Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [best books for 20 year olds .TXT] 📗

had drawn older librarians from receiving areas and offices behind the counter, women with the look of persons accustomed to terminating children's mischief and ejecting rowdy drunks with equal aplomb. One of them was talking into a phone, and two more were moving cautiously toward them, sizing them up.

"We should go," Mimi said.

"I need my library card," he said, and was as surprised as anyone at the pout in his voice, a sound that was about six years old, stubborn, and wounded.

Mimi looked hard at him, then at the librarians converging on them, then at the mesh back kid, who had backed all the way up to a work surface several paces back of him. She planted her palms on the counter and swung one foot up onto it, vaulting herself over. Alan saw the back of her man's jacket bulge out behind her as her wings tried to spread when she took to the air.

She snatched up the card, then planted her hands again and leapt into the air. The toe of her trailing foot caught the edge of the counter and she began to tumble, headed for a face-plant into the greyed-out industrial carpet. Alan had the presence of mind to catch her, her tit crashing into his head, and gentle her to the floor.

"We're going," Mimi said. "Now."

Alan hardly knew where he was anymore. The card was in Mimi's hand, though, and he reached for it, making a keening noise deep in his throat.

"Here," she said, handing it to him. When he touched the felted card stock, he snapped back to himself. "Sorry," he said lamely to the mesh-back kid.

Mimi yanked his arm and they jumped into the car and he fumbled the key into the ignition, fumbled the car to life. His head felt like a balloon on the end of a taut string, floating some yards above his body.

He gunned the engine and the body rolled in the trunk. He'd forgotten about it for a while in the library and now he remembered it again. Maybe he felt something then, a twitchy twinge of grief, but he swallowed hard and it went away. The clunk-clunk of the wheels going over the curb as he missed the curb-cut back out onto the road, Mimi sucking breath in a hiss as he narrowly avoided getting T-boned by a rusted-out pickup truck, and then the hum of the road under his wheels.

"Alan?" Mimi said.

"It was my first piece of identification," he said. "It made me a person who could get a book out of the library."

They drove on, heading for the city limits at a few klicks over the speed limit. Fast, lots of green lights.

"What did I just say?" Alan said.

"You said it was your first piece of ID," Mimi said. She was twitching worriedly in the passenger seat. Alan realized that she was air-driving, steering and braking an invisible set of controls as he veered around the traffic. "You said it made you a person --"

"That's right," Alan said. "It did."

He never understood how he came to be enrolled in kindergarten. Even in those late days, there were still any number of nearby farm folk whose literacy was so fragile that they could be intimidated out of it by a sheaf of school enrollment forms. Maybe that was it -- the five-year-old Alan turning up at the school with his oddly accented English and his Martian wardrobe of pieces rescued from roadside ditches and snitched off of clotheslines, and who was going to send him home on the first day of school? Surely the paperwork would get sorted out by the time the first permission-slip field trip rolled around, or possibly by the time vaccination forms were due. And then it just fell by the wayside.

Alan got the rest of his brothers enrolled, taking their forms home and forging indecipherable scrawls that satisfied the office ladies. His own enrollment never came up in any serious way. Permission slips were easy, inoculations could be had at the walk-in clinic once a year at the fire house.

Until he was eight, being undocumented was no big deal. None of his classmates carried ID. But his classmates did have Big Wheels, catcher's mitts, Batmobiles, action figures, Fonzie lunchboxes, and Kodiak boots. They had parents who came to parents' night and sent trays of cupcakes to class on birthdays -- Alan's birthday came during the summer, by necessity, so that this wouldn't be an issue. So did his brothers', when their time came to enroll.

At eight, he ducked show-and-tell religiously and skillfully, but one day he got caught out, empty-handed and with all the eyes in the room boring into him as he fumfuhed at the front of the classroom, and the teacher thought he was being kind by pointing out that his hand-stitched spring moccasins -- a tithe of the golems -- were fit subject for a brief exposition.

"Did your mom buy you any real shoes?" It was asked without malice or calculation, but Alan's flustered, red-faced, hot stammer chummed the waters and the class sharks were on him fast and hard. Previously invisible, he was now the subject of relentless scrutiny. Previously an observer of the playground, he was now a nexus of it, a place where attention focused, hunting out the out-of-place accent, the strange lunch, the odd looks and gaps in knowledge of the world. He thought he'd figured out how to fit in, that he'd observed people to the point that he could be one, but he was so wrong.

They watched him until Easter break, when school let out and they disappeared back into the unknowable depths of their neat houses, and when they saw him on the street headed for a shop or moping on a bench, they cocked their heads quizzically at him, as if to say, Do I know you from somewhere? or, if he was feeling generous, I wonder where you live? The latter was scarier than the former.

For his part, he was heartsick that he turned out not to be half so clever as he'd fancied himself. There wasn't much money around the mountain that season -- the flakes he'd brought down to the assayer had been converted into cash for new shoes for the younger kids and chocolate bars that he'd brought to fill Bradley's little round belly.

He missed the school library achingly during that week, and it was that lack that drove him to the town library. He'd walked past the squat brown brick building hundreds of times, but had never crossed its threshold. He had a sense that he wasn't welcome there, that it was not intended for his consumption. He slunk in like a stray dog, hid himself in the back shelves, and read books at random while he observed the other patrons coming and going.

It took three days of this for him to arrive at his strategy for getting his own library card, and the plan worked flawlessly. Bradley pulled the books off the back shelves for the final time, the librarian turned in exasperation for the final time, and he was off and out with the card in his hand before the librarian had turned back again.

Credentialed.

He'd read the word in a book of war stories.

He liked the sound of it.

"What did Krishna do?"

"What do you mean?" She was looking at him guardedly now, but his madness seemed to have past.

"I mean," he said, reaching over and taking her hand, "what did Krishna do when you went out for coffee with him?"

"Oh," she said. She was quiet while they drove a narrow road over a steep hill. "He made me laugh."

"He doesn't seem that funny," Alan said.

"We went out to this coffee shop in Little Italy, and he sat me down at a tiny green metal table, even though it was still cold as hell, and he brought out tiny cups of espresso and a little wax-paper bag of biscotti. Then he watched the people and made little remarks about them. 'She's a little old to be breeding,' or 'Oh, is that how they're wearing their eyebrow in the old country?' or 'Looks like he beats his wife with his slipper for not fixing his Kraft Dinner right.' And when he said it, I knew it wasn't just a mean little remark, I knew it was true. Somehow, he could look at these people and know what they were self-conscious about, what their fears were, what their little secrets were. And he made me laugh, even though it didn't take long before I guessed that that meant that he might know my secret."

"So we drank our coffee," she said, and then stopped when the body thudded in the trunk again when they caught some air at the top of a hill. "We drank it and he reached across the table and tickled my open palm with his fingertips and he said, 'Why did you come out with me?'

"And I mumbled and blushed and said something like, 'You look like a nice guy, it's just coffee, shit, don't make a big deal out of it,' and he looked like I'd just canceled Christmas and said, 'Oh, well, too bad. I was hoping it was a big deal, that it was because you thought I'd be a good guy to really hang out with a lot, if you know what I mean.' He tickled my palm again. I was a blushing virgin, literally though I'd had a couple boys maybe possibly flirt with me in school, I'd never returned the signals, never could.

"I told him I didn't think I could be romantically involved with him, and he flattened out his palm so that my hand was pinned to the table under it and he said, 'If it's your deformity, don't let that bother you. I thought I could fix that for you.' I almost pretended I didn't know what he meant, but I couldn't really, I knew he knew I knew. I said, 'How?' as in, How did you know and How can you fix it? but it just came out in a little squeak, and he grinned like Christmas was back on and said, 'Does it really matter?'

"I told him it didn't, and then we went back to his place in Kensington Market and he kissed me in the living room, then he took me upstairs to the bathroom and took off my shirt and he --"

"He cut you," Alan said.

"He fixed me," she said.

Alan reached out and petted her wings through her jacket. "Were you broken?"

"Of course I was," she snapped, pulling back. "I couldn't talk to people. I couldn't do anything. I wasn't a person," she said.

"Right," Alan said. "I'm following you."

She looked glumly at the road unraveling before them, grey and hissing with rain. "Is it much farther?" she said.

"An hour or so, if I remember right," he said.

"I know how stupid that sounds," she said. "I couldn't figure out if he was some kind of pervert who liked to cut or if he was some kind of pervert who liked girls like me or if I was lucky or in trouble. But he cut them, and he gave me a towel to bite on the first time, but I never needed it after that. He'd do it quick, and he kept the knife sharp, and I was able to be a person again -- to wear cute clothes and go where I wanted. It was like my life had started over again."

The hills loomed over the horizon now, low and rolling up toward the mountains. One of them was his. He