punch_kicker15

The bell clanged, and students filed into Giles’s library. He made one last adjustment to the biographies shelf, then headed for the circulation desk.

A dark haired girl, who carried herself with the hauteur of a duchess, marched up. “I need some books. For an English assignment.”

Simple enough. “Which books do you need?”

The girl handed him a list. “We’re supposed to write an essay comparing main characters in two books.”

Giles scanned the list. “There are several dozen suggested pairings here. If you read through them, I’m sure you can find one of them to your liking. Or if you give me some idea of what you’d like to read, I can make some suggest--”

The girl sneered. “You’re supposed to be Book Guy. Just pick two.”

Something about her disdain rubbed Giles exactly the wrong way. “Would you like me to write the essay for you while I’m at it?”

She smiled brightly. “Oh, that would be fantastic.”

Lord help him, sarcasm was lost on this one.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw two tall boys grab a smaller boy’s lunch bag. They started tossing it back and forth, over the hapless owner’s head.

Giles raced over to the game of keep-away, caught the bag in mid-air. He handed the bag back to its owner. “No food in the library.” The boy nodded and ran out.

He turned to the taller boys, fighting to keep his temper in check. It wouldn’t do to create an incident before his Slayer even arrived in Sunnydale. He settled on a moderately intimidating glare.

One of the taller boys had the cheek to look aggrieved by this. “We were just--”

“Out of my library. Now,” Giles growled. The boy slunk out without further protest.

“Hello,” the girl at the circulation desk huffed. “Are you going to write my essay or chase those doofuses around all day?

“I can’t write the essay for you.” He glanced at the cart of books to be reshelved, and picked up Little Women and Moby Dick. “But read these two, and your comparison essay will practically write itself.”

Apparently satisfied with this, the girl checked out the book and left.

A blonde girl, list in hand, approached the desk. “Hi! I need to pick two books to compare for English class right away.”

He said, “Have you looked at the suggested pairings--”

“But that’s work.” She clasped her hands over her chest in melodramatic fashion, and her voice went up an octave. “And I don’t have time for that! Spring Fling is four months away, and my wardrobe planning needs to start, like, now. Just tell me which books I need.”

Giles handed her Light in August and A Wrinkle in Time to check out. A line of dead-eyed students, all holding reading lists, formed behind her.

Giles spent the next twenty minutes dispensing books with amusingly mismatched protagonists, and despairing of the younger generation.

A tiny girl with long reddish-brown hair approached the desk, “Oh, hi, you’re the new librarian! I was wondering who had brought in all of those cool historical volumes.” She bounced on her heels, seemed to lose her train of thought for a moment, then plowed ahead. “There’s this assignment for English class--”

“--and you need two books for it,” he finished. He could do this on autopilot by now. Catcher in the Rye and The Good Earth.

“Yeah, that’s it. I wanna compare Jane Eyre to Helen Graham, from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Like Jane is poor and plain and orphaned, but is able to save Rochester; Helen’s beautiful and comes from a wealthy family, but isn’t able to save her husband. And it’s been a year or two since I read either one, so I’ll probably think of more when I re-read . . .Anyway, there there’s a biography of the Brontes by Juliet Barker that I wanted to read for context. ”

Good lord, this town hadn’t crushed the intellect of every student here. At least one had a functioning brain.

“ . . . I couldn’t find it at B. Dalton’s. And UC-Sunnydale’s Library is closed after a PCP gang attack, again, like the third time in four months, which is a kinda weird place for that, but . . . I am babbling, I’m sorry. I do that a lot.”

He smiled at her. “Never apologize for a love of books. In a happy coincidence, Barker’s book is one of the new biographies I brought with me.”  He reached under the counter, found the book, and handed it to her.

“Thank you!” She bounced out of the library, and apparently took all of the energy with her. The rest of the line consisted of lethargic, disengaged students with the same demands for books.

A couple of boys towards the back of the line began an impromptu wrestling match. One of them tumbled backwards into the shelf of historical volumes that Giles had carefully arranged just this morning.

Giles stifled a curse as the shelf teetered, but mercifully stayed upright.

The bell rang, and the students filed out. Giles sat down at the desk and rested his head in his hands, silently wishing for a glass of scotch. He’d spent years focusing on meeting every possible supernatural challenge his Slayer might face. He’d never imagined how exhausting a few dozen completely normal teenagers could be.

But if the Council’s Slayer mortality tables were to be believed, this assignment would last one year, maybe two at the most, before he could go home. He could last that long.

He grabbed the box of biographies and carried them over to the shelf. Perhaps only one student would want to read them, but one was enough.