The Library Agreement

It's a lazy Thursday afternoon here in the small town of Reidville, South Carolina—a place where everybody knows everybody, and nothing you do goes unnoticed. So, yeah. It's great for a guy like me. A guy who is a jock and a complete airhead at school, but volunteers at a library in the wee hours of the morning, where no one can find him. A guy who just loves being surrounded by books from midnight to 2 A.M. Tragic, I know. ________ Ugly. Fat. Stupid. Unwanted. Pitiful. Alone. Words are evil. I've known that for a long time. There is no word in the dictionary that can possibly lighten the load of those that burden me today. Everything had to go wrong today, of all days. My birthday. My birthday that nobody remembered. Nobody remembered it. That's okay. I was expecting that part, at least. What I wasn't expecting was the load of insults I got today—more than I've ever received in a day before. It was like the entire school decided to riot against me today. I'm used to passive comments every now and then, and of course the many that reach me through social media, but I didn't think anything would hit me as hard as it did today. The words today were lethal. And they don't even know how much it hurts. "Hailey!" My sister screeches from her room down the hallway, into the dead of night, tearing me from my thoughts as I shove my brightly-lit phone under my pillowcase. "What?" I shout back. "I need you to go to the library; it's important!" "It's one o' clock in the freaking morning!" "Mom and Dad aren't home, and they took my license away from me! You're the only one who can drive!" I groan into my pillow, knowing that this late-night library trip must be a result of Penny's uncanny ability to forget about homework just hours before it's due. Not to mention it's raining. "Hailey?" Her voice comes back, softer and more hopeful than before. "Please?" I let out another aggravated sigh, starting to cave in. "Are they even open?" "I think so." The uncertainty in her tone is not reassuring, but I get to my feet anyways. I'm still dressed in my day clothes, seeing as all I did after school was lie on my bed, motionlessly scrolling through the torrent of hate I get with every passing day. Not a single birthday message, not a single shoutout. Just one evil word after the other. Do I really have anything better to do? "Fine." I answer finally. "I'll go." "Thank you!" Penny calls back, her voice full of relief. "Yeah, yeah," I mutter, rolling unceremoniously out of bed and tugging on a pair of sneakers. "What book do you want?" ________ 1:15 A.M. No one inside. Just me and the soft lights and the smell of paper and ink. In other words, perfection. It's nice to have a pocket of quiet in the crazy world we live in every once and a while. I'm about to nod off right there at the Help Desk, my eyes barely skimming the words of some new contemporary novel I plucked off the shelf. "Late in the winter of my seventeenth year..." I kinda lose track after that, my thoughts becoming too distracting for the words on the page to make sense in my mind. I sigh, lying my head down on the counter and slumping into my usual nap position, breathing in the sweet scent of books and beginning to fall asleep... And then the entrance bell rings. The sound is foreign to me, so foreign that I snap out of my stupor in an instant, shock waves crawling up and down my spine as I turn wildly in my spot, blinking blurry eyes and trying to find the culprit. That's when a girl walks in, sloshing and heavy with rain, cursing under her breath. She's dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, both plastered to her body, her long hair stringy and sopping wet. "I'm here," she pants, not even bothering to look up at me, "For a book."