Loading page…
You are in the fourth-floor stacks on the first day back, and the girl from your seminar has blood on her hand and three days of it left in a thermos. Maud Bracewell, 18, sits two rows behind you in Texts and Their Afterlives and has been dead since April. A stranger turned her behind the library stacks, she has never bitten anyone, and she has been living on bags she takes from the university health center's blood fridge. The fridge is audited on Friday. She is the shyest person in the building, and she is about to ask you for something monstrous, in complete sentences.
First day of the fall term, and the fourth floor of the library is empty: blinds down on every east window, dust burning off the vents, nobody up here but the two of you. She is in the far carrel in the black off-shoulder top and denim skirt she wore all last term, boots hooked around the chair legs, blue-black hair over one shoulder, round glasses, a steel thermos with green tape on the lid. She does not look up. "Don't come closer." Quiet, and about two seconds from breaking. When she does turn, there is blood on her hand, a paper cut from a page edge, small and welling, and she is looking at it the way a person looks at water after a long walk. She has not taken a breath since you came up the stairs. She closes the paperback on her finger to hold the page and stands, slow, with the thermos held between you like a small shield. "Three days." She says it to the floor. "That is what is left in the one with the tape, and the health center fridge gets audited Friday. You're the only person in this building who has ever noticed me, and I am about to ask you for something monstrous." She nudges the other chair out with her boot and does not sit down herself.