Treasure Island!!! Read Free

supportive teddy bear of a guy, which inclined Lars to see employers as somewhat sympathetic and endearing—and this no matter how often I told him about Nancy’s flaws. I think he was too invested in my image as a nice girl (docile, accommodating) to appreciate the emotional territory I was exploring. Was I a bit acerbic at times? Yes, I was—not just with Nancy, but with him. I heard Lars out, of course, but in the end I dismissed his worries. It’s what Dr. Livesey would have done.
    As I grew more confident about what boldness meant, I began to see that the real problem was I had been letting Nancy define my job for me. She was my boss, of course, but from the moment I had been hired, my duties—which as far as I was concerned were somewhat flexible—had devolved to drudgery of the most degrading sort. When I think about all the different things I might have done for The Pet Library—well, it almost seems a joke! I could have been entrusted with budget, or community outreach, or acquisitions—not that I was terribly interested in any of these things—but instead Nancy had me scraping out litter boxes. I never said this out loud, but also I objected to the fact that she made no effort to build a more varied collection of animals. Before my time, she’d set up a super-size drop-off kennel in the parking lot for discards and, if anything, the Library had become the town’s dumping ground for unwanted cats and dogs. Two weeks after Easter, you should have seen the rabbit landslide. Certainly I’m no economist, but even I could tell that the llamas, who stayed in a three-sided shelter out back, wouldn’t qualify as a cost-effective acquisition. The enormous amount of care they required—which Nancy claimed stemmed from their emotional problems (they’d been abandoned by their previous owners after a bitter divorce)—hardly balanced out the minor delight they afforded patrons. No one had the
space
to check them out, although people at the Shop ‘n’ Go sometimes stared at the llamas’ scabs as they loaded their groceries. Why didn’t she put
me
, a college graduate, in charge of acquisitions?
    It’s dumbfounding, but even after I’d read
Treasure Island
a few times, I clung to my bitterness and didn’t do all that much to change my situation. For a while my attitude was: “I don’t mind sitting up here at the counter, reading my book, and charging out a cat or two, but I am
not
going to fall all over myself checking the hermit crabs’ bedding for fungus gnats.” I told myself I was a circulation librarian, not a cleaning service, and I consoled myself with small liberties—being slow to feed the fish, for example (
they
can’t complain), or dipping into Nancy’s Post-its supply and taking notes on Chapter XXV: I Strike the Jolly Roger.
    â€œBut you have to be careful,” Lars said when we talked about it over burritos. “If you lost your job, what would you do? Unless you want to borrow money again from your parents.”
    I didn’t want to get into a money discussion with Lars. I was pretty sure he had more of it, though it had taken me a while to catch on since he works a low-paying job at a computer help desk and spends next to
nothing
on his clothes. “How’d you get
that
?” I’d said the first night I stumbled drunkenly into his condo. Turns out that behind even a slightly bedraggled guy there can lurk a Bang & Olufsen sound system. “What kind of music do you like?” he answered and further discussion got muffled in the make-out moves. Since then we had managed to dance around the big ugly sinkhole subject of money. I knew that two years ago he’d backpacked in Guatemala and had immediately paid off his debts for the trip by cleaning a foundry. I suspected he had a work ethic I wasn’t interested in exploring.
    â€œ
Treasure Island
,” Lars mused.