and, she presumed, her future, too.
Though she had mapped the path of the sadness that glowed within her, it was clear that grief wasn’t all there was to her story. She was funny, too, that day in the library and in the days and weeks following when we’d run into each other. Her sense of humor was dry and weird and casual, and just a hair shy of nerdy. Contrary to the early observations of the Black Awareness Club, she was social. She was trying to be, anyway; quietly sometimes, other times tinged with grief, but trying nonetheless. I asked her, finally, after months of after-school chats and run-ins in the hall, why she never joined the Black Awareness Club. It had become obvious that she wasn’t antagonistic toward the club, and I’d really started to like her, so I just needed an answer to make sense of this one thing. Maybe it was some deep personal grievance. Maybe she wasn’t black and this had all been a wild mix-up? Really, anything was possible. I was willing to suspend any and every belief. She answered with the same matter-of-factness that she used when telling me about her name. “I don’t go because I don’t want to,” she replied. I stared at her slack-jawed. It had never occurred to me that that was an option. She just wasn’t into it and it didn’t belie some sort of inner racial turmoil. A whole world of affable ambivalence opened up to me. It was possible to be authentic and black and aware and not part of a club, much like it was possible to be constantly hounded by grief, yet funny and charming.
* * *
—
We saw more and more of each other, working together in the after-school daycare program and congregating in the school library with a crew of erudite girls from both of our grades, the kind of slightly-too-smart group that talked about Rent and gossip and foreign languages with equal passion, that dated only occasionally—as teenage boys are, by and large, a disappointment—and earned kind but clear reprimands from librarians for laughing too loud on a regular basis. We spent so much time in the library that the summer between her junior and senior years, she was hired as a library assistant for a reshelving project. She encouraged me to snatch up the other position, which I did because I love libraries, and I love money, and I really liked her.
This job was the bee’s knees, the perfect summer activity for a couple of nonathletes who liked books more than sunshine. We spent eight hours a day on either side of a book cart, slowly making our way up and down each aisle, scanning the books for inventory and replacing misfiled items. We were supposed to work separately to maximize our time, but when we tried it on the first day, we found that it was too hard to shout things to each other through the stacks. We decided that the working-separately thing was just a suggestion. Did they really want us to be focused on the task at hand all summer? How boring! The library was the center of our social lives and we assumed that an unspoken but crucial part of the job description was “hang out in the air-conditioning with one of your favorite people.” Why else would anyone want to come to work?
* * *
—
Park’s school library, like many libraries, uses the Dewey decimal system for categorizing and filing books. As a lifelong library-goer, I’d always been captivated by the numbers on the spine of every book. I loved that every possible thing, every story, every fact, everything in the universe of knowledge, could be classified. I loved that by understanding the Dewey decimal system, even at a rudimentary level, I gained access to an ever-deepening world of information. Knowing what the ten divisions in the system were and what many of the divisions’ subcategories were made what was often overwhelming and mysterious suddenly comprehensible. A library looks like endless possibility in this way, rather than rows of closed covers. A library is a universe of smaller universes contained within pages, and to me the Dewey decimal system was the key.
One of the most fascinating things about the Dewey decimal system is that while there are distinct categories for every subject imaginable, it also allows for internal referencing, acknowledging that while a book may be about one subject and exist in one place, it