Mimi peered at it. “There’s no name on that card,” she said.
“Never needed one,” he said.
He’d gotten the card from the sour-faced librarian back home, tricked her out of it by dragging along Bradley and encouraging him to waddle off into the shelves and start pulling down books. She’d rolled it into her typewriter and then they’d both gone chasing after Brad, then she’d asked him again for his name and they’d gone chasing after Brad, then for his address, and then Brad again. Eventually, he was able to simply snitch it out of the platen of the humming Selectric and walk out. No one ever looked closely at it again—not even the thoroughly professional staffers at the Kapuskasing branch who’d let him take out a stack of books to read in the bus station overnight while he waited for the morning bus to Toronto.
He picked up the card again then set it down. It was the first piece of identification he ever owned, and in some ways, the most important.
“I have to give you a new card,” the mesh-back kid said. “With a bar code. We don’t take that card anymore.” He picked it up and made to tear it in half.
“NO!” Alan roared, and lunged over the counter to seize the kid’s wrists.
The kid startled back and reflexively tore at the card, but Alan’s iron grip on his wrists kept him from completing the motion. The kid dropped the card and it fluttered to the carpet behind the counter.
“Give it to me,” Alan said. The boy’s eyes, wide with shock, began to screw shut with pain. Alan let go his wrists, and the kid chafed them, backing away another step.
His shout had drawn older librarians from receiving areas and offices behind the counter, women with the look of persons accustomed to terminating children’s mischief and ejecting rowdy drunks with equal aplomb. One of them was talking into a phone, and two more were moving cautiously toward them, sizing them up.
“We should go,” Mimi said.