“…and this is the maroon blazer that you will be wearing when on duty.”

Juliette Wiltsie looked at the dusty old blazer with a mixture of trepidation and ecstasy. She had never had a job where she was required to wear a blazer before, and she greedily examined every inch of it, then slipped her arms into it and pulled it snugly around her body.

“Lovely,” said Juliette. “When do I start?”

“Tomorrow, if you would like, dear.”

The woman training Juliette was elderly. Her face was a mass of wrinkles deep as rivers. Her hair, worn in a tight bun attempting to smooth out the wrinkles, was the shade of dirty snow and looked very brittle, as if touching it would make the strand crack and crumble to the carpeted floor. She wore thick circular glasses on the bridge of her nose, giving her an owlish appearance.

“Of course!” was the riposte. “I mean, yeah, sounds fine. What time?”

Can’t let them know how much I’m going to enjoy this job, she thought. They might make me work elsewhere. That’s what those employers do – they want their employees to be miserable. Subtlety, Juliette, subtlety is key. Don’t want to be forced back to that abomination where I used to work – the grocery store spawned in the depths of Hell itself; and that is where it shall return. First LowMart – then the world!

Juliette started out on her way home, or what was to be her home for the next four years. Boston University was always teeming with the odious and putrefying, but it was a wonderful place in its own right. Every city had its own little glacier of paradise, and Juliette figured that the Boston University Public Library would be her niche. A land of books! From fiction to nonfiction! Texts to encyclopedias! If knowledge is power, then Juliette would be a goddess. Smiling wider than the Cheshire cat, she skipped all the way to her dorm. It was a cheap, old thing – the oldest dormitory in at the University, built in 1839. Her own room was in the basement – a three-person room. And her roommates were the wildest things she had ever met (her mother had almost had a heart attack when she met Cindy). Juliette was fond of them in their oddities. Her room was like a cavernous little monster, so many nooks and crannies to discover and explore – which she spent the rest of the afternoon doing before settling into bed. Her explorations produced an aggregate of dust bunnies, three bent forks, a plastic spoon, and an aged inscription in the corner in a language she did not know (which was surprising, because she knew four languages – French, German, Japanese and English) but looked like Latin – in all, nothing really worth pondering on.

The following morning was filled with the dull drudgery of classes – the first day of classes, to be precise. “Hello, my name is Juliette Wiltsie. I enjoy wearing preposterously long scarves, reading obscure dust-covered books, and pretending that I live in a castle-with-an-underground-system-of-caverns in Romania.” Only four repetitions of that, but there were still three more new classes to introduce herself in the next day. That afternoon’s work at the library was a God-given relief. It was her first day at work there, and she felt that it was safest to be on her best behavior and do her job diligently – but Juliette could not quite help her nature, and she found herself slipping away from the book cart, entranced by a thick, golden spine or an eye-catching title. She simply couldn’t help herself.

At one point, she was sitting cross-legged, the book cart lost in another aisle somewhere, poring over a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman called The Yellow Wallpaper.

“Hello there,” came a voice to her left.

Juliette started and peered wildly around for the body of the voice whilst throwing the book back into place on the shelf and jumping to her feet, dusting herself off ferociously.

“Oh, I thought you were Agatha.” Relief melted over Juliette when she saw that it was just a boy her age with striking blue eyes in a creamy face wearing a lop-sided grin.

“I’m not Agatha,” he said. “But if I were her, you’d be dead.”

“I can imagine,” Juliette replied, fidgeting awkwardly, unsure if she should shoo him away so that she could finish her story or make idle chit-chat.

“I’m Adrian.” He thrust out a long, thin hand out to her, and she grasped it and shook it. She introduced herself for the fifth time that day, excluding the “interesting facts” about herself.

Juliette was just forming her next question when Adrian suddenly said “catch me if you can” and popped off around the corner. Juliette, a quizzical and silly question in every part of her face, popped around too, but every trace of Adrian was either invisible or all part of an elaborate hallucination.

“What an odd, odd boy.”

“Excuse me, Miss Wiltsie?”

Every nerve went rigid. Juliette’s eyes widened to the size of quarters, and she turned around like a rusty gate.

“Where is your cart?”

“Uhh…”

The remainder of Juliette’s afternoon in the library was nothing short of hell, as she was forced to work under the eyes of the hawk. But she could not cease her wondering of that strange boy…