Forty-One After Midnight (Completed)

Chapter Seven

We made plans to eat dinner really fast and then head on down to the library. We had to sneak though, because we didn't want anyone to know that that was where we were headed. A group of twelve kids rushing through dinner and heading off to the library would have looked just a tad bit suspicious.

There were three hallways you could take to get there. We split up into groups of three and each took a different hallway. One group stayed behind a little bit and waited for another opportunity to sneak out so it wasn't all twelve of us at once. We actually had this planned out rather well.

I was paired with Kyle and Courtney. On our way there I told them in more detail about the weird dreams I kept having when I saw the girl in the window.

"It's like that girl is specifically telling me what I have to do in real life. I think maybe she's part of it somehow. I just don't know how she'd be communicating with me like this."

"And that's why you said we need to go look for a book?" Kyle asked just to confirm that we weren't risking getting in trouble for nothing.

I nodded.

"Yeah. She wrote on her note that there's a book in the library. She didn't mention anything else, but she did say I was learning... and something about that same number forty-one. I'm guessing that it has to pertain to the book somehow."

Kyle rubbed at his forehead.

"It could be anything," Courtney said. "The shelf number, the page number, the row that it's in. It could even be part of the book number." She paused, looking around at all of us. "Are we supposed to just guess until we find it?"

"Not a problem." Kyle looked over at Courtney and then at me. "There are twelve of us. One can search book numbers, one could search the shelf and so on. It shouldn't take us that long if we all chose something with the number forty-one to look through."

"Kyle's right. It would be hard with just the three of us, but I think this will work," I added.

"And what if someone comes in and finds us?"

Courtney was the worrier of the group that was for sure, but at the same time, we should have been taking these things into consideration. I looked to Kyle to see if he had some kind of answer.

"I'll think of something," he told her.

The library was unfortunately much larger than I had been expecting it to be and had so many books that I began to lose hope the farther I walked in. The shelves were so tall you needed a ladder to get to the top and they were so long you could practically jog to the other side and it would tire you out. It was both amazing and discouraging at the same time.

We split up and began looking. I hoped it was extremely obvious when we found it, because none of us knew exactly what to look for. That had to have been why she hadn't really said anything else right? Just because it would be that obvious? Of course, she never really said much at all, so maybe it wasn't her choice to give us so few clues.

About an hour later we still had nothing. All that we found were books about animals, trees, presidents, essay writing, architecture, and any other random subjects you could possibly want to learn about. There were tons of fiction and non-fiction books, young adult and adult books. Our lucky number forty-one even led us over to the magazine stands, but that proved to be quite the waste of time. It was starting to get kind of late and we knew we couldn't stay here forever. We were going to have to start searching faster.