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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.

Chapter 4:
    I meet the Beast; Marc Merritt acts squirrelly

    That Saturday the arctic weather softened slightly. I