Page 55 of The Librarians
Hi Hazel, this is Jonathan. Hope it’s okay to text you privately. My friend Ryan, Conrad’s roommate, would like to invite us to dinner at their house tonight. I hope you’ll be able to come?
It’s only after he sends the text that he finally puts away the eggs and the rest of his groceries, so he won’t just stare at his phone on pins and needles.
But what if things didn’t work out after Hazel and Conrad were reunited? What if seeing each other in person isn’t a dream come true but finally waking up from that dream instead?
He realizes that he’s standing in the middle of the kitchen, biting his thumb, an old pregame nervous tick that he thought he’d banished ages ago.
His phone dings.
Thanks, says Hazel.I’d love to.
Jonathan leaps up, his head nearly hitting the recessed ceiling, relief raging through his body as pure happiness.
In a few more exchanges he gets Hazel’s okay on the menu and arranges to pick her up at seven thirty p.m.
He showers and agonizes over outfits before changing into a chambray shirt and a pair of chinos. Then he goes out and buys a six-pack of highly rated local IPA and a bottle of red wine that his mom likes to drink when she has Italian food.
After that he still has almost two hours to kill. He heads back to the library—Hazel lives nearby. Also, there’s a book about human cadavers that he keeps seeing in the stacks. Maybe he can flip through it and sound more knowledgeable in front of a man who does two hundred and fifty postmortems a year.
His stomach grumbles as he parks and it’s a no-brainer to march directly into the Den of Calories.
Astrid is there, eating an apple. “Hi, Jonathan.”
“Hey, Astrid. What’s good here?”
“Hazel brought some interesting Chinese crackers. They’re super flaky, like eating pie crust, except savory. They’re right next to the choco pies.”
He finds the individually wrapped crackers and sits down opposite Astrid.
“How come you’re back again?” she asks.
“I—wait, why do you sound different, Astrid?”
Astrid clears her throat. “I’ll tell you if you promise to still be my friend afterward.”
Are they friends? He likes Astrid a lot and would like to be her friend, but despite her seemingly sociable nature, she’s always felt rather closed off—he’s known her for years without really getting to know her any better.
Is that about to change? “Of course,” he says.
Astrid sets her apple core on a napkin on the small table. “I sound different because I dropped my Swedish accent. And I dropped my Swedish accent because I’ve never been Swedish.”
It takes a moment for his mind, full of visions of a perfect first date, to compile her words into meaning. “Come again?”
“Do you want the long version or the short version?”
He glances at his phone. “I have time.”
He’ll just have to walk into Ryan’s place completely ignorant about cadavers and ask Ryan to fill him in.
Astrid laughs, a nervous sound. “But I have to be back at work in a few minutes. So basically, I’m from the Midwest, but I was young and stupid and wanted a different background. At college I made up this story about my parents and grandparents being prosperous Swedish farmers, rather than Iowans of Scandinavian extraction who pretty much lost their shirt during the Farm Crisis.
“In the reductionist vein of things, somehow my fake Swedishness became my entire personality. And everywhere I went, there was already someone who knew that I was ‘Swedish.’ So I’ve had to keep it up all these years.
“Of course, now I understand that I neverhadto keep it up. I just couldn’t face the consequences of telling people that I’d been lying to them. I’m sorry, Jonathan. I’m sorry that I lied to you when we met and that I kept up the pretense all these years.”
Jonathan tries to digest everything that has just been fire-hosed at him. Across from him, Astrid fidgets as if her chair is sprouting nails.
“I won’t say I’m not shocked—I mean, I feel like I’ve just been told that pizza is actually French in origin,” he says slowly. “I’m disoriented. But I don’t think how I interact with pizza will change, whether pizza is French or Italian. Am I making any sense?”
