the first time all day. “You painted them?”

“Babette did the hard stuff. I just filled in the colors.”

“They really look like book spines,” he said then, studying them, the wonder in his voice softening it and making him sound the tiniest bit like the old Duncan.

“She figured out the shading to make them look three-D.”

Duncan read the spines out loud. “Charlotte’s Web.James and the Giant Peach.How to Train Your Dragon.Harriet the Spy.Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”

Was he going to read them all? “We let the kids vote on their favorites.”

“Of course.”

It was the first—the only—moment all day that had felt anything like a normal, pleasant conversation and it confirmed what I’d always believed about whimsy—that it found a way past people’s defenses.

At the top of the stairs, we found Clay Buckley lying on the reading-circle rug surrounded by stacks ofArchiecomics.

“Hey, Clay,” I said.

He rotated, chin on his hand. “Hey.”

“Doing some reading?”

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