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hours there that first day, poring over diagrams and tables, the print often so small I had to bring my face down close to the musty-smelling pages. I went back the very next week. Dance class this time, Alex declared grimly when we said goodbye in front of school. “Tick-tock,” she said. Eventually I worked up the courage to check out a book, then a second, the due date stamped in the back with a satisfying thwack!
    I remember those as some of my happiest hours. To sit at the end of those narrow aisles with the afternoon sun filtering through the windows, the smell of old books heavy in the air, the whine of the overhead light like the honeybees that gathered in my mother’s garden, come June, by the dozens—it was as close as I have ever come to understanding worship. My father was the only regular churchgoer in our family, but on the rare occasions my mother and I joined him, I was always surprised to find how much I liked it. I couldn’t tell you much of anything about Father Timothy’s sermons; I don’t believe I registered more than a handful of words over the years. All I heard as I sat between my parents in the hard-backed pew was the cavernous silence that continued even as he spoke, and the hundreds of small sounds under that sound, the echoes produced by the shuffle of feet moving against the wooden floors or the noise of someone swallowing. The library had that same persistent quiet, a stillness that I’m afraid made it all too easy for me to lose track of time. I often climbed the stairs with every intention of leaving within the hour, only to find myself startled by the click of the lights as Mrs. Farmington turned them off, one by one, signaling it was time to go.
    It was in the anatomy books that I found the most astonishing things: diagrams that unfolded like accordions to show tendons and muscles, pages of illustrations mapping out vast territories of veins. A single drawing that outlined all twenty-six bones of the foot. I lost myself in them the way I’d always lost myself in books, only instead of Catherine from Wuthering Heights weeping over Heathcliff or Emma Woodhouse getting into trouble over one thing or another, there was the fascinating architecture of the human skull, or the fat gray bellows of the lungs. There were the twin arches of the clavicle, the tiny, saclike alveoli clustered together like buds on the verge of blooming. I traced the bones of the leg up through the hip girdle and let my fingers wander over the pattern of veins. Later, I would stand in front of my bedroom mirror wearing nothing but my slip and start all over again: lingual artery , carotid , coronary , hepatic .
    I was careful to visit the library only on those days when Alex had something else—her goddamn elocution or whatever it was. I told my mother I was going to Alex’s straight from school; to Alex, I said I was going home, that my mother needed me for one thing or another. Each time I lied it bothered me less, as though lying were a sweater I stretched with each use until the shape of it molded to my body. Then there were moments I wished I could take it all back, afternoons as I hurried down the sunny stretch of East Walnut when I longed to do it all over again, to go back to that afternoon in Mr. Percy’s classroom and erase that first lie as easily as chalk from a board. No, I might have said. It’s not Mr. Percy. This is what I love—holding the tray aloft, the microscope. The tiny, waxen heart.
    But the truth is that I was afraid I would lose her. Not because I’d finally found my heart’s desire, and it was something so crude, so entirely lacking in glamour that I understood immediately Alex would never approve. And not because I had grown up a lonely child, unaccustomed to explaining my many peculiarities, or even because I was already used to maintaining a certain border between private and public, to turning a particular face to the world. Keeping up appearances , Mother called it: the silk