Wrapped Up in Books

Avery Sage walked out of her dorm room, hands laddened down with four books. She would have rather carried them in her bag, but it was full of her school books and random pieces of paper. Regardless of that, however, the books she carried where due to be returned at the library, Ry having finished reading the last one the day before, just before she'd fallen asleep. Each book was of a respectable length, all over 200 pages each and they had occupied her free time over the course of the last two weeks. She would have finished them quicker than that, but she had recently found herself with an impressive amount of homework.

She walked down the stairs of the dorm building, making sure to take care and not trip over her own two feet, which she often found herself doing when her hands were busy doing something else. It oddly affected her sense of balance, having her hands full.

Having suceeded in that, she made her way over to the main building of the campus, where the library was located.

Deeply interested in an article on the hadron collider at CERN, Pavel Alexei was bent over the front counter of the library, silently dragging his thumb down the page as he read. It wasn't often that he got quiet time like this; his friends were not exactly interested in randomly throwing particles together to see what happened, so they stayed far away from his shifts as an assistant in the library.

He wasn't sure how he'd ended up with the job, as he hadn't asked for it. Mr. Keaton, who ran the library, just happened to notice that Pasha spent a good bit of his time on the weekends helping point out different sections and books to the other students. After that, while not official, Pasha had been the librarian's assistant. It was a title only, as Pasha was pretty much the actual librarian on Saturday mornings, Mr. Keaton only to be found sleeping late in his room.

The bell over the door alerted Pasha that someone was entering the library, but he was only a few paragraphs from the end of the article and certainly wasn't going to stop now. "Heylo!" he called in his lingering Russian accent. "I vill be vith you in a second."

Ry managed to safely get to the library, nearly dropping the books a couple of times, but balancing them at the last minute. She walked to the library, then puzzled for a moment how to get the door open, since it was one of those doors that had a push down handle.

After a moment, though, she managed to get in the library without dropping the books yet again, smiling at the familiar tinkle of the bell above the door as she did so. She was just making her way over to where returned books went to get reshelved, when she heard someone. Ry looked in the direction it came from to see a person reading something.

"It's fine," she said. "I'm in here often enough to know how things work and where things are. No need to stop reading whatever that is you're reading. I can manage on my own."

She dropped off the books where they belonged and then wandered over to her favorite section of the library, eyes scanning over titles.

Pavel quickly slowed his reading speed back down to the steady crawl that he enjoyed when he was not hurrying through something, and when he finished he sighed with that particular kind of enjoyment one gets from being smarter than they were five minutes earlier. He carefully marked his page in the magazine with one of the free book-markers the library gave out and went to look for whomever had just come into the library. Anyone that he came upon would definitely be the one, unless someone had taken a liking to sleeping in the library. Turning a corner, he found a girl about his age poring over the books in the aisle. With an enthusiastic step forward, he cleared his throat as a warning to his presence before starting up.

"Heylo! I am sorry for my rudeness before. It is just that I get so caught up. Excuse my manners. My name is Pavel." He stuck an eager hand out for her to shake, a leftover affectation from his first days in America that he hadn't been able to stop, even after he learned that it wasn't very popular with young people. "May I help you?"

Avery was pondering a certain book when she heard someone clearing their throats. She turned to see the person that had been at the library's counter. He apologized and introduced himself. Pavel? Avery thought. That's a little odd, but it sort of explains the accent...

She saw that his hand was outstretched and stared at it for a moment before realizing she was meant to shake it and say something in return. She gingerly took the hand to shake, the action seeming odd and awkward to her. "I'm Avery," she said, wondering what else she should say, if anything. Then she realized it would be best to answer his question. "Er...I'm fine, really. I come here a lot so..."

It briefly crossed his mind that he might ought to be uncomfortable in the moment before the girl took his hand, but then he smiled broadly as she shook and gave her name. Avery. Not exactly....feminine, but it was somehow fitting. "It's nice to meet you," he said, verbally playing out the rest of his mental construct for meeting people. Even after seven years in the states, it was so much easier to follow the rules that they had taught him than to try things on his own that might or might not work.

Glancing at the shelf she was looking at, Pasha shook his head. "That's the thing about coming here too often. You get settled vith the books. It is like you are checking out the same things over and over, in different words." Spinning around to face the opposite aisle, he scanned quickly, his memory working to find the exact location of the book. "Aha!" he said in a half-whispered celebratory exclamation. "You should try different things," he said, handing her the book. It was Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, a favorite of his. Science fiction had come to be one of his favorite genres, even if it wasn't always so accurate. "Like this for example," he said, tapping the book's cover, "everyone could love this book."

Avery watched this Pavel person as he talked, turning to look at the shelf behind her. She had taken a look at the shelf a few weeks back, but nothing had caught her attention then. Then Pavel took a book from the shelf, his whispered triumph loud in the quiet library. Avery looked at the book. While she might not have picked it for the title, she had to admit that maybe it would be a good read. But she honestly should stop judging books by their covers. The attractiveness of the book didn't matter. The interior did.

She pondered it over for another moment. "Well," she finally said, "you seem like an intelligent person, so I guess I could give it a try. It's always nice to check out new things anyway. It expands your horizons after all." She shrugged lightly.

Still smiling, Pavel blushed mildly at the mention of his intelligence. It was true, he knew that was the only reason he had ever been brought to Canada and then to here, America, but it was still not something he talked about often. Small mentions of it tended to make him feel as if he was being teased, but he didn't think this girl, who he had never spoken to before, would do such a thing. "You are in my year, no?" he asked, not bothering to rearrange the question properly. He had learned that people would either mock his accent or ignore it, and it was much easier for him to speak in his own broken way than anything. Learning a few extra languages did not make him not Russian, especially as he spent most of his time with his sister practicing their Russian, determined not to forget. "In fact," he noted, studying her face, "you are in my house as vell, no?"

Avery looked at Pavel for a moment, noticing a light blush. Then she thought about his questions. "I believe so, but I'm never sure on these types of things. I get faces mixed up easily," she said. She gave him a small shrug, and noticing he was still holding the book asked, "Can I have it?" She motioned toward the book with her head.

"Oh!" Looking down, he realized he indeed was still holding the book in his hands. He often got sidetracked in such a way, and he was lucky that he'd never gotten seriously hurt by simply becoming too occupied with something else to notice that he was near a cliff or an oncoming car. Sheepishly handing over the book, he glanced at the floor for a moment before recovering his natural cool. "Vell, you are Meriwether, fourth year, right?" he asked, wondering if it was possible that they were really in the same house. It would seem strange that they had never managed to meet before, as Pasha put a lot of his attention into knowing people.

Ry smiled a little at his surprise to still be holding the book in his hand. He handed it over to her and Avery opened it to take a look at the front page. She was reading over the first few sentences when she heard Pavel say something else. She realized he was trying to confirm they were in the same house. "Yeah, I am," she replied, looking up from the book. "And I'm going to assume you are as wel, so we are indeed in the same house and year." Then, unable to help herself, she looked back down at the page she had previously been reading.

Grinning gleefully as he often did when he realized he had been right about something, Pasha nodded, childishly happy for a moment. His happiness shifted though, into literary joy as he saw that Avery was already running her eyes across the words that had drawn him in so few years before. "I should probably...just let you read, now. I vould not get in the middle of someone and that book for a million dollars." Turning to the aisle behind him again, he pulled out Ender's Shadow as well and placed it beside the girl on the shelf she'd been facing. "A companion piece, if you vish." He nodded politely and turned to make his trek back to the counter and his Popular Science magazine.

Avery just nodded at the other book, not willing to look up. She had to decide if this was worth finishing, so far so good. She stood there for a while, just reading, until she realized that she was hungry, and that she had not yet eaten breakfast. Memorizing the page number, she closed the book and grabbed the other one from beside her, walking to check-out the books. She might as well.

Pasha was flipping through the pages, now, of Popular Mechanics, which was much less interesting than he had expected it to be compared to his other magazines. Laying it aside, he picked up pen and paper and made a note that he must finish his homework for Physics and Magical Theory, which he had completely forgotten about. Hearing a sound, he looked up and noticed that the girl, Avery, had come to the counter, books in hand. "Good decision," he noted, reaching his hand out to take them from her. "I couldn't have made a better one myself."

Avery couldn't help but nearly laugh as he mentioned how good 'her' choice was. "Well," she said, a hint of laughter in her tone, "seeing as you sort of made it to begin with...But it really does seem like quite an interesting book. And to think I never would have picked it up at my own choice. Perhaps I should start looking at more things. Never know what I'll find that way."

Pasha smiled as he used the scanner to check out the books. It was one of the best things about the school, he thought, that even though they could use magic to run everything, they didn't. Technology was one of his interests, and it was nice that they kept machines around instead of wasting magic on things that could be done by hand. "Vell," he noted as he stacked the books back in front of the girl, "you could have put them back, could you not? But you chose to keep them." He put the scanner back in its dock and handed over the small receipt that came from the machine, showing which books had been taken out and when they would be due back. "You never know vhat you may find ven you go outside your comfort zone. New books, new places, new people. A vorld you never knew." He shook his head when he realized that he was going off on a bit of a tangent. He knew that sometimes his enthusiasm could overwhelm people, especially the types of people who visited the library on a regular basis. "I hope you enjoy them."

"I suppose you have a point," Avery (I'm getting all my charries confused right now...too much posting) agreed with him. "But it seems to good a book to put down. Although I have to say I normally don't approve of having a main character who isn't even in double digits of age. This one seems like it could work out though. I suppose I'll let you know what I think once I finsih, since you seem to like the books so much. It would only be right of me to do so after all." She gave him a smile, picking up her books from the counter. "See you around I suppose."

Pasha smiled and waved as he watched the girl leave. He was always happy to see someone leave with a book they would truly enjoy, and he was yet to see anyone not enjoy Ender's Game. He began to wonder again why he'd never noticed her in class before, but brushed it off. In class he was an entirely different creature, mostly devoted to carefully ticking away every bit of information given. He whistled to himself as he went back to his homework, wondering how long it would be before he saw Avery again.

Avery walked along the path back to her dorm, almost tempted to try walking as she read, but the last time she'd done that she'd tripped over a rock and...well that was just a bad day for her. So, she refrained from doing so. It was difficult, though, because not only did the book seem interesting, but that boy in the library had been a little cute and she wanted a good reason to talk with him again.