Chapter 9 Faye

Monday had been the longest day of the whole year. The first day of summer always made Faye think of her mother. She couldn't remember a time before their "summer celebration." Even when she was very, very small, Faye was allowed to stay up until sunset on the longest day of the year. It was usually during the last week of school, and a few times she'd fallen asleep in her classroom the next day, dozing off during story time because she'd stayed up past ten thirty to watch the pinks and reds and oranges turn to ink. Once Beans came along. He sat there, too, happy to snooze on warm feet until the dark came. All through high school, long past when she'd had a bedtime, she'd do it, sit with her mother out on the porch and watch. When she got older, the ritual wasn't that different from how they spent most evenings, sitting out there and reading and watching the sun until it got too dark to see their pages. It wasn't as though Faye ever had other plans.

Yet this year she'd missed it. On Mondays Faye did laundry. The machines were in the basement of her nine-story apartment building, where the ceiling was so low she could barely stand on her toes and the constant hum of a load washing or drying blocked out any sound from the outside world. Monday had been laundry day since her first year living in the dorms because it was inexplicably the least busy day for the machines. She thought all these teenagers she lived with, quivering sacks of Bud Light and hormones, would be desperate to be out humping each other all weekend, so at first she'd tried for a weekend laundry day, but it turned into a party down there with twiggy blonds flinging G-strings at one another while sets of new muscles used their laundry baskets to conceal their erections. Monday was the thing. Faye was the only person in Vermont who did laundry on a Monday.

That week she'd worked until five on Monday, and after the rare books library closed, she'd wandered over to the main library building, her stomach still fluttering from the thrill of Davey's invitation. A party. An all-night party that she'd been invited to above so many others. She found what she was looking for in the stacks on the ninth floor, the black and white ruins against the yellow cover and those blocky title letters meant to evoke the Greeks. Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries. The author had a Greek name, George Mylonas, which lent the whole thing an air of respectability—who would know if not him? Right there in the CC section of the stacks, she sat on the floor and opened the book because if Faye had never been the most popular girl, or the prettiest, or the funniest, she'd always been the most prepared. The chapter on the Eleusinian Mysteries wasn't for two hundred pages, but Faye had never been one to skip ahead. She sat there in those stacks and read right on through to the Peisistratean period before she happened to look at her watch and see she was at risk of missing the closing of the laundry room before her whites were fully dry.

***

The light changed and Faye crossed the street. By Thursday she'd read the book all the way to the end and even had the opportunity to look up some of what old George referenced as well as some of the books that had cited George the Greek in the years since he'd published. In the rush on Monday, she'd run her laundry down to the basement and sat there with the signed-out book, and by the time she got back to her room, it was ten thirty and the stars were out.

The evening before the ritual, before holing up in another basement for hours, she made a point of getting some early summer evening sunshine.

She had the slides she'd made that day to take back to the XRF lab. She was meant to scan the slides immediately—to log the results in the spreadsheet alongside the others and to check the volumes off her list of hundreds and either order the books sent for processing or send them back to the stacks. On any other day she'd have done just that but if she started her scans, she'd miss the close of the library, she'd miss her opportunity to slide into the basement with the others, she'd miss her very first party, not just of the year, not just of university, but ever.

The sun was so sweet it warmed the little hairs on her forearms, and if she'd been just 5 percent less excited, Faye might have sat herself on a bench until dark. She left the sidewalk and cut between a couple of buildings on a well-worn dirt path trodden by decades of students who didn't want to take the long way around. In the library book, she'd read that the priest at Eleusis was called "stone-bearer" and that agricultural communities like the one they'd be emulating would kill a sacrifice by stoning so they could moisten the earth with blood and be granted a bountiful harvest. The dirt path here was dry and dusty. It had been a while since it'd rained. Despite the warm air, she shivered.

She didn't really need to take the slides to the lab that night. There was nothing perishable, nothing urgent. The books had been as they were for two hundred years; another day would harm nothing. Most of the other students in the lab milked the clock. They would bring samples over one at a time, getting paid to stroll across the vast campus, and while that had never been Faye's style, it couldn't hurt to do it just this once.

There was no one in the lab when she arrived; Faye knew there wouldn't be. It was a quarter past seven the evening before graduation. There were gowns to be ironed and lunch reservations to be made. It was the one time Faye was happy not to cross paths with Professor Kopp, who'd want to chat about the project or about summer plans or September plans or even about the party. She didn't know about the party, but she would if she saw Faye's face because Faye had an ulterior motive for coming back to the lab.

She used her fob to open the door. The lights flicked on automatically when they sensed her. She loved laboratories. White and clean with uncluttered surfaces. It was a quarter mile from the library, but it was another planet. She put her two slides into the holder at her workstation and logged them. Every step before the scan. And then, with a last look around to make sure there was really and truly no one there, Faye went to the lab's single bathroom to put on some makeup.

"I wonder what we'll talk about." "I wonder who else will be there." "I wonder if we'll laugh." She was locked in with the streaky mirror, and the brightness of the overhead light made her look green. On Tuesday she'd taken the bus to the mall and had gone to the makeup store with the intimidating black and white sign, and a teenager with enormous eyelashes had done a makeup tutorial with her and had applied a full face that to Faye looked like it would be appropriate on a game show and nowhere else.

On Wednesday she'd gone to the local pharmacy and for thirteen dollars, she'd purchased a tube of mascara and a little pot of pink lip gloss. It was those that she pulled out of her pocket now. The mascara first. The purple tube had a plastic seal that she struggled to break; she found her hands slipping and sliding on it. The more she fought it, the sweatier her palms and the more impossible the whole endeavor became. She left the bathroom and went to her station in the lab, where she cut the purple plastic seal with a scalpel. It was satisfying, the clean slice. Though now the scalpel was contaminated and would need to be sterilized. No time for that at the moment, she put it in her back pocket and returned to the bathroom to get to the work of the mascara.

She took off her glasses and put her face right up to the mirror and swept the black goo first on her upper and then her lower lashes just like the blond teen at the mall had done. With her glasses back on, she tried to decide whether she looked different—older, funnier, more confident—and was sure only that she looked like she was wearing mascara.

The lip gloss was simpler, it required no technique. When she was a child she wasn't immune to the charms of a tube of Lip Smackers, so there was nothing foreign about the sticky smear on her lips. This lip gloss smelled faintly of roses—nice, but she'd have preferred her old butterscotch standby.

"Hey, I'm here."

She practiced in the mirror. How she'd greet them, how she'd laugh at a joke. The internet said that to make friends she should start conversations, ask people about themselves, offer to do small favors, smile, share what she had, say yes to things. She took a step back, as far back as the tiny bathroom would allow, to get a full picture of how she looked. She'd googled it—"how to make friends"—and was served a list of suggestions from WebMD. She performed a big smile, but she never did get the full effect—a dirty smear across the mirror sliced her face in two.

***

It was half past seven and Faye felt herself stalling but assured herself it was normal to be overwhelmed. By the next morning she would be a girl who had gone to college parties. She'd have a lifetime of stories and inside jokes about the time she snuck into the library and stayed the night. They played music with a throbbing beat and danced in the stacks, starting at L22, where the sleepy map books lay flat and scarcely visited, and winding their way to L24, where the recent Ana?s Nin donation had just been unboxed and Nin, from within her pages, would approve of their basement debauchery. And when they were tired of dancing, they would collapse, happy and sweaty, onto the cool concrete floor and tell one another their secrets. Someone kissed her, she wasn't sure who, but in the commotion of the dancing or maybe in the relief of the cold floor afterward, there were warm lips on hers and maybe even hot hands that followed the lips. They ate pizza at D24 by the large collection of Darwin. She didn't know how the pizza got there, but she knew it did because there was always pizza at parties, stacks and stacks of it. She was so convinced about the pizza she'd slipped a Lactaid into her pocket, right there next to the lip gloss. When they had the pizza after so many hours of fasting, they fell asleep in a big heap on the floor, all tangled in one another, and it was only the ping of the elevator announcing the arrival of the first of the morning staff that woke them and saved them from being discovered.

She had walked all the way back to the library, in her makeup and with her Lactaid and with her head full of fantasy. Into the elevator and there was no more of that evening sunlight. There had been a poster for the library's spring term exhibition up in the elevator for months. The theme was marginalia, and the poster featured doodles of a battle in the margins of a sixteenth-century book of Roman history. Faye had wandered over to the exhibition once on a lunch break to see the book from the poster in person. The placard accompanying the volume noted it had been printed in 1549 and the vandal had died in 1550. As though he doodled in it almost as soon as he got his hands on the book and died almost immediately after that. Penance for failing to respect the sanctity of the text. Anyway, the poster was gone now, and the elevator was just brown and brown and brown.

The doors opened in the reference area with a "ding." There wasn't anyone at the desk, but that wasn't strange ten minutes before the library closed. There wouldn't be new readers tonight. Only volumes to shelve and gates to lock and alarms to set. From the elevator door she could just glimpse the reading room, where there was a bit of motion. Should she go and say hello, she wondered, and say she was going down to the basement, or was the idea that she should just go and wait for closing? Were most of them down there already? Laughing together and wondering why she'd been invited? The elevator door began to slide closed, and she had to step through to block it. The door to the basement stairwell behind the reference desk was blocked open with a doorstop. Not allowed. She didn't work the reference desk, but she knew the rules for it. It was blocked open for her, she was meant to sneak through it.

Faye couldn't see anyone, couldn't hear anyone. She could leave right this moment, take the elevator back up to the street and sit on a bench until the sunset, or she could walk through that door and down the stairs into the basement. No one here to make that choice for her, no one here to tell her the outcome of either. She wiped the lip gloss off her face with the back of her hand. Stupid to have put it on.

I'll go back up, she thought. I'll go back up and get a hot dog from the hot dog guy who parks in front of the library. I'll put mustard and sauerkraut and hot peppers on it, and I'm so hungry that maybe I'll get two and I won't dribble any mustard on myself and then I'll go home and watch a movie.

And I won't have made a single friend in my four years here.

No, of course she went down the stairs. The elevator closed all the way and she didn't call it back. There were, what, ten minutes before the library closed? The deadline helped. If she went downstairs, she was downstairs for good. There would be no running up and down and back and forth. There was a sign over the door—ALARMWILLSOUND—in red block letters. A lie. The door hid the stairwell they used after public lectures, when it was impossible to usher one hundred people out using the single ancient elevator. They had staff keeping an eye on those nights, one at the top of the stairs, one at the bottom, checking for bulging pockets. Ronald trusted the staff to maintain order on those nights. And the rest of the time, he kept the door locked. Faye pulled open the door behind the reference desk and guided it closed with her hand. So it wouldn't make any noise, so it wouldn't disturb the doorstop. Then, like an invisible thread was pulling her, she made her way down those dark steps to the quiet library basement.