It was a hot, humid Wednesday when Beatrice caught the kid watching porn on the library computer. She was sorting books on a nearby bookshelf. Eight thirteen point eight oh five, Melvil decimal system. Romance fiction. She was slotting each book haphazardly in alphabetical order. Bodice rippers mostly, with pictures of big cities, discarded lingerie or--her personal favorite--stilettos with sharp heels. A few had body shots of guys with abdominals that looked like xylophone slats. She never read the blurbs on the inside jackets anymore. They were all the same. Instead, she looked past the shelf towards the entrance, watching the little kids coming inside to cool down, girls in strap-tops and plastic sandals that screeched on the linoleum, boys in wife beaters or t-shirts sticky with sweat.

The computers were just on the other side of the shelf, what everyone called the “quad”. The monitors all sat under the table--which had a transparent glass part where the user could see the screen. But it was obvious from the way the other boys were crowding around and giggling, that something was up. Middle schoolers never get excited about homework or looking up ISBN numbers. It could be computer games. They were frowned upon but reluctantly tolerated, especially in these summer months when school was out. The kid on the computer kept hissing at the others to shut up. Beatrice felt like throwing her weight around, maybe asking how long he had left on the timer. Her skin felt like it was shriveling, being under the AC all day, she needed a distraction.

They scattered at her approach. The kid tried his best to close out of the window but the computers were ancient and the system lagged a few seconds, letting her see everything. How did he do it? There were filters installed to prevent that kind of thing, supposedly. The kid kept eyeing the glass doors, leaning forward in his chair, like at any moment he was going to bolt. But he never did. He just looked at the dirty laces on his sneakers and bit his lip.

“Your mom here?”

He shook his head.

“I can see her right there.”

He shook his head again, harder.

“The computers aren’t for this kind of stuff, and also? You’re way too young.” But it wasn’t really something she believed: that he was too young.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Please don’t tell.”

“Get up,” she said. He did. She sat down and closed out of his session. The image of two perfectly shaped breasts lingered like the afterimage of something too bright.

He was a thin kid, tall, at least as tall as her, and he moved and gestured like a puppet supported by string. He wore glasses with thin metal frames, with square lenses that tapered at the edge. His braces had come off recently, and his teeth were straight and white as piano keys. He ran his tongue over them incessantly.

“Look at me.”

His eyes went slowly up from her closed-toed sandals, suited more to a municipal swimming pool, to her track pants and her size XL t-shirt, and up over her chin and cheeks and to her eyes, where they held.

“Please don’t tell,” he said again and tears welled up in him, almost to his eyes. His stare was intense, as though he were putting two pins through her face, as through an insect.

“Don’t do this again,” she said and went back to her cart. The kid stared at her till she looked back, then he grabbed his bag and bolted.

***

The kid was coming over every day now, sometimes even before all the lights were on, and pretty soon matching her shifts down to the minute. He tailed her on her rounds, pretending, running his thumbnail over the spines of the books on the shelves, sometimes taking one out and sitting down on the floor next to near her cart, trying to read it right there. Her eyes would stray to the titles: Atlas of the Human Circulatory System, The Modern Combustion Engine, 5001 Chess Tactics Puzzles. He was developing some eclectic tastes.

She caught him staring at her a few times, over his thin black frames, and then she just accepted that he was staring at her all the time. She started painting her nails again and wearing sandals with a little heel in them and started wearing flower-patterned dresses with lots of different colors. Some days she even wore shorts and lipstick and a smooth plastic hair band. She was hardly aware of what she did.

Sometimes she would say hi to him, which lit him up the rest of the day. He would say hi shyly back and follow her cart around, trailing it by the sound of its one squeaky wheel that never ran straight. Eventually they started talking. Shelving books took so little and he was always there. They repeated the same kind of conversation: did it look like rain, did she have any siblings, did she like working at the library, did he like any of his subjects at school.

One day he brought her a diet coke, which he must've seen her sometimes drinking with her deli sandwich. Food and drink weren’t allowed near the shelves. She drank half of it and gave it back to him and the kid stared at the opening of the can and slowly put his mouth on it with his lips puckered out, like he was a hummingbird sipping nectar. They started talking about her father.

“What’s renal failure?” he said.

“It means he has a problem with his kidneys. He has to go every other day to the hospital to get dialysis.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s when they put all your blood into a machine to clean it and then put it back inside.”

“They can do that?”

She nodded. “It’s expensive.”

“Can’t you just get a new kidney or something? I saw that on TV once, there was a guy who gave his son his kidney and it saved the boy’s life.”

“He won’t take mine.”

“Well, I didn’t mean yours but… why won’t he?”

She shoved a book so hard into the shelf that several books around it popped out and fell to the ground. The smiling young girl on the cover of Little Orphan Annie stared up at her. She sighed and put the books back and rolled the cart along. The kid followed, silent.

“What’s a travelogue?”

“Why?” He had seen her reading them at lunchtime. It was the only kind of book she read.

“Just asking.”

“It’s a book about places. A person goes out to visit a place like Egypt or Jerusalem or Death Valley and he writes about all the stuff that he sees, landmarks, buildings, people, food he eats, stuff like that.”

“You like them?”

“I don’t know.” She tied her hair back into a bun and started rolling down the sleeves of her dress. There was a sudden chill. She wanted to tell him to stop asking so many questions. “Makes me feel like I’ve been to those places, I guess.”

“I’m sorry about your dad,” he said. “My dad works all night so he’s always sleeping during the day and he gets mad when someone wakes him up.”

“Is that why you come to the library so much?”

He poked his tongue against his upper lip. “I used to go to the lake. You ever been to the lake?”

“No,” she said. But she was thinking about the smell of the pine needles in the water and the way you could cut the stillness with an oar and it went all the way up your arms and to the back of your head, what she imagined it might be like to drift in space, the gentleness of it, the depth.

“You’ve never been to the lake?”

She shook her head.

“I go swimming there all the time. My mom always says there’s leeches in there and even though I don’t really believe her I never go too far away from the shore. Some people even say they throw bodies in there, concrete shoes… Hey, can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“You won’t get mad?”

“What is it?”

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“That’s personal.”

“O.K.”

“No, I don’t.”

He didn’t say much more after that. He trailed behind her, laughing at small things with all his straight, perfect teeth.

***
She hadn’t seen the kayak in two years, since her father first got sick and lost his job; since Walker had moved on to New York for law school. It was leaning on the wall in the basement, half an inch of dust all over its smooth yellow-almost-orange body. Spiderwebs crisscrossed the two cloth seat-backs, but the spiders were long gone. She pulled it free from a box of old tools and a power saw and a sander and a pile of old two-by-fours that had been there also two years untouched. Its shape reminded her of a slice of mango. She didn’t really like tropical fruit.

She brought it outside to the backyard and went at it with the hose, peeling the dust away, shattering the cobwebs. She cleaned up the oars and the seats with a big round sponge. She soaped everything down and scrubbed until she could see her own face on the smooth, wet surface, and she was proud of owning such a thing.

Her father called for her, asking for water and the sound of his voice scared her, like when he’d caught her in the basement with Walker that one time and he’d screamed at her and tried to stripe Walker with his belt, even though they hadn’t been doing much of anything. She couldn’t herself understand the fear now because it was not the same, it was harmless now. He was harmless. It was like being afraid of a butterfly simply because it was a bug, a slimy caterpillar once upon a time. She thought about butterflies the entire drive, all the way to the lake. When she met the kid, smiling, waving at her and running up to help her take down the kayak and mount it on the water, her fear vanished.

They cut through the water, getting farther and farther away from the smell and sting of barbecues and the scent of pine needles. The chatter of the motorboats died down into echoes. The lake was full of little islands and there was no spot on it where you could turn around and see only water, there was just no escape from it, the earth. But at least there was silence, not even the song of birds, just wind and water.

The kid had rowed his best all the way with her and he was leaning back now and catching his breath. His hand was over the side, his chin pressed hard on his shoulder. He tapped the wrinkled surface of the water with his fingers and watched the ripples go out. “It’s warm,” he said.

“Gets colder on the bottom,” she said.

“I like your suit,” he said. She was wearing a blue one-piece that Walker had bought for her--she couldn’t remember when, it felt too long ago. He used to say that he liked the way her skin looked in it, which she couldn’t understand, which she thought sometimes that it was a joke at her expense, and maybe she didn’t get it because she wasn’t as clever, but he knew exactly when to say it, and he knew how to curve it so that it made her feel special, and that was always more important. She never felt special till she had met Walker, except maybe in a bad way. But they were just kids, it didn’t mean anything. She looked at herself in the water, touching her square chin, thinking that maybe there was a button or hinge somewhere she could click and it would come off and reveal something prettier.

Then she slipped in and swam out a little from the boat. The kid put his whole hand in the water, testing it, wondering if he would be allowed in it too or maybe wondering if there were any leeches. Beatrice lay on her back and kicked her feet. The kid took off his shirt and his glasses and jumped in.

“You were right, it is cold,” he said.

“It’s alright. Beats air conditioning.”

“Hey, can I ask you something... how come you have a boat?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” She drew herself up and pushed the water between them. He got closer. Or it was a trick of the waves.

“You said you’ve never been to the lake.”

“So?”

He shook his head sadly, and the tiny droplets on the ends of his hair shone briefly as they scattered and went their separate ways. “Never mind.”

“It’s not mine,” she said, rubbing the sides of her shoulders, like the lake water was a kind of ointment. Now he was really close, and it wasn’t a trick of the water.

“O.K.,” he said. And he craned his head forward and kissed her, inexpertly, uncertainly, but unreservedly. She felt her bowels rise inside her as he put his arms around her and they bobbed together from the water. Then she felt the heat on her back, on her head, the sun--and she pulled away violently. The kid was scared again and she was scared and she struck him across the cheek. Not hard, but with her hand wet, it made a big sound.

She swam back to the boat, even though she didn’t want to go back to shore yet. The kid followed her and didn’t say anything and even rowed his best all the way back. He was running through his teeth and blinking, looking like he was so sorry that he was going to cry. Maybe he was crying already and he was good at hiding it and it was just hard to tell with all the water. When they reached the shore he was good enough to help her put the kayak back on top of the car and then he toweled off and put his shirt on and wiped his glasses down slowly in little circles, like a watchmaker polishing an expensive watch, and finally ran off without saying anything.

For the rest of the summer, whenever the glass doors opened, briefly letting in the sound of outside traffic, she would perk up, crane her head out from between the shelves, stand on tip-toe to see who it was. Sometimes she did catch herself, and felt foolish. But mostly, it was reflex. Anyway, he never came back. She went by the lake a couple more times, with the kayak, and even went out into the water, like he would find him there, waiting for her, but her father found out, and although he said nothing beyond the fact that he knew she was going to the lake, nothing indicating disapproval, she stopped going. She even wrote a long letter to Walker about the whole thing. It’s buried somewhere in her desk drawer. Things went back to the way they were, and she was fine with it. Sometimes, though, she found herself wishing he had said goodbye.