Immortal Light: Wide Awake (2 page)

She turned off the car,
removed her keys and for a moment admired the way they looked in
her hand; her very own keys to her very own car. It felt good to
finally be driving it.  Unbuckling her seatbelt, she pulled
the door handle and stepped out into the parking lot. The door
slammed with a nice solid click. Just the sound of it made her
smile because it was
her
slamming door and
her
solid click.

Before heading to the front door, she looked
herself over once in the reflection of the side window. It was hard
to look at herself sometimes because during her middle school years
she went through what her mother called an “awkward phase.” If
awkward meant being too skinny and too tall to fit into any
clothing, having teeth that didn’t seem to fit into her mouth, and
having zero curvature to her body, then Lucy agreed that she had
gone through an awkward phase. It was just before her fifteenth
birthday that she finally started to see a little bit of real
femininity in her design.

Her hair had always been beautiful, long and
blonde with just the right amount of body, and for that she was
grateful. As she looked at her reflection she realized that the
rest of her might not be half bad. She had sparkling blue eyes. Her
porcelain skin looked perfect with just a little bit of make-up and
under her name-brand clothing she saw fullness and curvature she
was sure hadn’t been there yesterday. To her own surprise, she
might have even considered herself a little bit “hot” by high
school standards.

Arriving at the front door, she pulled on the
handle. The force of it jarred her a little bit when there was no
give. The door clattered and remained in position.

“
They don’t open until ten,” a
warm voice said from behind her.

Turning around, she saw a
guy about her age walking toward her on the sidewalk. The first
thing she noticed was that he was tall, more than six feet for
sure. He wore beige cargo shorts with flip flops, which wasn’t
exactly surprising in Coos Bay during the summer. Hanging loosely
on his torso and over the top of his shorts was a white button-down
shirt rolled up at the sleeves
.
The contrast of the white accented the perfectly
tanned shade of his skin, but it wasn’t a summer tan; from what she
could tell, the color was native to his skin. She could see that
his hands and forearms were toned, as were his legs. While her
heart fluttered at the sight of his chiseled jaw and perfect
features, his most dazzling feature was his eyes. They were
spectacular green emeralds glowing in the daylight and framed by
dark, black locks of hair that fell around his face. His gaze
seemed to grab Lucy’s attention and hold it
hostage.

“
Oh, uh, I know. I work here,” was
all she could manage to say.

“
And you don’t have a
key?”

“
Well, I mean, today is my first
day; I was kind of expecting someone to be here
already.”

He stopped in front of her,
gripping a backpack over his shoulder. He just raised his eyebrows
and stared. Lucy froze in the silence wondering why he was just
standing there. A moment turned into seconds and the awkwardness
was becoming palpable. Lucy pined for something to say, but the
newcomer spoke first.

“
Are you going to sit down?” He
gestured to a bench near the library door that Lucy had not
realized she was blocking.

Embarrassed, she stepped out of the way, and
the boy gave her a closed mouth smile, dropped his backpack to the
bench, and sat down.

Lucy tried to hide her flushed face. She had
never felt so rattled in the presence of someone her own age, so
she just stood, arms crossed, staring into the parking
lot.

“
Would
you
like
to sit
down?” she heard him ask from behind her.

Her mortification was obviously not going to
be relieved.

“
No, uh, I’m fine,
thanks.”

Lucy walked over to the opposite side of the
door and started pacing a groove into the sidewalk. After a minute
of torment, she was granted a reprieve. She and her new morning
companion looked up as the screeching sound of a car in need of
some serious repair pulled into the parking lot. Navigating the
vehicle to a spot at the edge of the lot, the driver turned to look
at Lucy. He was pale to a near sickly degree, young, and gaunt. His
expression was blank, his thin pink lips clamped together. He
couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old and the sight of
him was just creepy enough to send a cold chill down Lucy’s spine.
Lucy hoped he wasn’t coming for a visit to the library. As he
turned his gaze back to maneuvering into the parking space, Lucy
saw a long, black, stringy ponytail that hung  down his back
without being affected by the wind through his open
window.

With a squeaky slam of his car
door he approached the library, holding a black briefcase. He was
so skinny that the navy blue long-sleeved shirt he wore hung
loosely on his bony torso. Walking up to the door, Lucy watched the
expression on his glistening, damp face change from a stern,
miserable glare to a slightly softer, more innocent
look.

“
Are you Lucy?” he asked in a high
sort of whiny, though not totally unpleasant, voice.

Lucy looked at him confusedly for a moment
then thought she should answer him.

“
Yes, I’m Lucy.”

“
Kenny,” he said, leaving the keys
in the lock and holding a sweaty hand out to her. “I’m the
librarian here.”

Lucy’s heart sank as she took his hand. His
fingers were almost ice-cold with a thin, vaporous layer of
moisture.

“
I’m sorry we haven’t met until
now. I was at a library conference in California. That’s why the
city HR people did the hiring.”

Kenny seemed almost out of breath with every
word as his boney fingers fumbled at the lock. The process looked
laborious, as though each tumbler weighed a ton.

Once Kenny had the door open, Lucy
looked to the boy sitting on the bench. His face was buried in a
book, so she didn’t say anything to him; she simply followed Kenny
through the door that felt like the stone entrance of a tomb for
all the trouble it gave him.

“
Are you familiar with the
library?” Kenny asked in his weak voice, not looking at Lucy as
they walked through the entry way. It was obvious he was a rather
timid person. “Do you read books?” he followed up. He also didn’t
seem to have well-developed social skills.

“
Yeah,” Lucy replied, not sure to
which question she was responding. “I used to come here all the
time.”

“
And now you don’t?”

“
I haven’t really had time. I sort
of got busy with life and …”

Kenny slipped behind the
circulation desk and disappeared into a darkened office. It was
obvious he wasn’t listening, so Lucy stopped talking. Seconds
later, all the lights were on and Lucy’s immediate impulse was to
head to the fiction aisle, grab a copy of a favorite book, and hide
from her weird, new boss in the children’s section, curled up on a
beanbag chair.

Kenny reemerged from the back and stood behind
the desk.

“
So, this is going to be your
job.”

He pointed to a chair behind a computer
immediately adjacent to a large wooden box that was no doubt the
book return.

“
It’s really a lot of scanning
books into the computer and putting them back on the shelves.” He
spoke as kindly and as professionally as he could. It was almost
like someone had trained him to sound like that; it was almost
robotic.

Walking around the back of the desk, she saw
her computer and a scanning gun. Kenny punched some keys and picked
up the gun to demonstrate how the computer interfaced with the
scanner. It was a simple process that didn’t really require the
twenty or so examples Kenny made of the books sitting on a cart
behind them, but Lucy let him do his job. As he scanned, she would
catch him glancing at her. Every time she caught him he would
quickly go back to what he was doing. When he was done, Kenny stood
up and placed the books he had scanned back onto the rolling
cart.

“
When you finish, all you have to
do is put the books back where they belong on the
shelves.”

Lucy acknowledged him with a nod.

“
Any questions?”

“
No,” she said with a tight
smile.

“
Okay.
 I’ll be in there then.”  Kenny pointed toward his office
and Lucy just smiled and nodded
.

The remaining stack of books took Lucy only a
few minutes to scan, and as she prepared to reshelf them, Kenny
came out of the office holding an American flag under one arm and
two rolls of toilet paper and a package of paper towels in the
other. Lucy jumped at the opportunity to help. Wanting to make a
good impression, she hopped up from her perch and walked swiftly
over to where Kenny was having a difficult time holding everything
in his arms.

“
Can I do anything to
help?”

“
Uh, sure. Can
you do the flag? This other stuff is for the, uh, Men’s Room so, uh
…
”

He looked a little embarrassed to be on the
subject of the men’s bathroom, so Lucy grabbed the flag from his
pile.

“
I’ll get this one,” she said with
a weak smile as she headed for the door.

Behind her, she heard Kenny call out, “You’ll
need my keys to get back in.”

In his pale, bony fingers he held a set of
brass colored keys.

“
It’s the big square
one.”

With the keys in her pocket, Lucy headed
outside. Looking to her left as she exited, she noticed the same
guy still sitting on the bench. He didn’t look up, nor did he say
anything as she walked by.

Approaching the flagpole, she realized she had
no idea what to do, having never raised a flag in her life.
Surveying the pole and line, she saw that it was a rope wrapped
around a cleat, but she didn’t see where the flag attached. On the
line going up the pole, she saw two clips like one might see on a
construction worker’s keys. She looked at the flag that was tightly
folded into a triangle. There was no sign of any place to clip
onto. She decided to untuck the edge and let the flag unravel like
a bed sheet onto the ground.

“
It isn’t supposed to touch the
ground,” came a voice from near the library entrance. Lucy cringed
as she recognized immediately who it was.

“
I’m sorry?” she replied to him,
not wanting to be completely rude.

“
The flag isn’t supposed to touch
the ground.”

First he embarrassed her and now he was giving
her a lesson in flag etiquette.

“
Well, how else am I supposed to
do this?”

He laughed as he spoke, “You’ve already
defeated that method. Would you like a hand?”

Embarrassment had turned to frustration with
her new friend and she glared at him as he approached
her.

“
Sure. Show me what you’ve got,
Captain America.”

He chuckled. “You don’t think it’s important
to know the rules of your country’s flag?”

Lucy didn’t want to answer.
What kind of American would she be if she said
no
or expressed her true feelings of
total apathy?

“
I suppose. But, I think if I
break the rules this once, who’s going to know?”

“
God,” the boy said,
matter-of-factly.

Lucy jerked her head as the word smacked her
in the face. “I beg your pardon?”

“
Well, it’s just that the founders
of this country held their god in such high esteem that were it not
for him, they wouldn’t have been able to establish themselves. So,
to them, if you disrespect the flag, you are disrespecting God. And
since the Christian god is considered omniscient, God will know if
you let it touch the ground.”

Lucy was perplexed by his
response. She tried to hide her contorted face of
curiosity.

“
Are you okay?” he
asked.

“
Yeah,” Lucy
said, surprised. “I just …
”
she looked down at the flag in her hands.
“
Why
don
’
t you save me
from God
’
s wrath
and show me how this is done.”

He smiled and picked up the end
from the ground, then told Lucy to hold tight to her end. Pulling
the flag taut, he folded it in half once and then again like
folding a table cloth. This seemed easy enough, so Lucy followed
suit with her end.

“
Now, you just stand there and
hold on tightly to your end.”

His instructions were simple and Lucy lightly
scoffed at what she took as condescension; but she held on to her
end as instructed.

He folded a ten to twelve inch
section of the flag toward Lucy, followed by a ten to twelve inch
diagonal fold. He followed this pattern until he reached her hands.
As he went to take the resulting triangularly folded flag, he
accidentally grasped Lucy’s hand.