I am exhausted. My feet hurt and if I see another Dewey Decimal number I think I’m going to scream. I really need to mellow out. I’m sitting in the little room listening to Kate Bush and thinking about smoking a cigarette, but that would mean I would have to actually pull myself off the floor and crawl over to my purse. Simply thinking about moving makes me more tired — as if that was possible.
Today after school was my first day working at the library. This older lady, Gladys, kept following me around, making sure I was shelving the books correctly. She was literally breathing on my neck, she stood so close behind me. She smelled like old people mints and lavender perfume. I wanted to gag.
It’s not rocket science, scanning the books in, putting them in order on the cart, then placing them back in their proper place on the shelves, but Gladys seemed to think she needed to follow me the whole time. I mean, if they didn’t think I could put books in numerical order why did they hire me in the first place?
Every year the library hires two new “pages,” as they call us, which is totally cringy. My friend Laurie applied, too, but I got one of the positions and she didn’t. Now she’s getting a job at McDonald’s, which sucks for her. She says she’s happy for me, but when she showed me her brown polyester uniform I felt really bad.
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Image: Kate Bush, as featured in The New Music, Harmony Books, 1981.
Welcome to the Little Room is a series of 250-word re-imagined vignettes from my ’80s youth with a focus on music and style. It appears weekly on periodicult.com.
