Beverly

Later that day, I was seated in Beverly’s office, a pile of oatmeal-cranberry-carob cookies in a tin on the desk in front of me. Her day calendar was completely full, with names and times and abbreviations for all the things she had to do. A very neat stack of papers sat on Beverly’s chair, and everything else on her desk was lined up as tidily as usual, all edges perfectly parallel or perpendicular as if arranged with a ruler.

Beverly had asked me to wait for her while she finished up with Lenny in the reading room. She was helping him put together a flyer outlining why the library was so important. The mayor was pushing the argument that libraries were irrelevant in the “age of technology” because everyone had access to the whole world from their home computers. But his argument didn’t include all the people who were not tech savvy and all the people who didn’t have personal computers, not to mention the people who didn’t have homes! He wanted to send Foxfield residents to Waverly, which was five miles away, and pay a fee—“a very reasonable fee,” he claimed—to use their services. But what if you couldn’t drive or didn’t have a car or didn’t have the money to pay for a service that used to be free?

Mayor Trippley had to be stopped, and Lenny’s petition was our best shot. It turned out people listened to Lenny, too. He knew everyone and was collecting signatures left and right, whether they were regular library patrons or not.

Today’s oatmeal cookies were lumpy and chunky and looked a bit like those other nest cookies, but the smell of sugary cinnamon wafting off them alone was enough to make my mouth water. I didn’t know what carob was—it looked like chocolate but it wasn’t chocolate—but those cookies were seriously good.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Jamie.” Beverly swept in, rubbing her hands together before her and nodding at me. She had come to work with a new hairstyle that morning. It was still fire-engine red but was cropped closer to her scalp than before and stood out in all directions in thick tufts around her head. Her hair made me think of punk rock and medieval weaponry at the same time. And it definitely wasn’t what you’d expect to see with her yellow polka-dotted blouse and beige loafers, but that was Beverly.

She moved the papers on her chair to the floor, took a seat behind the desk, and, noting the tin of cookies, said, “Oh, how lovely.” She looked out her door toward Lenny and nodded at his back, then turned back to me and offered me one.

“I’ve had two already,” I admitted. “They’re really good.”

“Well then.” She opened a drawer at her side, pulled out a sheet of paper, and got right to it. “This is the form I’m supposed to submit to your principal confirming your community service hours.”

I shifted in my seat.

“You have worked well beyond the hours assigned to you”—she nodded at me as she said this—“and have provided immeasurable service here. In short, you have far exceeded the requirements of your community service, and I am going to make sure your principal knows that.”

A wave of relief swept through my body. It was officially over: the crime, the humiliation, the punishment, even the self-loathing. Officially over and done with for good.

A line from the quotes chair popped in my head: It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then. I knew this one—it was from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice survived her long fall down the rabbit hole and the mysteries she faced once she landed. I had survived my long fall and had turned it into something else altogether. I was a different person now.

Beverly smiled and signed the bottom of the time sheet in front of me.

“I will be mailing this back before school begins, in the next week or two, with a letter I will compose describing how you have exceeded all our expectations and became an essential member of staff this summer.”

“Thank you, Beverly,” I said, blushing at her praise.

“You’re very welcome.” She answered, then continued in her professional library director voice, “Please know I would like to extend your position here as a permanent volunteer and, if we are able to keep the library up and running, would love to offer you a legitimate part-time position once you are old enough. You can get working papers at fifteen or sixteen, I believe. And I will, somehow, find a way to obtain funding for your pay.”

My eyes lit up. “Really? I would love to stay here, and then to have an actual real job here, like Sonia and Lenny—that would be amazing!”

“It would be amazing for all of us.” Beverly smiled once but then quickly dropped her grin to say, “But, as you know, first we have to deal with—”

“The mayor,” we said at the same time.

“How can he do this?” I pleaded. “Doesn’t he know how many people rely on us, how much they need us? Doesn’t he know how much we do for the whole town?”

“I think there are a lot of things the mayor knows and a lot of things he doesn’t. I don’t think he has any idea what kind of opposition he’s about to face, for one thing,” Beverly said with a smooth cool in her voice. “The letter from Mrs. Evans and the petition are strong arguments for our side. If he goes against residents’ wishes, he won’t be reelected. He knows that.”

“So we just have to let him know what residents want,” I finished.

“Exactly. And Lenny has been working tirelessly on that. I think he’s surprised himself with how many names he’s collected already.”

I smiled in triumph and folded my arms across my chest as if it were all settled and done. But Beverly didn’t look ready to celebrate. We hadn’t won anything yet.

“There’s one more thing,” Beverly said, bending down to reach into the bottom drawer of her desk. She came back up with a book in her hand. It was an old paperback, the edges faded from sun, the binding fragile as a baby bird. She passed it to me. “I wanted to give you this. It was my very first copy. My sister Dorothy and I”—she swallowed, then relaxed her lips into a gentle smile—“we shared it, passed it back and forth like a bag of candy. Only better, because when we finished it, we could just begin again.”

It was a copy of Jane Eyre.

And it was beautiful.

The cover illustration showed Jane in a long black cloak fastened at her neck over a heavy burgundy dress, her white-gloved hands resting on her bustled skirt in front of her. Thornfield Hall stood in the gray distance, surrounded by bare, scraggly trees, and several windows of the house were lit in an ominous shade of red. Approaching Jane on horseback was Mr. Rochester, his face in shadow, his mood unknowable. I had never seen this cover illustration before.

“Beverly, I can’t—” I began, but she cut me off quickly.

“I want you to, Jamie, please.” She was looking right at me now, telling me straight and true. “I would love for you to have this book. I would love for you to read it again and keep it always.”

I picked the book up and felt both the lightness and weight of it in my hands. The book was thick and worn, and the page edges were soft as velvet against my skin. I clutched it to my chest. “I will. I’ll keep it forever, I promise,” I told her. “Thank you so much, Beverly. This is really special.”

“Well, so are you. Thank you so much for joining us this summer.” She reached up to the locket around her neck and fingered it, sliding it back and forth on the chain, then released it back down under her shirt.

And that’s when I knew, clear as if I’d opened it and looked with my own two eyes, that it was her sister, Dorothy, tucked away in that locket. Beverly carried her sister to the library with her every day, nestled in gold above her heart.

“Would you like a few cookies before you go?” Beverly asked then as she heaved a huge stack of papers from the floor back onto her desk. She still had a library to run.

“I’ll take some from the stash downstairs. I think Lenny made those for you to take home,” I told her.

As I stepped out of her office, the entrance bells jingled and I saw Mrs. Evans march through the door. She scanned the library space and spotted Lenny just as he lifted his head from his laptop, smiled, and waved her over.

I knew then for absolute sure—Mrs. Evans had meant every single word she wrote in that letter to the Biweekly. She had officially joined our fight.