Other Worlds Than These (collection)

MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS ^{KELLY LINK}

Fox is a television character, and she isn’t dead yet. But she will be, soon. She’s a character on a television show called The Library. You’ve never seen The Library on TV, but I bet you wish you had.

In one episode of The Library, a boy named Jeremy Mars, fifteen years old, sits on the roof of his house in Plantagenet, Vermont. It’s eight o’clock at night, a school night, and he and his friend Elizabeth should be studying for the math quiz that their teacher, Mr. Cliff, has been hinting at all week long. Instead they’ve sneaked out onto the roof. It’s cold. They don’t know everything they should know about X, when X is the square root of Y. They don’t even know Y. They ought to go in.

But there’s nothing good on TV and the sky is very beautiful. They have jackets on, and up in the corners where the sky begins are patches of white in the darkness, still, where there’s snow, up on the mountains. Down in the trees around the house, some animal is making a small, anxious sound: “Why cry? Why cry?”

“What’s that one?” Elizabeth says, pointing at a squarish configuration of stars.

“That’s The Parking Structure,” Jeremy says. “And right next to that is The Big Shopping Mall and The Lesser Shopping Mall.”

“And that’s Orion, right? Orion the Bargain Hunter?”

Jeremy squints up. “No, Orion is over there. That’s The Austrian Bodybuilder. That thing that’s sort of wrapped around his lower leg is The Amorous Cephalopod. The Hungry, Hungry Octopus. It can’t make up its mind whether it should eat him or make crazy, eight-legged love to him. You know that myth, right?”

“Of course,” Elizabeth says. “Is Karl going to be pissed off that we didn’t invite him over to study?”

“Karl’s always pissed off about something,” Jeremy says. Jeremy is resolutely resisting a notion about Elizabeth. Why are they sitting up here? Was it his idea or was it hers? Are they friends, are they just two friends sitting on the roof and talking? Or is Jeremy supposed to try to kiss her? He thinks maybe he’s supposed to kiss her. If he kisses her, will they still be friends? He can’t ask Karl about this. Karl doesn’t believe in being helpful. Karl believes in mocking.

Jeremy doesn’t even know if he wants to kiss Elizabeth. He’s never thought about it until right now.

“I should go home,” Elizabeth says. “There could be a new episode on right now, and we wouldn’t even know.”

“Someone would call and tell us,” Jeremy says. “My mom would come up and yell for us.” His mother is something else Jeremy doesn’t want to worry about, but he does, he does.

Jeremy Mars knows a lot about the planet Mars, although he’s never been there. He knows some girls, and yet he doesn’t know much about them. He wishes there were books about girls, the way there are books about Mars, that you could observe the orbits and brightness of girls through telescopes without appearing to be perverted. Once Jeremy read a book about Mars out loud to Karl, except he kept replacing the word Mars with the word “girls.” Karl cracked up every time.

Jeremy’s mother is a librarian. His father writes books. Jeremy reads biographies. He plays trombone in a marching band. He jumps hurdles while wearing a school tracksuit. Jeremy is also passionately addicted to a television show in which a renegade librarian and magician named Fox is trying to save her world from thieves, murderers, cabalists, and pirates. Jeremy is a geek, although he’s a telegenic geek. Somebody should make a TV show about him.

Jeremy’s friends call him Germ, although he would rather be called Mars. His parents haven’t spoken to each other in a week.

Jeremy doesn’t kiss Elizabeth. The stars don’t fall out of the sky, and Jeremy and Elizabeth don’t fall off the roof either. They go inside and finish their homework.

Someone who Jeremy has never met, never even heard of—a woman named Cleo Baldrick—has died. Lots of people, so far, have managed to live and die without making the acquaintance of Jeremy Mars, but Cleo Baldrick has left Jeremy Mars and his mother something strange in her will: a phone booth on a state highway, some forty miles outside of Las Vegas, and a Las Vegas wedding chapel. The wedding chapel is called Hell’s Bells. Jeremy isn’t sure what kind of people get married there. Bikers, maybe. Supervillains, freaks, and Satanists.

Jeremy’s mother wants to tell him something. It’s probably something about Las Vegas and about Cleo Baldrick, who—it turns out—was his mother’s great-aunt. (Jeremy never knew his mother had a great-aunt. His mother is a mysterious person.) But it may be, on the other hand, something concerning Jeremy’s father. For a week and a half now, Jeremy has managed to avoid finding out what his mother is worrying about. It’s easy not to find out things, if you try hard enough. There’s band practice. He has overslept on weekdays in order to rule out conversations at breakfast, and at night he climbs up on the roof with his telescope to look at stars, to look at Mars. His mother is afraid of heights. She grew up in L.A.

It’s clear that whatever it is she has to tell Jeremy is not something she wants to tell him. As long as he avoids being alone with her, he’s safe.

But it’s hard to keep your guard up at all times. Jeremy comes home from school, feeling as if he has passed the math test after all. Jeremy is an optimist. Maybe there’s something good on TV. He settles down with the remote control on one of his father’s pet couches: oversized and reupholstered in an orange-juice-colored corduroy that makes it appear as if the couch has just escaped from a maximum security prison for criminally insane furniture. This couch looks as if its hobby is devouring interior decorators. Jeremy’s father is a horror writer, so no one should be surprised if some of the couches he reupholsters are hideous and eldritch.

Jeremy’s mother comes into the room and stands above the couch, looking down at him. “Germ?” she says. She looks absolutely miserable, which is more or less how she has looked all week.

The phone rings and Jeremy jumps up.

As soon as he hears Elizabeth’s voice, he knows. She says, “Germ, it’s on. Channel forty-two. I’m taping it.” She hangs up.

“It’s on!” Jeremy says. “Channel forty-two! Now!”

His mother has the television on by the time he sits down. Being a librarian, she has a particular fondness for The Library. “I should go tell your dad,” she says, but instead she sits down beside Jeremy. And of course it’s now all the more clear something is wrong between Jeremy’s parents. But The Library is on and Fox is about to rescue Prince Wing.

When the episode ends, he can tell without looking over that his mother is crying. “Don’t mind me,” she says and wipes her nose on her sleeve. “Do you think she’s really dead?”

But Jeremy can’t stay around and talk.

Jeremy has wondered about what kind of television shows the characters in television shows watch. Television characters almost always have better haircuts, funnier friends, simpler attitudes toward sex. They marry magicians, win lotteries, have affairs with women who carry guns in their purses. Curious things happen to them on an hourly basis. Jeremy and I can forgive their haircuts. We just want to ask them about their television shows.

Just like always, it’s Elizabeth who worked out in the nick of time that the new episode was on. Everyone will show up at Elizabeth’s house afterward, for the postmortem. This time, it really is a postmortem. Why did Prince Wing kill Fox? How could Fox let him do it? Fox is ten times stronger.

Jeremy runs all the way, slapping his old track shoes against the sidewalk for the pleasure of the jar, for the sweetness of the sting. He likes the rough, cottony ache in his lungs. His coach says you have to be part-masochist to enjoy something like running. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s something to exploit.

Talis opens the door. She grins at him, although he can tell that she’s been crying, too. She’s wearing a T-shirt that says I’m So Goth I Shit Tiny Vampires.

“Hey,” Jeremy says. Talis nods. Talis isn’t so Goth, at least not as far as Jeremy or anyone else knows. Talis just has a lot of T-shirts. She’s an enigma wrapped in a mysterious T-shirt. A woman once said to Calvin Coolidge, “Mr. President, I bet my husband that I could get you to say more than two words.” Coolidge said, “You lose.” Jeremy can imagine Talis as Calvin Coolidge in a former life. Or maybe she was one of those dogs that don’t bark. A basenji. Or a rock. A dolmen. There was an episode of The Library, once, with some sinister dancing dolmens in it.

Elizabeth comes up behind Talis. If Talis is unGoth, then Elizabeth is Ballerina Goth. She likes hearts and skulls and black pen-ink tattoos, pink tulle, and Hello Kitty. When the woman who invented Hello Kitty was asked why Hello Kitty was so popular, she said, “Because she has no mouth.” Elizabeth’s mouth is small. Her lips are chapped.

“That was the most horrible episode ever! I cried and cried,” she says. “Hey, Germ, so I was telling Talis about how you inherited a gas station.”

“A phone booth,” Jeremy says. “In Las Vegas. This great-great-aunt died. And there’s a wedding chapel, too.”

“Hey! Germ!” Karl says, yelling from the living room. “Shut up and get in here! The commercial with the talking cats is on—”

“Shut it, Karl,” Jeremy says. He goes in and sits on Karl’s head. You have to show Karl who’s boss once in a while.

Amy turns up last. She was in the next town over, buying comics. She hasn’t seen the new episode and so they all shut it (except for Talis, who has not been saying anything at all) and Elizabeth puts on the tape.

In the previous episode of The Library, masked pirate-magicians said they would sell Prince Wing a cure for the spell that infested Faithful Margaret’s hair with miniature, wicked, fire-breathing golems. (Faithful Margaret’s hair keeps catching fire, but she refuses to shave it off. Her hair is the source of all her magic.)

The pirate-magicians lured Prince Wing into a trap so obvious that it seemed impossible it could really be a trap, on the one-hundred-and-fortieth floor of The Free People’s World-Tree Library. The pirate-magicians used finger magic to turn Prince Wing into a porcelain teapot, put two Earl Grey tea bags into the teapot, and poured in boiling water, toasted the Eternally Postponed and Overdue Reign of the Forbidden Books, drained their tea in one gulp, belched, hurled their souvenir pirate mugs to the ground, and then shattered the teapot, which had been Prince Wing, into hundreds of pieces. Then the wicked pirate-magicians swept the pieces of both Prince Wing and collectable mugs carelessly into a wooden cigar box, buried the box in the Angela Carter Memorial Park on the seventeenth floor of The World-Tree Library, and erected a statue of George Washington above it.

So then Fox had to go looking for Prince Wing. When she finally discovered the park on the seventeenth floor of The Library, the George Washington statue stepped down off his plinth and fought her tooth and nail. Literally tooth and nail, and they’d all agreed that there was something especially nightmarish about a biting, scratching, life-sized statue of George Washington with long, pointed metal fangs that threw off sparks when he gnashed them. The statue of George Washington bit Fox’s pinky finger right off, just like Gollum biting Frodo’s finger off on the top of Mount Doom. But of course, once the statue tasted Fox’s magical blood, it fell in love with Fox. It would be her ally from now on.

In the new episode, the actor playing Fox is a young Latina actress whom Jeremy Mars thinks he recognizes. She has been a snotty but well-intentioned fourth-floor librarian in an episode about an epidemic of food poisoning that triggered bouts of invisibility and/or levitation, and she was also a lovelorn, suicidal Bear Cult priestess in the episode where Prince Wing discovered his mother was one of the Forbidden Books.

This is one of the best things about The Library, the way the cast swaps parts, all except for Faithful Margaret and Prince Wing, who are only ever themselves. Faithful Margaret and Prince Wing are the love interests and the main characters, and therefore, inevitably, the most boring characters, although Amy has a crush on Prince Wing.

Fox and the dashing-but-treacherous pirate-magician Two Devils are never played by the same actor twice, although in the twenty-third episode of The Library, the same woman played them both. Jeremy supposes that the casting could be perpetually confusing, but instead it makes your brain catch on fire. It’s magical.

You always know Fox by her costume (the too-small green T-shirt, the long, full skirts she wears to hide her tail), by her dramatic hand gestures and body language, by the soft, breathy-squeaky voice the actors use when they are Fox. Fox is funny, dangerous, bad-tempered, flirtatious, greedy, untidy, accident-prone, graceful, and has a mysterious past. In some episodes, Fox is played by male actors, but she always sounds like Fox. And she’s always beautiful. Every episode you think that this Fox, surely, is the most beautiful Fox there could ever be, and yet the Fox of the next episode will be even more heartbreakingly beautiful.

On television, it’s night in The Free People’s World-Tree Library. All the librarians are asleep, tucked into their coffins, their scabbards, priest-holes, buttonholes, pockets, hidden cupboards, between the pages of their enchanted novels. Moonlight pours through the high, arched windows of the Library and between the aisles of shelves, into the park. Fox is on her knees, clawing at the muddy ground with her bare hands. The statue of George Washington kneels beside her, helping.

“So that’s Fox, right?” Amy says. Nobody tells her to shut up. It would be pointless. Amy has a large heart and an even larger mouth. When it rains, Amy rescues worms off the sidewalk. When you get tired of having a secret, you tell Amy.

Understand: Amy isn’t that much stupider than anyone else in this story. It’s just that she thinks out loud.

Elizabeth’s mother comes into the living room. “Hey guys,” she says. “Hi, Jeremy. Did I hear something about your mother inheriting a wedding chapel?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jeremy says. “In Las Vegas.”

“Las Vegas,” Elizabeth’s mom says. “I won three hundred bucks once in Las Vegas. Spent it on a helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon. So how many times can you guys watch the same episode in one day?” But she sits down to watch, too. “Do you think she’s really dead?”

“Who’s dead?” Amy says. Nobody says anything.

Jeremy isn’t sure he’s ready to see this episode again so soon, anyway, especially not with Amy. He goes upstairs and takes a shower. Elizabeth’s family have a large and distracting selection of shampoos. They don’t mind when Jeremy uses their bathroom.

Jeremy and Karl and Elizabeth have known each other since the first day of kindergarten. Amy and Talis are a year younger. The five have not always been friends, except for Jeremy and Karl, who have. Talis is, famously, a loner. She doesn’t listen to music as far as anyone knows, she doesn’t wear significant amounts of black, she isn’t particularly good (or bad) at math or English, and she doesn’t drink, debate, knit or refuse to eat meat. If she keeps a blog, she’s never admitted it to anyone.

The Library made Jeremy and Karl and Talis and Elizabeth and Amy friends. No one else in school is as passionately devoted. Besides, they are all the children of former hippies, and the town is small. They all live within a few blocks of each other, in run-down Victorians with high ceilings and ranch houses with sunken living rooms. And although they have not always been friends, growing up, they’ve gone skinny-dipping in lakes on summer nights, and broken bones on each other’s trampolines. Once, during an argument about dog names, Elizabeth, who is hot-tempered, tried to run Jeremy over with her ten-speed bicycle, and once, a year ago, Karl got drunk on green-apple schnapps at a party and tried to kiss Talis, and once, for five months in the seventh grade, Karl and Jeremy communicated only through angry e-mails written in all caps. I’m not allowed to tell you what they fought about.

Now the five are inseparable; invincible. They imagine that life will always be like this—like a television show in eternal syndication—that they will always have each other. They use the same vocabulary. They borrow each other’s books and music. They share lunches, and they never say anything when Jeremy comes over and takes a shower. They all know Jeremy’s father is eccentric. He’s supposed to be eccentric. He’s a novelist.

When Jeremy comes back downstairs, Amy is saying, “I’ve always thought there was something wicked about Prince Wing. He’s a dork and he looks like he has bad breath. I never really liked him.”

Karl says, “We don’t know the whole story yet. Maybe he found out something about Fox while he was a teapot.” Elizabeth’s mom says, “He’s under a spell. I bet you anything.” They’ll be talking about it all week.

Talis is in the kitchen, making a Velveeta-and-pickle sandwich.

“So what did you think?” Jeremy says. It’s like having a hobby, only more pointless, trying to get Talis to talk. “Is Fox really dead?”

“Don’t know,” Talis says. Then she says, “I had a dream.”

Jeremy waits. Talis seems to be waiting, too. She says, “About you.” Then she’s silent again. There is something dreamlike about the way that she makes a sandwich. As if she is really making something that isn’t a sandwich at all; as if she’s making something far more meaningful and mysterious. Or as if soon he will wake up and realize that there are no such things as sandwiches.

“You and Fox,” Talis says. “The dream was about the two of you. She told me. To tell you. To call her. She gave me a phone number. She was in trouble. She said you were in trouble. She said to keep in touch.”

“Weird,” Jeremy says, mulling this over. He’s never had a dream about The Library. He wonders who was playing Fox in Talis’s dream. He had a dream about Talis, once, but it isn’t the kind of dream that you’d ever tell anybody about. They were just sitting together, not saying anything. Even Talis’s T-shirt hadn’t said anything. Talis was holding his hand.

“It didn’t feel like a dream,” Talis says.

“So what was the phone number?” Jeremy says.

“I forgot,” Talis says. “When I woke up, I forgot.”

Kurt’s mother works in a bank. Talis’s father has a karaoke machine in his basement, and he knows all the lyrics to “Like a Virgin” and “Holiday” as well as the lyrics to all the songs from Godspell and Cabaret. Talis’s mother is a licensed therapist who composes multiple-choice personality tests for women’s magazines. “Discover Which Television Character You Resemble Most.” Etc. Amy’s parents met in a commune in Ithaca: her name was Galadriel Moon Shuyler before her parents came to their senses and had it changed legally. Everyone is sworn to secrecy about this, which is ironic, considering that this is Amy.

But Jeremy’s father is Gordon Strangle Mars. He writes novels about giant spiders, giant leeches, giant moths, and once, notably, a giant carnivorous rosebush who lives in a mansion in upstate New York, and falls in love with a plucky, teenaged girl with a heart murmur. Saint Bernard-sized spiders chase his characters’ cars down dark, bumpy country roads. They fight the spiders off with badminton rackets, lawn tools, and fireworks. The novels with spiders are all bestsellers.

Once a Gordon Strangle Mars fan broke into the Marses’s house. The fan stole several German first editions of Gordon Strangle’s novels, a hairbrush, and a used mug in which there were two ancient, dehydrated tea bags. The fan left behind a betrayed and abusive letter on a series of Post-It Notes, and the manuscript of his own novel, told from the point of view of the iceberg that sank the Titanic. Jeremy and his mother read the manuscript out loud to each other. It begins: “The iceberg knew it had a destiny.” Jeremy’s favorite bit happens when the iceberg sees the doomed ship drawing nearer, and remarks plaintively, “Oh my, does not the Captain know about my large and impenetrable bottom?”

Jeremy discovered, later, that the novel-writing fan had put Gordon Strangle Mars’s used tea bags and hairbrush up for sale on eBay, where someone paid forty-two dollars and sixty-eight cents, which was not only deeply creepy, but, Jeremy still feels, somewhat cheap. But of course this is appropriate, as Jeremy’s father is famously stingy and just plain weird about money.

Gordon Strangle Mars once spent eight thousand dollars on a Japanese singing toilet. Jeremy’s friends love that toilet. Jeremy’s mother has a painting of a woman wearing a red dress by some artist, Jeremy can never remember who. Jeremy’s father gave her that painting. The woman is beautiful, and she looks right at you as if you’re the painting, not her. As if you’re beautiful. The woman has an apple in one hand and a knife in the other. When Jeremy was little, he used to dream about eating that apple. Apparently the painting is worth more than the whole house and everything else in the house, including the singing toilet. But art and toilets aside, the Marses buy most of their clothes at thrift stores.

Jeremy’s father clips coupons.

On the other hand, when Jeremy was twelve and begged his parents to send him to baseball camp in Florida, his father ponied up. And on Jeremy’s last birthday, his father gave him a couch reupholstered in several dozen yards of heavy-duty Star Wars-themed fabric. That was a good birthday.

When his writing is going well, Gordon Strangle Mars likes to wake up at 6 A.M. and go out driving. He works out new plot lines about giant spiders and keeps an eye out for abandoned couches, which he wrestles into the back of his pickup truck. Then he writes for the rest of the day. On weekends he reupholsters the thrown-away couches in remaindered, discount fabrics. A few years ago, Jeremy went through his house, counting up fourteen couches, eight love seats, and one rickety chaise lounge. That was a few years ago. Once Jeremy had a dream that his father combined his two careers and began reupholstering giant spiders.

All lights in all rooms of the Mars house are on fifteen-minute timers, in case Jeremy or his mother leave a room and forget to turn off a lamp. This has caused confusion—and sometimes panic—on the rare occasions that the Marses throw dinner parties.

Everyone thinks that writers are rich, but it seems to Jeremy that his family is only rich some of the time. Some of the time they aren’t.

Whenever Gordon Mars gets stuck in a Gordon Strangle Mars novel, he worries about money. He worries that he won’t, in fact, manage to finish the current novel. He worries that it will be terrible. He worries that no one will buy it and no one will read it, and that the readers who do read it will demand to be refunded the cost of the book. He’s told Jeremy that he imagines these angry readers marching on the Mars house, carrying torches and crowbars.

It would be easier on Jeremy and his mother if Gordon Mars did not work at home. It’s difficult to shower when you know your father is timing you, and thinking dark thoughts about the water bill, instead of concentrating on the scene in the current Gordon Strangle Mars novel, in which the giant spiders have returned to their old haunts in the trees surrounding the ninth hole of the accursed golf course, where they sullenly feast on the pulped entrail-juices of a brace of unlucky poodles and their owner.

During these periods, Jeremy showers at school, after gym, or at his friends’ houses, even though it makes his mother unhappy. She says that sometimes you just need to ignore Jeremy’s father. She takes especially long showers, lots of baths. She claims that baths are even nicer when you know that Jeremy’s father is worried about the water bill. Jeremy’s mother has a cruel streak.

What Jeremy likes about showers is the way you can stand there, surrounded by water and yet in absolutely no danger of drowning, and not think about things like whether you screwed up on the Spanish assignment, or why your mother is looking so worried. Instead you can think about things like if there’s water on Mars, and whether or not Karl is shaving, and if so, who is he trying to fool, and what the statue of George Washington meant when it said to Fox, during their desperate, bloody fight, “You have a long journey ahead of you,” and, “Everything depends on this.” And is Fox really dead?

After she dug up the cigar box, and after George Washington helped her carefully separate out the pieces of tea mug from the pieces of teapot, after they glued back together the hundreds of pieces of porcelain, when Fox turned the ramshackle teapot back into Prince Wing, Prince Wing looked about a hundred years old, and as if maybe there were still a few pieces missing. He looked pale. When he saw Fox, he turned even paler, as if he hadn’t expected her to be standing there in front of him. He picked up his leviathan sword, which Fox had been keeping safe for him—the one which faithful viewers know was carved out of the tooth of a giant, ancient sea creature that lived happily and peacefully (before Prince Wing was tricked into killing it) in the enchanted underground sea on the third floor—and skewered the statue of George Washington like a kebab, pinning it to a tree. He kicked Fox in the head, knocked her down, and tied her to a card catalog. He stuffed a handful of moss and dirt into her mouth so she couldn’t say anything, and then he accused her of plotting to murder Faithful Margaret by magic. He said Fox was more deceitful than a Forbidden Book. He cut off Fox’s tail and her ears and he ran her through with the poison-edged, dog-headed knife that he and Fox had stolen from his mother’s secret house. Then he left Fox there, tied to the card catalog, limp and bloody, her beautiful head hanging down. He sneezed (Prince Wing is allergic to swordplay) and walked off into the stacks. The librarians crept out of their hiding places. They untied Fox and cleaned off her face. They held a mirror to her mouth, but the mirror stayed clear and unclouded.

When the librarians pulled Prince Wing’s leviathan sword out of the tree, the statue of George Washington staggered over and picked up Fox in his arms. He tucked her ears and tail into the capacious pockets of his bird-shit-stained, verdigris riding coat. He carried Fox down seventeen flights of stairs, past the enchanted-and-disagreeable Sphinx on the eighth floor, past the enchanted-and-stormy underground sea on the third floor, past the even-more-enchanted checkout desk on the first floor, and through the hammered-brass doors of The Free People’s World Tree Library. Nobody in The Library, not in one single episode, has ever gone outside. The Library is full of all the sorts of things that one usually has to go outside to enjoy: trees and lakes and grottoes and fields and mountains and precipices (and full of indoor things as well, like books, of course). Outside The Library, everything is dusty and red and alien, as if George Washington has carried Fox out of The Library and onto the surface of Mars.

“I could really go for a nice cold Euphoria right now,” Jeremy says. He and Karl are walking home.

Euphoria is: The Librarian’s Tonic—When Watchfulness Is Not Enough. There are frequently commercials for Euphoria on The Library. Although no one is exactly sure what Euphoria is for, whether it is alcoholic or caffeinated, what it tastes like, if it is poisonous or delightful, or even whether or not it’s carbonated, everyone, including Jeremy, pines for a glass of Euphoria once in a while.

“Can I ask you a question?” Karl says.

“Why do you always say that?” Jeremy says. “What am I going to say? ‘No, you can’t ask me a question’?”

“What’s up with you and Talis?” Karl says. “What were you talking about in the kitchen?” Jeremy sees that Karl has been Watchful.

“She had this dream about me,” he says, uneasily.

“So do you like her?” Karl says. His chin looks raw. Jeremy is sure now that Karl has tried to shave. “Because, remember how I liked her first?”

“We were just talking,” Jeremy says. “So did you shave? Because I didn’t know you had facial hair. The idea of you shaving is pathetic, Karl. It’s like voting Republican if we were old enough to vote. Or farting in Music Appreciation.”

“Don’t try to change the subject,” Karl says. “When have you and Talis ever had a conversation before?”

“One time we talked about a Diana Wynne Jones book that she’d checked out from the library. She dropped it in the bath accidentally. She wanted to know if I could tell my mother,” Jeremy says. “Once we talked about recycling.”

“Shut up, Germ,” Karl says. “Besides, what about Elizabeth? I thought you liked Elizabeth!”

“Who said that?” Jeremy says. Karl is glaring at him.

“Amy told me,” Karl says.

“I never told Amy I liked Elizabeth,” Jeremy says. So now Amy is a mind reader as well as a blabbermouth? What a terrible, deadly combination!

“No,” Karl says, grudgingly. “Elizabeth told Amy that she likes you. So I just figured you liked her back.”

“Elizabeth likes me?” Jeremy says.

“Apparently everybody likes you,” Karl says. He sounds sorry for himself. “What is it about you? It’s not like you’re all that special. Your nose is funny looking and you have stupid hair.”

“Thanks, Karl.” Jeremy changes the subject. “Do you think Fox is really dead?” he says. “For good?” He walks faster, so that Karl has to almost-jog to keep up. Presently Jeremy is much taller than Karl, and he intends to enjoy this as long as it lasts. Knowing Karl, he’ll either get tall, too, or else chop Jeremy off at the knees.

“They’ll use magic,” Karl says. “Or maybe it was all a dream. They’ll make her alive again. I’ll never forgive them if they’ve killed Fox. And if you like Talis, I’ll never forgive you, either. And I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I think I mean what I say, but if push came to shove, eventually I’d forgive you, and we’d be friends again, like in seventh grade. But I wouldn’t, and you’re wrong, and we wouldn’t be. We wouldn’t ever be friends again.”

Jeremy doesn’t say anything. Of course he likes Talis. He just hasn’t realized how much he likes her, until recently. Until today. Until Karl opened his mouth. Jeremy likes Elizabeth too, but how can you compare Elizabeth and Talis? You can’t. Elizabeth is Elizabeth and Talis is Talis.

“When you tried to kiss Talis, she hit you with a boa constrictor,” he says. It had been Amy’s boa constrictor. It had probably been an accident. Karl shouldn’t have tried to kiss someone while they were holding a boa constrictor.

“Just try to remember what I just said,” Karl says. “You’re free to like anyone you want to. Anyone except for Talis.”

The Library has been on television for two years now. It isn’t a regularly scheduled program. Sometimes it’s on two times in the same week, and then not on again for another couple of weeks. Often new episodes debut in the middle of the night. There is a large online community who spend hours scanning channels; sending out alarms and false alarms; fans swap theories, tapes, files; write fanfic. Elizabeth has rigged up her computer to shout “Wake up, Elizabeth! The television is on fire!” when reliable Library watch-sites discover a new episode.

The Library is a pirate TV show. It’s shown up once or twice on most network channels, but usually it’s on the kind of channels that Jeremy thinks of as ghost channels. The ones that are just static, unless you’re paying for several hundred channels of cable. There are commercial breaks, but the products being advertised are like Euphoria. They never seem to be real brands, or things that you can actually buy. Often the commercials aren’t even in English, or in any other identifiable language, although the jingles are catchy, nonsense or not. They get stuck in your head.

Episodes of The Library have no regular schedule, no credits, and sometimes not even dialogue. One episode of The Library takes place inside the top drawer of a card catalog, in pitch dark, and it’s all in Morse code with subtitles. Nothing else. No one has ever claimed responsibility for inventing The Library. No one has ever interviewed one of the actors, or stumbled across a set, film crew, or script, although in one documentary-style episode, the actors filmed the crew, who all wore paper bags on their heads.

When Jeremy gets home, his father is making upside-down pizza in a casserole dish for dinner.

Meeting writers is usually disappointing at best. Writers who write sexy thrillers aren’t necessarily sexy or thrilling in person. Children’s book writers might look more like accountants, or axe murderers for that matter. Horror writers are very rarely scary looking, although they are frequently good cooks.

Though Gordon Strangle Mars is scary looking. He has long, thin fingers—currently slimy with pizza sauce—which are why he chose “Strangle” for his fake middle name. He has white-blond hair that he tugs on while he writes until it stands straight up. He has a bad habit of suddenly appearing beside you, when you haven’t even realized he was in the same part of the house. His eyes are deep-set and he doesn’t blink very often. Karl says that when you meet Jeremy’s father, he looks at you as if he were imagining you bundled up and stuck away in some giant spider’s larder. Which is probably true.

People who read books probably never bother to wonder if their favorite writers are also good parents. Why would they?

Gordon Strangle Mars is a recreational shoplifter. He has a special, complicated, and unspoken arrangement with the local bookstore, where, in exchange for autographing as many Gordon Strangle Mars novels as they can possibly sell, the store allows Jeremy’s father to shoplift books without comment. Jeremy’s mother shows up sooner or later and writes a check.

Jeremy’s feelings about his father are complicated. His father is a cheapskate and a petty thief, and yet Jeremy likes his father. His father hardly ever loses his temper with Jeremy, he is always interested in Jeremy’s life, and he gives interesting (if confusing) advice when Jeremy asks for it. For example, if Jeremy asked his father about kissing Elizabeth, his father might suggest that Jeremy not worry about giant spiders when he kisses Elizabeth. Jeremy’s father’s advice usually has something to do with giant spiders.

When Jeremy and Karl weren’t speaking to each other, it was Jeremy’s father who straightened them out. He lured Karl over, and then locked them both into his study. He didn’t let them out again until they were on speaking terms.

“I thought of a great idea for your book,” Jeremy says. “What if one of the spiders builds a web on a soccer field, across a goal? And what if the goalie doesn’t notice until the middle of the game? Could somebody kill one of the spiders with a soccer ball, if they kicked it hard enough? Would it explode? Or even better, the spider could puncture the soccer ball with its massive fangs. That would be cool, too.”

“Your mother’s out in the garage,” Gordon Strangle Mars says to Jeremy. “She wants to talk to you.”

“Oh,” Jeremy says. All of a sudden, he thinks of Fox in Talis’s dream, trying to phone him. Trying to warn him. Unreasonably, he feels that it’s his parents’ fault that Fox is dead now, as if they have killed her. “Is it about you? Are you getting divorced?”

“I don’t know,” his father says. He hunches his shoulders. He makes a face. It’s a face that Jeremy’s father makes frequently, and yet this face is even more pitiful and guilty than usual.

“What did you do?” Jeremy says. “Did you get caught shoplifting at Wal-Mart?”

“No,” his father says.

“Did you have an affair?”

“No!” his father says, again. Now he looks disgusted, either with himself or with Jeremy for asking such a horrible question. “I screwed up. Let’s leave it at that.”

“How’s the book coming?” Jeremy says. There is something in his father’s voice that makes him feel like kicking something, but there are never giant spiders around when you need them.

“I don’t want to talk about that, either,” his father says, looking, if possible, even more ashamed. “Go tell your mother dinner will be ready in five minutes. Maybe you and I can watch the new episode of The Library after dinner, if you haven’t already seen it a thousand times.”

“Do you know the end? Did Mom tell you that Fox is—”

“Oh jeez,” his father interrupts. “They killed Fox?”

That’s the problem with being a writer, Jeremy knows. Even the biggest and most startling twists are rarely twists for you. You know how every story goes.

Jeremy’s mother is an orphan. Jeremy’s father claims that she was raised by feral silent-film stars, and it’s true, she looks like a heroine out of a Harold Lloyd movie. She has an appealingly disheveled look to her, as if someone has either just tied or untied her from a set of train tracks. She met Gordon Mars (before he added the Strangle and sold his first novel) in the food court of a mall in New Jersey, and fell in love with him before realizing that he was a writer and a recreational shoplifter. She didn’t read anything he’d written until after they were married, which was a typically cunning move on Jeremy’s father’s part.

Jeremy’s mother doesn’t read horror novels. She doesn’t like ghost stories or unexplained phenomena or even the kind of phenomena that require excessively technical explanations. For example: microwaves, airplanes. She doesn’t like Halloween, not even Halloween candy. Jeremy’s father gives her special editions of his novels, where the scary pages have been glued together.

Jeremy’s mother is quiet more often than not. Her name is Alice and sometimes Jeremy thinks about how the two quietest people he knows are named Alice and Talis. But his mother and Talis are quiet in different ways. Jeremy’s mother is the kind of person who seems to be keeping something hidden, something secret. Whereas Talis just is a secret. Jeremy’s mother could easily turn out to be a secret agent. But Talis is the death ray or the key to immortality or whatever it is that secret agents have to keep secret. Hanging out with Talis is like hanging out with a teenage black hole.

Jeremy’s mother is sitting on the floor of the garage, beside a large cardboard box. She has a photo album in her hands. Jeremy sits down beside her.

There are photographs of a cat on a wall, and something blurry that looks like a whale or a zeppelin or a loaf of bread. There’s a photograph of a small girl sitting beside a woman. The woman wears a fur collar with a sharp little muzzle, four legs, a tail, and Jeremy feels a sudden pang. Fox is the first dead person that he’s ever cared about, but she’s not real. The little girl in the photograph looks utterly blank, as if someone has just hit her with a hammer. Like the person behind the camera has just said, “Smile! Your parents are dead!”

“Cleo,” Jeremy’s mother says, pointing to the woman. “That’s Cleo. She was my mother’s aunt. She lived in Los Angeles. I went to live with her when my parents died. I was four. I know I’ve never talked about her. I’ve never really known what to say about her.”

Jeremy says, “Was she nice?”

His mother says, “She tried to be nice. She didn’t expect to be saddled with a little girl. What an odd word. Saddled. As if she were a horse. As if somebody put me on her back and I never got off again. She liked to buy clothes for me. She liked clothes. She hadn’t had a happy life. She drank a lot. She liked to go to movies in the afternoon and to séances in the evenings. She had boyfriends. Some of them were jerks. The love of her life was a small-time gangster. He died and she never married. She always said marriage was a joke and that life was a bigger joke, and it was just her bad luck that she didn’t have a sense of humor. So it’s strange to think that all these years she was running a wedding chapel.”

Jeremy looks at his mother. She’s half-smiling, half-grimacing, as if her stomach hurts. “I ran away when I was sixteen. And I never saw her again. Once she sent me a letter, care of your father’s publishers. She said she’d read all his books, and that was how she found me, I guess, because he kept dedicating them to me. She said she hoped I was happy and that she thought about me. I wrote back. I sent a photograph of you. But she never wrote again. Sounds like an episode of The Library, doesn’t it?”

Jeremy says, “Is that what you wanted to tell me? Dad said you wanted to tell me something.”

“That’s part of it,” his mother says. “I have to go out to Las Vegas, to find out some things about this wedding chapel. Hell’s Bells. I want you to come with me.”

“Is that what you wanted to ask me?” Jeremy says, although he knows there’s something else. His mother still has that sad half-smile on her face.

“Germ,” his mother says. “You know I love your father, right?”

“Why?” Jeremy says. “What did he do?”

His mother flips through the photo album. “Look,” she says. “This was when you were born.” In the picture, his father holds Jeremy as if someone has just handed him an enchanted porcelain teapot. Jeremy’s father grins, but he looks terrified, too. He looks like a kid. A scary, scared kid.

“He wouldn’t tell me either,” Jeremy says. “So it has to be pretty bad. If you’re getting divorced, I think you should go ahead and tell me.”

“We’re not getting divorced,” his mother says, “but it might be a good thing if you and I went out to Las Vegas. We could stay there for a few months while I sort out this inheritance. Take care of Cleo’s estate. I’m going to talk to your teachers. I’ve given notice at the library. Think of it as an adventure.”

She sees the look on Jeremy’s face. “No, I’m sorry. That was a stupid, stupid thing to say. I know this isn’t an adventure.”

“I don’t want to go,” Jeremy says. “All my friends are here! I can’t just go away and leave them. That would be terrible!” All this time, he’s been preparing himself for the most terrible thing he can imagine. He’s imagined a conversation with his mother, in which his mother reveals her terrible secret, and in his imagination, he’s been calm and reasonable. His imaginary parents have wept and asked for his understanding. The imaginary Jeremy has understood. He has imagined himself understanding everything. But now, as his mother talks, Jeremy’s heartbeat speeds up, and his lungs fill with air, as if he is running. He starts to sweat, although the floor of the garage is cold. He wishes he were sitting up on top of the roof with his telescope. There could be meteors, invisible to the naked eye, careening through the sky, hurtling toward Earth. Fox is dead. Everyone he knows is doomed. Even as he thinks this, he knows he’s overreacting. But it doesn’t help to know this.

“I know it’s terrible,” his mother says. His mother knows something about terrible.

“So why can’t I stay here?” Jeremy says. “You go sort things out in Las Vegas, and I’ll stay here with Dad. Why can’t I stay here?”

“Because he put you in a book!” his mother says. She spits the words out. He has never heard her sound so angry. His mother never gets angry. “He put you in one of his books! I was in his office, and the manuscript was on his desk. I saw your name, and so I picked it up and started reading.”

“So what?” Jeremy says. “He’s put me in his books before. Like, stuff I’ve said. Like when I was eight and I was running a fever and told him the trees were full of dead people wearing party hats. Like when I accidentally set fire to his office.”

“It isn’t like that,” his mother says. “It’s you. It’s you. He hasn’t even changed your name. The boy in the book, he jumps hurdles and he wants to be a rocket scientist and go to Mars, and he’s cute and funny and sweet and his best friend Elizabeth is in love with him and he talks like you and he looks like you and then he dies, Jeremy. He has a brain tumor and he dies. He dies. There aren’t any giant spiders. There’s just you, and you die.”

Jeremy is silent. He imagines his father writing the scene in his book where the kid named Jeremy dies, and crying, just a little. He imagines this Jeremy kid, Jeremy the character who dies. Poor messed-up kid. Now Jeremy and Fox have something in common. They’re both made-up people. They’re both dead.

“Elizabeth is in love with me?” he says. Just on principle, he never believes anything that Karl says. But if it’s in a book, maybe it’s true.

“Oh, whoops,” his mother says. “I really didn’t want to say that. I’m just so angry at him. We’ve been married for seventeen years. I was just four years older than you when I met him, Jeremy. I was nineteen. He was only twenty. We were babies. Can you imagine that? I can put up with the singing toilet and the shoplifting and the couches and I can put up with him being so weird about money. But he killed you, Jeremy. He wrote you into a book and he killed you off. And he knows it was wrong, too. He’s ashamed of himself. He didn’t want me to tell you. I didn’t mean to tell you.”

Jeremy sits and thinks. “I still don’t want to go to Las Vegas,” he says to his mother. “Maybe we could send Dad there instead.”

His mother says, “Not a bad idea.” But he can tell she’s already planning their itinerary.

In one episode of The Library, everyone was invisible. You couldn’t see the actors: you could only see the books and the bookshelves and the study carrels on the fifth floor where the coin-operated wizards come to flirt and practice their spells. Invisible Forbidden Books were fighting invisible pirate-magicians and the pirate-magicians were fighting Fox and her friends, who were also invisible. The fight was clumsy and full of deadly accidents. You could hear them fighting. Shelves were overturned. Books were thrown. Invisible people tripped over invisible dead bodies, but you didn’t find out who’d died until the next episode. Several of the characters—The Accidental Sword, Hairy Pete, and Ptolemy Krill (who, much like the Vogons in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, wrote poetry so bad it killed anyone who read it)—disappeared for good, and nobody is sure whether they’re dead or not.

In another episode, Fox stole a magical drug from The Norns, a prophetic girl band who headline at a cabaret on the mezzanine of The Free People’s World-Tree Library. She accidentally injected it, became pregnant, and gave birth to a bunch of snakes who led her to the exact shelf where renegade librarians had misshelved an ancient and terrible book of magic which had never been translated, until Fox asked the snakes for help. The snakes writhed and curled on the ground, spelling out words, letter by letter, with their bodies. As they translated the book for Fox, they hissed and steamed. They became fiery lines on the ground, and then they burnt away entirely. Fox cried. That’s the only time anyone has ever seen Fox cry, ever. She isn’t like Prince Wing. Prince Wing is a crybaby.

The thing about The Library is that characters don’t come back when they die. It’s as if death is for real. So maybe Fox really is dead and she really isn’t coming back. There are a couple of ghosts who hang around The Library looking for blood libations, but they’ve always been ghosts, all the way back to the beginning of the show. There aren’t any evil twins or vampires, either. Although someday, hopefully, there will be evil twins. Who doesn’t love evil twins?

“Mom told me about how you wrote about me,” Jeremy says. His mother is still in the garage. He feels like a tennis ball in a game where the tennis players love him very, very much, even while they lob and smash and send him back and forth, back and forth.

His father says, “She said she wasn’t going to tell you, but I guess I’m glad she did. I’m sorry, Germ. Are you hungry?”

“She’s going out to Las Vegas next week. She wants me to go with her,” Jeremy says.

“I know,” his father says, still holding out a bowl of upside-down pizza. “Try not to worry about all of this, if you can. Think of it as an adventure.”

“Mom says that’s a stupid thing to say. Are you going to let me read the book with me in it?” Jeremy says.

“No,” his father says, looking straight at Jeremy. “I burned it.”

“Really?” Jeremy says. “Did you set fire to your computer too?”

“Well, no,” his father says. “But you can’t read it. It wasn’t any good, anyway. Want to watch The Library with me? And will you eat some damn pizza, please? I may be a lousy father, but I’m a good cook. And if you love me, you’ll eat the damn pizza and be grateful.”

So they go sit on the orange couch and Jeremy eats pizza and watches The Library for the second-and-a-half time with his father. The lights on the timer in the living room go off, and Prince Wing kills Fox again. And then Jeremy goes to bed. His father goes away to write or to burn stuff. Whatever. His mother is still out in the garage.

On Jeremy’s desk is a scrap of paper with a phone number on it. If he wanted to, he could call his phone booth. When he dials the number, it rings for a long time. Jeremy sits on his bed in the dark and listens to it ringing and ringing. When someone picks it up, he almost hangs up. Someone doesn’t say anything, so Jeremy says, “Hello? Hello?”

Someone breathes into the phone on the other end of the line. Someone says in a soft, musical, squeaky voice, “Can’t talk now, kid. Call back later.” Then someone hangs up.

Jeremy dreams that he’s sitting beside Fox on a sofa that his father has reupholstered in spider silk. His father has been stealing spider webs from the giant-spider superstores. From his own books. Is that shoplifting or is it self-plagiarism? The sofa is soft and gray and a little bit sticky. Fox sits on either side of him. The right-hand-side Fox is being played by Talis. Elizabeth plays the Fox on his left. Both Foxes look at him with enormous compassion.

“Are you dead?” Jeremy says.

“Are you?” the Fox who is being played by Elizabeth says, in that unmistakable Fox voice which, Jeremy’s father once said, sounds like a sexy and demented helium balloon. It makes Jeremy’s brain hurt, to hear Fox’s voice coming out of Elizabeth’s mouth.

The Fox who looks like Talis doesn’t say anything at all. The writing on her T-shirt is so small and so foreign that Jeremy can’t read it without feeling as if he’s staring at Fox-Talis’s breasts. It’s probably something he needs to know, but he’ll never be able to read it. He’s too polite, and besides he’s terrible at foreign languages.

“Hey look,” Jeremy says. “We’re on TV!” There he is on television, sitting between two Foxes on a sticky gray couch in a field of red poppies. “Are we in Las Vegas?”

“We’re not in Kansas,” Fox-Elizabeth says. “There’s something I need you to do for me.”

“What’s that?” Jeremy says.

“If I tell you in the dream,” Fox-Elizabeth says, “you won’t remember. You have to remember to call me when you’re awake. Keep on calling until you get me.”

“How will I remember to call you,” Jeremy says, “if I don’t remember what you tell me in this dream? Why do you need me to help you? Why is Talis here? What does her T-shirt say? Why are you both Fox? Is this Mars?”

Fox-Talis goes on watching TV. Fox-Elizabeth opens her kind and beautiful un-Hello-Kitty-like mouth again. She tells Jeremy the whole story. She explains everything. She translates Fox-Talis’s T-shirt, which turns out to explain everything about Talis that Jeremy has ever wondered about. It answers every single question that Jeremy has ever had about girls. And then Jeremy wakes up—

It’s dark. Jeremy flips on the light. The dream is moving away from him. There was something about Mars. Elizabeth was asking who he thought was prettier, Talis or Elizabeth. They were laughing. They both had pointy fox ears. They wanted him to do something. There was a telephone number he was supposed to call. There was something he was supposed to do.

In two weeks, on the fifteenth of April, Jeremy and his mother will get in her van and start driving out to Las Vegas. Every morning before school, Jeremy takes long showers and his father doesn’t say anything at all. One day it’s as if nothing is wrong between his parents. The next day they won’t even look at each other. Jeremy’s father won’t come out of his study. And then the day after that, Jeremy comes home and finds his mother sitting on his father’s lap. They’re smiling as if they know something stupid and secret. They don’t even notice Jeremy when he walks through the room. Even this is preferable, though, to the way they behave when they do notice him. They act guilty and strange and as if they are about to ruin his life. Gordon Mars makes pancakes every morning, and Jeremy’s favorite dinner, macaroni and cheese, every night. Jeremy’s mother plans out an itinerary for their trip. They will be stopping at libraries across the country, because his mother loves libraries. But she’s also bought a new two-man tent and two sleeping bags and a portable stove, so that they can camp, if Jeremy wants to camp. Even though Jeremy’s mother hates the outdoors.

Right after she does this, Gordon Mars spends all weekend in the garage. He won’t let either of them see what he’s doing, and when he does let them in, it turns out that he’s removed the seating in the back of the van and bolted down two of his couches, one on each side, both upholstered in electric-blue fake fur.

They have to climb in through the cargo door at the back because one of the couches is blocking the sliding door. Jeremy’s father says, looking very pleased with himself, “So now you don’t have to camp outside, unless you want to. You can sleep inside. There’s space underneath for suitcases. The sofas even have seat belts.”

Over the sofas, Jeremy’s father has rigged up small wooden shelves that fold down on chains from the walls of the van and become table tops. There’s a travel-sized disco ball dangling from the ceiling, and a wooden panel—with Velcro straps and a black, quilted pad—behind the driver’s seat, where Jeremy’s father explains they can hang up the painting of the woman with the apple and the knife.

The van looks like something out of an episode of The Library. Jeremy’s mother bursts into tears. She runs back inside the house. Jeremy’s father says, helplessly, “I just wanted to make her laugh.”

Jeremy wants to say, “I hate both of you.” But he doesn’t say it, and he doesn’t. It would be easier if he did.

When Jeremy told Karl about Las Vegas, Karl punched him in the stomach. Then he said, “Have you told Talis?”

Jeremy said, “You’re supposed to be nice to me! You’re supposed to tell me not to go and that this sucks and you’re not supposed to punch me. Why did you punch me? Is Talis all you ever think about?”

“Kind of,” Karl said. “Most of the time. Sorry, Germ, of course I wish you weren’t going and yeah, it also pisses me off. We’re supposed to be best friends, but you do stuff all the time and I never get to. I’ve never driven across the country or been to Las Vegas, even though I’d really, really like to. I can’t feel sorry for you when I bet you anything that while you’re there, you’ll sneak into some casino and play slot machines and win like a million bucks. You should feel sorry for me. I’m the one that has to stay here. Can I borrow your dirt bike while you’re gone?”

“Sure,” Jeremy said.

“How about your telescope?” Karl said.

“I’m taking it with me,” Jeremy said.

“Fine. You have to call me every day,” Karl said. “You have to e-mail. You have to tell me about Las Vegas show girls. I want to know how tall they really are. Whose phone number is this?”

Karl was holding the scrap of paper with the number of Jeremy’s phone booth.

“Mine,” Jeremy said. “That’s my phone booth. The one I inherited.”

“Have you called it?” Karl said.

“No,” Jeremy said. He’d called the phone booth a few times. But it wasn’t a game. Karl would think it was a game.

“Cool,” Karl said and he went ahead and dialed the number. “Hello?” Karl said, “I’d like to speak to the person in charge of Jeremy’s life. This is Jeremy’s best friend Karl.”

“Not funny,” Jeremy said.

“My life is boring,” Karl said, into the phone. “I’ve never inherited anything. This girl I like won’t talk to me. So is someone there? Does anybody want to talk to me? Does anyone want to talk to my friend, the Lord of the Phone Booth? Jeremy, they’re demanding that you liberate the phone booth from yourself.”

“Still not funny,” Jeremy said and Karl hung up the phone.

Jeremy told Elizabeth. They were up on the roof of Jeremy’s house and he told her the whole thing. Not just the part about Las Vegas, but also the part about his father and how he put Jeremy in a book with no giant spiders in it.

“Have you read it?” Elizabeth said.

“No,” Jeremy said. “He won’t let me. Don’t tell Karl. All I told him is that my mom and I have to go out for a few months to check out the wedding chapel.”

“I won’t tell Karl,” Elizabeth said. She leaned forward and kissed Jeremy and then she wasn’t kissing him. It was all very fast and surprising, but they didn’t fall off the roof. Nobody falls off the roof in this story. “Talis likes you,” Elizabeth said. “That’s what Amy says. Maybe you like her back. I don’t know. But I thought I should go ahead and kiss you now. Just in case I don’t get to kiss you again.”

“You can kiss me again,” Jeremy said. “Talis probably doesn’t like me.”

“No,” Elizabeth said. “I mean, let’s not. I want to stay friends and it’s hard enough to be friends, Germ. Look at you and Karl.”

“I would never kiss Karl,” Jeremy said.

“Funny, Germ. We should have a surprise party for you before you go,” Elizabeth said.

“It won’t be a surprise party now,” Jeremy said. Maybe kissing him once was enough.

“Well, once I tell Amy it can’t really be a surprise party,” Elizabeth said. “She would explode into a million pieces and all the little pieces would start yelling, ‘Guess what? Guess what? We’re having a surprise party for you, Jeremy!’ But just because I’m letting you in on the surprise doesn’t mean there won’t be surprises.”

“I don’t actually like surprises,” Jeremy said.

“Who does?” Elizabeth said. “Only the people who do the surprising. Can we have the party at your house? I think it should be like Halloween, and it always feels like Halloween here. We could all show up in costumes and watch lots of old episodes of The Library and eat ice cream.”

“Sure,” Jeremy said. And then: “This is terrible! What if there’s a new episode of The Library while I’m gone? Who am I going to watch it with?”

And he’d said the perfect thing. Elizabeth felt so bad about Jeremy having to watch The Library all by himself that she kissed him again.

There has never been a giant spider in any episode of The Library, although once Fox got really small and Ptolemy Krill carried her around in his pocket. She had to rip up one of Krill’s handkerchiefs and blindfold herself, just in case she accidentally read a draft of Krill’s terrible poetry. And then it turned out that, as well as the poetry, Krill had also stashed a rare, horned Anubis earwig in his pocket which hadn’t been properly preserved. Ptolemy Krill, it turned out, was careless with his kill jar. The earwig almost ate Fox, but instead it became her friend. It still sends her Christmas cards.

These are the two most important things that Jeremy and his friends have in common: a geographical location, and love of a television show about a library. Jeremy turns on the television as soon as he comes home from school. He flips through the channels, watching reruns of Star Trek and Law & Order. If there’s a new episode of The Library before he and his mother leave for Las Vegas, then everything will be fine. Everything will work out. His mother says, “You watch too much television, Jeremy.” But he goes on flipping through channels. Then he goes up to his room and makes phone calls.

“The new episode needs to be soon, because we’re getting ready to leave. Tonight would be good. You’d tell me if there was going to be a new episode tonight, right?”

Silence.

“Can I take that as a yes? It would be easier if I had a brother,” Jeremy tells his telephone booth. “Hello? Are you there? Or a sister. I’m tired of being good all the time. If I had a sibling, then we could take turns being good. If I had an older brother, I might be better at being bad, better at being angry. Karl is really good at being angry. He learned how from his brothers. I wouldn’t want brothers like Karl’s brothers, of course, but it sucks having to figure out everything all by myself. And the more normal I try to be, the more my parents think that I’m acting out. They think it’s a phase that I’ll grow out of. They think it isn’t normal to be normal. Because there’s no such thing as normal.

“And this whole book thing. The whole shoplifting thing, how my dad steals things, it figures that he went and stole my life. It isn’t just me being melodramatic, to say that. That’s exactly what he did! Did I tell you that once he stole a ferret from a pet store because he felt bad for it, and then he let it loose in our house and it turned out that it was pregnant? There was this woman who came to interview Dad and she sat down on one of the—”

Someone knocks on his bedroom door. “Jeremy,” his mother says. “Is Karl here? Am I interrupting?”

“No,” Jeremy says, and hangs up the phone. He’s gotten into the habit of calling his phone booth every day. When he calls, it rings and rings and then it stops ringing, as if someone has picked up. There’s just silence on the other end, no squeaky pretend-Fox voice, but it’s a peaceful, interested silence. Jeremy complains about all the things there are to complain about, and the silent person on the other end listens and listens. Maybe it is Fox standing there in his phone booth and listening patiently. He wonders what incarnation of Fox is listening. One thing about Fox: she’s never sorry for herself. She’s always too busy. If it were really Fox, she’d hang up on him.

Jeremy opens his door. “I was on the phone,” he says. His mother comes in and sits down on his bed. She’s wearing one of his father’s old flannel shirts. “So have you packed?”

Jeremy shrugs. “I guess,” he says. “Why did you cry when you saw what Dad did to the van? Don’t you like it?”

“It’s that damn painting,” his mother says. “It was the first nice thing he ever gave me. We should have spent the money on health insurance and a new roof and groceries and instead he bought a painting. So I got angry. I left him. I took the painting and I moved into a hotel and I stayed there for a few days. I was going to sell the painting, but instead I fell in love with it, so I came home and apologized for running away. I got pregnant with you and I used to get hungry and dream that someone was going to give me a beautiful apple, like the one she’s holding. When I told your father, he said he didn’t trust her, that she was holding out the apple like that as a trick and if you went to take it from her, she’d stab you with the peeling knife. He says that she’s a tough old broad and she’ll take care of us while we’re on the road.”

“Do we really have to go?” Jeremy says. “If we go to Las Vegas I might get into trouble. I might start using drugs or gambling or something.”

“Oh, Germ. You try so hard to be a good kid,” his mother says. “You try so hard to be normal. Sometimes I’d like to be normal, too. Maybe Vegas will be good for us. Are these the books that you’re bringing?”

Jeremy shrugs. “Not all of them. I can’t decide which ones I should take and which ones I can leave. It feels like whatever I leave behind, I’m leaving behind for good.”

“That’s silly,” his mother says. “We’re coming back. I promise. Your father and I will work things out. If you leave something behind that you need, he can mail it to you. Do you think there are slot machines in the libraries in Las Vegas? I talked to a woman at the Hell’s Bells chapel and there’s something called The Arts and Lovecraft Library where they keep Cleo’s special collection of horror novels and gothic romances and fake copies of The Necronomicon. You go in and out through a secret, swinging-bookcase door. People get married in it. There’s a Dr. Frankenstein’s LoveLab, the Masque of the Red Death Ballroom, and also something just called The Crypt. Oh yeah, and there’s also The Vampire’s Patio and The Black Lagoon Grotto, where you can get married by moonlight.”

“You hate all this stuff,” Jeremy says.

“It’s not my cup of tea,” his mother says. “When does everyone show up tonight?”

“Around eight,” Jeremy says. “Are you going to get dressed up?”

“I don’t have to dress up,” his mother says. “I’m a librarian, remember?”

Jeremy’s father’s office is above the garage. In theory, no one is meant to interrupt him while he’s working, but in practice Jeremy’s father loves nothing better than to be interrupted, as long as the person who interrupts brings him something to eat. When Jeremy and his mother are gone, who will bring Jeremy’s father food? Jeremy hardens his heart.

The floor is covered with books and bolts and samples of upholstering fabrics. Jeremy’s father is lying facedown on the floor with his feet propped up on a bolt of fabric, which means that he is thinking and also that his back hurts. He claims to think best when he is on the verge of falling asleep.

“I brought you a bowl of Froot Loops,” Jeremy says.

His father rolls over and looks up. “Thanks,” he says. “What time is it? Is everyone here? Is that your costume? Is that my tuxedo jacket?”

“It’s five-ish. Nobody’s here yet. Do you like it?” Jeremy says. He’s dressed as a Forbidden Book. His father’s jacket is too big, but he still feels very elegant. Very sinister. His mother lent him the lipstick and the feathers and the platform heels.

“It’s interesting,” his father allows. “And a little frightening.”

Jeremy feels obscurely pleased, even though he knows that his father is more amused than frightened. “Everyone else will probably come as Fox or Prince Wing. Except for Karl. He’s coming as Ptolemy Krill. He even wrote some really bad poetry. I wanted to ask you something, before we leave tomorrow.”

“Shoot,” his father says.

“Did you really get rid of the novel with me in it?”

“No,” his father says. “It felt unlucky. Unlucky to keep it, unlucky not to keep it. I don’t know what to do with it.”

Jeremy says, “I’m glad you didn’t get rid of it.”

“It’s not any good, you know,” his father says. “Which makes all this even worse. At first it was because I was bored with giant spiders. It was going to be something funny to show you. But then I wrote that you had a brain tumor and it wasn’t funny anymore. I figured I could save you—I’m the author, after all—but you got sicker and sicker. You were going through a rebellious phase. You were sneaking out of the house a lot and you hit your mother. You were a real jerk. But it turned out you had a brain tumor and that was making you behave strangely.”

“Can I ask another question?” Jeremy says. “You know how you like to steal things? You know how you’re really, really good at it?”

“Yeah,” says his father.

“Could you not steal things for a while, if I asked you to?” Jeremy says. “Mom isn’t going to be around to pay for the books and stuff that you steal. I don’t want you to end up in jail because we went to Las Vegas.”

His father closes his eyes as if he hopes Jeremy will forget that he asked a question, and go away.

Jeremy says nothing.

“All right,” his father says finally. “I won’t shoplift anything until you get home again.”

Jeremy’s mother runs around taking photos of everyone. Talis and Elizabeth have both showed up as Fox, although Talis is dead Fox. She carries her fake fur ears and tail around in a little see-through plastic purse and she also has a sword, which she leaves in the umbrella stand in the kitchen. Jeremy and Talis haven’t talked much since she had a dream about him and since he told her that he’s going to Las Vegas. She didn’t say anything about that. Which is perfectly normal for Talis.

Karl makes an excellent Ptolemy Krill. Jeremy’s Forbidden Book disguise is admired.

Amy’s Faithful Margaret costume is almost as good as anything Faithful Margaret wears on TV. There are even special effects: Amy has rigged up her hair with red ribbons and wire and spray color and egg whites so that it looks as if it’s on fire, and there are tiny papier-mâché golems in it, making horrible faces. She dances a polka with Jeremy’s father. Faithful Margaret is mad for polka dancing.

No one has dressed up as Prince Wing.

They watch the episode with the possessed chicken and they watch the episode with the Salt Wife and they watch the episode where Prince Wing and Faithful Margaret fall under a spell and swap bodies and have sex for the first time. They watch the episode where Fox saves Prince Wing’s life for the first time.

Jeremy’s father makes chocolate/mango/espresso milk shakes for everyone. None of Jeremy’s friends, except for Elizabeth, know about the novel. Everyone thinks Jeremy and his mother are just having an adventure. Everyone thinks Jeremy will be back at the end of the summer.

“I wonder how they find the actors,” Elizabeth says. “They aren’t real actors. They must be regular people. But you’d think that somewhere there would be someone who knows them. That somebody online would say, hey, that’s my sister! Or that’s the kid I went to school with who threw up in P.E. You know, sometimes someone says something like that or sometimes someone pretends that they know something about The Library, but it always turns out to be a hoax. Just somebody wanting to be somebody.”

“What about the guy who’s writing it?” Karl says.

Talis says, “Who says it’s a guy?” and Amy says, “Yeah, Karl, why do you always assume it’s a guy writing it?”

“Maybe nobody’s writing it,” Elizabeth says. “Maybe it’s magic or it’s broadcast from outer space. Maybe it’s real. Wouldn’t that be cool?”

“No,” Jeremy says. “Because then Fox would really be dead. That would suck.”

“I don’t care,” Elizabeth says. “I wish it were real, anyway. Maybe it all really happened somewhere, like King Arthur or Robin Hood, and this is just one version of how it happened. Like a magical After School Special.”

“Even if it isn’t real,” Amy says, “parts of it could be real. Like maybe The World-Tree Library is real. Or maybe The Library is made up, but Fox is based on somebody that the writer knew. Writers do that all the time, right? Jeremy, I think your dad should write a book about me. I could be eaten by giant spiders. Or have sex with giant spiders and have spider babies. I think that would be so great.”

So Amy does have psychic abilities, after all, although hopefully she will never know this. When Jeremy tests his own potential psychic abilities, he can almost sense his father, hovering somewhere just outside the living room, listening to this conversation and maybe even taking notes. Which is what writers do. But Jeremy isn’t really psychic. It’s just that lurking and hovering and appearing suddenly when you weren’t expecting him are what his father does, just like shoplifting and cooking. Jeremy prays to all the dark gods that he never receives the gift of knowing what people are thinking. It’s a dark road and it ends up with you trapped on late night television in front of an invisible audience of depressed insomniacs wearing hats made out of tinfoil and they all want to pay you nine-ninety-nine per minute to hear you describe in minute, terrible detail what their deceased cat is thinking about, right now. What kind of future is that? He wants to go to Mars. And when will Elizabeth kiss him again? You can’t just kiss someone twice and then never kiss them again. He tries not to think about Elizabeth and kissing, just in case Amy reads his mind. He realizes that he’s been staring at Talis’s breasts, glares instead at Elizabeth, who is watching TV. Meanwhile, Karl is glaring at him.

On television, Fox is dancing in the Invisible Nightclub with Faithful Margaret, whose hair is about to catch fire again. The Norns are playing their screechy cover of “Come On, Eileen.” The Norns only know two songs: “Come On, Eileen,” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” They don’t play real instruments. They play squeaky dog toys and also a bathtub, which is enchanted, although nobody knows who by, or why, or what it was enchanted for.

“If you had to chose one,” Jeremy says, “invisibility or the ability to fly, which would you choose?”

Everybody looks at him. “Only perverts would want to be invisible,” Elizabeth says.

“You’d have to be naked if you were invisible,” Karl says. “Because otherwise people would see your clothes.”

“If you could fly, you’d have to wear thermal underwear because it’s cold up there. So it just depends on whether you like to wear long underwear or no underwear at all,” Amy says.

It’s the kind of conversation that they have all the time. It makes Jeremy feel homesick even though he hasn’t left yet.

“Maybe I’ll go make brownies,” Jeremy says. “Elizabeth, do you want to help me make brownies?”

“Shhh,” Elizabeth says. “This is a good part.”

On television, Fox and Faithful Margaret are making out. The Faithful part is kind of a joke.

Jeremy’s parents go to bed at one. By three, Amy and Elizabeth are passed out on the couch and Karl has gone upstairs to check his e-mail on Jeremy’s iBook. On TV, wolves are roaming the tundra of The Free People’s World-Tree Library’s fortieth floor. Snow is falling heavily and librarians are burning books to keep warm, but only the most dull and improving works of literature.

Jeremy isn’t sure where Talis has gone, so he goes to look for her. She hasn’t gone far. She’s on the landing, looking at the space on the wall where Alice Mars’s painting should be hanging. Talis is carrying her sword with her, and her little plastic purse. In the bathroom off the landing, the singing toilet is still singing away in German. “We’re taking the painting with us,” Jeremy says. “My dad insisted, just in case he accidentally burns down the house while we’re gone. Do you want to go see it? I was going to show everybody, but everybody’s asleep right now.”

“Sure,” Talis says.

So Jeremy gets a flashlight and takes her out to the garage and shows her the van. She climbs right inside and sits down on one of the blue-fur couches. She looks around and he wonders what she’s thinking. He wonders if the toilet song is stuck in her head.

“My dad did all of this,” Jeremy says. He turns on the flashlight and shines it on the disco ball. Light spatters off in anxious, slippery orbits. Jeremy shows Talis how his father has hung up the painting. It looks truly wrong in the van, as if someone demented put it there. Especially with the light reflecting off the disco ball. The woman in the painting looks confused and embarrassed as if Jeremy’s father has accidentally canceled out her protective powers. Maybe the disco ball is her Kryptonite.

“So remember how you had a dream about me?” Jeremy says. Talis nods. “I think I had a dream about you, that you were Fox.”

Talis opens up her arms, encompassing her costume, her sword, her plastic purse with poor Fox’s ears and tail inside.

“There was something you wanted me to do,” Jeremy says. “I was supposed to save you, somehow.”

Talis just looks at him.

“How come you never talk?” Jeremy says. All of this is irritating. How he used to feel normal around Elizabeth, like friends, and now everything is peculiar and uncomfortable. How he used to enjoy feeling uncomfortable around Talis, and now, suddenly, he doesn’t. This must be what sex is about. Stop thinking about sex, he thinks.

Talis opens her mouth and closes it again. Then she says, “I don’t know. Amy talks so much. You all talk a lot. Somebody has to be the person who doesn’t. The person who listens.”

“Oh,” Jeremy says. “I thought maybe you had a tragic secret. Like maybe you used to stutter.” Except secrets can’t have secrets, they just are.

“Nope,” Talis says. “It’s like being invisible, you know. Not talking. I like it.”

“But you’re not invisible,” Jeremy says. “Not to me. Not to Karl. Karl really likes you. Did you hit him with a boa constrictor on purpose?”

But Talis says, “I wish you weren’t leaving.” The disco ball spins and spins. It makes Jeremy feel kind of carsick and also as if he has sparkly, disco leprosy. He doesn’t say anything back to Talis, just to see how it feels. Except maybe that’s rude. Or maybe it’s rude the way everybody always talks and doesn’t leave any space for Talis to say anything.

“At least you get to miss school,” Talis says, at last.

“Yeah,” he says. He leaves another space, but Talis doesn’t say anything this time. “We’re going to stop at all these museums and things on the way across the country. I’m supposed to keep a blog for school and describe stuff in it. I’m going to make a lot of stuff up. So it will be like Creative Writing and not so much like homework.”

“You should make a list of all the towns with weird names you drive through,” Talis says. “Town of Horseheads. That’s a real place.”

“Plantagenet,” Jeremy says. “That’s a real place too. I had something really weird to tell you.”

Talis waits, like she always does.

Jeremy says, “I called my phone booth, the one that I inherited, and someone answered. She sounded just like Fox when she talked. They told me to call back later. So I’ve called a few more times, but I don’t ever get her.”

“Fox isn’t a real person,” Talis says. “The Library is just TV.” But she sounds uncertain. That’s the thing about The Library. Nobody knows for sure. Everyone who watches it wishes and hopes that it’s not just acting. That it’s magic, real magic.

“I know,” Jeremy says.

“I wish Fox was real,” Fox-Talis says.

They’ve been sitting in the van for a long time. If Karl looks for them and can’t find them, he’s going to think that they’ve been making out. He’ll kill Jeremy. Once Karl tried to strangle another kid for accidentally peeing on his shoes. Jeremy might as well kiss Talis. So he does, even though she’s still holding her sword. She doesn’t hit him with it. It’s dark and he has his eyes closed and he can almost imagine that he’s kissing Elizabeth.

Karl has fallen asleep on Jeremy’s bed. Talis is downstairs, fast-forwarding through the episode where some librarians drink too much Euphoria and decide to abolish Story Hour. Not just the practice of having a Story Hour, but the whole Hour. Amy and Elizabeth are still sacked out on the couch. It’s weird to watch Amy sleep. She doesn’t talk in her sleep.

Karl is snoring. Jeremy could go up on the roof and look at stars, except he’s already packed up his telescope. He could try to wake up Elizabeth and they could go up on the roof, but Talis is down there. He and Talis could go sit on the roof, but he doesn’t want to kiss Talis on the roof. He makes a solemn oath to only ever kiss Elizabeth on the roof.

He picks up his phone. Maybe he can call his phone booth and complain just a little and not wake Karl up. His dad is going to freak out about the phone bill. All these calls to Nevada. It’s 4 A.M. Jeremy’s plan is not to go to sleep at all. His friends are lame.

The phone rings and rings and rings and then someone picks up. Jeremy recognizes the silence on the other end. “Everybody came over and fell asleep,” he whispers. “That’s why I’m whispering. I don’t even think they care that I’m leaving. And my feet hurt. Remember how I was going to dress up as a Forbidden Book? Platform shoes aren’t comfortable. Karl thinks I did it on purpose, to be even taller than him than usual. And I forgot that I was wearing lipstick and I kissed Talis and got lipstick all over her face, so it’s a good thing everyone was asleep because otherwise someone would have seen. And my dad says that he won’t shoplift at all while Mom and I are gone, but you can’t trust him. And that fake-fur upholstery sheds like—”

“Jeremy,” that strangely familiar, sweet-and-rusty door-hinge voice says softly. “Shut up, Jeremy. I need your help.”

“Wow!” Jeremy says, not in a whisper. “Wow, wow, wow! Is this Fox? Are you really Fox? Is this a joke? Are you real? Are you dead? What are you doing in my phone booth?”

“You know who I am,” Fox says, and Jeremy knows with all his heart that it’s really Fox. “I need you to do something for me.”

“What?” Jeremy says. Karl, on the bed, laughs in his sleep as if the idea of Jeremy doing something is funny to him. “What could I do?”

“I need you to steal three books,” Fox says. “From a library in a place called Iowa.”

“I know Iowa,” Jeremy says. “I mean, I’ve never been there, but it’s a real place. I could go there.”

“I’m going to tell you the books you need to steal,” Fox says. “Author, title, and the jewelly festival number—”

“Dewey Decimal,” Jeremy says. “It’s actually called the Dewey Decimal number in real libraries.”

“Real,” Fox says, sounding amused. “You need to write this all down and also how to get to the library. You need to steal the three books and bring them to me. It’s very important.”

“Is it dangerous?” Jeremy says. “Are the Forbidden Books up to something? Are the Forbidden Books real, too? What if I get caught stealing?”

“It’s not dangerous to you,” Fox says. “Just don’t get caught. Remember the episode of The Library when I was the little old lady with the beehive and I stole the Bishop of Tweedle’s false teeth while he was reading the banns for the wedding of Faithful Margaret and Sir Petronella the Younger? Remember how he didn’t even notice?”

“I’ve never seen that episode,” Jeremy says, although as far as he knows he’s never missed a single episode of The Library. He’s never even heard of Sir Petronella.

“Oh,” Fox says. “Maybe that’s a flashback in a later episode or something. That’s a great episode. We’re depending on you, Jeremy. You have got to steal these books. They contain dreadful secrets. I can’t say the titles out loud. I’m going to spell them instead.”

So Jeremy gets a pad of paper and Fox spells out the titles of each book twice. (They aren’t titles that can be written down here. It’s safer not to even think about some books.) “Can I ask you something?” Jeremy says. “Can I tell anybody about this? Not Amy. But could I tell Karl or Elizabeth? Or Talis? Can I tell my mom? If I woke up Karl right now, would you talk to him for a minute?”

“I don’t have a lot of time,” Fox says. “I have to go now. Please don’t tell anyone, Jeremy. I’m sorry.”

“Is it the Forbidden Books?” Jeremy says again. What would Fox think if she saw the costume he’s still wearing, all except for the platform heels? “Do you think I shouldn’t trust my friends? But I’ve known them my whole life!”

Fox makes a noise, a kind of pained whuff.

“What is it?” Jeremy says. “Are you okay?”

“I have to go,” Fox says. “Nobody can know about this. Don’t give anybody this number. Don’t tell anyone about your phone booth. Or me. Promise, Germ?”

“Only if you promise you won’t call me Germ,” Jeremy says, feeling really stupid. “I hate when people call me that. Call me Mars instead.”

“Mars,” Fox says, and it sounds exotic and strange and brave, as if Jeremy has just become a new person, a person named after a whole planet, a person who kisses girls and talks to Foxes.

“I’ve never stolen anything,” Jeremy says.

But Fox has hung up.

Maybe out there, somewhere, is someone who enjoys having to say good-bye, but it isn’t anyone that Jeremy knows. All of his friends are grumpy and red-eyed, although not from crying. From lack of sleep. From too much television. There are still faint red stains around Talis’s mouth and if everyone weren’t so tired, they would realize it’s Jeremy’s lipstick. Karl gives Jeremy a handful of quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. “For the slot machines,” Karl says. “If you win anything, you can keep a third of what you win.”

“Half,” Jeremy says, automatically.

“Fine,” Karl says. “It’s all from your dad’s sofas, anyway. Just one more thing. Stop getting taller. Don’t get taller while you’re gone. Okay.” He hugs Jeremy hard: so hard that it’s almost like getting punched again. No wonder Talis threw the boa constrictor at Karl.

Talis and Elizabeth both hug Jeremy good-bye. Talis looks even more mysterious now that he’s sat with her under a disco ball and made out. Later on, Jeremy will discover that Talis has left her sword under the blue fur couch and he’ll wonder if she left it on purpose.

Talis doesn’t say anything and Amy, of course, doesn’t shut up, not even when she kisses him. It feels weird to be kissed by someone who goes right on talking while they kiss you and yet it shouldn’t be a surprise that Amy kisses him. He imagines that later Amy and Talis and Elizabeth will all compare notes.

Elizabeth says, “I promise I’ll tape every episode of The Library while you’re gone so we can all watch them together when you get back. I promise I’ll call you in Vegas, no matter what time it is there, when there’s a new episode.”

Her hair is a mess and her breath is faintly sour. Jeremy wishes he could tell her how beautiful she looks. “I’ll write bad poetry and send it to you,” he says.

Jeremy’s mother is looking hideously cheerful as she goes in and out of the house, making sure that she hasn’t left anything behind. She loves long car trips. It doesn’t bother her one bit that she and her son are abandoning their entire lives. She passes Jeremy a folder full of maps. “You’re in charge of not getting lost,” she says. “Put these somewhere safe.”

Jeremy says, “I found a library online that I want to go visit. Out in Iowa. They have a corn mosaic on the façade of the building, with a lot of naked goddesses and gods dancing around in a field of corn. Someone wants to take it down. Can we go see it first?”

“Sure,” his mother says.

Jeremy’s father has filled a whole grocery bag with sandwiches. His hair is drooping and he looks even more like an axe murderer than usual. If this were a movie, you’d think that Jeremy and his mother were escaping in the nick of time. “You take care of your mother,” he says to Jeremy.

“Sure,” Jeremy says. “You take care of yourself.”

His dad sags. “You take care of yourself, too.” So it’s settled. They’re all supposed to take care of themselves. Why can’t they stay home and take care of each other, until Jeremy is good and ready to go off to college? “I’ve got another bag of sandwiches in the kitchen,” his dad says. “I should go get them.”

“Wait,” Jeremy says. “I have to ask you something before we take off. Suppose I had to steal something. I mean, I don’t have to steal anything, of course, and I know stealing is wrong, even when you do it, and I would never steal anything. But what if I did? How do you do it? How do you do it and not get caught?”

His father shrugs. He’s probably wondering if Jeremy is really his son. Gordon Mars inherited his mutant, long-fingered, ambidextrous hands from a long line of shoplifters and money launderers and petty criminals. They’re all deeply ashamed of Jeremy’s father. Gordon Mars had a gift and he threw it away to become a writer. “I don’t know,” he says. He picks up Jeremy’s hand and looks at it as if he’s never noticed before that Jeremy had something hanging off the end of his wrist. “You just do it. You do it like you’re not really doing anything at all. You do it while you’re thinking about something else and you forget that you’re doing it.”

“Oh, Jeremy says, taking his hand back. “I’m not planning on stealing anything. I was just curious.”

His father looks at him. “Take care of yourself,” he says again, as if he really means it, and hugs Jeremy hard.

Then he goes and gets the sandwiches (so many sandwiches that Jeremy and his mother will eat sandwiches for the first three days, and still have to throw half of them away). Everyone waves. Jeremy and his mother climb in the van. Jeremy’s mother turns on the CD player. Bob Dylan is singing about monkeys. His mother loves Bob Dylan. They drive away.

Do you know how, sometimes, during a commercial break in your favorite television shows, your best friend calls and wants to talk about one of her boyfriends, and when you try to hang up, she starts crying and you try to cheer her up and end up missing about half of the episode? And so when you go to work the next day, you have to get the guy who sits next to you to explain what happened? That’s the good thing about a book. You can mark your place in a book. But this isn’t really a book. It’s a television show.

In one episode of The Library, an adolescent boy drives across the country with his mother. They have to change a tire. The boy practices taking things out of his mother’s purse and putting them back again. He steals a sixteen-ounce bottle of Coke from one convenience market and leaves it at another convenience market. The boy and his mother stop at a lot of libraries, and the boy keeps a blog, but he skips the bit about the library in Iowa. He writes in his blog about what he’s reading, but he doesn’t read the books he stole in Iowa, because Fox told him not to, and because he has to hide them from his mother. Well, he reads just a few pages. Skims, really. He hides them under the blue-fur sofa. They go camping in Utah, and the boy sets up his telescope. He sees three shooting stars and a coyote. He never sees anyone who looks like a Forbidden Book, although he sees a transvestite go into the woman’s rest room at a rest stop in Indiana. He calls a phone booth just outside Las Vegas twice, but no one ever answers. He has short conversations with his father. He wonders what his father is up to. He wishes he could tell his father about Fox and the books. Once the boy’s mother finds a giant spider the size of an Oreo in their tent. She starts laughing hysterically. She takes a picture of it with her digital camera, and the boy puts the picture on his blog. Sometimes the boy asks questions and his mother talks about her parents. Once she cries. The boy doesn’t know what to say. They talk about their favorite episodes of The Library and the episodes that they really hated, and the mother asks if the boy thinks Fox is really dead. He says he doesn’t think so.

Once a man tries to break into the van while they are sleeping in it. But then he goes away. Maybe the painting of the woman with the peeling knife is protecting them.

But you’ve seen this episode before.

It’s Cinco de Mayo. It’s almost seven o’clock at night, and the sun is beginning to go down. Jeremy and his mother are in the desert and Las Vegas is somewhere in front of them. Every time they pass a driver coming the other way, Jeremy tries to figure out if that person has just won or lost a lot of money. Everything is flat and sort of tilted here, except off in the distance, where the land goes up abruptly, as if someone has started to fold up a map. Somewhere around here is the Grand Canyon, which must have been a surprise when people first saw it.

Jeremy’s mother says, “Are you sure we have to do this first? Couldn’t we go find your phone booth later?”

“Can we do it now?” Jeremy says. “I said I was going to do it on my blog. It’s like a quest that I have to complete.”

“Okay,” his mother says. “It should be around here somewhere. It’s supposed to be four point five miles after the turnoff, and here’s the turnoff.”

It isn’t hard to find the phone booth. There isn’t much else around. Jeremy should feel excited when he sees it, but it’s a disappointment, really. He’s seen phone booths before. He was expecting something to be different. Mostly he just feels tired of road trips and tired of roads and just tired, tired, tired. He looks around to see if Fox is somewhere nearby, but there’s just a hiker off in the distance. Some kid.

“Okay, Germ,” his mother says. “Make this quick.”

“I need to get my backpack out of the back,” Jeremy says.

“Do you want me to come too?” his mother says.

“No,” Jeremy says. “This is kind of personal.”

His mother looks like she’s trying not to laugh. “Just hurry up. I have to pee.”

When Jeremy gets to the phone booth, he turns around. His mother has the light on in the van. It looks like she’s singing along to the radio. His mother has a terrible voice.

When he steps inside the phone booth, it isn’t magical. The phone booth smells rank, as if an animal has been living in it. The windows are smudgy. He takes the stolen books out of his backpack and puts them in the little shelf where someone has stolen a phone book. Then he waits. Maybe Fox is going to call him. Maybe he’s supposed to wait until she calls. But she doesn’t call. He feels lonely. There’s no one he can tell about this. He feels like an idiot and he also feels kind of proud. Because he did it. He drove cross-country with his mother and saved an imaginary person.

“So how’s your phone booth?” his mother says.

“Great!” he says, and they’re both silent again. Las Vegas is in front of them and then all around them and everything is lit up like they’re inside a pinball game. All of the trees look fake. Like someone read too much Dr. Seuss and got ideas. People are walking up and down the sidewalks. Some of them look normal. Others look like they just escaped from a fancy-dress ball at a lunatic asylum. Jeremy hopes they’ve just won lots of money and that’s why they look so startled, so strange. Or maybe they’re all vampires.

“Left,” he tells his mother. “Go left here. Look out for the vampires on the crosswalk. And then it’s an immediate right.” Four times his mother let him drive the van: once in Utah, twice in South Dakota, once in Pennsylvania. The van smells like old burger wrappers and fake fur, and it doesn’t help that Jeremy’s gotten used to the smell. The woman in the painting has had a pained expression on her face for the last few nights, and the disco ball has lost some of its pieces of mirror because Jeremy kept knocking his head on it in the morning. Jeremy and his mother haven’t showered in three days.

Here is the wedding chapel, in front of them, at the end of a long driveway. Electric purple light shines on a sign that spells out HELL’S BELLS. There’s a wrought-iron fence and a yard full of trees dripping Spanish moss. Under the trees, tombstones and miniature mausoleums.

“Do you think those are real?” his mother says. She sounds slightly worried.

“‘Harry East, Recently Deceased,’” Jeremy says. “No, I don’t.”

There’s a hearse in the driveway with a little plaque on the back. RECENTLY BURIED MARRIED. The chapel is a Victorian house with a bell tower. Perhaps it’s full of bats. Or giant spiders. Jeremy’s father would love this place. His mother is going to hate it.

Someone stands at the threshold of the chapel, door open, looking out at them. But as Jeremy and his mother get out of the van, he turns and goes inside and shuts the door. “Look out,” his mother says. “They’ve probably gone to put the boiling oil in the microwave.”

She rings the doorbell determinedly. Instead of ringing, there’s a recording of a crow. Caw, caw, caw. All the lights in the Victorian house go out. Then they turn on again. The door swings open and Jeremy tightens his grip on his backpack, just in case. “Good evening, Madam. Young man,” a man says and Jeremy looks up and up and up. The man at the door has to lower his head to look out. His hands are large as toaster ovens. He looks like he’s wearing Chihuahua coffins on his feet. Two realistic-looking bolts stick out on either side of his head. He wears green pancake makeup, glittery green eye shadow, and his lashes are as long and thick and green as AstroTurf. “We weren’t expecting you so soon.”

“We should have called ahead,” Jeremy’s mother says. “I’m real sorry.”

“Great costume,” Jeremy says.

The Frankenstein curls his lip in a somber way. “Thank you,” he says.

“Call me Miss Thing, please.”

“I’m Jeremy,” Jeremy says. “This is my mother.”

“Oh please,” Miss Thing says. Even his wink is somber. “You tease me. She isn’t old enough to be your mother.”

“Oh please, yourself,” Jeremy’s mother says.

“Quick, the two of you,” someone yells from somewhere inside Hell’s Bells. “While you zthtand there gabbing, the devil ithz prowling around like a lion, looking for a way to get in. Are you juthzt going to zthtand there and hold the door wide open for him?”

So they all step inside. “Is that Jeremy Marthz at lathzt?” the voice says. “Earth to Marthz, Earth to Marthz. Marthzzz, Jeremy Marthzzz, there’thz zthomeone on the phone for Jeremy Marthz. She’thz called three timethz in the lathzt ten minutethz, Jeremy Marthzzzz.”

It’s Fox, Jeremy knows. Of course, it’s Fox! She’s in the phone booth. She’s got the books and she’s going to tell me that I saved whatever it is that I was saving. He walks toward the buzzing voice while Miss Thing and his mother go back out to the van.

He walks past a room full of artfully draped spider webs and candelabras drooping with drippy candles. Someone is playing the organ behind a wooden screen. He goes down the hall and up a long staircase. The banisters are carved with little faces. Owls and foxes and ugly children. The voice goes on talking. “Yoohoo, Jeremy, up the stairthz, that’thz right. Now, come along, come right in! Not in there, in here, in here! Don’t mind the dark, we like the dark, just watch your step.” Jeremy puts his hand out. He touches something and there’s a click and the bookcase in front of him slowly slides back. Now the room is three times as large and there are more bookshelves and there’s a young woman wearing dark sunglasses, sitting on a couch. She has a megaphone in one hand and a phone in the other. “For you, Jeremy Marth,” she says. She’s the palest person Jeremy has ever seen and her two canine teeth are so pointed that she lisps a little when she talks. On the megaphone the lisp was sinister, but now it just makes her sound irritable.

She hands him the phone. “Hello?” he says. He keeps an eye on the vampire.

“Jeremy!” Elizabeth says. “It’s on, it’s on, it’s on! It’s just started! We’re all just sitting here. Everybody’s here. What happened to your cell phone? We kept calling.”

“Mom left it in the visitor’s center at Zion,” Jeremy says.

“Well, you’re there. We figured out from your blog that you must be near Vegas. Amy says she had a feeling that you were going to get there in time. She made us keep calling. Stay on the phone, Jeremy. We can all watch it together, okay? Hold on.”

Karl grabs the phone. “Hey, Germ, I didn’t get any postcards,” he says. “You forget how to write or something? Wait a minute. Somebody wants to say something to you.” Then he laughs and laughs and passes the phone on to someone else who doesn’t say anything at all.

“Talis?” Jeremy says.

Maybe it isn’t Talis. Maybe it’s Elizabeth again. He thinks about how his mouth is right next to Elizabeth’s ear. Or maybe it’s Talis’s ear.

The vampire on the couch is already flipping through the channels. Jeremy would like to grab the remote away from her, but it’s not a good idea to try to take things away from a vampire. His mother and Miss Thing come up the stairs and into the room and suddenly the room seems absolutely full of people, as if Karl and Amy and Elizabeth and Talis have come into the room, too. His hand is getting sweaty around the phone. Miss Thing is holding Jeremy’s mother’s painting firmly, as if it might try to escape. Jeremy’s mother looks tired. For the past three days her hair has been braided into two long fat pigtails. She looks younger to Jeremy, as if they’ve been traveling backward in time instead of just across the country. She smiles at Jeremy, a giddy, exhausted smile. Jeremy smiles back.

“Is it The Library?” Miss Thing says. “Is a new episode on?”

Jeremy sits down on the couch beside the vampire, still holding the phone to his ear. His arm is getting tired.

“I’m here,” he says to Talis or Elizabeth or whoever it is on the other end of the phone. “I’m here.” And then he sits and doesn’t say anything and waits with everyone else for the vampire to find the right channel so they can all find out if he’s saved Fox, if Fox is alive, if Fox is still alive.