that.”
“Your duty at this desk is to help people with circulation questions. How can you answer their questions if you can’t hear them? If you want to listen to music, you can be reassigned to shelving duty quite easily.”
Ryan nodded noncommittally. Shelving books was the worst job in the library, by far, and everyone knew it. Endless and constantly growing stacks of worn books—often with infuriating broken bindings—requiring placement in one precise location on one of the hundreds of shelves. Shelving was a drudgery mainly relegated to incoming freshmen that did not know any better when signing up for the work-study jobs. Ryan had been on shelving duty last year, and he had no intentions of returning to it.
“You’re right,” Ryan said. “I won’t put on my headphones again. Really, I promise.”
“Oh, I know you won’t. If I ever, ever see you wearing headphones at this desk again, you will be formally let go from your position. Is that clear?”
Ryan nodded. “Crystal.”
“Good,” Mrs. McCreedy said. “Since you’ve already been warned once, you can place this cart back onto shelves before you leave.”
Ryan rose and leaned over the desk. She had pushed over a rickety steel cart filled with nonfiction books . It was a sight he knew all too well from his shelving days. He guessed from the size of the stacks that it would easily take an hour or more to place all of the books in their appropriate places.
Ryan looked up at her with resigned dismay. “Today?”
“Yes, I should think so. And don’t leave until it’s finished. Maybe this will remind you how easy you have it at this desk. I’m certain one of the freshmen would jump at the chance to have your position.”
“But I have class at two.” Ryan glanced to the clock. He would never finish the shelving in time.
“Do you?” Mrs. McCreedy checked her watch. “Well then, you had better get started.”
Ryan sat down heavily and shut his laptop. She was mental if she thought he would skip class to shelve books for her. At the very least the clash between capitalism and human rights would have to wait until he got back to his dorm later that evening. He wrapped up his headphones with an assenting nod, tossing his backpack over the desk and onto the stacks of hard covers in the cart.
“Then I guess I better get to it.”
“Very good,” Janet McCreedy said. She turned and plodded toward the coffee lounge, stopping on the way to admonish a group of girls for laughing in a designated quiet section.
Ryan pushed the rusted cart of books, lurching it into motion. The front right wheel emitted a sharp squeak. Ryan smirked; Janet McCreedy was diabolical. He rolled the noisy cart through the otherwise silent library toward the nonfiction levels, causing many heads to turn and scowl. In return Ryan offered a self-deprecating shrug.
The windowless nonfiction levels of the library were a desolate place for the majority of the semester, excluding the days directly preceding midterms and finals. Long narrow aisles ran between cumbersome shelves and an endless treasury of enlightening texts. Faintly humming fluorescent lights cast the maze of shelves and immaculate tile floors in a harsh clarity.
With an apathetic sigh and a long stretch, Ryan began the task of organizing the texts. The daunting piles of worn books in the cart spanned an array of subjects, from The Life Cycle of the Honey Bee to A Brief History of Italian Neorealism to Nero: A Leader Misunderstood . Ryan knew the best strategy to deal with this task, as he was no amateur in the refined art of nonfiction shelving. He began to methodically organize the books into separate stacks by field: biology, history, music, film, engineering, geology, art, and so on. Shelving duty, although monotonous, had proven interesting to Ryan in some aspects. As he passed each book onto a respective stack, he decided shelving duty was not as bad as he remembered. It often exposed him to unusual or