On Monday morning, the boss was gone. My coworker found a note on the office door. She was on a plane to California. I was in charge. She had known on Friday that she would be going. In fact, she had known for weeks. She had forgotten to say anything until after our last shift ended the week before. The remaining two lines scrawled on the post-it note told me that the key to the office was at the Reference Desk and wished us good luck. There was no mention of when she would be back. I cursed myself for taking a job at the Durham Public Library.

On the Martin Luther King weekend of my tenth grade year, it snowed in the mountains. My family owns a house up around Boone, but we have never gotten around to buying a car with four wheel drive. Dad's Camry was built for solid, dependable comfort and economy, not rugged terrain. Mom had an aging van, a heavy Dodge. Its six cylinder engine allowed the lumbering vehicle to pull its own weight up the steep back roads of Appalachia in decent road conditions, but it was never meant to clime steep grades on an equal mixture of cracked blacktop and ice. I went to a teen summer job fair on a whim. I had nothing better to do that frosty morning. I was just fourteen years old, so not much was open to me. I settled for filling out an application for a city work program. It seemed like it was mostly for underprivileged kids, but I was told they let in some teens from fairly prosperous, stable families. I was surprised when they called me back.

After a drug test and more paperwork than I had ever seen before, I sat through three hours of City of Durham employee training. I was pretty much useless for the rest of the day. I was so slack jawed and stupid that I missed a downbeat for the first, and, I hope, last, time in my life. In fact, I missed the entirety of Pomp and Circumstance at graduation later that day. After a week off and a mission trip, I started work for six dollars an hour. I worked thirty hours a week, and this added up to a sum I simply understood as more money than I have ever had before or since. It was with this money that I bought my coat and the oldest book in my collection, a little Florentine volume published in 1640. I also saved. The money was nice. I certainly enjoyed it. I had a big problem, though, a personality quirk that made me utterly ill suited to work at the library. I had a work ethic.

I came home and told my mother that I felt like a leach on society the first time my boss told me to take a long lunch. She was a friend of the man in charge of the program, and he gave her as many teens as she wanted every summer. She took three of us and made us do her job while she sat in her office and discussed her medical conditions with friends on the phone. There were two others in the library, one who commonly worked on our floor and another who stayed upstairs. I was in periodicals. There was very little to do except hide from patrons and look busy. I work hard, and I believe in an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. I was getting the pay alright, but no one expected me to do anything. On top of my growing concern about the ethicality of lying on my time sheet more than once a week, which my boss told me to do, was the misery of picking up the paycheck I so prized. Every two weeks, I had to go get it from the man who ran the program in person and listen to him make sexist remarks with a smile on my face. The latter problem lasted the length of the ordeal, but the former was temporarily resolved when my boss up and left for the west coast.

The day ticked by neatly. After all, we had been doing her job for several weeks. The one issue was that she was not around to sign our time sheets, but we assumed she would upon her return. Then Jimmy came back from lunch. Jimmy was our resident pot head. He was a weed aficionado, a real connoisseur of this forbidden plant. He was a decent enough guy, but he was often noticeably stoned. That day, his dealer had found him something special. He described it as best he could in his intoxicated state. It was a cigar laced with some sort of hallucinogen. Then he informed me that the tables were growing legs and walking around. I hid him until it was time to lock up and go home. Things went downhill from there.