Three days later, Brian was back at school. The minute Katie spotted him with his red backpack, she was out the door in a flash.  Brian looked tired and pasty from being indoors so long, but he was pleased to see her.

       “The itching was terrible, like thousands of mosquito bites,” he said. Katie was impressed:  you could still see some of the spots.

       “And the hospital was gross. Have you ever been to the hospital?” 

       Katie merely shook her head. Her mother had briefly explained what hospitals were and she had no desire to know more.

       “They had to stick a needle my back,” said Brian matter-of-factly.

       Katie gasped involuntarily. “Why?”

       Brian frowned. “They said it was to take out some kind of juice that might have germs in it. They had to take blood out of my arm, too."

       “Really?”

       “Really. It was kind of cool the way they did it.”

       Katie stared at him. How in the world could that be cool?

       “Why out of your arm?”

       “Dunno really. You’d figure it’d be easier to take it out of your neck, wouldn’t you?”

       Katie found her hands straying up to her throat and Brian laughed.

       “Anyway – forget about all that. I’m better now. And your mom’s medicine really dried up my spots – not like the stuff they used at the hospital.”

        “She grows it all herself,” said Katie. “That’s what we both do all day in the garden.”

       “Well it worked so well on me that the doctor said I could go back to school right away,” said Brian. Oddly enough, he didn’t sound very happy about it.

       When Wednesday came, Katie awoke bright and early.

        “Not hungry today?” her mother asked, as Katie toyed unenthusiastically with her bean soup.

        “No, not really.”  She was too excited to eat.

       By 3:30, Katie was at the front room window, ready to leave the minute Brian arrived. And suddenly, there he was coming down the street, his bright red backpack bumping back and forth as he ran. Katie called out a good-bye to her mother. Grabbing her coat, she was out the door even before Brian had reached their gate.

       It was the middle of January, and bitterly cold. Snow lay on the ground in thin patches, and Katie and Brian skipped and ran all the way to the library, laughing when they skidded on the icy sidewalks. Katie could have wept for joy as she raced along, trying to keep up with Brian: suddenly she felt just like one of those children she always heard on their way to school every morning. In less than ten minutes, they were at the library.

       The front door was heavy and old. Brian pulled it open and they stepped inside. Katie gasped. What hit her first was the smell – the most wonderful smell she could imagine. When she mentioned it to Brian, he nodded.

       “Know what it is?”

       Katie shook her head.

       “It’s books.  That’s what tons and tons of books smell like when they’re all in one place. I think it’s the paper in them mixed with the ink – and something else too. But there’s just no smell like it.”

       Katie gazed around her. There were thousands of books – row after row of them in bookcases.  It made her weak in the knees to see so many books in one place. She turned to Brian, whispering.  “Are we allowed to touch them?”

      Brian laughed. “Of course! That’s what they’re there for! But first I want to show you the other stuff.”

      Katie could barely keep track of everything. She trailed after Brian, trying to remember everything he told her and showed her, but it wasn’t easy.

       “Check this out, Katie,” he said, opening a door to a room filled with machines and rows and rows of shelves. “This is the AV Room.” Katie nodded and tried to look as though she understood.

       “Lavatory!” he announced, opening another door. Katie peeked inside. Toilets! How convenient!

        “Drinking fountain,” said Brian next, showing her how you could make the water squirt up. Katie shook her head in wonder.

       All the people working there greeted Brian by name; they seemed to know him well.

       “How’s school?” one woman asked him. Brian made a face and groaned and Katie felt a stab of envy. Nothing Brian had told her about school made it sound bad to her.

       “Who’s this?” asked an elderly woman, smiling at Katie.

       Brian smiled proudly back.  “This is my friend Katie.”

       “Nice to meet you, Katie,” said the woman. “I’m Bessie.”

       Katie nodded. She felt terribly shy and awkward, but thrilled all the same. My friend Katie Brian had said!

       “Come on, Katie – I’ll show you the books!”

       Katie could not take it all in. There were books about everything you could imagine – people, places, animals, rocks, planets. The ones she liked the best were the books with pictures in them.  How perfectly detailed and clear the illustrations were – so different from anything she or her mother could produce – even better than the pictures in her mother’s books!  When she mentioned this to Brian, though, he frowned. “Those aren’t drawings, Katie, they’re photographs. Like, with a camera.”  Katie nodded and pretended to understand, but she felt embarrassed all the same. Why was it that every time she talked to Brian she felt so stupid?

       Brian immediately began taking books off the shelves, but Katie took her time trying to find just the right one. She finally settled on a book about cats. It told you everything you wanted to know about cats and even a few things you might not want to know, such as cat illnesses like mange, runny eyes, and tapeworm infections, all with the same fantastically detailed pictures that Brian had called photographs. Still, even with the pictures of mangy cats and the diagrams of tapeworms, Katie was so engrossed that she completely lost track of the time.

       If the woman across from her hadn’t sneezed, Katie probably wouldn’t have thought to look up at the clock. She had a brief moment of panic. It was almost 4:30!  

       “Brian, I have to go home!” she whispered, nudging him.

       Brian jumped. “Hunh?”

       “I have to go home now. I promised.”

         Katie was worried that Brian would tell her to go home on her own, but he gathered up his stack of books. “Okay.”

       Katie frowned. “Don’t you have to put those back?” she whispered. Katie’s mother got cross with her if she didn’t put things back after using them.

       “No, I’m going to check ‘em out.”

       Katie followed him, mystified.  She had seen people leaving the library with stacks of books, but she had assumed that they were buying them.

       Brian pulled something out of his pocket and handed it to the woman at the desk. Then he put his books down and she did something magic with each book, using his card and a little machine.  The woman handed him back the books with a smile. “See you next week, Brian. And maybe you too, Katie?”  Katie flushed and tried to smile.  How she hoped!

       Brian put his books in his backpack. “Bye, Bessie. Thanks.”

       Katie followed Brian out of the library, mystified.  “Did you… buy those books?”

        Brian laughed. “Of course not,” he said. “I checked them out, what did you think?” He turned and looked at her. Katie squirmed, but did not answer.

       They walked side by side, quiet for a while. Then Brian looked at her again, thoughtfully. “You know,” he said, “You are seriously different.  At school, they think I’m weird, but you’re even – well, you’re much more different than I am. You’re the most different person I’ve ever met.”

       Katie didn’t know whether to feel flattered or offended. So she kept silent.

       “You’ve never been anywhere, never done anything. So everything’s fun for you. That’s great. I mean, I go to the library every week. Most kids could go anytime they wanted to, you know. Their moms would be thrilled if they went. But you’ve never been, so you think it’s like, you know, the greatest thing in the world.”

       Katie looked at Brian to see if he was making fun of her. But he wasn’t. She could see that.

       “Hey, I’m not making fun of you” said Brian, just at that moment, as though he had known what she was thinking.

       They walked along in silence for a minute or two. Then Brian spoke again, quietly.

       “Let’s always be friends, even when we’re old, okay?”

        “All right.”

       “Ask your mom if you can go to the library again next week. I mean, if you want to.”

       “Of course I want to.”

          Brian looked pleased. “Do you think she’ll say yes”?

       “I don’t know.  I hope so. Um, Brian?”

       “Yeah?”

       “Do you think I could…at the library, um, do you think they’d let me…” Katie could not remember the expression Brian had used.

       “What, check out books?”

       “Yes! Do you think I could? Can anybody do it?”

       “Sure, yeah, of course. Anybody. I’ll ask my mom what you’re supposed to do to get a card. It’s really easy to get one, though.”

       It was growing dark. A bitter wind began to blow as they hurried along. But Katie, who could think of nothing but getting her own library card, hardly felt the cold.

       That night, Katie’s mother listened to her account of the marvels of the library as she ladled soup into wooden bowls. Hot mushroom soup tonight. From time to time, Katie’s mother would look at her thoughtfully, a perplexed look on her face as though she was waiting for something, and Katie wished once again that they could talk. Brian said that he and his mother talked to each other all the time; his father, however, almost never talked to anyone. That was one of the reasons why he and Brian’s mother had gotten a divorce.  Katie had asked Brian all about divorce – what it meant and who got divorced from whom and why.  Only adults got divorced from each other, it seemed, and usually it was men and women who got divorced from each other. Parents and children were different:  if you were a kid and your mother didn’t talk to you, you couldn’t get a divorce from her.

       Katie stared glumly at the bottom of her soup bowl. One of the books she'd seen at the library had a picture of a family eating dinner together. Their table, covered in a flawlessly white tablecloth, groaned with bowls of exotic looking food that Katie could only guess at. The children's faces said it all, though – happy and smiling as they fairly drooled over the many dishes in front of them, forks and knives at the ready. She sighed deeply and dipped her spoon into her last bit of now-cold soup. She hated mushrooms.