Songs without Words Read Free

than a man?
    Harper left the library a few minutes later, a load of folders under her arm and a crammed backpack slung over her shoulder. As she skipped up the steps to the Administration Building, the door swung open and Mary Tillotson stepped out, sunglasses in hand. They both stopped short. As Harper worked to get her folders under control again, she saw the unhappily startled look on Mary’s face give way to carefully constructed indifference.
    Wow , Harper thought, this sucks .
    “Harper,” Mary said, stiffly, sliding her sunglasses into place.
    “Hi, Mary,” Harper said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Turning in your grades?”
    “No. I didn’t teach this semester. I had a committee meeting.”
    “Oh.”
    Though they were able to be civil to one another, Mary’s distaste for this exchange was palpable. Years ago, before Harper had any inkling that she could be Chelsea’s lover, she had hoped for a real friendship with Mary. Now, obviously, that was never going to happen.
    It was always anybody’s guess what they’d say to one another whenever they met. The answer this time, apparently, was practically nothing.
    “Well, have a nice summer,” Harper said, moving past her into the building. That was awkward , Harper thought. Thankfully, it didn’t happen very often. Mary never seemed to come to the library anymore, which wasn’t too surprising under the circumstances. Still, she was bound to be on campus now and then. And even when she wasn’t there incarnate like today, it was hard to avoid other reminders such as the Volkswagen-sized Tillotson in the lobby of the Administration Building. Harper stopped in front of the painting, an impressionistic portrait of a woman in blues and golds. It was typical of her work, bold, beautiful and suggestive, but not explicit. Harper sighed, then swung by the mailboxes for one last check. Peering through the glass door of her box, she saw that it was empty.
    She headed across campus toward the parking lot, enjoying the warm spring evening. Preston Carlisle, a foreign language professor, was suddenly walking beside her. “Hey, Harper,” he said, “congratulations on another school year.”
    “Oh, Preston, hi. You too. Any exciting travel destination for you this summer?”
    “Oxford,” Preston enthused. “I can’t wait for a chance to work in the Bodleian Library, in those great halls of classical learning.”
    He was sincere. And passionate. Sincerely passionate. Harper was moved by his passion. She could easily imagine him opening the dusty cover of an obscure book with the ecstasy of a young man unveiling for the first time the breasts of a lover. Here was a man lamenting the obsolescence of books. He probably assumed she shared his admiration for this most prestigious of libraries. She was a librarian, after all. Unlike most bibliophiles she knew, though, she valued the wisdom imparted by books, but the medium didn’t really matter to her. A library of the future, she imagined, would be a phenomenally rich electronic database of texts encompassing all of written history, from Sumerian hieroglyphics to the latest Spiderman comic book, where no one would preside over the value or ranking of the information. It would be freely available to everyone via some miniature device held in the hand or implanted in the brain. Libraries, in the sense of a building a person visited, would no longer exist. This process was already well underway. To Harper, these were cheerful concepts.
    “How about you?” Preston asked as they stood at the fork in the cobbled path where they would separate.
    “House maintenance I’ve been putting off,” she told him. “Visiting the folks in Cape Cod, as usual. And there’s a video series that I’ve been working on for several years. I’m hoping to spend some time on that.”
    “You know,” he said, “I saw your video of Mary Tillotson. Someone told me about it and I checked it out of the library. I thought it was