The Librarians Are Plotting the Revolution - 1/2
Title: The Librarians Are Plotting the Revolution
Fandom: American Idol S8
Genre: Gen
Characters: Adam, Kris, the rest of Season 8, including Ryan and the judges. Special guest appearances by Neil Lambert and David Archuleta.
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 15,010
Warnings/Spoilers: Things don't end well for Gokey.
Summary:
The excitement started about a month into summer break, when a group of concerned citizens from a radical church challenged some of the books on the shelf in our teen area. By the time it was all over, they had flooded the library with phone calls and e-mails about the books, the suggestions on our booklists and website, and personally attacked our teen librarian via e-mail and at library board meeting. It was a pretty crazy summer.
Disclaimer: None of this is real, I made it all up. If you're reading this because you know me outside of fandom and googled my screen name, this would be a good time to back away slowly like a forklift. (Beep. Beep. Beep.) If you're reading this because you googled your own name, then I have three words for you, Matt Giraud. Stop googling yourself.
Artwork by iheartthings-ii is here. Big thanks to missquiet for helping get my grammar act together.
The Librarians Are Plotting the Revolution
"I really didn't realize the librarians were, you know, such a dangerous group. ... You think they're just sitting at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're like, plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn't mess with them. You know, they've had their budgets cut. They're paid nothing. Books are falling apart. The libraries are just like the ass end of everything, right?" -- Michael Moore
The excitement started about a month into summer break, when a group of concerned citizens from a radical church challenged some of the books on the shelf in our teen area. By the time it was all over, they had flooded the library with phone calls and e-mails about the books, the suggestions on our booklists and website, and personally attacked our teen librarian via e-mail and at library board meeting. It was a pretty crazy summer.
I had started at the beginning of the summer, fresh out of graduate school, the ink barely dry on my newly minted degree. Public libraries weren't exactly my first choice for a career path, but I couldn't argue with a steady paycheck until I figured out what I really wanted to do. Also, my wife had told me that "You need to get a job. A real job. Sitting around thinking about things on the Internet is not a job."
I had said something about maybe getting my Ph.D, and she said something about murdering me while I slept. So, I got a job. The Franklin Public Library happened to be the first one that was offered to me, and now I got paid to babysit out of control teenagers and confused seniors. As a special bonus, I got to work with the most dysfunctional bunch of people I’d ever come across, and I spent more than my fair share of time on university campuses.
For instance, Anoop Desai was the other reference librarian on our floor. He had three degrees, was considering a fourth, and was obsessed with the reference collection. On my first day, after Ryan Seacrest had deposited me in the second floor work room and sprinted back up to his office in Human Resources - Ryan liked to keep his heart rate elevated so he could burn more calories - Anoop’s first words to me were “I realize we both have reference librarian in our job title, but when it comes to collection development, I am responsible for the actual reference collection." This was the librarian equivalent of peeing on your territory, since you can’t actually pee on books without ruining them.
Everyone had their own little favorite collections that they’d staked out over the years. Since I was the new guy, I got stuck with the last third of the non-fiction collection and the magazines, also known as the stuff no one else wanted. I don't know why, since the magazines were actually really easy. The second floor clerk did most of the magazine work anyway.
The clerk's name was David, but everyone called him Archie. I asked him why once and he stammered out an answer along the lines of “Oh man, it’s because there were like, two Davids downstairs in circulation, plus Danny, and it was really confusing, so everyone just called me Archie. I don’t mind.” And then he smiled at me a little too enthusiastically, like he was trying to convince me that he really didn’t mind.
Archie was, quite frankly, a little weird. He was still in high school and only worked a couple afternoons after school and on Saturday mornings. He wore headphones when he was working, unless he realized someone was talking directly to him, and sometimes he sang along quietly to whatever he was listening to. If someone caught him singing along, he usually stopped and blushed and said something like, “Gosh, I really like this album.”
Really, he said gosh. Like Opie Taylor. “Such a little weirdo.” Anoop said one afternoon after Archie headed out to the public floor with a cart of fiction to be reshelved.
“Aww.” Adam said. “I think he’s sweet. I was weird in high school too, and look at me now.”
Adam was our teen librarian. When I first met him, I thought he was going to be one of those obnoxious fully grown adults who try to prove they're teenager's best friends by dressing like them and listening to their music. Like any teenager in their right mind would be fooled into thinking an adult trying really hard to act cool actually was. I haven't ever told Adam about my first impression, but I should, because he would think it was hilarious.
-----
The patrons were crazy too. My first day, Anoop had left me by myself at the reference desk. I think it had been some kind of twisted initiation ritual, where if I survived, I was allowed to stay. He told me to call the work room if I needed anything, and then disappeared.
Of course, I didn't know how to call the work room on the phone, but the door was only ten feet away, I could probably just stick my head inside and call him the old-fashioned way if I had to.
A blind guy with crazy maestro hair and an actual red tipped cane had approached the desk after Anoop left. "I need to reserve the study room."
"Oh." I said. I hadn't even known there was a study room.
"You're new." The blind guy told me.
"Yeah." I started to get out of my chair. "Let me go get..."
"There's a notebook." The blind guy offered helpfully. "It's in that drawer to your right. The top one, I think."
I opened the top drawer, and there was a monthly planner notebook. It even had a label on the front that said Study Room, written in neat, careful block letters.
"You just have to write my name and how long I want it. I'm Scott."
This was a really great start to my career, with the blind patron telling me what I should be doing. Really fantastic. Clearly I needed to demand a tuition refund.
I scanned the days already booked for the month. Scott was written in on every Monday morning. "Until two o'clock?" I asked, since all the other Mondays were booked from ten until two.
"How did you know that?" Scott asked suspiciously.
"Um... the other days on the calendar all say two o'clock."
Scott cackled loudly, causing half of the group of patrons at the computers to turn at look at us. The rest were too busy typing furiously to bother with looking up. "Oh man!" Scott said. "I thought maybe you were psychic!"
Anoop came back out to the desk later that morning. He didn't seem pleased that I was still there, but he didn't seem disappointed either.
Paula was tiny, with big, elaborately styled hair, strappy heels and a low cut, flamingo pink dress. She leaned across the reference desk, grabbed my face with both hands, and tried her best to squish it like a pillow. My face wasn't really intended for that. "Look at you!" She cooed. "You're the cutest thing I've ever seen!"
"Yeah..." I tried to pull my cute face free, but it was harder to break loose than I had expected. She had a good grip. I could see one of her acrylic nails out of my peripheral vision, and it was uncomfortably close to being in my eye socket.
Anoop watched the entire exchange with something similar to interest, but made no move to interfere.
"Isn't he adorable?" She said to Anoop, who just raised his eyebrows and took another sip of coffee from his mug. I hoped this wasn't also part of the secret initiation ritual.
She finally released my face, smiled and patted my cheek, and then gathered her bags and headed for the chairs near the windows. I straightened my shirt and tried to make sure my jaw still worked.
Anoop stared at me solemnly. "That was Paula. We're not sure what's up with her, but she's harmless." He paused for a moment. "Although, I've never seen her do that before."
-----
I suppose the first indicator that there were going to be problems this summer was when a mother came in to the library towards the end of June. Adam and I were manning the reference desk on the second floor, and she walked up to me and flung a paperback teen novel on the desk. "Do you know what this is?" She asked me.
Of course, the first answer that came to mind was a book, but that was clearly the wrong thing to say, so I waited to see what she said next.
"My daughter checked this book out because this library recommended it." She stabbed the front of the book with her index finger for emphasis. The book was called Rainbow Party and it had a collection of lipstick tubes in rainbow colors on the front cover. If I were to judge this book by the cover, there was going to be some rainbow colored sexiness inside; probably at a party.
"Oh." I said, glancing over at Adam, who had stopped writing an e-mail and was watching the woman while pretending not to. "We did?"
"You should put a warning label on it. This is not appropriate for teenagers to read."
Curiosity got the better of Adam and he moved over next to me and picked up the book. "Someone here recommended this book to your daughter?" He asked.
"She picked it up from one of your displays." The woman said displays like it was a dirty word.
"Oh,” Adam said. "On one of the shelves?"
"I don't know." The woman managed to sound even more annoyed. "It doesn't really matter where she got it, you shouldn't be recommending books like that to teenagers."
When I got to work the next morning, Adam was already sitting at his desk, reading Rainbow Party.
"So?" I asked. "Is it inappropriate?"
Adam sighed. "Probably, but mostly it's just terrible. Why did I buy this in the first place?"
"Standing purchase order?"
Adam shook his head. "I know I would have never suggested this to anyone. I can think of three other books about teenagers having sex that are better than this one, right off the top of my head."
"It's about teenagers having sex?" I raised my eyebrows.
Adam held the book up and pointed at the title. "Apparently rainbow parties are when each girl wears a different color lipstick, and then they go down on each guy, and by the end of the night each guy has a 'rainbow' down there."
"That... actually sounds pretty inappropriate."
"And then because they really wrote this book to educate, there's some heavy-handed lecturing on STDs, and then everyone gets gonorrhea!" Adam finished.
Anoop walked through the doorway into the work room halfway through Adam's explanation, the expression on his face clearly saying he really wished he had picked another time to walk through that door.
------
A few days later, another mother showed up at the reference desk and asked Anoop about the themed book lists Adam had on display in the teen area, and on the teen page of the library website. The lists so far included the standard genres like romances, humor, classics, and historical fiction, plus some others around themes like girl power, GLBT, and vampires. He periodically added new lists, usually when we started getting more requests than usual for a topic. Vampires had been popular lately, and it was nice for the rest of us at the reference desk to have something to refer to when teenagers wanted another vampire book, or needed historical fiction for a school project.
"Who creates these lists?" The woman asked him. She had a copy of each list in her hand.
"All of our booklists are created by the librarians who work here." Anoop explained. "The lists for the teen books are usually created by our teen librarian."
"And how does she decide what books end up on the list?"
"I can't tell you exactly, but it's probably a combination of books he's read and books that were well reviewed by Library Journal or the American Library Association."
"And what about the book group?"
Anoop paused. "What about it?"
"How does he pick the books for that?"
"That, I don't know." Anoop fished around in the reference desk drawer for the business card holder. "I can give you our teen librarian's card; you can follow up with him if you want."
The business card holder didn’t do a very good job. I could spend ten minutes organizing all the cards into the little slots, and then as soon as I closed the drawer, it fell over and they all fell out again. Usually we just pawed through the pile until we found the right name.
The only cards anyone ever wanted were for Kara or Adam anyway. It's not like anyone was interested in following up with the rest of us.
The woman took the card and left, and Anoop turned to me. "Is it just me, or have we been getting a lot of concerned parents lately?"
"It's not just you." I confirmed. "And what do you mean you don't know how Adam picks the book group books?" He had seen Adam's selection process even more than I had. If someone asked Adam, he would say the teens in the group picked what books to read, but there was usually some serious influence from the teen librarian about some amazing book he had just read. Adam usually read at least two "amazing" books a month. I thought his enthusiasm for any particular title should probably be taken with a grain of salt.
Anoop smiled. "Okay, maybe I did know. I was tired of getting interrogated."
The phone at the desk rang, and I picked it up before Anoop. "Oh man!" Megan said. "I wanted Anoop to answer!"
Megan was the children's librarian. We didn't see her very often, since she worked in the children's room on the first floor, but we talked to her on the phone a lot. She enjoyed calling the reference phone from downstairs, and when Anoop answered, disguising her voice and asking him weird reference questions. The only thing that stopped Anoop from hanging up on her was the slight possibility that one time it would be an actual person calling with a weird question.
-----
Allison came into the library every day after school, until 6:00 or so, when her parents get home from work and she could get into her house. Or, at least that’s what Adam told me. According to Allison, her parents thought she spent her afternoons at the library doing homework, but I never saw her doing anything remotely resembling homework. Well, sometimes she held a book in her hand. I’m not sure if she did her homework some other time, or if she just didn’t do it, period.
When Allison had used up her daily allotment of time on the computers, she wandered around the teen area looking bored, and eventually made her way over to the reference desk to kill time by annoying whoever was out there that hour.
On the days Adam was in the building, he usually put her to work adding stickers to spine labels or updating the library’s MySpace page. Once he even got her to sit down and read a book, under the pretense of needing her opinion on it. I think she caught on to him though, because he hadn’t been able to pull that one off again.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that Allison had a crush on Adam. Maybe it made me a bad person, but it only took me a week or so to learn how to exploit this to my advantage. It turned out Allison would do almost anything I asked as long as I prefaced the request with "You know, Adam really needed some help with..." I managed to get her to put the teen comic books in order, shelf read half of the teen fiction, and write five reviews for the library's MySpace page.
Allison came in one afternoon with bright cherry red hair. Delighted didn’t really even begin to cover Adam's reaction. "Oh my god."
"I know, right?" Allison tossed her hair and twirled around.
"Oh my god." Adam repeated. "That is bitchin'. So rockstar." He lifted the top layers up to look at the purple streaks halfway through. "Did you do this yourself?"
Allison made an are-you-crazy face at Adam. “No! A friend of my sisters did it.”
When Archie arrived for his shift an hour later, Adam stopped him. "Hey, did you see Allison's hair?"
"Oh yeah!" Archie said in a weirdly enthusiastic voice. "It's really pretty!" He seemed to think about what he just said for a moment, then added in a more normal tone, “It’s pretty cool, you know?”
“You should come to book club next week.” Adam said. "I think you'd like the book."
“Oh, I don’t know.” Archie shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other. “I mean, I don’t really read… I mean, I do, but not like… I don’t know. Gosh.”
“You go to the same school as Allison, right?” Adam asked.
Archie blushed. “Yeah. She’s in my class. One of my classes. My history class, actually. She’s pretty scary.”
I couldn't help laughing at this, but Archie didn't seem to notice.
“She’s not scary!” Adam protested.
“Yeah, she is.” Archie said. “She’s loud and kind of crazy and one time she knocked me over in the hallway.”
Judging from Adam's face, this was the best thing anyone had said to him all week.
“She could probably beat me up if she wanted to.” Archie finished.
Adam was actually speechless for several seconds. I had to put my head down my desk so I wouldn't start laughing again. At this point, I honestly wasn't sure which was funnier, Archie's story about how Allison knocked him down, or Adam trying to figure out what to say next.
"Well, no one gets to beat up anyone else at book club." Adam said finally. "That's a different club entirely."
This was a reference that sailed way, way over Archie's head.
"Aren't you guys reading that playlist book you made me read last week?" I asked Adam after Archie went back out on the floor with his magazine cart.
"Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist!" Adam said. "I think he'd like it. He's all into music, and apparently girls who can beat him up. Oh my god, how cute would the two of them be?"
I knew what the title was, it was just really long to say. "Yeah, but do you remember how much swearing is in that book? Archie says 'gosh' and 'heck.'"
"Jesus." Adam rolled his eyes. "Like it isn't anything he doesn't hear at school already."
-----
Danny tracked me down at lunch after the fourth of July. I had actually started switching my lunch break times with Adam just to avoid this scenario. Adam didn’t have to worry about having conversations with Danny in the break room, since Danny usually ignored him. I wasn’t that lucky.
I shouldn't be so mean about it. Danny probably meant well, it's just that he was a little weird, and I didn’t really want to spend my lunch break fending off invitations to visit his church.
"So, Kris." He said casually, while sticking his frozen dinner tray into the microwave. "I hear there've been a lot of concerned parents upstairs lately."
I shrugged and pretended to be very interested in my book, which I wasn't really interested in at all. "I don't know." Then my curiosity got the better of me. "Where'd you hear that?"
"Matt."
Of course. If you wanted everyone in the building to know something within the space of eight hours, you’d just tell Matt from IT.
"So?" Danny asked again. "What's Adam doing about it?" Danny had a weird little smirk on his face when he said this, and I couldn’t tell if it was because he was happy over the idea of Adam having to deal with parent's questions, or if it was just Danny being weird again.
-----
My first encounter with Danny Gokey was on my third day, when I was sent downstairs to obtain office supplies for my workspace. Danny unlocked a beige cabinet with enough ceremony to suggest he was a little too proud of having the key on his keyring than was strictly necessary for office supplies, and doled out five pencils, three pens, a tape dispenser, a stapler and two notebooks. “These are all you get until the next quarter.” He informed me solemnly. “Whatever you do, don’t leave them out on the desk where the patrons can access them, because they will take the pencils and we’ll never get them back.”
It seemed like the patrons should be able to take the pencils if they wanted to, since their tax dollars paid for them in the first place, but I could already tell from the flourish as he unlocked his precious cabinet of office supplies, this was not the time to raise that argument.
When I shared this exchange with Adam fifteen minutes later - it seemed like the sort of thing he would find entertaining - Adam rolled his eyes. “Oh god. The patrons don’t even take his precious pencils, we’ve been stealing them from the circulation desk for months. He doesn’t work on Tuesday mornings, that’s the best time to do it.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of this. “You steal the pencils from the circ desk when he’s not here?”
Adam nodded. “Also, I stole the circ desk stapler about six months ago. I peeled the little label off that said “circ desk” so my tracks were covered. You’ll notice now that he’s actually chained the stapler to the desk.”
“You must be proud.” I said.
“A little bit.” Adam admitted.
It wasn’t just his weird hoarding of the library’s office supplies. He ruled with an iron fist over the patron’s circulation records too. Danny didn’t believe in waiving fines, because those people were just trying to scam the library out of seventy five cents. He put blocking notes on records when patrons returned items in the wrong bookdrop, or didn’t put their videotapes back in the cases the right way. Lil ran across a note once on a patron’s record that they “smelled drunk” when they checked out their items and we should keep an eye on them. Kara knew about the notes, but hadn’t had time to do anything about it, since she was writing her sophomore novel.
Within the first week, Danny had latched on to me as a fellow Christian. I’m not sure exactly what that was supposed to imply, since I’m pretty sure that our views on Christianity were about as similar as our views on patrons using the pencils. I probably should have shut him down the first time obliquely referenced our “similarities” but I didn’t, and he took silence as permission to share any potentially sinful information about coworkers or patrons with me.
I was downstairs in the lobby one afternoon, waiting for Megan, who was supposed to have a children’s nonfiction purchase list for me, when Danny approached me in his usual awkwardly cocky way. “You know,” he said to me. “I’m glad you’re working Saturday mornings now.”
Yeah. Boy, there’s nothing quite as excellent as having to work weekends. “Oh?” I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t phrased it as a question, because that was just going to invite him to continue, and I was pretty sure that I didn’t want him to.
“Before, when your position was still open, it was just Adam and Archie upstairs on Saturday mornings.” Danny explained.
“Well, Saturday mornings are usually pretty quiet.” I said. “It’s the afternoon when it gets kind of crazy.”
“No,” Danny said. “I meant more that Archie was alone up there with Adam.”
I frowned. “Wait, what?”
“You know.” Danny raised his eyebrows.
I thought about this for a minute. Did Adam and Archie have some kind of longstanding feud? I hadn't ever noticed, but between the two of them, it might be hard to tell. No, that couldn’t be it, neither one of them were capable of actually feuding with someone else. They’d forget and be all nice and excited. And sure, Adam could be kind of intense, but it didn’t seem like Archie was scared of Adam. Or any more scared of him than he was of anything else, including the copy machine and when the staff door closed behind him too loudly.
“No, I don’t think I do know what you mean.” I said to Danny.
“Well, you know.” Danny said again, with the suggestive eyebrow raise again. “I mean, you know how Adam is, right? I just worry about Archie being left alone with him like that.”
Okay. Never mind that for eight hours of the day, the general public was also on the second floor, and if Adam was the only librarian on duty, their paths would probably never cross the entire day, but Archie shouldn’t be upstairs alone with Adam because Adam was, you know… a serial killer. Because you know… he was a sex offender. Because you know… oh.
-----
“So you figured out that Adam's gay?” Katy said to me. "How? Did he hit on you?"
"No." I said firmly.
"Gay guys always hit on you." Katy explained. "Probably because you're adorable and they can tell you exfoliate."
Where did she come up with this stuff? I frowned. “You know I only do that because I like the tingly feeling.”
-----
I was late to work on Monday, mostly because it was Monday, and because it was raining. It's not like I had a long commute or anything, but it seemed like everything always moved slower when it rained during the summer.
Kara was actually at work and in her office when I got there, which was surprising enough all on it's own, but she had Adam in there with her, which was even more surprising since it meant she was actually doing something library-related and not novel-related.
When Adam came back out to his desk ten minutes later, he was clutching a piece of paper, and almost jumping up and down he was so excited. "I have a book challenge!" He announced. "Oh my god, this is awesome."
"Like a program?" I was confused.
Adam scrunched his face at me. "What? No, like someone actually printed the Reconsideration of Library Materials form off the website and challenged one of my books! They want us to put it in the adult fiction section."
Right. That's what it had sounded like, but I don’t know, it seemed like excitement wasn’t the appropriate reaction to news like that. Unless you were Adam, I suppose.
"So what do you have to do now?"
"I have to write a letter!" He said it with the same enthusiasm he had used for announcing the challenge in the first place, and then we both started laughing, because no one should be that excited about writing a letter, ever.
Adam took the entire day to write his letter. This was mostly because he didn’t just sit down at his desk and write a response. He sat at his desk for five minutes and then spent the rest of the hour wandering around the library, talking to people, or sitting at the desk talking about how he needed to write the rest of the letter, then he’d wander back to the work room and write another sentence before repeating the entire process again. I knew it was just his process for working through something, but it was actually exhausting to watch.
That afternoon, Adam was still supposedly writing his letter. Lil and I were in the middle of a quiet hour on the reference desk when Archie approached us nervously. He was almost wringing his hands.
"What do you need, sweetie?" Lil asked.
"Um." Archie said. "Oh my gosh. There's a guy over there." He half-flapped one of his hands in the direction of the row of computers. "Um. This guy. He's sitting over there, and he's looking at some stuff. On the computer. You know, like, um, inappropriate stuff."
Lil and I exchanged looks. "David," I said. "You know as long as it's not illegal, we don't police what anyone's looking at, right?"
"Oh yeah." Archie nodded, and now he really was wringing his hands. "I know that. But, um, it's just that, he's not really, um, it's that he's not... inside his pants." He said the last part all in a rush and managed to look even more awkward than before.
Nice. I turned to Lil, because honestly? What's the correct response to something like that? Lil folded her arms across her chest. "Oh, hell no. I've got this one."
That was actually a really good response.
The work room door opened and Adam came back out onto the floor just in time to hear Lil's voice raised loud enough to be clearly heard across the entire floor. "What I'm saying is you need to zip it back up and leave the building immediately."
Adam's face was priceless, like a hybrid of surprise and delight. "Oh my god." He mouthed at me. "What did I miss?"
"Sir," Lil's voice carried over to the reference desk again. "If you don't, I'm going to call the police."
"Gosh." Archie said.
-----
By the end of the week, there had been challenge forms turned in for over seventy books in the teen collection. Adam's excitement had been tempered slightly, something I think had less to do with realizing the potential seriousness of the situation, and more to do with realizing that now he was going to have to write seventy of those response letters.
Kara, on the other hand, was officially freaking out. That's how we all ended up in the meeting room on the fourth floor Friday morning. Well, everyone except for Lil, who volunteered to work at the reference desk instead. Megan even came up from the children's room.
Simon arrived fifteen minutes late, with Randy and Ryan Seacrest from Human Resources in tow. It seemed like Ryan spend half of his time doing Human Resources related tasks, and the rest of his time acting as Simon's personal assistant.
"So." Simon said, seating himself at the head of the conference table. "Exactly how many titles were challenged here?"
"Seventy seven." Adam said. "They're mostly from our GLBT teen booklist, and then from the related subject headings."
"But, at least that means someone knows how to do a subject search in the catalog." Anoop offered helpfully.
"Yay, bibliographic instruction!" I added. Simon looked at both of us like we’d each grown an extra head.
Megan took Anoop's pen and started to draw daises in the margin of his notepad. Anoop arrived at every meeting prepared to take notes. The rest of us weren’t so organized.
"So let me see if I understand this correctly." Simon said. "We have seventy seven challenges to our collection because some community group thinks you're inflicting your gay agenda on their children?"
"Apparently." Adam shrugged.
"Whoa." Ryan interrupted. "Simon, I don't think we want to start..."
Simon rolled his eyes. "Oh come on. Like everyone here doesn't know he's gay."
"Wait," Adam said. "Who's gay?"
Ryan looked horrified.
-----
When Simon Cowell descended from his office on the fourth floor and visited the lowly peons in the rest of the library, he usually announced his arrival by standing just inside the lobby doors and folding his arms across his chest. Then he surveyed the entire floor with an expression that implied it smells bad and he’s just waiting to see whose fault it is.
Actually, there was a pretty good chance it did smell bad on the second floor, since it was a public library. It was hard to tell, since the rest of us were used to the smell of unwashed library patron.
Then, Simon usually messed with our heads. As Riverside City Librarian, and acting director of the city’s three libraries, it was in his job description to make us second guess every choice we made in the last week. If we looked up at the reference desk and waited to see what he wanted, he asked why we weren’t working. If we ignored him when he walked in, and kept working, he told us it was “very poor customer service. Quite awful, really.”
“He just likes fucking with our heads.” Adam had shrugged it off after Simon announced, after a brief walk through the teen and fiction areas, that he didn’t want to see any books on display, because it made the library look cluttered.
“I’ll fuck with his head.” Lil grumbled at the next desk. I think she meant it in a way that involved physical violence. Lil and Simon had a long, not so pleasant history that had culminated in his not promoting her to library manager. This had all happened shortly before I started working at Franklin, but I had heard about it several times already. If you wanted to start a conversation in the work room, you’d just mention Simon Cowell.
Instead of promoting Lil, who had five years experience at Franklin and years of prior experience at multiple busy city libraries, Simon had hired Kara, who was less interested in managing a library than she was in her budding chick lit romance novel career. Her debut novel was titled “No Boundaries” and a poster-sized version of the cover was framed on her office wall.
“Kris, you know why he didn’t hire me.” Lil had said to me the third or fourth time I had heard the story. Then she gathered the draft schedule she was working on since Kara wasn’t any good at scheduling, and headed out to the reference desk without explaining why.
Adam was at his desk and Anoop had just returned from lunch, Matt from IT following after him, as usual. “Why?” I asked. “Why didn’t he hire her?”
“Because he’s threatened by a successful black woman?” This was Matt’s suggestion, and Adam and I both turned to look at each other.
“Whaaaat?” Adam said skeptically. He raised his eyebrows at Anoop. “Do you think that’s what it is?”
“You realize I’m not black, right?” Anoop said, deadpan. Matt cackled in approval.
“Fuck you.” Adam retorted. “See if I ever try to include you in a conversation again.”
“If only.” Anoop sighed, sitting down at his desk. Matt perched on the corner of the desk, reading what was on the computer screen over Anoop’s shoulder.
“I think he didn’t hire her because she’s been the president of the city employees union since she started working here, she stands up to Simon in meetings, and she made him look bad that one time at the board meeting.” Adam said. “Or maybe it’s because she’s black.”
“And because Kara’s hot.” Matt finished. Trust Matt to up the inappropriateness of a conversation exponentially. “You all know what I’m doing if Simon ever tries anything with me.” He patted the front pocket of his jacket reassuringly. “I’ve got my resignation letter right here in my pocket, all ready to go. He goes too far with me, I’m going to whip this baby out and sign it. I’m just waiting for him to try something.”
This seemed a little too Milton from Office Space to me, but who was I to judge the behavior of someone who actually had an office in the basement of the library?
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Adam said absently. “You’re going to burn the building down, Milton.” This clearly wasn’t the first time he had heard Matt’s plan.
“You make fun of me now, but you won’t be laughing when Simon comes after you and you don’t have a plan.” Matt informed him.
Adam shrugged. “I have a plan. Simon’s gone back upstairs, I’m going to go put my books back on display.” He picked up the pile of young adult titles Simon had pulled from the shelves and dumped ceremoniously in the back room.
This was exciting. Anoop actually looked up from his computer monitor, not quite curious, but definitely interested enough to pay attention. It never would have occurred to me to openly defy my boss’ orders, especially over something as unimportant as books displayed on the end of shelves, but I wasn’t Adam Lambert.
After working with Adam for a few weeks, I had realized that he just liked being provocative. He liked swearing in a staff meeting and then pretending it had just slipped out. Or saying something too loudly at the reference desk so everyone on the second floor turned to look at him. The hair and clothes were mostly for the skeptical looks he got from parents during library programs and the disparaging comments from Simon. Once, Simon had called Adam’s jacket “too theatrical” and Adam had responded with, “I think it’s just the right amount of theatrical.”
Simon had actually laughed at this, and it had thrown me for the entire rest of the day. It was unnatural, like astroturf on an outdoor field, or seeing a dachshund with a bad back on one of those little wheely carts.
Adam had put the books back on display in the teen section. The next day, Randy Jackson came down to the second floor and commented on how nice all the displayed books looked, and he thought that was a great idea.
Randy was the assistant city librarian, and other than publishing rambly, nonsensical blog posts on the library website, I’m not sure exactly what he did. He usually wore flashy, dramatic outfits, but in a completely different way than Adam. Randy would wear a bright yellow argyle sweater with pin striped pants. Like a swing dancer had suddenly decided to go golfing.
Randy and Kara had interviewed me when I applied for the reference librarian position at Franklin. Randy had spent half the time in the interview going off on tangents about his own work experiences in between asking me questions. Then he had called me “dawg.” Kara, at least, had managed to stay on topic, but kept using catchphrases like “community outreach” and “defining standards of excellence” in sentences where they didn’t really belong.
It had been a pretty weird interview.
-----
"Oh, fuck me." Adam said on Saturday when he sat down at his desk. Archie looked worried, like he always does when Adam swore, like he was expecting something terrible to happen. Like maybe God would strike us all down on the spot with a lightning bolt. Archie probably stopped holding onto anything metal, just in case.
"Um, no thanks." I said, like I always did, and Adam didn't even react, which wasn't a good sign. "What?"
"They found my e-mail address." Adam pulled his computer monitor around towards me, but it still wasn't close enough for me to read his e-mail, so I got up and stood behind him, reading over his shoulder. That week, he had a patch of blue hair on the top of his head.
Adam never deleted anything from his inbox, so there were a lot of messages in the first place. His total inbox count was well over 5,000. But he was right, there were close to fifty messages from different names, all about the book challenges and the lists on the website.
He scrolled through the messages quickly.
“What’s next? Playboys displayed at the check out counter?”
“It’s people like you that make me realize how far our society has fallen. You are influencing young minds with the blatant promotion of your sexually corrupt lifestyle. The power your twisted influence has must be intoxicating. You’re going to burn in Hell if you don’t repent.”
“I can’t believe you would put something like this on your website - it’s disgusting.”
“I pray for people like you. You should use your gifts and abilities to set them on the right path towards a decent life. That is the reason God gave those gifts to you.”
"Get back in the CLOSET, where YOU BELONG."
Curiosity got the better of Archie, and he hovered close enough to read the messages, but still far enough away to escape any lightning bolts. "Gosh." He said. "That's so rude."
-----
When Archie came into the workroom Wednesday afternoon, he was actually wheezing, like he had just ran up the stairs. "Gosh," he said by way of greeting. Then he paused to breathe for several seconds.
"Exciting day?" I asked.
Archie took another deep breath. "Oh my heck, there are people protesting outside."
"About what?" Anoop asked.
Adam and I both frowned at him. "What do you think they're protesting about?" Adam said, waving the stack of challenge forms in the air.
"They have signs." Archie continued. "And they're waving them around like this." He waved his arm in the air to demonstrate.
Part Two
Fandom: American Idol S8
Genre: Gen
Characters: Adam, Kris, the rest of Season 8, including Ryan and the judges. Special guest appearances by Neil Lambert and David Archuleta.
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 15,010
Warnings/Spoilers: Things don't end well for Gokey.
Summary:
The excitement started about a month into summer break, when a group of concerned citizens from a radical church challenged some of the books on the shelf in our teen area. By the time it was all over, they had flooded the library with phone calls and e-mails about the books, the suggestions on our booklists and website, and personally attacked our teen librarian via e-mail and at library board meeting. It was a pretty crazy summer.
Disclaimer: None of this is real, I made it all up. If you're reading this because you know me outside of fandom and googled my screen name, this would be a good time to back away slowly like a forklift. (Beep. Beep. Beep.) If you're reading this because you googled your own name, then I have three words for you, Matt Giraud. Stop googling yourself.
Artwork by iheartthings-ii is here. Big thanks to missquiet for helping get my grammar act together.
The Librarians Are Plotting the Revolution
"I really didn't realize the librarians were, you know, such a dangerous group. ... You think they're just sitting at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're like, plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn't mess with them. You know, they've had their budgets cut. They're paid nothing. Books are falling apart. The libraries are just like the ass end of everything, right?" -- Michael Moore
The excitement started about a month into summer break, when a group of concerned citizens from a radical church challenged some of the books on the shelf in our teen area. By the time it was all over, they had flooded the library with phone calls and e-mails about the books, the suggestions on our booklists and website, and personally attacked our teen librarian via e-mail and at library board meeting. It was a pretty crazy summer.
I had started at the beginning of the summer, fresh out of graduate school, the ink barely dry on my newly minted degree. Public libraries weren't exactly my first choice for a career path, but I couldn't argue with a steady paycheck until I figured out what I really wanted to do. Also, my wife had told me that "You need to get a job. A real job. Sitting around thinking about things on the Internet is not a job."
I had said something about maybe getting my Ph.D, and she said something about murdering me while I slept. So, I got a job. The Franklin Public Library happened to be the first one that was offered to me, and now I got paid to babysit out of control teenagers and confused seniors. As a special bonus, I got to work with the most dysfunctional bunch of people I’d ever come across, and I spent more than my fair share of time on university campuses.
For instance, Anoop Desai was the other reference librarian on our floor. He had three degrees, was considering a fourth, and was obsessed with the reference collection. On my first day, after Ryan Seacrest had deposited me in the second floor work room and sprinted back up to his office in Human Resources - Ryan liked to keep his heart rate elevated so he could burn more calories - Anoop’s first words to me were “I realize we both have reference librarian in our job title, but when it comes to collection development, I am responsible for the actual reference collection." This was the librarian equivalent of peeing on your territory, since you can’t actually pee on books without ruining them.
Everyone had their own little favorite collections that they’d staked out over the years. Since I was the new guy, I got stuck with the last third of the non-fiction collection and the magazines, also known as the stuff no one else wanted. I don't know why, since the magazines were actually really easy. The second floor clerk did most of the magazine work anyway.
The clerk's name was David, but everyone called him Archie. I asked him why once and he stammered out an answer along the lines of “Oh man, it’s because there were like, two Davids downstairs in circulation, plus Danny, and it was really confusing, so everyone just called me Archie. I don’t mind.” And then he smiled at me a little too enthusiastically, like he was trying to convince me that he really didn’t mind.
Archie was, quite frankly, a little weird. He was still in high school and only worked a couple afternoons after school and on Saturday mornings. He wore headphones when he was working, unless he realized someone was talking directly to him, and sometimes he sang along quietly to whatever he was listening to. If someone caught him singing along, he usually stopped and blushed and said something like, “Gosh, I really like this album.”
Really, he said gosh. Like Opie Taylor. “Such a little weirdo.” Anoop said one afternoon after Archie headed out to the public floor with a cart of fiction to be reshelved.
“Aww.” Adam said. “I think he’s sweet. I was weird in high school too, and look at me now.”
Adam was our teen librarian. When I first met him, I thought he was going to be one of those obnoxious fully grown adults who try to prove they're teenager's best friends by dressing like them and listening to their music. Like any teenager in their right mind would be fooled into thinking an adult trying really hard to act cool actually was. I haven't ever told Adam about my first impression, but I should, because he would think it was hilarious.
-----
The patrons were crazy too. My first day, Anoop had left me by myself at the reference desk. I think it had been some kind of twisted initiation ritual, where if I survived, I was allowed to stay. He told me to call the work room if I needed anything, and then disappeared.
Of course, I didn't know how to call the work room on the phone, but the door was only ten feet away, I could probably just stick my head inside and call him the old-fashioned way if I had to.
A blind guy with crazy maestro hair and an actual red tipped cane had approached the desk after Anoop left. "I need to reserve the study room."
"Oh." I said. I hadn't even known there was a study room.
"You're new." The blind guy told me.
"Yeah." I started to get out of my chair. "Let me go get..."
"There's a notebook." The blind guy offered helpfully. "It's in that drawer to your right. The top one, I think."
I opened the top drawer, and there was a monthly planner notebook. It even had a label on the front that said Study Room, written in neat, careful block letters.
"You just have to write my name and how long I want it. I'm Scott."
This was a really great start to my career, with the blind patron telling me what I should be doing. Really fantastic. Clearly I needed to demand a tuition refund.
I scanned the days already booked for the month. Scott was written in on every Monday morning. "Until two o'clock?" I asked, since all the other Mondays were booked from ten until two.
"How did you know that?" Scott asked suspiciously.
"Um... the other days on the calendar all say two o'clock."
Scott cackled loudly, causing half of the group of patrons at the computers to turn at look at us. The rest were too busy typing furiously to bother with looking up. "Oh man!" Scott said. "I thought maybe you were psychic!"
Anoop came back out to the desk later that morning. He didn't seem pleased that I was still there, but he didn't seem disappointed either.
Paula was tiny, with big, elaborately styled hair, strappy heels and a low cut, flamingo pink dress. She leaned across the reference desk, grabbed my face with both hands, and tried her best to squish it like a pillow. My face wasn't really intended for that. "Look at you!" She cooed. "You're the cutest thing I've ever seen!"
"Yeah..." I tried to pull my cute face free, but it was harder to break loose than I had expected. She had a good grip. I could see one of her acrylic nails out of my peripheral vision, and it was uncomfortably close to being in my eye socket.
Anoop watched the entire exchange with something similar to interest, but made no move to interfere.
"Isn't he adorable?" She said to Anoop, who just raised his eyebrows and took another sip of coffee from his mug. I hoped this wasn't also part of the secret initiation ritual.
She finally released my face, smiled and patted my cheek, and then gathered her bags and headed for the chairs near the windows. I straightened my shirt and tried to make sure my jaw still worked.
Anoop stared at me solemnly. "That was Paula. We're not sure what's up with her, but she's harmless." He paused for a moment. "Although, I've never seen her do that before."
-----
I suppose the first indicator that there were going to be problems this summer was when a mother came in to the library towards the end of June. Adam and I were manning the reference desk on the second floor, and she walked up to me and flung a paperback teen novel on the desk. "Do you know what this is?" She asked me.
Of course, the first answer that came to mind was a book, but that was clearly the wrong thing to say, so I waited to see what she said next.
"My daughter checked this book out because this library recommended it." She stabbed the front of the book with her index finger for emphasis. The book was called Rainbow Party and it had a collection of lipstick tubes in rainbow colors on the front cover. If I were to judge this book by the cover, there was going to be some rainbow colored sexiness inside; probably at a party.
"Oh." I said, glancing over at Adam, who had stopped writing an e-mail and was watching the woman while pretending not to. "We did?"
"You should put a warning label on it. This is not appropriate for teenagers to read."
Curiosity got the better of Adam and he moved over next to me and picked up the book. "Someone here recommended this book to your daughter?" He asked.
"She picked it up from one of your displays." The woman said displays like it was a dirty word.
"Oh,” Adam said. "On one of the shelves?"
"I don't know." The woman managed to sound even more annoyed. "It doesn't really matter where she got it, you shouldn't be recommending books like that to teenagers."
When I got to work the next morning, Adam was already sitting at his desk, reading Rainbow Party.
"So?" I asked. "Is it inappropriate?"
Adam sighed. "Probably, but mostly it's just terrible. Why did I buy this in the first place?"
"Standing purchase order?"
Adam shook his head. "I know I would have never suggested this to anyone. I can think of three other books about teenagers having sex that are better than this one, right off the top of my head."
"It's about teenagers having sex?" I raised my eyebrows.
Adam held the book up and pointed at the title. "Apparently rainbow parties are when each girl wears a different color lipstick, and then they go down on each guy, and by the end of the night each guy has a 'rainbow' down there."
"That... actually sounds pretty inappropriate."
"And then because they really wrote this book to educate, there's some heavy-handed lecturing on STDs, and then everyone gets gonorrhea!" Adam finished.
Anoop walked through the doorway into the work room halfway through Adam's explanation, the expression on his face clearly saying he really wished he had picked another time to walk through that door.
------
A few days later, another mother showed up at the reference desk and asked Anoop about the themed book lists Adam had on display in the teen area, and on the teen page of the library website. The lists so far included the standard genres like romances, humor, classics, and historical fiction, plus some others around themes like girl power, GLBT, and vampires. He periodically added new lists, usually when we started getting more requests than usual for a topic. Vampires had been popular lately, and it was nice for the rest of us at the reference desk to have something to refer to when teenagers wanted another vampire book, or needed historical fiction for a school project.
"Who creates these lists?" The woman asked him. She had a copy of each list in her hand.
"All of our booklists are created by the librarians who work here." Anoop explained. "The lists for the teen books are usually created by our teen librarian."
"And how does she decide what books end up on the list?"
"I can't tell you exactly, but it's probably a combination of books he's read and books that were well reviewed by Library Journal or the American Library Association."
"And what about the book group?"
Anoop paused. "What about it?"
"How does he pick the books for that?"
"That, I don't know." Anoop fished around in the reference desk drawer for the business card holder. "I can give you our teen librarian's card; you can follow up with him if you want."
The business card holder didn’t do a very good job. I could spend ten minutes organizing all the cards into the little slots, and then as soon as I closed the drawer, it fell over and they all fell out again. Usually we just pawed through the pile until we found the right name.
The only cards anyone ever wanted were for Kara or Adam anyway. It's not like anyone was interested in following up with the rest of us.
The woman took the card and left, and Anoop turned to me. "Is it just me, or have we been getting a lot of concerned parents lately?"
"It's not just you." I confirmed. "And what do you mean you don't know how Adam picks the book group books?" He had seen Adam's selection process even more than I had. If someone asked Adam, he would say the teens in the group picked what books to read, but there was usually some serious influence from the teen librarian about some amazing book he had just read. Adam usually read at least two "amazing" books a month. I thought his enthusiasm for any particular title should probably be taken with a grain of salt.
Anoop smiled. "Okay, maybe I did know. I was tired of getting interrogated."
The phone at the desk rang, and I picked it up before Anoop. "Oh man!" Megan said. "I wanted Anoop to answer!"
Megan was the children's librarian. We didn't see her very often, since she worked in the children's room on the first floor, but we talked to her on the phone a lot. She enjoyed calling the reference phone from downstairs, and when Anoop answered, disguising her voice and asking him weird reference questions. The only thing that stopped Anoop from hanging up on her was the slight possibility that one time it would be an actual person calling with a weird question.
-----
Allison came into the library every day after school, until 6:00 or so, when her parents get home from work and she could get into her house. Or, at least that’s what Adam told me. According to Allison, her parents thought she spent her afternoons at the library doing homework, but I never saw her doing anything remotely resembling homework. Well, sometimes she held a book in her hand. I’m not sure if she did her homework some other time, or if she just didn’t do it, period.
When Allison had used up her daily allotment of time on the computers, she wandered around the teen area looking bored, and eventually made her way over to the reference desk to kill time by annoying whoever was out there that hour.
On the days Adam was in the building, he usually put her to work adding stickers to spine labels or updating the library’s MySpace page. Once he even got her to sit down and read a book, under the pretense of needing her opinion on it. I think she caught on to him though, because he hadn’t been able to pull that one off again.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that Allison had a crush on Adam. Maybe it made me a bad person, but it only took me a week or so to learn how to exploit this to my advantage. It turned out Allison would do almost anything I asked as long as I prefaced the request with "You know, Adam really needed some help with..." I managed to get her to put the teen comic books in order, shelf read half of the teen fiction, and write five reviews for the library's MySpace page.
Allison came in one afternoon with bright cherry red hair. Delighted didn’t really even begin to cover Adam's reaction. "Oh my god."
"I know, right?" Allison tossed her hair and twirled around.
"Oh my god." Adam repeated. "That is bitchin'. So rockstar." He lifted the top layers up to look at the purple streaks halfway through. "Did you do this yourself?"
Allison made an are-you-crazy face at Adam. “No! A friend of my sisters did it.”
When Archie arrived for his shift an hour later, Adam stopped him. "Hey, did you see Allison's hair?"
"Oh yeah!" Archie said in a weirdly enthusiastic voice. "It's really pretty!" He seemed to think about what he just said for a moment, then added in a more normal tone, “It’s pretty cool, you know?”
“You should come to book club next week.” Adam said. "I think you'd like the book."
“Oh, I don’t know.” Archie shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other. “I mean, I don’t really read… I mean, I do, but not like… I don’t know. Gosh.”
“You go to the same school as Allison, right?” Adam asked.
Archie blushed. “Yeah. She’s in my class. One of my classes. My history class, actually. She’s pretty scary.”
I couldn't help laughing at this, but Archie didn't seem to notice.
“She’s not scary!” Adam protested.
“Yeah, she is.” Archie said. “She’s loud and kind of crazy and one time she knocked me over in the hallway.”
Judging from Adam's face, this was the best thing anyone had said to him all week.
“She could probably beat me up if she wanted to.” Archie finished.
Adam was actually speechless for several seconds. I had to put my head down my desk so I wouldn't start laughing again. At this point, I honestly wasn't sure which was funnier, Archie's story about how Allison knocked him down, or Adam trying to figure out what to say next.
"Well, no one gets to beat up anyone else at book club." Adam said finally. "That's a different club entirely."
This was a reference that sailed way, way over Archie's head.
"Aren't you guys reading that playlist book you made me read last week?" I asked Adam after Archie went back out on the floor with his magazine cart.
"Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist!" Adam said. "I think he'd like it. He's all into music, and apparently girls who can beat him up. Oh my god, how cute would the two of them be?"
I knew what the title was, it was just really long to say. "Yeah, but do you remember how much swearing is in that book? Archie says 'gosh' and 'heck.'"
"Jesus." Adam rolled his eyes. "Like it isn't anything he doesn't hear at school already."
-----
Danny tracked me down at lunch after the fourth of July. I had actually started switching my lunch break times with Adam just to avoid this scenario. Adam didn’t have to worry about having conversations with Danny in the break room, since Danny usually ignored him. I wasn’t that lucky.
I shouldn't be so mean about it. Danny probably meant well, it's just that he was a little weird, and I didn’t really want to spend my lunch break fending off invitations to visit his church.
"So, Kris." He said casually, while sticking his frozen dinner tray into the microwave. "I hear there've been a lot of concerned parents upstairs lately."
I shrugged and pretended to be very interested in my book, which I wasn't really interested in at all. "I don't know." Then my curiosity got the better of me. "Where'd you hear that?"
"Matt."
Of course. If you wanted everyone in the building to know something within the space of eight hours, you’d just tell Matt from IT.
"So?" Danny asked again. "What's Adam doing about it?" Danny had a weird little smirk on his face when he said this, and I couldn’t tell if it was because he was happy over the idea of Adam having to deal with parent's questions, or if it was just Danny being weird again.
-----
My first encounter with Danny Gokey was on my third day, when I was sent downstairs to obtain office supplies for my workspace. Danny unlocked a beige cabinet with enough ceremony to suggest he was a little too proud of having the key on his keyring than was strictly necessary for office supplies, and doled out five pencils, three pens, a tape dispenser, a stapler and two notebooks. “These are all you get until the next quarter.” He informed me solemnly. “Whatever you do, don’t leave them out on the desk where the patrons can access them, because they will take the pencils and we’ll never get them back.”
It seemed like the patrons should be able to take the pencils if they wanted to, since their tax dollars paid for them in the first place, but I could already tell from the flourish as he unlocked his precious cabinet of office supplies, this was not the time to raise that argument.
When I shared this exchange with Adam fifteen minutes later - it seemed like the sort of thing he would find entertaining - Adam rolled his eyes. “Oh god. The patrons don’t even take his precious pencils, we’ve been stealing them from the circulation desk for months. He doesn’t work on Tuesday mornings, that’s the best time to do it.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of this. “You steal the pencils from the circ desk when he’s not here?”
Adam nodded. “Also, I stole the circ desk stapler about six months ago. I peeled the little label off that said “circ desk” so my tracks were covered. You’ll notice now that he’s actually chained the stapler to the desk.”
“You must be proud.” I said.
“A little bit.” Adam admitted.
It wasn’t just his weird hoarding of the library’s office supplies. He ruled with an iron fist over the patron’s circulation records too. Danny didn’t believe in waiving fines, because those people were just trying to scam the library out of seventy five cents. He put blocking notes on records when patrons returned items in the wrong bookdrop, or didn’t put their videotapes back in the cases the right way. Lil ran across a note once on a patron’s record that they “smelled drunk” when they checked out their items and we should keep an eye on them. Kara knew about the notes, but hadn’t had time to do anything about it, since she was writing her sophomore novel.
Within the first week, Danny had latched on to me as a fellow Christian. I’m not sure exactly what that was supposed to imply, since I’m pretty sure that our views on Christianity were about as similar as our views on patrons using the pencils. I probably should have shut him down the first time obliquely referenced our “similarities” but I didn’t, and he took silence as permission to share any potentially sinful information about coworkers or patrons with me.
I was downstairs in the lobby one afternoon, waiting for Megan, who was supposed to have a children’s nonfiction purchase list for me, when Danny approached me in his usual awkwardly cocky way. “You know,” he said to me. “I’m glad you’re working Saturday mornings now.”
Yeah. Boy, there’s nothing quite as excellent as having to work weekends. “Oh?” I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t phrased it as a question, because that was just going to invite him to continue, and I was pretty sure that I didn’t want him to.
“Before, when your position was still open, it was just Adam and Archie upstairs on Saturday mornings.” Danny explained.
“Well, Saturday mornings are usually pretty quiet.” I said. “It’s the afternoon when it gets kind of crazy.”
“No,” Danny said. “I meant more that Archie was alone up there with Adam.”
I frowned. “Wait, what?”
“You know.” Danny raised his eyebrows.
I thought about this for a minute. Did Adam and Archie have some kind of longstanding feud? I hadn't ever noticed, but between the two of them, it might be hard to tell. No, that couldn’t be it, neither one of them were capable of actually feuding with someone else. They’d forget and be all nice and excited. And sure, Adam could be kind of intense, but it didn’t seem like Archie was scared of Adam. Or any more scared of him than he was of anything else, including the copy machine and when the staff door closed behind him too loudly.
“No, I don’t think I do know what you mean.” I said to Danny.
“Well, you know.” Danny said again, with the suggestive eyebrow raise again. “I mean, you know how Adam is, right? I just worry about Archie being left alone with him like that.”
Okay. Never mind that for eight hours of the day, the general public was also on the second floor, and if Adam was the only librarian on duty, their paths would probably never cross the entire day, but Archie shouldn’t be upstairs alone with Adam because Adam was, you know… a serial killer. Because you know… he was a sex offender. Because you know… oh.
-----
“So you figured out that Adam's gay?” Katy said to me. "How? Did he hit on you?"
"No." I said firmly.
"Gay guys always hit on you." Katy explained. "Probably because you're adorable and they can tell you exfoliate."
Where did she come up with this stuff? I frowned. “You know I only do that because I like the tingly feeling.”
-----
I was late to work on Monday, mostly because it was Monday, and because it was raining. It's not like I had a long commute or anything, but it seemed like everything always moved slower when it rained during the summer.
Kara was actually at work and in her office when I got there, which was surprising enough all on it's own, but she had Adam in there with her, which was even more surprising since it meant she was actually doing something library-related and not novel-related.
When Adam came back out to his desk ten minutes later, he was clutching a piece of paper, and almost jumping up and down he was so excited. "I have a book challenge!" He announced. "Oh my god, this is awesome."
"Like a program?" I was confused.
Adam scrunched his face at me. "What? No, like someone actually printed the Reconsideration of Library Materials form off the website and challenged one of my books! They want us to put it in the adult fiction section."
Right. That's what it had sounded like, but I don’t know, it seemed like excitement wasn’t the appropriate reaction to news like that. Unless you were Adam, I suppose.
"So what do you have to do now?"
"I have to write a letter!" He said it with the same enthusiasm he had used for announcing the challenge in the first place, and then we both started laughing, because no one should be that excited about writing a letter, ever.
Adam took the entire day to write his letter. This was mostly because he didn’t just sit down at his desk and write a response. He sat at his desk for five minutes and then spent the rest of the hour wandering around the library, talking to people, or sitting at the desk talking about how he needed to write the rest of the letter, then he’d wander back to the work room and write another sentence before repeating the entire process again. I knew it was just his process for working through something, but it was actually exhausting to watch.
That afternoon, Adam was still supposedly writing his letter. Lil and I were in the middle of a quiet hour on the reference desk when Archie approached us nervously. He was almost wringing his hands.
"What do you need, sweetie?" Lil asked.
"Um." Archie said. "Oh my gosh. There's a guy over there." He half-flapped one of his hands in the direction of the row of computers. "Um. This guy. He's sitting over there, and he's looking at some stuff. On the computer. You know, like, um, inappropriate stuff."
Lil and I exchanged looks. "David," I said. "You know as long as it's not illegal, we don't police what anyone's looking at, right?"
"Oh yeah." Archie nodded, and now he really was wringing his hands. "I know that. But, um, it's just that, he's not really, um, it's that he's not... inside his pants." He said the last part all in a rush and managed to look even more awkward than before.
Nice. I turned to Lil, because honestly? What's the correct response to something like that? Lil folded her arms across her chest. "Oh, hell no. I've got this one."
That was actually a really good response.
The work room door opened and Adam came back out onto the floor just in time to hear Lil's voice raised loud enough to be clearly heard across the entire floor. "What I'm saying is you need to zip it back up and leave the building immediately."
Adam's face was priceless, like a hybrid of surprise and delight. "Oh my god." He mouthed at me. "What did I miss?"
"Sir," Lil's voice carried over to the reference desk again. "If you don't, I'm going to call the police."
"Gosh." Archie said.
-----
By the end of the week, there had been challenge forms turned in for over seventy books in the teen collection. Adam's excitement had been tempered slightly, something I think had less to do with realizing the potential seriousness of the situation, and more to do with realizing that now he was going to have to write seventy of those response letters.
Kara, on the other hand, was officially freaking out. That's how we all ended up in the meeting room on the fourth floor Friday morning. Well, everyone except for Lil, who volunteered to work at the reference desk instead. Megan even came up from the children's room.
Simon arrived fifteen minutes late, with Randy and Ryan Seacrest from Human Resources in tow. It seemed like Ryan spend half of his time doing Human Resources related tasks, and the rest of his time acting as Simon's personal assistant.
"So." Simon said, seating himself at the head of the conference table. "Exactly how many titles were challenged here?"
"Seventy seven." Adam said. "They're mostly from our GLBT teen booklist, and then from the related subject headings."
"But, at least that means someone knows how to do a subject search in the catalog." Anoop offered helpfully.
"Yay, bibliographic instruction!" I added. Simon looked at both of us like we’d each grown an extra head.
Megan took Anoop's pen and started to draw daises in the margin of his notepad. Anoop arrived at every meeting prepared to take notes. The rest of us weren’t so organized.
"So let me see if I understand this correctly." Simon said. "We have seventy seven challenges to our collection because some community group thinks you're inflicting your gay agenda on their children?"
"Apparently." Adam shrugged.
"Whoa." Ryan interrupted. "Simon, I don't think we want to start..."
Simon rolled his eyes. "Oh come on. Like everyone here doesn't know he's gay."
"Wait," Adam said. "Who's gay?"
Ryan looked horrified.
-----
When Simon Cowell descended from his office on the fourth floor and visited the lowly peons in the rest of the library, he usually announced his arrival by standing just inside the lobby doors and folding his arms across his chest. Then he surveyed the entire floor with an expression that implied it smells bad and he’s just waiting to see whose fault it is.
Actually, there was a pretty good chance it did smell bad on the second floor, since it was a public library. It was hard to tell, since the rest of us were used to the smell of unwashed library patron.
Then, Simon usually messed with our heads. As Riverside City Librarian, and acting director of the city’s three libraries, it was in his job description to make us second guess every choice we made in the last week. If we looked up at the reference desk and waited to see what he wanted, he asked why we weren’t working. If we ignored him when he walked in, and kept working, he told us it was “very poor customer service. Quite awful, really.”
“He just likes fucking with our heads.” Adam had shrugged it off after Simon announced, after a brief walk through the teen and fiction areas, that he didn’t want to see any books on display, because it made the library look cluttered.
“I’ll fuck with his head.” Lil grumbled at the next desk. I think she meant it in a way that involved physical violence. Lil and Simon had a long, not so pleasant history that had culminated in his not promoting her to library manager. This had all happened shortly before I started working at Franklin, but I had heard about it several times already. If you wanted to start a conversation in the work room, you’d just mention Simon Cowell.
Instead of promoting Lil, who had five years experience at Franklin and years of prior experience at multiple busy city libraries, Simon had hired Kara, who was less interested in managing a library than she was in her budding chick lit romance novel career. Her debut novel was titled “No Boundaries” and a poster-sized version of the cover was framed on her office wall.
“Kris, you know why he didn’t hire me.” Lil had said to me the third or fourth time I had heard the story. Then she gathered the draft schedule she was working on since Kara wasn’t any good at scheduling, and headed out to the reference desk without explaining why.
Adam was at his desk and Anoop had just returned from lunch, Matt from IT following after him, as usual. “Why?” I asked. “Why didn’t he hire her?”
“Because he’s threatened by a successful black woman?” This was Matt’s suggestion, and Adam and I both turned to look at each other.
“Whaaaat?” Adam said skeptically. He raised his eyebrows at Anoop. “Do you think that’s what it is?”
“You realize I’m not black, right?” Anoop said, deadpan. Matt cackled in approval.
“Fuck you.” Adam retorted. “See if I ever try to include you in a conversation again.”
“If only.” Anoop sighed, sitting down at his desk. Matt perched on the corner of the desk, reading what was on the computer screen over Anoop’s shoulder.
“I think he didn’t hire her because she’s been the president of the city employees union since she started working here, she stands up to Simon in meetings, and she made him look bad that one time at the board meeting.” Adam said. “Or maybe it’s because she’s black.”
“And because Kara’s hot.” Matt finished. Trust Matt to up the inappropriateness of a conversation exponentially. “You all know what I’m doing if Simon ever tries anything with me.” He patted the front pocket of his jacket reassuringly. “I’ve got my resignation letter right here in my pocket, all ready to go. He goes too far with me, I’m going to whip this baby out and sign it. I’m just waiting for him to try something.”
This seemed a little too Milton from Office Space to me, but who was I to judge the behavior of someone who actually had an office in the basement of the library?
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Adam said absently. “You’re going to burn the building down, Milton.” This clearly wasn’t the first time he had heard Matt’s plan.
“You make fun of me now, but you won’t be laughing when Simon comes after you and you don’t have a plan.” Matt informed him.
Adam shrugged. “I have a plan. Simon’s gone back upstairs, I’m going to go put my books back on display.” He picked up the pile of young adult titles Simon had pulled from the shelves and dumped ceremoniously in the back room.
This was exciting. Anoop actually looked up from his computer monitor, not quite curious, but definitely interested enough to pay attention. It never would have occurred to me to openly defy my boss’ orders, especially over something as unimportant as books displayed on the end of shelves, but I wasn’t Adam Lambert.
After working with Adam for a few weeks, I had realized that he just liked being provocative. He liked swearing in a staff meeting and then pretending it had just slipped out. Or saying something too loudly at the reference desk so everyone on the second floor turned to look at him. The hair and clothes were mostly for the skeptical looks he got from parents during library programs and the disparaging comments from Simon. Once, Simon had called Adam’s jacket “too theatrical” and Adam had responded with, “I think it’s just the right amount of theatrical.”
Simon had actually laughed at this, and it had thrown me for the entire rest of the day. It was unnatural, like astroturf on an outdoor field, or seeing a dachshund with a bad back on one of those little wheely carts.
Adam had put the books back on display in the teen section. The next day, Randy Jackson came down to the second floor and commented on how nice all the displayed books looked, and he thought that was a great idea.
Randy was the assistant city librarian, and other than publishing rambly, nonsensical blog posts on the library website, I’m not sure exactly what he did. He usually wore flashy, dramatic outfits, but in a completely different way than Adam. Randy would wear a bright yellow argyle sweater with pin striped pants. Like a swing dancer had suddenly decided to go golfing.
Randy and Kara had interviewed me when I applied for the reference librarian position at Franklin. Randy had spent half the time in the interview going off on tangents about his own work experiences in between asking me questions. Then he had called me “dawg.” Kara, at least, had managed to stay on topic, but kept using catchphrases like “community outreach” and “defining standards of excellence” in sentences where they didn’t really belong.
It had been a pretty weird interview.
-----
"Oh, fuck me." Adam said on Saturday when he sat down at his desk. Archie looked worried, like he always does when Adam swore, like he was expecting something terrible to happen. Like maybe God would strike us all down on the spot with a lightning bolt. Archie probably stopped holding onto anything metal, just in case.
"Um, no thanks." I said, like I always did, and Adam didn't even react, which wasn't a good sign. "What?"
"They found my e-mail address." Adam pulled his computer monitor around towards me, but it still wasn't close enough for me to read his e-mail, so I got up and stood behind him, reading over his shoulder. That week, he had a patch of blue hair on the top of his head.
Adam never deleted anything from his inbox, so there were a lot of messages in the first place. His total inbox count was well over 5,000. But he was right, there were close to fifty messages from different names, all about the book challenges and the lists on the website.
He scrolled through the messages quickly.
“What’s next? Playboys displayed at the check out counter?”
“It’s people like you that make me realize how far our society has fallen. You are influencing young minds with the blatant promotion of your sexually corrupt lifestyle. The power your twisted influence has must be intoxicating. You’re going to burn in Hell if you don’t repent.”
“I can’t believe you would put something like this on your website - it’s disgusting.”
“I pray for people like you. You should use your gifts and abilities to set them on the right path towards a decent life. That is the reason God gave those gifts to you.”
"Get back in the CLOSET, where YOU BELONG."
Curiosity got the better of Archie, and he hovered close enough to read the messages, but still far enough away to escape any lightning bolts. "Gosh." He said. "That's so rude."
-----
When Archie came into the workroom Wednesday afternoon, he was actually wheezing, like he had just ran up the stairs. "Gosh," he said by way of greeting. Then he paused to breathe for several seconds.
"Exciting day?" I asked.
Archie took another deep breath. "Oh my heck, there are people protesting outside."
"About what?" Anoop asked.
Adam and I both frowned at him. "What do you think they're protesting about?" Adam said, waving the stack of challenge forms in the air.
"They have signs." Archie continued. "And they're waving them around like this." He waved his arm in the air to demonstrate.
Part Two