Threshold by Caitlin R. Kiernan Read Free Book Online

the bus.

    Dancy’s lost deep in the glossy pages of 1963, already halfway through her second heavy librarybound volume of National Geographic that morning, half a year stitched between sturdy brown covers, when she looks up, blinks, and sees the tall girl at the information counter. All skin and bones, her grandmomma would have said, Ain’t nobody been feedin’ you? and Dancy closes the book, closes the year, the month, story about Egyptian excavations unfinished, and she watches the tall girl as she talks to the man behind the counter. The girl has set a cardboard box on the counter and keeps pointing at it. Dancy wishes that she could hear what they’re saying, could see what’s in the box, but the girl is whispering and too far away, besides. She has hair that isn’t long, but isn’t short, either, stringyflat hair the color of broken walnut shells, and Dancy knows that this is the girl, doesn’t know her name, but that can wait, time for that later, sure enough that this is the same girl she’s been sitting here, day in, day out, two weeks reading musty old magazines, waiting for her to come.
    Dancy pushes the National Geographic s aside, January through June, six months smooth across varnished wood, and she slides her chair back, stands up, and the gay boy who tried to give her the Loving Sheperd card glances at her from his desk, then. Possessive, half-resentful glance like she’s some opportunity that he’s missed, gold star beside his name he’ll never get because she wouldn’t cooperate, because she doesn’t have the good sense to know when someone’s just trying to help. Dancy ignores him, picks up her duffel bag from the library floor, and the brown-haired girl’s still talking, still pointing at her box, Campbell’s tomato soup box but anything might be in a box like that, she thinks.
    She counts the steps, better than trying to figure out what the hell she’s going to say when she gets there, better to think about something else, how the rough beige carpet under her feet turns to smooth beige linoleum halfway to the information counter. Twelve steps from her table, linoleum scuffed by shoes, scuffed by years of shoes, and when she reaches twenty-seven and looks up again, the girl has lifted the box, holds it under her left arm, leaning a bit to her right to compensate, to balance, and the black man behind the counter points towards the escalators, points up at the great open atrium at the center of the library, the second or third or fourth floor, no way to know which. She can tell the box is heavy, the expression on the girl’s face, the way the wirethin muscles in her arm stand out. Dancy stops, thirty-one steps, and if the girl has to go to the escalator then she’ll have to come right past her to get there.
    “Thank you,” the girl says, louder now or Dancy’s just close enough to hear, and the man behind the counter nods his head and goes back to work, back to his computer screen. And she’s right, and it’s only a few seconds before the girl with walnut hair is coming towards her. And of course she sees Dancy, of course she notices the girl with skin so white it’s a wonder she can’t see straight through her, cornsilk hair and her pink eyes with their startling crimson pupils; dangerous to walk in the sunlight, too blind to drive, but at least she has that much going for her, hard to miss a girl like Dancy Flammarion, hard not to gawk, and this one time she’s glad, this one time it doesn’t matter when the girl stares, maybe not meaning to but her eyes wide, and then she looks quickly away. That’s nice, Dancy thinks, so used to people not giving a shit, like she was in a carnival sideshow tent and they’d paid for the privilege so what business did she have being offended if they stared or laughed or pointed their fingers at her. But now the girl’s staring down at her scruffy leather work boots as she passes, like she never even saw Dancy, so Dancy has to say something to