Death of the School Librarian

I haven’t thought about it in twenty years. I guess I blanked it from my mind – it was easier to forget than to wonder what really happened that day. I wish I could put it aside forever, but now it gnaws at me, keeping me awake until the small hours, forcing me to type out my version of the events.

We were book nerds, for the most part. Unathletic, artsy, creative types. We might not have fit in with the ‘In Crowd’, but we carved out our own space and formed a group of our own – The Library Gang.

The library was the ideal hang-out during lunch hour – no rain or wind, cool in Summer, and cozy in Winter. The armchairs formed a friendly circle and we made it our own, marking our territory with backpacks and sweaters till everyone arrived. We claimed it.

The Librarian HATED us. Hated our cheery chatter, our total irreverence towards the sanctity of the study area.

“Shhh! If you can’t be quiet, you have to leave.”

“Silence in the library!”

“This isn’t a social area! Take it outside!”

How many times had she attempted to shoo us out? We’d lost count. It became almost a war – a battle of wills. As much as she loathed us, the feeling was mutual.

I don’t remember her name – it’s lost somewhere in the fog. Yet I can see her as clear as day if I close my eyes. Her lips were thin and usually pressed together in a thin grimace, as though she could taste the bubblegum stuck under the desks. Her eyes were a cold blue, like the slushy ice along the road on a grey winter’s day. Her hair was the kind of blonde that came out of a bottle, dry and brittle with chemicals. She was stick-thin, and always had the faint odor of formaldehyde. But worst of all was her mole.

The mole deserves a paragraph all to itself. I don’t know why it bothered us so much. It sat above her lip, about the size of a pinkie fingernail. Beige-brown and puckered, the edges uneven and mottled darker. Three thick, wiry hairs grew out of its center, and it was impossible not to stare at it when she lectured you. We named it ‘The Blob’ and whispered warnings to one another as we took our seats,

“Watch out! The Blob is angry, it’s twitching!”

Looking back, she must have known about our jokes at her expense. How hard it must have been, sitting behind her desk, trying to ignore the stares of a dozen snickering teenagers? No wonder she was always in such a bad mood.

Chaz was the one who came up with the bookmarks. He had always been the best at art, his caricatures remarkably good for a fourteen-year-old. I heard he later went into Graphics Design, hope he’s doing well now. It’s been so long since we were all together.

His artwork was masterful. He’d sell them to us for 50p apiece, sketches of the Librarian with an angry black cloud over her head, a skeletal finger in front of her lips. Or standing on a step-stool to put the books back on the higher shelves, with a green gas cloud behind her bony backside. My favorite was a picture of an actual mole, tortoiseshell glasses pushed up its furry nose, and a brassy blonde wig. “Don’t anger the Mole!” it said underneath in Graffiti font.

We would laugh till we almost puked, the way you only do for those brief golden years between thirteen and nineteen. The pictures were passed around between us, then left inside the flyleaf of the books on her return pile.

We were wearing her down. She shouted more and more, finally making it a rule that everyone in the library had to be reading.

So we’d play her game, smirking as we waltzed right past her, made eye contact, and removed a book at random from the nearest shelf.

“Oooh, Mohammed Ali, fascinating!”

“The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, just what I wanted!”

We’d exclaim as we made a big display of opening the book in front of us. Giggles would erupt around the group, as we all tried to goad her, holding our books upside down or sideways. Danny even brought in a monocle one day, and Stella had a magnifying glass and a Sherlock Holmes hat. It became a game, how ridiculous we could be, how far we could push her.

It was the ‘smell’ game that got us banned. Each day one of us would bring in a gross food item – some stinky Gorgonzola cheese, or a can of tuna. We’d open it and put it under our chair, waiting for her rat-like nose to come sniffing us out, trying to find the source of the rank odor. Of course, we would all try to keep a straight face, our books held primly in our laps, the perfect models of well-behaved school children.

“Can’t any of you smell that?” She would demand, her mole quivering in frustration. Our shoulders would start to shake, someone would snort, but nobody ever confessed.

I brought in a jar of peanut butter. It was rubbish as far as smells go, but I was running late, grabbed the first thing I could find. I left it open on the coffee table, Danny’s gherkin stuck in the top for comedic effect.

She flipped out. Just went totally batty. What the heck was wrong with us? Were we trying to kill her? She ran out of the room in tears, and the janitor came in with cleaning spray and closed the library for the rest of the day. How was I to know she was allergic?

The next day there was a sign on the door. “Closed during lunch.” We tried the handle, but it was locked. We were shut out, our sanctuary denied. Forced to find a corner of some corridor to loiter in, away from the comfortable armchairs.

We wanted our space back. Somehow, we had to make amends. We had to make peace with the enemy.

We pooled our pocket money together. Stella bought a bunch of flowers from the gas station, Chaz made a card with her picture on the front. Not a cruel one, a nice one – the mole was barely visible. We all signed it, with smiley faces and balloons and hearts. Danny had his mom pick up a chocolate cake in Marks And Spencers, ‘We’re Sorry’ in white frosting across the top.

During study period we placed it all on her desk.

“What’s all this?” She said, picking up the card suspiciously. She opened it as though she expected a spider to crawl out. She looked around the classroom, picking us each out from among the other students, scrutinizing us carefully. We weren’t laughing or playing up, we tried to look contrite.

“Well, thank you. This is a nice gesture. I accept your apology.” She sat down, examining the cake box carefully. She read the ingredients list, presumably checking for nuts. Finally, she accepted it was safe.

“I can't eat this all by myself. Who wants a slice? I don’t normally approve of eating in the library, but just this once…” She watched carefully as we filed up to take a piece, and visibly relaxed as she saw us eat it. I guess she must have wondered if it was tampered with, and really, who could blame her? At any rate, she didn’t eat any then, claiming she’d save it for later.

At lunchtime, we hurried back to the library but were stopped cold by the “Closed” sign still hung on the door. Clearly ‘project suck-up’ had been for nothing. I peered through the narrow glass in the door and saw the Librarian, smiling as she caught my eye. She lifted a forkful of gooey chocolate cake up to her mouth and winked. I was probably the last one of us to see her alive.

We stormed out to the patio behind the English block, wishing death and destruction and all things bad down upon her head until the bell rang for the next class.

That next day, school was canceled. The news showed police tape outside the English block, “School Librarian found dead in suspicious circumstances” scrolling under the footage.

An officer came to my house. He asked questions in a stern voice, making notes on a flip pad. Did I know anyone with cause to hurt her? What had we been apologizing for? Who handled the cake? I answered truthfully, omitting only the way we cursed her that afternoon, the cruel things we had called her. After all, they were only words. We didn’t actually mean any of it.

A few days passed, then a week. School re-opened. Rumors spread like wildfire – the Librarian had been found behind a bookcase, her face swollen to twice its size, bleeding from her nose and foam around her mouth. Most kids avoided the library – sure that it was haunted.

One night I overheard Dad whispering with Mum after I’d been sent to bed.

“Apparently, they tested the rest of the cake and the flowers, card – everything. No sign of contamination. Nobody’s going to be charged – seems like it was just a case of bad timing.”

“I knew those kids couldn’t be involved,” Mum said with relief in her voice. “They’re good kids, really.”

And that was the end of it. Or so I thought. With a new librarian in place we gradually returned to normal – lunchtime chatter went unchecked, the new guy almost too lenient with us. Looking back, I wonder if he was afraid? We finished high school and moved on to higher education, our group scattered across the globe. The whole thing forgotten and buried in the past.

So why am I suddenly unable to let it go? After all, whatever happened to her, however tragic - it wasn’t our fault… right? It couldn’t be. Teenagers couldn’t have committed murder and got away with it, not even nerdy ones.

Or so I thought.

Last week I returned to my parents for a brief holiday, showing my own kids around my old haunts. We punted down the river Cam, ate banana splits as big as our heads in Garfunkels, visited the Fitzwilliam Museum. It was a walk down memory lane.

So when we ducked into a charity shop to get out of the rain I was delighted to see a stack of ex-library books on the shelves. Inside the front covers were the familiar stamps of our school logo, the check-out sheets still glued in place. I searched through the pile for anything familiar – and found a copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Not just any old copy – the same brown volume Danny had picked out every single lunchtime. It was a game to him – where could he put it to annoy the librarian the most? Under her cushion, on top of the blinds… balanced on the supply cupboard door so it might fall down and scare her when she opened it. I smiled as I held it in my hands, remembering all the good times we had shared.

I bought the book. £2.50 was worth it as a memento of the Library Gang. That night I pulled it out of the bag, flicking through it to see if there were any of Chaz’s little sketches still left inside. As the pages fell closed, I saw a faint brown stain along their edges. A smear, almost. Something oily – it seeped onto some of the pages, blurring words. It couldn’t be… And yet… I picked it up in trembling hands, raising it to my nose as my stomach lurched.

I hope I’m wrong. It’s just guilt over the mean pranks we played, surely. Yet I could have sworn the book has a faint whiff of peanut butter.