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“Hi, Félix!”
Félix didn’t startle because the greeting had been unexpected—he heard the bumps through the aisles, the wheeling rack screeching back, and a paperback book fell on his head when she opened a breach for her head on the shelf over his head—he was startled because his body was used to hunching on itself when someone approached him in the library—or anywhere, really, but mainly in the library.
He let his head fall back on the bookshelf and gazed up at the wide gray eyes peeking at him behind dark fringes and over the wooden shelf, muffled giggles falling off the mouth pressed on the wood.
He waved at Marinette and soon she disappeared between the colorful covers—toppling two more books in her retreat—and reappeared from around the shelf with a bounce before he even lowered his hand.
She leaned her back on the wall by his side, heaving a long and unnecessarily loud sigh, as he picked the fallen A Summary on Arachnids and put it over the thick encyclopedias’ block on the lower shelf.
“I’m boooorrreeeed,” she stretched the word as she slid down the wall, only releasing the ‘d’ when her bottom connected to the floor. “No one’s on the playground.” She scooched over, craning her neck to face him with wide eyes, but instead of the pressed-up smile, her lips were pursed into a pout. “Wanna go to the playground with me?”
“It’s still library time,” Félix said, opening the book on the page he had bookmarked with his thumb.
“But the playground’s already empty!”
“But it’s still library time.” Félix’s shoulder pulled up and he shifted to push himself onto the nook of the textbooks shelf with his foot and raised his book over his face.
The printed letters floated over the yellowed-out paper, blurring his retinas, and leaked out of the pages through his fingers, but he kept running his eyes over where he knew to be straight lines of comprehensible words in a movement similar enough to reading.
Thud.
Félix peeked over the book to Marinette, who had dropped her back on the floor and propped her feet on the wall, a leg bouncing, then quickly turned his gaze back to the smudged words when her eyes turned to him.
“What are you reading?”
“To No One in Particular.” Félix rubbed his eyes with a sleeve, back slumping on the wall as the black smudges refocused onto letters, that refocused onto words, then onto readable sentences. “It’s about a typewriter that writes bottle letters about her week and throws them on the lake behind her house. It’s a therapy thing for her, but one day, someone sends a reply.”
“Bottle pals.”
The printed sentence wavered out of focus as Félix exhaled a giggle and he had to go back to the start of the paragraph.
“We should write a bottle letter,” Marinette continued, now knocking her knees on each other, “then throw it on the Seine so that we can get our own bottle pal.”
“What’d we write about?” Félix mentally noted the unread page’s number before flipping it to the next one—purposely smudging out words wasn’t as easy, but he much preferred accidentally spoiling himself rather than having his book snatched out of his hands since he “clearly couldn’t listen and read at the same time, so better stop pretending to be focusing on both.”
“Our day. Like the lady in your story.”
“It’s not mine, it’s the library’s.”
“‘To whoever finds this…’” Marinette threw her hands on the floor by both sides of her head, eyes closed and nose scrunching in thought. “‘Hi!’” She grinned, legs bouncing once more. “‘Today I almost bored to death and Félix didn’t even try to save me, he’d just let me die in my boredom. Send help! Love, Marinette.’”
Félix humphed, covering his face with the book again. “You’re the one that came here when it’s library time. If you don’t want to do something here, why come during library time?”
“Because you’re here.”
The words scattered out of the page and clattered all around Félix’s brain, but he still buried his nose in the book in a terrible imitation of what reading was supposed to look like.
“Can we go write the bottle letter now?”
Félix squeezed out of the corner where he had folded himself onto—limbs aching as they spread out a bit—and pulled the wristwatch that still didn’t fit his wrist out of his pocket.
“It’s still library time,” he said, raising his eyes from the time pointers to Marinette.
She flopped to her side, back turned to Félix, bemoaning the clock’s snailness.