Page 1 of Night Shift

One

I’ve always loved libraries after dark.

This one—the only twenty-four-hour library at Clement University—may not have the marble floors and cathedral ceilings that adorn Pinterest boards and travel Instagrams, but it’s still one of my favorite places on campus. And despite the outdated furniture, questionable carpet stains, fake ferns, and lingering stench of old coffee, there’s something magical about the way moonlight floods the central atrium through the glass ceiling overhead, casting the mostly empty tables far below in a soft blue glow.

There’s nowhere else I’d rather be at ten o’clock on a Friday night.

It helps, of course, that I’m getting paid to do nothing.

At the beginning of my shift, I did a lap around the second and third floors to collect stray books, which took me all of fifteen minutes. Now I’m wrapped up in my biggest knit cardigan and seated behind the circulation desk. It’s the end of October—just past the usual midterm rush—so there are only a few people still scattered around the tables in the atrium: five or six students who seem deeply engrossed in their laptops, a group of girls who are currently packing up to leave, and a boy who’s walking back and forth between one of the desktop computers and the old copy machine that never seems to print what you want it to on the first try.

Soon the library will be a ghost town, but outside, campus is buzzing with students. Some of them are trudging back to the dorms from their night classes, but most are leaving pregames in search of house parties. Their drunken laughter and shouts echo in the quad and drift in through the glass front doors of the library. I watch them stumble past from my seat at the circulation desk with a sense of detached curiosity, like I’m on one side of the glass at a zoo exhibit.

I can’t figure out if I’m the visitor or the captive animal.

Maybe I should feel lonely during these long and quiet night shifts, but I don’t. Not when I’m surrounded by books. And definitely not when the rest of my life feels so loud and bright and inescapably hectic.

Besides, I’m not totally on my own. I have Margie, my supervisor and the resident overnight librarian at Clement—who, right on cue, appears at my side and drops a stack of heavy tomes on the desk. Margie might be a foot shorter than me and three times my age, but she’s got the arm strength and no-nonsense attitude of a drill sergeant.

“These were on the floor outside the drop box,” she says. “Apparently, putting them into the box is too much work.”

“People are the worst. Here—I’ll log them.”

The circulation desk is long enough to hold five stations for processing checkouts and returns. During the day, there are enough student workers to staff the entire desk, but tonight, it’s only me and Margie. I boot up a computer to log in to the library’s record-keeping system, sighing and propping my chin in my palm when it gives me the dreaded loading screen.

Clement University might have a billion-dollar endowment, but our wireless network is notoriously unreliable.

The atrium girls finally walk past my desk on their way to the doors, some of them stopping next to me to toss their empty coffee cups in the trash. I catch bits and pieces of their conversation.

“—professor wants us to read the whole book by Monday.”

“You can always drop the class—”

“Oh, fuck, my phone died.”

“Guys, Georgia just texted me. She says there’s a party at the basketball team’s house. Do we want to pregame at her place? She has tequila.”

“Aren’t they not supposed to be throwing parties this close to the start of the season?”

“Yeah, it’s top secret. Invite only. I might still have some chaser in my—”

“Seriously, though, can I borrow someone’s charger?”

The door swings shut behind the girls, their now-muffled voices fading until all is quiet again. My eyes slide from the loading screen in front of me to my phone. If the basketball team is having a secret party, that’s where Harper and Nina—my roommates—will end up. Which means I’m sure to get some drunk texts over the next few hours.

The three of us have been inseparable since we got shoved into a triple in the freshman dorms. Now that we’re juniors, we’ve gotten good at respecting one another’s differences. Harper can’t stand theatrical productions or discussions of three-act structure. Nina can’t stand anything that involves workout clothes and braving the crowd of sweaty bodies at Clement’s gym. And I can’t stand college parties—too many people, lukewarm beer, shitty music played at eardrum-rupturing volumes. So, on Fridays, while Harper and Nina go out and get shit-faced, I work the night shift at the library and get a few hours of peace and quiet.

It’s the perfect arrangement.

Once I get past the loading screen and into the library’s record-keeping system, it takes all of five minutes to process the stack of returns Margie gave me. With nothing else immediately on my agenda, I push back my chair and reach for my backpack. It contains all the things I usually bring for the night shift: a full Hydro Flask, my lanyard with the keys to my apartment and a copy of the key to the library’s front door, a plastic baggie of assorted snacks (in case the vending machine by the elevators is out of order again), and—most importantly—my book of the week.

With one last look to make sure no one’s watching, I discreetly retrieve The Mafia’s Princess from the depths of my backpack.

The cover is humiliating. I don’t know who made the executive decision to put naked male torsos on romance novels, but I have a sneaking suspicion that some big-shot marketing executive wanted to shame me into buying an e-reader so I wouldn’t have to be seen holding this in public. My face heats as I flip it open, press my thumb down the crease, and dive back into the third chapter of yet another story about a bookish young woman and the brooding, smart-ass alpha male who adores her.

My roommates call me a hopeless romantic. I let them. It’s nicer than being called a lonely hermit.

“Kendall.”

---