As it turned out, the Ultimate Plan of Vengeance was derailed rather quickly.
I didn't even have a chance to organize it. I had planned to use the weapons of any self-respecting librarian: construction paper, glue, and fishing wire. I would have created an elaborate vision board of how I wanted to save the Riverside branch, and hopefully destroy Wesley in the process. I would have created a perfect ten-step plan for conquering him. Vengeance would be mine.
But instead, my mother called.
I was sitting at my rickety kitchen table, staring at my assembled materials, when my phone rang. Visions of world domination faded. "Hey, Mom."
"Sweetie! How are you?"
"I'm good, how are you?"
All of our calls started the same way, complete with Dad swearing in the background. He was onto a new hobby - scrapbooking. The only problem was that the tiny little pieces were too small for his rather clumsy hands.
"Look, honey, I bought way too many groceries today. I'd hate to throw out anything." Mom could never ask me directly to come over for dinner. There was a pause as she waited for my line.
"I could come over for dinner." I felt a bit like an actor in a shoddy play. I knew my lines. I just wasn't enthusiastic about them.
"Sounds great, honey."
I loved my parents, and I enjoyed spending time with them. But there was always something hovering at the edge of our conversation. Something we wanted to talk about, and never did.
I banished my dark thoughts to a musty corner of my brain. No self-pity for me today. The day would be dedicated towards revenge.
And yet, after I hung up, I wasn't too interested any more. I would much rather have a snack. Ultimately, I believed that a snack could cure most of the evils in the world.
I put away my trusty materials and planned on starting the project later in the day. I spent the next few hours puttering around, promising myself I would do the dishes, when I knew for a fact that nothing in the world would entice me to do the dishes.
Finally, just as I was starting to feel guilty about the plate that hadn't been washed since last week, I realized it was time to leave. Mom and Dad lived about twenty minutes away in the same bungalow that I had grown up in. I grabbed my keys and a cardigan before hitting the road.
Dinner was never a huge production with my parents. When I visited my friends as a kid, their parents tended to whip out some sort of elaborate meal: a stew, a casserole, something from the slow cooker. At my house, most of our meals came out of boxes.
Not that I was complaining - there was something about frozen chicken fingers that cleansed the soul.
By the time I reached home, dinner was just coming out of the oven.
"Thanks, Mom." She passed me a plate with a chicken burger, fries, and corn - all of which had lived in the freezer until an hour ago. "Looks delicious."
She must have just come from a house showing. As a real estate agent, she always said that clients judged her appearance before they judged the house. Her dark hair was carefully pinned into a bun; her fingernails were carefully pained a firetruck red. The dress she wore looked pricier than anything I owned.
Dad was her opposite. I hadn't seen him wear anything other than t-shirts and jeans in years. Lately his hair had started grow past his ears. Mom said she had her own personal hippy.
As we ate, we caught up with the week: Dad's scrapbooking successes, Mom's latest house sale, funny stories from the library. I hadn't told them about the fire, or even that I might lose my job. They wouldn't be able to handle the stress. Instead, I gave a modified version of my unicorn hair story.
"How in the world did you forget to let the kids know to do their hair?" Dad actually slapped his knee in laughter, like a character on a comedy show.
"No idea," I said, and cursed Wesley's existence once again.
"We really are proud of you, honey." Mom's rapid descent into sentimentality was a warning sign. I could almost predict what she was about to say next. "We always knew you would end up in some sort of literary career. Do you remember that picture of you? The one with the book fort? I think it's in the photo album."
Once again, my Mom couldn't directly ask me to go get the photo album. She danced around it in the same way a moth would circle a light, not understanding the pain it was inflicting on herself.
"I'll go get it," I said, the words thick in my throat.
On my way down the hallway, I thought about nice things. Puppies. Kittens. Lemon poppyseed muffins. But my heart still constricted as I put my hand on the doorknob to Alex's room.
"Sorry," I whispered, mentally apologizing to my brother for invading his space. His bed was unmade, his clothes strewn out of the hamper. A Muppets poster was tacked onto the wall.
Holding my breath, I went over to the closet and grabbed the photo album. I closed his bedroom door behind me.
I walked back to the kitchen, flipping open the album. The photos stared back at me. Me and Alex, swimming at a beach. Me and Alex, eating ice cream at a barbeque. Me and Alex, minigolf clubs in hand.
"Let me see." I handed the album to Mom, who flicked the plastic pages quickly. She knew where every photo was. "See? Aren't you adorable?"
I'd seen the picture before, of course. It was me when I was roughly eight years old, cackling under a pile of children's books. I'd had the great idea to build a castle out of paperbacks. I had visions of being the Queen of All Literature, spending my days walking down hallways of paper and ink. The catch, of course, is that it required a lot of books. And as it turns out, endless copies of The Baby-Sitters Club and The Magic Tree House didn't necessarily make great construction materials. (I'm glad I never became an engineer.) I didn't get very far before the books fell on me, leading to the photo.
I was never a huge fan of looking at old pictures of myself. I hardly looked the same - my bangs had grown out a decade ago, and since I spent most of my time indoors, I lost the tan. I'm as pallid as ever, these days. It was always hard to look back and realize how happy I was.
Not that I was complaining. I loved my job, I loved my family, and I loved my friends. But I still winced when I saw my hydro bill come in, and I still believed witchcraft was necessarily for folding fitted sheets. There was a time when I didn't have to worry about that. When my biggest dream was creating a castle of books.
"It's no surprise you became a librarian," Dad said, looking at the photo from over Mom's shoulder. "We should have seen that from a mile away."
I shrugged. I hadn't even considered the career option for the majority of my life. According to my grandparents, there were only three real professions - doctor, lawyer, or teacher. The problem was that any math whatsoever inspired me to rip my brain out. I suffered through grade 10 math, imagining a life filled with the quadratic equation and the Pythagorean theorem. That was at the same time as our other family problems, so as sad as it sounds, I took the state of suffering as a baseline normal.
It was only in university that I started to breathe again. I had gone to The University of British Columbia, as far away as possible as I could get from my family. It wasn't particularly nice of me - Mom and Dad missed me terribly - but I needed space. Needed the mountains, needed the ocean, needed fresh air.
And it worked. For the first time in years, I was just me. I had no backstory. I was just Emma Richards, an Ontario transplant living on the west coast. I studied English, telling myself I could transition to law eventually. But then I discovered the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library, and my image of being a lawyer in a cute pencil skirt vanished instantly. The building looked like a modern-day Colosseum. It was a love story between the past and present, glass and granite. I walked into the concourse and thought, I found it.
My career, my future - I had found it all.
I would check out books, bike to Stanley Park, and read on the benches that overlooked the inlet. I liked to look at the boats and imagine my life in a far-off place. I spent four years with books and friends, coffee and tea.
I moved back east for my Masters degree. It wasn't fair to my parents to stay away for two more years. So I tucked a piece of the ocean into my heart and came back.
"Do you still have any of those books?" Dad asked, gesturing to the photo. "Or did they come from the library?"
"Probably the library," I mumbled, not paying close attention. My thoughts were far away. Somewhere west, on a seawall.
"Don't forget to talk to Alex tonight," Mom said. My heart dropped through the floor, past the mantle of the earth, and into the fiery core at the center of the planet. She sounded casual. She could have been talking about the weather or the score of a hockey game. "He misses you."
"Sure," I hedged. I searched desperately for a new topic, like a drowning swimmer grasping for a life jacket. "Dad, I'm thinking about getting into scrapbooking. Any ideas on where to start?"
Perfect. Dad launched into a rather impressive monologue on the merits of three-ring albums versus post-bound albums. I barely heard what he said; I was just happy to escape any further conversation about Alex.
I helped clean up after dinner. After hugging my parents goodbye, I hopped back in my car, ignoring the empty fast food bags in the backseat. By the time I was home, I felt so drained that the idea of working on my Ultimate Plan of Vengeance seemed like too much work. Wesley could wait.
The very thought of yesterday made me cringe. My outburst was way out of character; I wasn't normally a fan of yelling at people in bars. There was just something about him that made my blood pressure skyrocket.
I needed a break after everything - dinner, Alex, Wesley. It was all too much.
So I did what I always do when I want to escape: I pulled out a book, made a cup of tea, and started to read.