Night Shift

01.

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 And despite the outdated furniture, questionable carpet stains, fake ferns and lingering stench of old coffee, there's something magic about the way moonlight floods the central atrium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. It took me all of fifteen minutes to re-shelf them. Now I'm wrapped up in my biggest knit cardigan and seated behind the circulation desk. It's the first week of September—too early for the 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 are so loud they echo in the quad and drift in through the glass front doors of the library. I can't help but 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 check-outs and returns. During the day, there are enough student-workers to staff the entire desk, but tonight, it's just 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 group of girls who were packing up in the atrium 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 during the season?"