Popular Lightning

The hardest part about being a librarian is keeping the teenagers from having sex in the different rooms. Most of the time I am the only librarian here and so most of my day is spent running from room to room to make pry apart the teenagers who are having sex in the rooms.

"Go somewhere else and have sex," I tell them. "Have sex in your beds or in the back seats of your cars or in your school. Just don't have sex in the library." They just stare at me with their bat eyes and move apart as slowly as possible, waiting for me to leave so they can throw themselves right back onto each other as soon as I turn my back to go into one of the other rooms to stop the teenagers from having sex in there.

The library opens at 10 AM, but I'm in every morning at 8:30, getting the library ready for the day, reshelving books that were knocked onto the floor in a fit of passion. At 10 I open the front doors and the teenagers (who have been waiting outside since 9:15 or 9:30) burst in and run off for the different corners of the library and begin having sex. I stop the ones who hide under my desk first (two of them always hide under my desk, although it's never the same two), then move to the Periodicals Room, then the Fiction Room, then Nonfiction, then Children, and then back to my front desk, and then I start it over again. This goes until 6, when I close the library and send the teenagers on their way.

Last week, there were two teenagers in the Event Room who were having sex in a particularly disruptive way. It was difficult to get them to stop -- I had to pry them apart with a mop. The third time I broke them up, I yelled at them, I said, "Who do you think you are?" The young man said, "I'm Popular Lightning," and showed me his tee-shirt, which featured a picture of a lightning bolt in the middle. It was a sharp shirt, I had to admit. Finally after the fourth time, I tied the two of them up, drenched the Event Room in gasoline and lit it on fire. It burned through the night and the next morning it was just a pile of ash and we had to move our events into the Periodicals Room.

At 6 when all the teenagers have all gone home or somewhere else to continue having sex for the rest of the night, the library is very quiet. I walk through the stacks to make sure no one is still hanging around, trying to have sex in the library while it's closed, but no one's ever there. I start from the back of the library and flick off the light switches, one by one, and then I stand in front of the front door for a couple seconds, the only light in the building whatever's coming through the glass doors from the parking lot lights, and I just stand there and listen to the library breathe, like it's been holding its breath all day and it's just about turned purple holding it in.