I had always compared the fiction section in the far corner of the school library to a set of gills, as the shelves, which at 5'7" plus a bit in my clunky shoes I can easily see just over, are crammed so tightly together that two people can only squeeze uncomfortably past one another, so my tiny, nagging seed of agoraphobia was urging me to get what I needed and get out before anyone wanted something from the same place I was. It was my little free time before school and I was hunched over like a vulture to peer at the names, specifically "Gaiman," when I happened to glance at a bit of fancy-looking gold letters crammed upright into the space the black spine allowed, reading "The Alchemist's Door."
I slid the book out of its place. A good portion of the blurb on the back cover was obscured by the library's bar code, but what little I could read, among which were demon, ancient, chaos, magic, and sixteenth century, said it was exactly what I was looking for, and I tucked it under my arm and was about to head off before I remembered what my Etymology teacher told us about our book choices for his class: anything outside our comfort zone. So I paused and once more hunched over, fingers twitching over the spines before they happened upon a purple-and-pink title in a staggered size: "Into the Wild Nerd..." Another library sticker covered the rest. I pulled the book out and examined the hot-pink cover decorated with repeated drawings of a 20-sided die scattered behind another drawing of a corseted dress. Into the Wild Nerd Yonder: My Life on the Dork Side, it said. I scanned the blurb and decided that my selection was sufficiently not what I was looking for, so I left the shelves and checked out my books, fully intent on reading the worse one first.
