1
On the eve of Mad Purdy’s first class at the Elmswood Public Library, all the leaves on the trees turned red overnight. Mad was a chemist, not a botanist, but she knew the true color of leaves, in the absence of chlorophyll, was yellow. Leaves only turned red on purpose, the result of the creation of a pigment called anthocyanin. Mad was nervous about the class, about standing in front of a room like a teacher. The kids would have questions about the leaves, she worried. Anthocyanin was costly, energy-wise, for a tree to produce. Mad imagined breathing in through her right nostril, breathing out through the left, though she kept her sweaty hands on the steering wheel. Scientists weren’t certain why trees created anthocyanin, though one theory was that it protected leaves from light, which was something Mad understood well—as a cosmetic chemist, she worked in sunscreen formulation, which was less sexy than bath bomb formulation, her project for tonight. It was also possible leaves turned red to attract birds, which would then eat and disperse the tree’s seeds.
Mad didn’t notice any birds when she pulled into the library’s parking lot, but they were already gathering.
The Elmswood Public Library, located in Mad’s West Virginia hometown, was a forty-minute drive from her condo in Pennsylvania—a safe distance, she believed, from the place she’d spent most of her young life, desperate to escape. The commute gave her time to prepare, but she’d instead spent it imagining every disastrous scenario that might unfold over the course of a two-hour chemistry lesson for middle school students. She could forget how to speak or fail to suppress a nervous fart, and then the kids would mock her mercilessly for the duration. The class could be unruly and refuse to listen, or there could be a bully—multiple bullies!—and their victim might start crying, and she would stand there frozen, at a loss for what to do. She was catastrophizing. She hummed to make sure her voice still worked. She’d agreed to teach the class because the young adult librarian was a childhood friend who’d caught Mad off guard, asking what she did on Thursday nights—Mad’s answer to which was nothing—and because her mother had been not-so-gently pressuring her to try something outside her comfort zone. When it came down to it, Mad convinced herself that teaching a roomful of middle school girls was less intimidating than, say, finishing the doctoral program applications languishing on her laptop or going on a date. The class would focus on the chemistry of bath and beauty products—bath bombs, sugar scrubs, lip balms. It would run for six weeks, and then everyone would get off her fucking back. The last thing she wanted was to be a teacher.
The Elmswood Public Library was located in a building that had previously been a bank, and in the rear, there was a vestigial drive-thru window with a pneumatic tube system. The pneumatic tube sending station had been shuttered since the last time Mad had been here, years ago, with a spray-painted sign that said NOT FOR TRASH, breaking the long Elmswood tradition of teenagers depositing into the system undesirable objects—condoms, bad jokes written on cheeseburger wrappers—to fuck with the librarians. There wasn’t that much to do in Elmswood. Mad herself had once driven through with her friends and inserted a glazed donut, squealed off as the vacuum suctioned it away, laughing until they cried. She felt a wash of shame rinse over her as she unloaded her trunk and carried her bags through the library’s back door.
The rear entrance led to the lower level—a dim hallway punctuated by the library’s modest children’s room. Inside, a woman with black hair that flowed past her waist knelt on the floor to change the diaper of a toddler who flailed and screeched against the quiet. The walls were still hung with faded quilts, donated by a long-defunct sewing group. There was a small play kitchen against one wall, a train table. At a desk near the door, an older woman playing Minesweeper on the computer spotted Mad before she could slink away.
“Maddie Purdy!” the woman yelled. “Get out of town!”
Mad dropped her bags and stepped tentatively into the children’s room. “Mrs. Jankowski.”
Mrs. Jankowski was the size of a middle schooler and wore so much perfume Mad worried she would break out in hives when Mrs. Jankowski hugged her. She’d lived three doors down from Mad’s childhood home since the dawn of time, and was always working in her yard when the school bus dropped Mad at the end of the street, so Mad would be forced to engage in conversation on her walk home. Mrs. Jankowski’s house had a stone goose out front, which she dressed in hats and coats to celebrate each holiday or season. Mr. Jankowski had been known for giving out coins instead of candy for Halloween—the world’s shiniest nickels and dimes, and once, to the neighborhood children’s delight, silver dollars.
“Your mother didn’t tell me you were going to be here,” Mrs. Jankowski said.
Mad’s mother hadn’t told Mrs. Jankowski she was going to be there because Mad hadn’t told her mother in the first place, hoping to avoid the expectation of a visit after class, at eight P.M. on a work night, when her mother would already be on her second bottle of chardonnay. Now she’d have to call her.
“I didn’t know you were working here,” Mad said.
“Since my back surgery,” Mrs. Jankowski said. “Can’t be hunching over in the garden like I used to. I have a boy for that now.” She elbowed Mad and winked. “He does the bending over for me. So I work here, and I watch the Korean dramas. Very spicy, some of those Korean dramas.” She winked again. “It’s a nice place to have a chat. In the children’s department, no one expects it to be quiet. You think you’re supposed to be quiet in a library, but babies don’t give a damn. You’ve changed your hair since the last time I saw you.” She touched Mad’s hair, kinked at her neck where her ponytail had been. “It’s longer now.” There was no time for Mad to respond to any of this. “What does your mother think about your hair? You know I always told her, if you pull out one gray hair, two will grow back. I don’t think she listened!”
She nudged Mad and laughed. The toddler ran past them, toward a glass case of painted gourds, and his mother trailed after him, flashing Mrs. Jankowski an apologetic smile.
“I’m supposed to discourage running,” Mrs. Jankowski said, “but I don’t care.”
Mad couldn’t respond to this either, because then Farrah rushed in from the hall.
“You made it!” Farrah said.
Farrah gave Mad a squeeze and pulled her, protectively, away from Mrs. Jankowski. Farrah had taken both her tanning and teeth whitening a few shades too far, but otherwise she looked the same as always, both of a small town in West Virginia and too expensive for it. Farrah and Mad had been classmates since kindergarten, friends by virtue of proximity—their last names started with the same letter, which meant they were always next to each other in line or paired as partners. Otherwise, they made no sense together—Farrah’s father was a doctor, and she had all the things other girls coveted, including an easy beauty that blurred into popularity. Mad was too much of an oddball to sit at Farrah’s lunch table—Mad had worn her grandmother’s costume jewelry to school, or hats she found at the thrift store, because it was fun to dress up. She responded to socially awkward situations by reciting facts about the ocean and harbored a moderate obsession with the possibility of life on other planets. But Farrah’s friendship had given Mad a pass, shielding her from the brunt of her peers’ derision. Now that Mad had moved away and Farrah had stayed, it was easier to repurpose her old jealousy into disconnection.
“I wasn’t sure you’d show,” Farrah said. She was a little out of breath, as if she’d run down here for Mad, though Mad knew she was always like that. Farrah had the air of a person in demand, always being pulled from one thing to the next, even when she wasn’t.
“Here I am,” Mad said. She turned back to Mrs. Jankowski, but she’d already moved on, talking to the mother of the toddler about the painted gourds, which had been donated by a local artist whose work Mrs. Jankowski did not care for. Mad would have to say goodbye later.
Mad followed Farrah up the stairs to the main level, into the library’s open lobby, where the bank teller stations now served as a circulation desk, and up another set of stairs to the mezzanine.
“This part of the library was renovated last year,” Farrah said. The carpet was obviously new, rich green and still off-gassing. The walls of the staircase were hung with photos by library patrons—a blurry bald eagle, a bear dismantling a bird feeder in someone’s backyard. Some nondescript birds Mad couldn’t name. She’d never liked birds. “But the room you’re in has some issues.”
The upper level was small, consisting of two rooms nestled off the wood-railed mezzanine that looked out over the lobby. Mad followed Farrah past the Genealogy Room to a room she’d never been in, the Antiques Room. It was cramped inside—half the room crowded with narrow aisles of books, the other half occupied by a table so enormous it could’ve seated thirty people. Mad tried to imagine standing in front of thirty students and refocused on her breathing.
The table was a rich reddish wood, its surface glassy, opulent and out of place. This room, too, had new carpeting, but the ceiling over the shelving units was torn open, and there were drywall patches scattered across the otherwise maroon walls.
“Something with a pipe,” Farrah said. “There was water damage, and we can’t fix it until the insurance pays up.” Across the room, Mad saw an orange bucket strategically placed to catch drips. “I don’t usually come in here if I don’t have to. The YA department is downstairs. But we put you up here because the kids are so loud sometimes.”
At that, the sole girl at the table, clearly there for the class, looked up from her math homework with offense.
“Here’s your roster,” Farrah said, and handed Mad a folder from the table. “You have eight registered, but you never know. Sometimes no one shows. Sometimes you get a bunch of kids who didn’t register at all!”
Copyright © 2024 by Aimee Pokwatka