A Study in Drowning(3)

She reached the horseshoe-shaped circulation desk and placed two hands flat on the varnished wood. The woman behind the desk looked at her disinterestedly.

“Good morning,” Effy said, with the brightest smile she could muster. Morning was generous. It was two fifteen. But she’d only been awake for three hours, just long enough to throw on clothes and make it to her studio class.

“What are you looking for today?” the woman asked, unmoved.

“Do you have any books on Emrys Myrddin?”

The woman’s expression shifted, her eyes pinching with disdain. “You’ll have to be more specific than that. Fiction, nonfiction, biography, theory—”

“Nonfiction,” Effy cut in quickly. “Anything about his life, his family.” Hoping to endear herself to the librarian, she added, “I have all his novels and poetry already. He’s my favorite author.”

“You and half the university,” the woman said dismissively. “Wait here.”

She vanished through a doorway behind the circulation desk. Effy’s nose itched at the smell of old paper and mildew. From the adjacent rooms she could hear the flutter of pages being turned and the slowly scything blades of the ceiling fans.

“Hey,” someone said.

It was the boy from the college lobby, the one who’d come up behind her to see the poster. His tweed jacket was under his arm now, suspenders pulled taut over a white shirt.

“Hi,” she said. It was more of a reflex than anything. The word sounded odd in all that quiet, empty space. She snatched her hands off the circulation desk.

“You’re in the architecture college, right,” he said, but it didn’t have the tenor of a question.

“Yes,” she said hesitantly.

“So am I. Are you going to send in a proposal? For the Hiraeth Manor project?”

“I think so.” She suddenly had the very strange sensation that she was underwater. It had been happening to her more and more often lately. “Are you?”

“I think so. We could work on it together, you know.” The boy’s hand curled around the edge of the circulation desk, the intensity of his grip turning his knuckles white. “I mean, send in a joint proposal. There’s nothing in the rules that says otherwise. Together we’d have a better chance at winning the contract. It would make us famous. We’d get scooped up by the most prestigious architectural firms in Llyr the second we graduate.”

The memory of his whispered slur hummed in the back of her mind, quiet but insistent. “I’m not sure. I think I already know what I’m going to do. I spent all of studio class sketching it.” She gave a soft laugh, hoping to smother the sting of the rejection.

The boy didn’t laugh, or even smile back. For a long moment, silence stretched between them.

When he spoke again, his voice was low. “You’re so pretty. You really are. You’re the most gorgeous girl I’ve ever seen. Do you know that?”

If she said yes, I do, she was a conceited harpy. If she shook her head and rebuffed the compliment, she was falsely modest, playing coy. It was fae-like trickery. There was no answer that wouldn’t damn her.

So she said, fumbling, “Maybe you can help me with the cross sections for Parri’s studio. Mine are really bad.”

The boy brightened, drawing himself up to his full height. “Sure,” he said. “Let me give you my number.”

Effy pulled the pen out of her bag and offered it to him. He clasped his fingers around her wrist and wrote out seven digits on the back of her hand. That same rainwater rush of white noise drowned out everything again, even the scything of the fans.

The door behind the circulation desk opened and the woman came back through. The boy let go of her.

“All right,” he said. “Call me when you want to work on your cross sections.”

“I will.”

Effy waited until he had vanished down the stairs to turn back to the librarian. Her hand felt numb.

“I’m sorry,” the librarian said. “Someone has taken out everything on Myrddin.”

She couldn’t help the high pitch of her voice when she echoed, “Everything?”

“Looks like it. I’m not surprised. He’s a popular thesis subject. Since he only just died, there’s a lot of fertile ground. Untapped potential. All the literature students are clamoring to be the first to write the narrative of his life.”

Her stomach lurched. “So a literature student checked them out?”

The librarian nodded. She reached under the desk and pulled out the logbook, each row and column filled out with book titles and borrowers’ names. She flipped open a page that listed a series of biographical titles and works of reception. Under the Borrower column was the same name, inked over and over again in cramped but precise handwriting: P. Héloury.

An Argantian name. Effy felt like she’d been struck.

“Well, thank you for your help,” she said, her voice suddenly thick with a knot of incoming tears. She pressed her fingernails into her palm. She couldn’t cry here. She wasn’t a child any longer.

“Of course,” said the librarian. “I’ll give you a call when we get the books back in.”



Outside, Effy rubbed at her eyes until they stopped welling. It was so unfair. Of course a literature student had gotten to the books first. They spent their days agonizing over every stanza of Myrddin’s famous poetry, over every line of his most famous novel, Angharad. They got to do every day what Effy had time for only at night, after she’d finished her slapdash architecture assignments. Under her covers, in a pale puddle of lamplight, she pored over her tattered copy of Angharad, which lay permanently on her nightstand. She knew every crack in its spine, every crease on the pages inside.