Michael Guillebeau - MAD Librarian - You Gotta Fight for Your Right to Library

“Not as much as it would hurt me to see something happen to my Sweet…” He took a breath.

She reached up to wipe his eyes and that seemed to trigger the flood.

“I’m sorry, Serenity.” His voice was breaking and fighting through the sobs. “Sorry as hell for both of us. Mostly for me. I’ll always love you, but I can’t be a part of this. I know I just said that twice now, but it feels like a song stuck in my head and it’s a sad, bitter song for me, but it’s the only one I hear, over and over. I’ll move my stuff out today. I can’t do this anymore.”

She looked at him and wanted to argue. “I don’t know if I would love you if you could. And part of me—a big part of me—wishes I could be different.”

“I don’t. This is the Serenity I fell in love with, written in a big, big book.”

She could barely see as he walked away. Twenty years gone and only one thing left to say one last time. “I will always love me my cowboy.”

He turned partway and looked at the floor. “And I’ll always love me my Sweetblossom.”

“Maybe someday—”

There was a knock on the door and Joy, Doom and OHR came in without waiting. Joe slipped past them and out the door. Joy said, “First staff meeting in the palace,” and they pulled folding chairs up to the plywood.

Oddly, it felt like an ordinary day to Serenity. No rum, no crisis, just details of running the MAD: Life and death, and all that.

“We’re wasting the roof,” said Doom.

“Jesus, Doom,” said Joy. “We expanded times seven in every direction already. Give us a break.”

“No, listen to me. They’ve got these drones to deliver small packages. We could put a fleet of them on the roof and deliver books to homes and schools.”

“So we could,” said Serenity.

“We can use the roof for security, too,” said OHR. He gave the security status and talked about various weapons and their placements and backups.

“This feels like Eisenhower planning for D-Day,” Joy said.

“Just business,” said Serenity.

Joy closed her notebook and Doom smiled a slight smile as she held up a book.

“We’re not done with enemies,” she said.

“No,” said Serenity.

“So we need a weapon they won’t expect. A library weapon.”

She sat the book in her lap, opened it, and a white powder floated out in a cloud.

“Talcum powder,” she said. “But I’ve got a source that can make ricin—a powerful poison from beans of castor plants—in the back of her farm. We can send someone a book. After they open it, we carefully retrieve the book. And fade away.”

Joy and OHR exchanged shocked looks but Serenity just shook her head.

“There’s a line we’re not going to cross, Doom,” she said. “Somewhere.”

They all watched as Faulkner jumped into his wheel and started spinning faster and faster.

LIZZIE HAD NEVER in her life taken a thing that didn’t belong to her, and this is where it got her: grouchy from being up too early, tired from staying up too late—and the wig itched like hell. It was just her luck to get stuck wearing a god-damned cheap, sweaty, platinum blonde wig while going out into the searing Florida Panhandle heat and back into freezing hotel rooms. Over and over, all day long, trying to save money working on minimum wage cleaning rooms at the Emerald Coast Beach Hilton.

She tapped on the door to room 415 twice.

“Housekeeping,” she said in a clear, cheerful voice, the way the corporate trainer had told her.

There was no sound from the room. She stepped inside to the residue of a night of joy and margaritas and coconut oil—just like every other Florida hotel room. She peeled the gloves off her clammy hands and took the wig off to scratch her head. In the mirror, an angry young woman with a bright red mohawk and brown stubble on each side of her head stared back at her.

The mohawk had worked when she was in Los Angeles. There it was all about attitude and style. Lizzie Borden had been the future of rock and roll and she strutted out there, a cute, ballsy, fresh-faced little girl doing Florida blues rock with an L.A. edge to it. Both the crowds and the suits told her she was the new Janis Joplin.

Critics loved her first album. But then the record company was sold, and the new owner didn’t love her. He pulled the album, kept the rights to Lizzie’s music and her name, and told her she could buy it all back for a hundred thousand dollars.

So here she was, standing in front of a mirror in a dirty hotel room back in her hometown, trying to save up a hundred grand on minimum wage, pushing the cleaning cart around every day with a notebook tucked under the towels. She’d pull it out when new songs came to her, get the song down, and get the room cleaned fast. She couldn’t afford to get fired.

The wig was the hotel’s idea: No tattoos, no weird hair or piercings. The Hilton was a five-star hotel. So, she stopped shaving the sides of her head a couple of days ago.

To hell with it all, she thought. I’m a maid now, not a singer. Get over it.

As she finished the room, a line popped into her head. She started singing quietly, and then added a twist, a little downbeat blues riff with an angry vibe laid on top. Then she was jumping on the bed in front of the mirror, holding an invisible microphone, singing the song low to stay out of trouble, but singing it. Someday, she’d sing this one loud.

She hopped down and looked back in the mirror. The defiant red streak of hair burned straight and true through the brown bristles on the sides of her head.

“The hell with someday,” she told the mirror. “I’m shaving the sides tonight. After all, I’m the queen of rock and roll.”

She pulled the wig back on, smoothed the bed, and stepped out the door before pushing her cart to room 417.

The door was not quite closed. She knocked and called out the same robotic “Housekeeping.” The unlatched door made her nervous, but she pushed in anyway.

The smell hit her as soon as she opened the door. The room looked unused, except for a closed suitcase and an open overnight bag on the dresser.

“Housekeeping?” she called out again, hoping someone would answer and she could leave the room for the afternoon girl.

No one answered. She propped the door open with the cart and looked down at the open bag. It was filled with neat stacks of crisp hundred-dollar bills in paper wrappers, more money than she had ever seen. She stared at it for a moment, and then pulled her eyes away.

She tiptoed to the foot of the bed and peeked into the bathroom where the smell seemed to be coming from. There was nothing there but tiny bottles of unopened shampoo and unused towels. Maybe she could back out carefully and not have to clean at all. Get this room for free.

On her way out, she tripped over something at the edge of the bed and jumped. There was a man in a suit lying on the floor in the narrow space beside the bed and the bathroom wall.

“Sir?” she whispered. She looked at his head, which was lying in a pool of black-red blood and featured a neat hole in the middle of his forehead.

“Sir?” Her voice cracked. Lizzie leaned over and checked his neck for a pulse, and jumped back when she found his skin was already cold. She stood rooted in place for a minute with her hand over her mouth and her brain churning.

Lizzie had never in her life taken a thing that didn’t belong to her.

She took the money