it to me. “Let’s see how you handle this,” he said.
“You sure you trust me?” I was a little surprised at my own sarcastic tone. This guy really got under my skin.
“Not yet. That’s the point. The last page, the one you’re replacing—she was a disaster. I’m a senior page. I have responsibilities. I need to see how you work.”
“Was that Mona?”
“No, Zandra. What do you know about Mona?”
“Nothing, really—just that Anjali told me she disappeared. Who’s Zandra, and why was she a disaster?”
“Never mind Zandra. She was a disorganized mess-up and a liar and a thief, and now she’s gone. Let’s see if you’re better.”
Wow, I thought, this guy could be related to my stepsisters. “Fine,” I said. I read the slip, a request for a Chinese headdress. I found the right cabinet easily enough, despite the dim room. But when I reached up for the elaborate headdress, Aaron hovered so close I was afraid he was going to step on my feet. I tilted the headdress to slide it off the shelf.
“Careful! It’s fragile; those bobbles are glass,” he said.
“Back off, you’re making me nervous,” I snapped. “I’m not going to hurt it.” I lifted it down. “See? Safe and sound.”
“All right,” said Aaron. “I just had to make sure.”
I checked the label and carried the headdress down the hall to the staging area, where Aaron showed me how to file the call slip.
The next request was from someone named John Weinstein from Dark on Monday Productions. He wanted to borrow a doublet.
“Who are these people, and why are they borrowing these things?” I asked.
“This guy’s from a theater company, so chances are he’s getting ideas for costumes. Probably Shakespeare. They always borrow doublets when they do Shakespeare,” he said. This time he stood back and let me take the doublet out of the cabinet without comment. We ran a few more slips—my favorite was a delicate mask, with feathers curling around the upper half of the face. Aaron watched me closely, but he didn’t find anything to criticize. He was pretty intense, but I was impressed at how seriously he took his job.
When it was time to take my break, Ms. Callender took me upstairs to see the Main Examination Room. “This is where patrons come to get the items they requested,” she said. “They can sit and work at the tables.”
“Like the main room in the library,” I said.
“Exactly.”
It was a striking space, with tall ceilings, massive, imposing tables, and an elaborately carved staging area where Anjali and the other pages and librarians were bustling around, putting away slips and stacking pneums. I finally got a chance to see the Tiffany windows, but since it was a gloomy afternoon, I couldn’t make out any shapes or patterns in them.
I sat at one of the tables and did homework, then went back downstairs to Stack 2 when my break was over.
One patron requested antique Navajo rugs from New Mexico and kilim rugs from Turkey. They were heavy—it took both me and Aaron to carry them. We spread them out on the big table to check their condition before sending them upstairs in the big dumbwaiter.
“Look at how similar these two patterns are, with those triangles and diamonds and rectangles,” I said. “They’re from different continents, but they look like the weavers knew each other.”
“That’s just because of how they’re woven,” said Aaron. “The yarns cross each other at right angles, so it’s easier to make straight lines than curves.”
“Yes, but it’s more than that,” I said. “The colors are completely different, but look at those zigzags and that border. And the rug from Iran we sent up before looks nothing like either one of them.”
“I see what you mean,” said Aaron. “I wonder what made them choose the same patterns.”
“I wish we could go back in time and ask them,” I said.
“Me too.”
Aaron was much nicer when he was talking about rugs than when he was scolding me about not breaking things, I thought.
Around five, the fire door opened and Anjali came in, pushing a large cart full of objects. “Returns!” she called.
Aaron went running over to help her.
They wheeled the cart over to the center of the stack, Aaron pushing and Anjali steadying it.
“How’s it going, Elizabeth?” she asked. “Having fun?”
“Yes, thanks.”
“Good. Don’t let Aaron work you too hard.” She winked at me and vanished through the stack door. Aaron stared after her with a look of naked longing.
“She seems nice,” I said, to break the silence.
He turned to me as if he’d forgotten I was there. “What? Yeah . . . yeah, she’s very . . . nice,” he said.
Seeing the transformation in Aaron made me wonder how it would feel to have someone—even a not-so-nice guy like Aaron—look at me the way he looked at Anjali.
I hoped that someday I would find out.
That Saturday the arctic weather softened slightly. I was walking in Central Park after my morning shift at the repository when a bear came bounding toward me across the snow. I froze.
Not a bear, I saw as it got closer, but a bear-sized shaggy dog making the frozen air echo with its barks.
“Griffin, stay!”
The dog skidded to a stop in front of me. I took a step back. It was wagging its tail—that was reassuring. It put its huge wet paws on my shoulders and tried to lick my face.
“Do I know you?” I asked the dog, trying to duck away.
“Down, Griffin! Don’t knock Elizabeth over!” said a familiar stern voice. It was Mr. Mauskopf. He snapped his long fingers at the dog.
This, then, must be the Beast.
The dog subsided onto its haunches, put its head to one side, turned its ears forward, and looked up at me with eyes as big as saucers. It didn’t have to look up very far; we were practically at eye level. It raised a big, hairy paw and offered it to me.
“How do you do?” I said, shaking the paw. It felt as heavy as a sack of onions.
The Beast took that as an invitation to put its paws on my shoulders again.
“Down, Griffin! I said down!” barked Mr. Mauskopf. The dog subsided again. “He seems to like you.”
“Good dog,” I said, amused. For all his famous sternness, Mr. Mauskopf didn’t seem to be too good at making his dog obey. He must be more of a softy than he let on. I patted Griffin’s lumpy, shaggy brown shoulder. He put his tongue out and wagged his entire hindquarters.
“Nice day for a walk,” Mr. Mauskopf said.
“At least it’s warmer than yesterday. I just finished my shift at the repository.”
“Yes, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about that. How are things there?”
“I love it. It’s like getting to take things out of museum display cases and actually touch them.”
Mr. Mauskopf smiled. “I remember that excitement,” he said. “Before I started working at the repository, I
