“You’re bouncing,” Petra complains.
“Your car’s bouncing.”
“Because you’re bouncing it.”
“I’m shivering,” I admit.
“It’s ninety degrees out here.”
“I’m algid.”
She turns to look at me. “Have you been doing SAT prep without me?”
“Only a little.”
“Does ‘algid’ mean crazy?”
“‘Algid’ means cold.”
“You’re not algid”—we are sweating against each other—“but you might be crazy.”
“Pusillanimous,” I offer.
“‘Pusillanimous’ means fearful. I’ve known you for sixteen years. You’re not fearful. Timorous maybe.”
Shit. “I forget ‘timorous.’”
“That was in last week’s flash cards. Do them again.”
“I will,” I promise. This is my pact with Petra. We will get into college. We will get out of Bourne.
“Afraid,” she supplies.
“How is that different from fearful?”
“You’re not afraid as a personality trait. It’s just weird as shit what’s happening over there right now.”
We’re quiet, watching. We can just make out people moving inside. “I think ‘pusillanimous’ and ‘timorous’ might mean the same thing,” I say.
“Maybe.”
Petra grasps my hand in hers, and I slowly stop shaking. We watch a little longer, but there’s nothing much to see. We can’t tell how many people there are or anything about them. We can’t imagine who they might be, and we really can’t imagine what it might mean that they’re here.
“Heteroclitic,” I say finally.
“What?”
“Week before last,” I remind her. “Weird as shit.”
We lean back against the windshield and shift our hips away from the wiper blades and watch in silence as our lives change forever.
Two
There is no right way to systematize the arrangement of books. Some people like Dewey decimal classification, but that is usually nostalgia because that is how their childhood library was organized. Some people like the Library of Congress classification system, but that is usually elitism because that is what academic libraries use. And that is only if you want to organize by subject. You could alphabetize by author’s last name or first name. You could alphabetize titles or even keywords. You could arrange books by color, and that would be nice because if it was a rainy day you could go to the green section and get a rainy book. I bet Melvil Dewey never even thought of that.
I do not have a system though because I do not need one. Once I put a book somewhere, I remember where that somewhere is. And also because to have a system you need to have a large storage apparatus—usually bookshelves—which I do not.
Instead I have books under my bed, under Mab’s and Mirabel’s beds, under Mama’s, on our bedside tables, under our kitchen and coffee tables, on our countertops and next to our sinks, though you have to be careful because books, like huskies, do not like to be wet. I have piled books on the sides of the stairs because our stairs are thirty-four inches wide, and you only need fourteen inches to walk up. Mama bakes a lot, so I cannot put books in the oven, but she says you cannot bake in a microwave, and she does not trust the microwave anyway, so I put books in it and just take them out and hold them if someone wants to heat something up and Mama is not home to object. They are on top of the kitchen cabinets, between the blankets in the upstairs hall closet, in the spaces beneath the sinks between the water pipes and the walls, under the sofa, inside the fireplace, on the corner of the porch it does not rain on. They fill the unfinished attic and the even less finished crawl space. They are stacked tightly around the chimney, which is good because that means they could also help hold up the house if there is an earthquake or mudslide.
My mother keeps all the law books in her room.
Mr. Beechman told us all about how taxes work the year we were doing percents in math. Instead of each individual paying for her own teacher and her own school, her own roads and her own sidewalks, her own books and her own wars, each individual pays taxes on her home, land, income, investments, and holdings, and that money goes to the government, and then the government buys one teacher and one school and one road and one sidewalk and one library, and everyone shares. The government hosts a war, and everyone just comes to that. This is called efficiency, and it means you cannot have your own war. You can only join someone else’s.