Chapter 2 Faye

Faye Bradshaw was a fourth-year student when she started at the library. The only person at the university she counted as a friend was Professor Valerie Kopp, who had recommended her for the library job in the first place, but in truth they were not so much friends as they were instructor and student.

Faye had worked preparing samples for X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy in Professor Kopp's lab for three years when the position in the library became available. The student library assistant job paid nineteen dollars per hour and the work-study role in Professor Kopp's lab paid only fifteen fifty for the exact same work. But for the friendship with Professor Kopp, there was no good reason for Faye to stay where she was.

If one didn't count Beans the dog, an ugly brown and white thing of indeterminate breed whose perpetually wagging tail had entered Faye's life on her twelfth birthday, Faye hadn't ever had a best friend. In high school she wandered around behind the other kids who were good at math and hoped no one would notice her. It was supposed to be different, according to the movies, anyway, when she got to college, but it was all meals alone and Friday nights in front of the small flat-screen television she purchased for her dorm room first year before realizing that everyone else preferred to watch things on their phones or laptops. There were no study groups or friends who popped into her dorm room just to chat, only the anxious stomach pain she'd carried since childhood, and silence. She took to keeping her earbuds in, though she wasn't much for music, because it seemed to excuse her solitude. She could go days without speaking to anyone at all until she had a shift scheduled at the lab and Professor Kopp would point out the samples that needed to be prepared and Faye would thrill at being paid attention to, her tail wagging just as Beans's would have.

***

She'd been up at her desk in the main library workroom on Monday when Davey approached and asked if she was interested in a little gathering. It was only the ninth time that Davey had ever spoken to her, but nine was more than anyone else who worked at the library, so if she'd had to draw up a list of emergency contacts, he might be somewhere on that list.

Faye hardly ever used the desk she'd been assigned at the library. She came up there to sign in at the start of each shift and print title information for the books she was meant to be sampling, but then she retreated down to the basement where she worked in the security cage, wearing a mask and goggles. Had she been less self-aware, she might have blamed her lack of friends on the circumstances of her job, but she knew better. The fault was entirely her own.

The first time Davey ever spoke to her was before she'd even been hired. She came on a tour of the library a week before interviewing for her position. On that tour he'd pointed out a volume of poetry bound in emerald-green book cloth, and she'd correctly identified it as an 1859 edition of the Poems of Oliver Goldsmith. For a moment Davey had looked positively smitten and he'd even recited a couple of lines: "but where to find that happiest spot below, who can direct, when all pretend to know?" but when he saw how baffled she looked, he stopped. She only knew the book because she'd studied up on the collection donated by the Woodend family that she would work with, if hired, and she recognized the cover. Davey, it turned out, was a scholar of poetic forms.

When she got home that night, she looked up the poem on the internet. Perhaps Davey could be her friend and they could bond over a shared love of poetry. She thought the poem was pretty good, but she never found a way to bring it up in conversation again.

The ninth time Davey ever spoke to Faye was to invite her to the gathering, but then he spoke to her a tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth time in the days that followed to add details about what she should expect from Thursday night. If he'd told her she needed a suit made of fish scales, she would have gone to the river and fished out the trout herself. Fasting before the ritual. Davey first brought that up on Wednesday, incidentally at the same time as he first used the word "ritual" to describe it, and if that should have scared Faye off, it only piqued her interest. She stood in her gloves and mask and eye protection and asked a couple of clarifying questions about when exactly her fast should begin (sunrise) and whether or not she was allowed to consume clear liquids during the length of it (only water), and when her curiosity on these matters was satisfied, she went back to work and did some mental math about how many more times Davey would have to speak to her before she could consider him a proper friend.

***

In the privacy of their bedroom, out on the prairies where the wheat and soybeans grew, Mrs. Bradshaw, Faye's mother, whispered her reservations to Mr. Bradshaw after a phone call with their daughter. Did Mr. Bradshaw, she asked, think that these kids really wanted Faye at their party, or would this be like one of those cruel tricks they'd seen kids inflict on one another in teen comedies that they'd sat and watched with Faye on Friday nights all through high school? The movies had given Faye a sort of armor against bullying, though practically speaking, the armor was unnecessary. No one at her medium-sized high school was mean to her. They simply acted like she didn't exist.