Les Grands Chantiers (Wattys 2022)

4. The Bookstore

Diggory Discount Books sat opposite the train station. The shop had been around in its current form for around thirty years, but the building it resided in predated that by a considerable margin. It had been built as the pack house of the Bronze Moon pack. Generations of wolves had grown up within its walls. 

The pack was long gone, and the other pack buildings had been torn down as Diggory became just another northeastern Corviston suburb in the 1980s. But it was still here, now incorporated rather incongruously into one corner of the Diggory Plaza in the centre of town. It smelled of damp in the winter, and the roof timbers creaked like an old ship with the strong winds that regularly blew across the plain.Brendan stood behind the counter, idly tapping on the flat surface, watching the few cars go by. 

It was not very busy at all. But then it had been a long time since this particular strip had seen its halcyon days. 

The summer after he had dropped out of Carleton he had been forced to look for a job. His parents were not too worried about forcing him to pay rent or anything but they weren't too keen on seeing him mooch around the house either, while he waited to start his Year 12 equivalency course at the local college. 

Several applications that went nowhere later, he had heard from a family friend that the bookstore was hiring. It was just outside Diggory station, a five-minute walk from his house. The pay wasn't brilliant, but it beat working at McDonalds. It was a no-brainer. 

 The beads hung across the doorway shimmied, followed by the familiar thump of someone's foot over the poorly fitted carpet at the front. Brendan had said nothing of the disastrous events of the day before to Floriana. That would remain between him, Wilbur and Adrian-

Speak of the devil. It was him. What the hell was he doing here, in jävla-kuk fucking Diggory? Before he'd had the chance to grab a second glimpse, he had disappeared into the shelves. He seemed to not have noticed who was behind the register. 

Brendan loosely kept an eye on the shelves while he unboxed some copies of Ruth Gray's diary that he was meant to shelf. There was also some of the latest romance by Elisha Collins, the pseudonym coined by a bunch of university students for their ever-popular self-parodying works. He looked up to see that the guy had done a lap of the store and was now perusing the Young Adult section, right next to the counter behind which he was standing. He was getting rather close to that counter. 

Brendan felt slightly self-conscious. 

He probably didn't even remember you, Brendan told himself, glancing up at the ceiling, with ornate carvings of the phases of the moon. You're probably the least important of many people he met yesterday. 

The guy - Adrian- was still browsing. He still hadn't realised how close he was to the cash register. 

"Uh, just be careful there," Brendan piped up, as Adrian's elbow almost touched the countertop. "This is a staff-only area." 

Adrian jolted upright. He was a full head taller than Brendan. He looked Brendan in the eye. 

"It does catch quite a few people out," Brendan continued. The eye contact was burning a hole in his resolve. 

"It's interesting threshold condition, how you've got the YA section so close to the cash register," he broke his silence. Brendan's ears perked up at the word threshold, which he'd encountered more than once in his internship. 

"There's almost no threshold at all. Why? Is there some kind of reason for it? Do people just come in, casually slip a copy of The Fault In Out Stars under their jackets, and run for it?"

"Well, no, not really," Brendan said. "Our most stolen book is actually The Book Thief." He felt quite proud of that. 

Adrian laughed at that one. His eyes laughed too.