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.
And an Argantian. She couldn’t fathom how there even was one at the literature college, which was the university’s most prestigious, and especially one who was studying Myrddin. He was Llyr’s national author. The whole thing seemed like a terrible knife-twist of fate, a personal and spiteful slap in the face. The name in its precise writing hovered in the forefront of her mind: P. Héloury.
Why had she even thought this might work? Effy was no great architect; she was only six weeks into her first semester at the university and already in danger of failing two classes. Three, if she didn’t turn in those cross sections. Her mother would tell her not to waste her time. Just focus on your studies, she would say. Your friends. Don’t run yourself ragged chasing something beyond your reach. She wouldn’t mean it to be cruel.
Your studies, her mother’s imagined voice echoed, and Effy thought of Master Parri’s disdainful glare. He had held up her one cross section and shaken it at her until the page rippled, like she was an insect he was trying to swat.
Your friends. Effy looked down at the number on the back of her hand. The boy’s 0s and 8s were bulging and fat, as if he had been trying to cover as much of her skin as he could in the blue ink. All of a sudden, she felt very sick.
Someone shouldered roughly past her, and Effy realized she had been blocking the doorway to the library. Blinking, embarrassed, she hurried down the steps and crossed to the other side of the street, darting between two rumbling black cars. There was a small pier that overlooked Lake Bala. She leaned over the railing and rubbed at the third knuckle of her left hand like a worry stone. It ended there, abruptly, in a shiny mass of scar tissue. If the boy had noticed the absence of her ring finger, he hadn’t said anything about it.