“I need my library card,” he said, and was as surprised as anyone at the pout in his voice, a sound that was about six years old, stubborn, and wounded.
Mimi looked hard at him, then at the librarians converging on them, then at the mesh back kid, who had backed all the way up to a work surface several paces back of him. She planted her palms on the counter and swung one foot up onto it, vaulting herself over. Alan saw the back of her man’s jacket bulge out behind her as her wings tried to spread when she took to the air.
She snatched up the card, then planted her hands again and leapt into the air. The toe of her trailing foot caught the edge of the counter and she began to tumble, headed for a face-plant into the greyed-out industrial carpet. Alan had the presence of mind to catch her, her tit crashing into his head, and gentle her to the floor.
“We’re going,” Mimi said. “Now.”
Alan hardly knew where he was anymore. The card was in Mimi’s hand, though, and he reached for it, making a keening noise deep in his throat.
“Here,” she said, handing it to him. When he touched the felted card stock, he snapped back to himself. “Sorry,” he said lamely to the mesh-back kid.
Mimi yanked his arm and they jumped into the car and he fumbled the key into the ignition, fumbled the car to life. His head felt like a balloon on the end of a taut string, floating some yards above his body.
He gunned the engine and the body rolled in the trunk. He’d forgotten about it for a while in the library and now he remembered it again. Maybe he felt something then, a twitchy twinge of grief, but he swallowed hard and it went away. The clunk-clunk of the wheels going over the curb as he missed the curb-cut back out onto the road, Mimi sucking breath in a hiss as he narrowly avoided getting T-boned by a rusted-out pickup truck, and then the hum of the road under his wheels.
“Alan?” Mimi said.
“It was my first piece of identification,” he said. “It made me a person who could get a book out of the library.”