This isn't weird.

Here I Am

Feeling the prickle of goosebumps rising on his exposed skin, Ben pulled the sweater over his head and started forward. He ran his fingers along the spines of the books as he passed by them, imagining Millie doing the same, wondering if she had touched the same ones.

She had.

The evidence was obvious.

The books he was touching, and all the rows beneath them, were fastidiously arranged from tallest to shortest, their spines perfectly flush with the edge of the shelf. But the books starting around his eye level and everything above were in a state of chaos. He grinned broadly, imagining her up on the tips of her toes, stubbornly struggling to organize the shelves above her head. It gave him an urge to grab up an armful of the books she had handled and hug them to his chest—but of course, he would never disrespect her work like that.

He paced through aisle after aisle, studying each column for signs of her presence. In some places, it seemed as if her work was systematic. Today, I will organize everything from here to there. But several aisles were nearly untouched, save for a seemingly random column or two that she'd singled out. Those he studied with great interest, wondering what it was about that shelf in particular that had made her stop to give it special attention. Mostly, he was mystified, but a few of them, he noticed, seemed to hold a higher than average number of books about wizards.

The company he'd come with was quickly forgotten, as well as any meaningful sense of time. He might have been wandering for five minutes or a solid hour when he turned a corner and found himself in an open space, occupied by a single desk and few mismatched chairs arranged over a timeworn oriental rug. A silver haired woman with red cat eye glasses was leaning back in her seat behind the desk, absorbed in a paperback book. Her presence startled Ben, but she seemed entirely unperturbed when she noticed his movement in the corner of her eye.

"I'm sorry, I didn't hear you come in," she said casually, not quite lifting her gaze from the page until she reached the end of a paragraph. When she finally did look up at Ben, her eyes lit up, and she slammed her book down on the desk. "Oh, I knew it!"

Ben blinked several times, then glanced over his shoulder in search of whatever it was that had made her face brighten. "Knew what?" he asked.

The woman rose to her feet and marched toward him. She looked a bit eccentric, clad in a green wool sweater vest incongruously layered over a blue paisley dress with a ruffled skirt that swept the floor with every brisk step. She stopped in front of him and thrusted out a finger to poke him in the chest. "That there had to be a young man somewhere out there attached to that damn sweater!"

He looked down to where she was pointing, as if to confirm the tacky reindeer was still where he'd left it, then carefully took her hand in his and clasped her palm with a smile. "You must be Eliza, then. Hi, I'm Ben."

"Ben, hm?" She accepted his handshake, then took a step back to look him over. "I knew it. I just knew it. I'm old, not blind. That girl's been pinier than East Texas this whole summer."

"You know, at this point, about half the population of Texas has told me more or less the same thing, and I'm still not bored of hearing it," he said, straightening his sweater. "Well, not that she's been sad, of course—but that she's missed me. That part's nice."

Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Then where exactly have you been while that poor, darling girl has been languishing all this time?"

"Hey, hey, I've been languishing too!" he said, holding up his palms in a defensive gesture. "There was some... miscommunication, caused by third party interference. It's a long story."

"Oh, wonderful. I love long stories. How about a cup of coffee?"

"Please, anything but that."

"Suit yourself." She shuffled back to her seat behind the desk and plopped down. "Oh, and I suppose Molly must be here somewhere?"