When friends couldn't be found, the books were always waiting with something new to tell. Life that was getting too much the same could be shaken up in a few minutes by the picture in a book of some ancient temple newly discovered deep in a rainforest, a fuzzy photo of Uranus with its up- and-down rings, or a prismed picture taken through the faceted eye of a bee. And though she would rather have died than admit it — no respectable thirteen-year-old ever set foot down there — she still loved the children's library too. Nita had gone through every book in the place when she was younger, reading everything in sight — fiction and nonfiction alike, fairy tales, science books, horse stories, dog stories, music books, art books, even the encyclopedias. (Bookworm,) she heard the old jeering voices go in her head, (foureyes, smartass, hide-in-the-house-and-read. Walking encyclopedia. Think you're so hot.) "No," she remembered herself answering once, "I just like to find things out!" And she sighed, feeling rueful. That time she had found out about being punched in the stomach.

She strolled between shelves, looking at titles, smiling as she met old friends, books she had read three times or five times or a dozen. Just a title, or an author's name, would be enough to summon up happy images. Strange creatures like phoenixes and psammeads, moving under smoky London day-light of a hundred years before, in company with groups of bemused children; starships and new worlds and the limitless vistas of interstellar night, outer space challenged but never conquered; princesses in silver and golden dresses, princes and heroes carrying swords like sharpened lines of light, monsters rising out of weedy tarns, wild creatures that talked and tricked one an-other I used to think the world would be like that when I got older. Wonderful all the time, exciting, happy. Instead of the way it is—