The Book Nook

19

What I found was a half dozen glow-sticks laying haphazardly at random over about ten feet of the length of the aisle. I tried to tell if they had been set in a pattern, but I couldn't know until I saw what was at the approximate center of the glow-stick design.

A sticky note, with dark sapphire blue glow-in-the-dark handwriting that stood out like the moon on a clear night sky.

I couldn't be sure if it were Alexandria's writing, but I was certain that if I held it up against another of her notes I'd kept that she had left around our place, surely they would be almost identical.

The note read: Everything is memoir, yet at the same time everything is fiction.

I unstuck the note from the bookshelf and held it up, peering at it. I should've been used to the crypticness by now, but at this ungodly hour it wasn't anywhere close to as endearing as I had used to find it.

I was tired. I had biked from my place to the playground and then to the library, which is far too many kilometers for someone who had awoken half-asleep at somewhere around one or two a.m. which would make it surely sometime past three now. I had no idea if this charade would end there in the library or if the game would continue further. I didn't know if I'd be able to handle it anymore, mentally or physically.

I was about to go towards the center of the library where I saw the alien-like green glow coming from, but I stopped.

"Everything's a game," I whispered aloud, unaware I was doing it until the silence came after the words left my lips.

The words were written in blue. I had noticed three different colors emanating from different points in the library. I went to the red, because it was closest. Alex would obviously know that's what I would do. The writing, however, was in blue. Did that mean I should head to the blue lights next?

With that being logical enough for me, I headed upstairs to the blue lights. There was a very, very high chance that I was merely over-thinking things to the extreme. If so, I could blame it on Alexandria for putting me in such a mindset that was forcing me to think there was a conspiracy behind every littlest thing. There's also reason to suggest that I had been over-thinking and creating fantasies this entire time; maybe there was no notes or hints, maybe none of these things meant anything at all. But yet, here I was in a library after hours at around three in the morning, standing in the luminesce of glow sticks and holding a Post-It note that both looks like and sounds like something that my mysterious female companion had written.

I reached the blue glow and found a similar scene with glow sticks and a sticky note that this time was written in green. Maybe I wasn't crazy.

This one read: The point of a story is the character arc, the change.

What was she talking about? What was the point? Fiction, character arcs; it was all just fiction jargon that she was throwing at me disguised as cryptic messages, but was there even a method to her madness? Was she just playing mind games now? What was I supposed to do next, just follow along the candy trail until I reached an end?

Even from the vantage point where I stood, the central area with the otherworldly green glow was too far to make out if there was anybody there. I saw green glow sticks stuck to the lamps that sat on the many desks that seated readers at their wooden refectory-style tables.

I travelled back down the stairs and made my way towards the center, barely even hearing my own footsteps on the carpeted floor. It was most likely silly, but I decided to approach as silently as I could, perhaps catching her by surprise and providing a suitable scare to end this ridiculous game, or perhaps I would run in shouting 'Home free! Home free! You can come out now!' like a children's game of tag taken to an extreme.