author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Notes from the author:

In Margaret Mahy’s astonishing YA novel The Tricksters, Harry has a secret. Actually, she has two. The reader is privy to one of them: She is writing a supernatural romance. And it’s torrid. She lets her id out to play on the page, safe in the knowledge that no one will ever read it but her. Of Harry’s other secret, the reader only knows that she’ll “never tell. Never, never!” And this, of course, is by way of being the proverbial gun over the mantelpiece.

In this story, Madison, too, has a secret she swears she’ll never reveal. My original intent was to have her blurt it out when one of the other characters pushes her to the breaking point. I couldn’t really develop that tension over only 1,200 words, though. But I think what I ended up with here works better.

“That one’s a book person,” my brother said with eight-year-old meticulousness, “and that one’s a book person, and that one...” He was pointing at random passersby on that portion of Main Street visible from the restaurant window. “That one, too.”

“Scotty, cut it out,” I didn’t trust myself to say more. Talking about book people wasn’t good for my temper, and losing my temper wouldn’t be good for anyone?—not Scotty, not our Dad, and definitely not my boyfriend Audrey??—who was already looking mildly panicked as it was. This was his first time meeting my family. I didn’t blame him for being nervous. And while I couldn’t trust my brother to be on his best behavior, I should at least behave well myself.

Dad shot me a grateful look through the forest of water glasses. He wasn’t happy with this choice of subject matter, either. But catch him telling Scotty to shut up about it? Not hardly. Not dear Scotty with his mother’s eyes and his mother’s soft brown curls. His mother, Dad always says when he gets morose about it. As though she wasn’t my mother, too. As though I didn’t miss her just as much every minute of every day. But for her sake, Dad can’t seem to bring himself to speak sharply to Scotty on any occasion.

Scotty was wrong, by the way. Unlike him, I was alive during the library meltdown. I’ve actually seen book people close up and personal. I know how to spot them, and the only one I’d spotted today was a red-haired woman walking south on Main with an infant in her arms. That worried me?—whose infant was it, really??—but I resolved that it wasn’t my business. It could not be my business, not if I wanted to get out of Bloomsbury Falls with sound mind intact. Anyway, she was maybe the only person Scotty hadn’t pointed out.

So here’s what you need to know about Bloomsbury Falls and book people, although I’m guessing it’s, like, the one thing you already do know about Bloomsbury Falls. I mean, what’s the one thing everyone knows about Three Mile Island? Same here, only instead of a nuclear reactor, it was a library. Some goofball metaphysicist with federal pull got this idea for using libraries as a renewable source of energy. Theory was, readers expend and generate energy when their eyeballs and imaginations interact with text, any text really but fiction most of all. All you gotta do is figure out how to capture the juice.

Anyway, they got together with some tame alchemists and came up with the apparatus to try it out. And it was a raging success. For a few weeks, the library generated more energy than the entire town of Bloomsbury Falls needed. Other towns were shipping us batteries to recharge, something like that. But there were warning signs, some sort of leakage or feedback or?—look, I don’t know, I’m not a metaphysicist?—that nobody paid much attention to, until boom. Meltdown.

What that meant was, fictional characters escaped their books by the hundred, and if you think that’s not a nightmare you haven’t read enough horror novels. Even the “good guys” had a tendency to infect real people with plot logic. Like, “You’ll turn into one of them if it bites you.” Like, “the couple having sex will be the first victims.” Like, “the love interest dies in childbirth to serve the male protagonist’s character development.”

Sorry, do I sound bitter? It was really ugly around here for a while. Then the EPA sent down some of their top wizards to clean things up, which they say they did, but no one believes they mopped up all the leakage. Everyone’s convinced some slasher villain is still out there in the woods or stalking the drive-in theater. I don’t know about that, but every once in a while I still cross paths with a book person. Like that lady with the baby I mentioned. They’re still out there, the bastards. There’s a number you can call at the EPA but it’s always an answering machine and they never return your calls.

“He is, though,” said Scotty. He was pressing his face against the glass, so his voice came out muffled. “He’s a book person. So’s that lady. The one with the black hair and the big necklace.”

I was gritting my teeth. I made myself stop and take a deep breath. If Scotty saw me getting mad, he’d just double down. He was that kind of eight-year-old. I glanced at Audrey’s worried expression. Best behavior, I reminded myself. “I’m bored of this game. Let’s play I Spy. ‘I spy, with my little eye, something that begins with...’”

“Book person, book person, book person!” Scotty jabbed his finger in three different directions, then whirled back toward the table so that he could point straight at Audrey. “Wow, you’re totally a book person,” he said. And I thought, you know what? I’m allowed to lose my cool when someone throws a fucking hypocritical slur at my boyfriend.

Because here’s the thing you need to know about book people: my brother’s one. Partially. No one admits it, Dad refuses to talk about it, but a fucking book person seduced my mother and got her pregnant with Scotty. Because book logic says one night of passion is always 100% guaranteed to result in pregnancy, no matter how old you are or how many precautions you take. She died giving birth to him. I was twelve years old. My Dad drove my Mom to the hospital and she never came home again. Neither did Dad, really. Someone came home shuffling hunched over inside his skin and looking out of his eyes with the most desolate expression imaginable, but it wasn’t the same person I’d grown up calling Dad.

Book people steal into your life and they steal your loved ones and then they steal your peace of mind forever. Book people are the worst. You call my boyfriend a book person at your peril.

But before I could say a word, Audrey stood up. “I was afraid of this,” he said. “I was hoping you wouldn’t find out. I thought I could make a life with someone, even though?—” He finished the sentence by flapping one hand at himself to indicate his very existence as a shortcoming he’d attempted overcome. “But I guess not. It was a lot of fun while it lasted, though.”

Then he walked away without even saying goodbye. I never saw him again.

Here’s the thing to know about me: I’m not nearly as good at spotting book people as I thought I was.

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