A Long Time Coming (part 3)

She dropped me off at the Pierre Public Library, and told me to get a leg up in case I couldn't get into school right away. And so I did. I headed right for the mystery section, and pulled three books at random off the shelf. I flipped to page 50 and then forward from there. There's almost always a good sex scene in the first 50 pages of a mystery, unless they're old, or christian, or both. “She allowed her honey-colored breasts to fall out of the simple white bra, and I bent forward to lick her nipples with renewed exuberance.” Not bad, I thought. Not bad at all. An ace on the first book I picked up.
I flipped forward, then back again, and then wrote down the title and page number in my tattered little notebook (whose first page was missing. I didn't want to read my mother's bouncing mash of feel good hallmark sentiment cheering me on to “find myself,” every time I looked for something worthwhile to read. And the only thing I ever thought of reading, then, could be found in the first fifty or hundred pages of a cheap paperback.
Or not, as I found by looking through the two others. I rushed forward, not in pages one through fifty, so then a hundred through fifty. Soon I was at the end, finding the dashing detective, or writer, or doctor, platonically hugging the ex-prostitute. The next one had a Scientist finding out his research university was being funded by a shady group, and the cadavers he opened daily were their victims. There was a black girl, and a white woman, but the menage a trois that seemed promised never arrived.
I looked up from my little pile of books, knowing that I was giving it up with how slyly I looked for adult supervision. There was a girl standing at the end of my aisle, in bright blue shorts and a tank top. She wasn't skinny, or tall, or fat, or short for that matter. She turned away from the bookshelves, and started walking towards me. Her face was pretty, freckled in a way, and her breasts, which I hadn't really been impressed by in profile, rounded out, to the side of her, seeming to hold her hands at her side, and making perfect half moons against her stomache. She saw me staring.
“What are you looking at?” She didn't quite snap. The emphasis was on the are, like she was in some Mystery! program on PBS. Mystery! had poor sex scenes, mostly people my mom's age sucking face and then lying in bed.
“The Peril in Ward 9,” I held up the book, hoping my misinterpretation would work.
“I know what you're doing.” She said flatly. “Turn towards the beginning. It's extra early, and not very good.”
I did what she said, and found, to my amazement, another unclasping bra.
“Thanks,” I said, and tried to smile.
“My names Steph, do you go to school around here?”
“Not yet. I just moved.”
“Huh. I go to Feneston Regional. But we call it Penistown. See you around!”
And like that she was gone. I was frozen. I read the page in front of me. She was right, it was downright terrible. All vague metaphors and ways of referring to the bits that weren't quite like refering to bits. It all sounded like an ad for curtains. I thought of Steph, and Penistown, and how I'd never heard any girl say penis, and how I just had. I hoped I was going to Feneston. I really did. And I kinda felt like crying.