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at me on his way to the gate. Gave me this look. Like the sudden weirdness was all my fault, and none of his own.
    I made a mental note not to get into any more conversations with Paul Inverness. Any more than I absolutely had to.
    I went inside to tell my mom the good news. That things were going to be easy for a while. For a few hours, at least.
    A few hours of peace is a lot.
    Depending on what you’re used to.

    I walked to the library, even though it was almost two miles away. It’s not that I didn’t have money for the bus. It’s that I didn’t have a lot of money, ever, and if I walked, I’d get to keep having it.
    It was a smaller branch than I was used to, because we were out in the suburbs now. When I stepped inside, my eyes went straight to the computer room. It had eight computers, which wasn’t even half of what I was used to. But there were only two people using them. I was used to twenty computers and a line.
    I walked up to the checkout counter. The woman there was only maybe in her early twenties, with hair that was blond but with a blue streak along one side.
    I showed her my library card.
    “We just moved. Can I use this same card here?”
    She blinked a couple of times, like easy questions were harder to answer than hard ones. Then she said, “It’s the same library system all over the county.”
    “Oh. Good. Thanks.”
    Not that I wanted to check out any books. I love books. But I never checked them out. I read them for hours, and looked at pictures in them, but I didn’t take them home, because I didn’t want them to get ruined. But I knew I needed a library card to use the computer.
    I started by sitting down at the reference computer for library books. I just sat there with my hands on my knees for a couple of minutes, trying to think. It didn’t really matter, because there were three terminals, and nobody was waiting to use any of them.
    After a while, I felt like there was somebody behind me, so I looked up and around. There was a woman standing over me, maybe forty, with long, straight hair. She had nice eyes.
    “Help you find something?”
    “Oh. No, thanks. I’m pretty good at using the system. I’m just trying to decide where I want to go today.”
    I watched her face for a minute. She was looking at me like that was funny.
    “What?” I asked.
    “Nothing. I just like that. It sounded nice. Where do you usually like to go?”
    “I like travel. And travel books. And I like to look up travel photography and videos on the internet. But my favorite are big coffee-table books that tell you all about the places but also have lots of color pictures of them. Because then I learn about the place, but I feel like I can see it, too. But usually, libraries don’t have those, because they’re so expensive. I go all kinds of places, but my favorite is Tibet. So if I can’t decide, I’ll usually go to Tibet. I like mountains, so I also like India and Nepal and Bhutan, because they have the Himalayas, too. But I also like the Andes in South America, and the Alps. And I like Australia, because of the Great Barrier Reef. Even though that’s not a mountain.”
    “Hmm,” she said. “Sounds like you know exactly what you want.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    I knew what I wanted, all right. How to get it was the problem.
    She walked away, and I figured she couldn’t have cared less, and that I’d told her a lot more about what I was looking for than she needed to know. I never have much to say unless I’m in a library or a bookstore, and then I say too much. I never seem to get the talking thing right.
    I was thinking maybe something new, so I started searching for Norway. Maybe someplace along the fiords or something.
    A minute later, she came back and said, “We don’t have too much with photos on the Himalayas, but we have the Lonely Planet books for Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan.”
    She’d knocked me out of my train of thought. I felt disoriented.
    “Thanks,” I said, “but I’ve read