Neighborhood Watch by Cammie McGovern Page A

“Hot Books” shelf, seven-day loans on popular fiction. I was working in the back office, out of view, but I watched carefully as he looked around, as if he’d come in not for books but for something else. I could have gone out there on any excuse. I waited five minutes, then ten, to see what he would do. After fifteen minutes, he left.
    Two days later, he returned while I was shelving an overflowing return cart, struggling with a rolling ladder that hadn’t been working for a while. “Let me get that,” he said, taking the book from my hand, tall enough to reach the shelf without help.
    “You know Dewey!” I said too loud, after he’d placed it properly. I tried to laugh as if I’d made a joke because Dewey is so often the punch line of librarian jokes. We all have more mugs with “Librarians Dewey it in the Stacks” than we know what to do with.
    “Yes,” he said, grabbing a book and reaching up again, so close I could smell his musk deodorant. He told me he was here to do some research. “I’m trying to write something from a teenage girl’s point of view, except now I realize I know almost nothing about teenage girls.”
    His eyes were so blue and clear it was hard to look at them for long. I told him I knew a little bit about teenage girls—or what they read, anyway. “And of course I was one once,” I added. Was that too flirtatious? It’s true that I wouldn’t have said it standing at the front desk with my colleagues around, sorting through request slips, listening to everything. “I was a bookish girl. Not very popular,” I admitted. “Mostly I sat around watching people who had more friends than I did.”
    He smiled. “That’s exactly what I need. A girl who’s an observer, a watcher of everything. Can you remember your life at age fourteen?”
    All too well, unfortunately, but I didn’t tell him that. Nor did I admit that bookish and unpopular would have been kind adjectives to describe me at that age. I was also surly and difficult, given to wearing layers of black and writing bleak, angry poetry.
    “I’m happy to give you the books I read at that age,” I told him, thinking I’d amend the list and leave off Go Ask Alice . I composed a cheery list of Judy Blumes and classics: Jane Eyre, To Kill a Mocking-bird, Little Women, Gone With the Wind. The same books, I realize now, that are sitting on Trish’s shelf. This makes no sense. Was he using me to befriend her? She was twelve when he moved in, fifteen by the time we all left. What kind of friendship could they have possibly had?
    “This is great,” Geoffrey said that first day, checking out five of my recommendations and reading them all inside of a week. I started thinking of more, reading a few myself, storing up anecdotes to tell him on the days when he came in. Eventually I told him the truth about my adolescence: “I don’t think I was invited to a single party until I got to college and forced myself to do a personality makeover. I found an article in a magazine that walked me through it.”
    He clapped his hands and laughed. “A personality makeover. I love it. Does Paul know about this?”
    I stopped short for a second. Paul didn’t know all of it, or not in any detail. I’d never told him about my sleepwalking episodes because the episodes seemed to be behind me. I told myself it was a temporary matter, more connected to the stress of school than to any deep-seated psychosis.
    I got called away before I could answer. “Look,” Geoffrey said later, resting his books on my desk. “I’d like to hear more of your story if I could. All the re-creating yourself fits right in with what I’m doing.”
    I smiled and mouthed, How about later? pointing to the line behind him. For the rest of the day, I reconstructed my old stories. I made up funny details and forgot what was true and what wasn’t because that seemed less important than getting in his book.
    Eventually he started finding his own books. “What do you