Someone is already sitting in the Marshmallow, and Autumn Povitsky? She is not impressed.
Autumn likes to think of herself as something of an expert at handling conflict. She has, for example, been the fearless leader of the St. Bernadette’s Academy debate team for the past two years, recently leading them to victory in the Massachusetts league finals. Plus, she’s currently senior class president, which means she could resolve feuds over food drive organization and class trip fund allocation in her sleep.
But the Marshmallow, an oversized armchair so large and mushy, it’s a scientific marvel that it retains any shape at all, is sacred territory for Autumn. The fabric is midnight blue, worn thin enough that it feels like crushed velvet, and its existence is almost a library trade secret since it’s tucked into an alcove between shelves of middle grade novels that Autumn makes sure to keep meticulously organized.
“Excuse me,” she says now, an edge shredding through her typically calm demeanor, but she can’t help it. Her watch reads 6:40 p.m. on a Saturday—almost closing time—and to be perfectly frank, Autumn is having a day.
Or maybe more like a week, the memories of which are printed on her mind like ink—memories of her twin brother, Ezra, so distracted by prom preparations that he forgot to pick her up from her library shift three days in a row; and memories of May standing in the St. Bernadette’s parking lot yesterday afternoon, her cute little swishes of cat eyeliner suddenly reminding Autumn of pocketknives as May filled her bike basket with skeins of yarn and told Autumn that she wanted to skip the weekly sleepover they’ve been having every Saturday since they were fifteen. Even now, Autumn can feel her best friend’s words gnawing at her insides, repeating ad nauseam, Maybe we need to shake things up before college does it for us. Maybe we need to practice spending time apart.
What Autumn wants in this moment—what she needs—is the Marshmallow. She needs its warm and musty embrace, the same one that cradled her back when she was a kid and would spend long afternoons in the library, reading Anne of Green Gables and Little Women, deeply sunk into a world that felt wholly her own.
But alas, the universe must be laughing and pointing at her because here she is, mere feet from the Marshmallow’s twinkle-lit sanctuary, and what she finds instead is Tara Esposito, Autumn’s greatest nemesis, the Montague to her Capulet, the white whale to her Ahab.
Or, as May would put it, the Darcy to Autumn’s Elizabeth Bennet but with “worse vibes and no romance.” Tara is the one girl in all of St. Bernadette’s who gets her daily kicks from tormenting Autumn, the one girl Autumn would never have expected to stumble across in a library of all places, surrounded by books she is seemingly reading on purpose.
Autumn knows that Tara would delight in learning that Autumn is currently falling apart at the seams, and would, given the chance, happily crack her knuckles and pick at those seams until they snap. Which means that the adult thing for Autumn to do is to hold her head high and gracefully walk away, but—you know what? No.
She came here for the Marshmallow, damn it, and the Marshmallow is exactly what she’s going to get.
gged in the chair, ratty sneakers bouncing to the beat of whatever electro dance music is pounding through her oversized headphones, and a paperback copy of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf open in her lap. Haphazard piles of books are stacked on the Marshmallow’s arms, uncapped pens stuck between their pages, and Tara’s laptop is on the floor, its charger plugged into a nearby extension cord below a sign that explicitly states it should not be used for personal electronic devices. The most distressing part, though, out of all these admittedly distressing things, is the reusable coffee cup perched precariously on one of Tara’s book stacks, filled to the brim with a milky caramel liquid. And not
a.
Lid.
In.
Sight.
Autumn’s blood, already at a low simmer, begins to boil. Reckless energy rockets through her arm, and she reaches over, “accidentally” knocking a copy of Bridge to Terabithia from the shelf, making it thunk against the carpeted floor next to Tara’s laptop. Tara startles out of her reverie, shock flitting across her face before being instantly replaced by a look that Autumn recognizes from the two years they’ve spent locked in a ruthless battle of wills. It’s a look of aloof amusement, a look that seems to say, Well, well, well, who do we have here?
“Red.” Tara pushes back her headphones, and Autumn’s jaw twitches over the nickname that only Tara uses. A deeply creative one since Autumn does, indeed, have red hair.
Still, she can’t let Tara get under her skin now. Autumn wasn’t hired as the youngest key-holding part-time staff member of the Lyndhurst Cove Public Library because of her inability to handle the occasional surly customer. In fact, no matter how rude Tara is, Autumn is determined not to return the favor. She’s determined to rise above.
“Sorry.” She adjusts her horn-rimmed glasses and gives Tara her most serene, professional smile. “I just wanted to let you know that we’ll be closing up soon.”
“Um. Okay.” Tara lifts her hand in a salute and moves to snap her headphones back into place, but Autumn can’t leave it at that. She just—she can’t.
“Okay.” She runs her hands down the front of her slacks. “So, I’m afraid I need to ask you to leave.”
Tara frowns, the nearby twinkle lights washing over her beige skin and angular features, glinting off the metal jewelry that slashes through her right eyebrow and runs along the shells of her ears. She must have had a haircut recently, because it’s buzzed even closer to her skull than usual, filling Autumn with envy that someone like Tara—someone with nothing but snark and Red Bull churning through her veins—could have such perfect, chiseled bone structure. Autumn knows she would look like a gangly preteen if she dared to go for a style so edgy and queer, while Tara looks like the badass heroine of a postapocalyptic video game, the kind of heroine that Autumn gazes at in flustered awe whenever Ezra cajoles her into playing on the PS5 with him until two in the morning.
Autumn feels a telltale flushing crawling up her neck as Tara continues staring at her like she’s reading every thought unfurling across Autumn’s brain. It’s as if Tara knows that the library doesn’t close for another twenty minutes, and that, technically, Autumn isn’t supposed to badger patrons about leaving early. She is, in fact, betraying every book-loving bone in her body, because one of the reasons she loves libraries—one of the many reasons, actually—is that they aren’t really businesses. They’re community spaces and quiet shelters where you can read and rest and follow whatever pathways the pages choose to open in front of you. Nobody understands and respects this more than Autumn, but Miriam, her boss, had to leave early when her stepson got a nosebleed at his T-ball game, leaving Autumn to close up for the night.
Which means she’s desperate for a few minutes of solo Marshmallow wallowing before she goes through her carefully curated end-of-day checklist followed by a lonely thirty-minute bike ride home since tonight is Lyndhurst Cove High School’s prom, so Ezra won’t be picking her up in his Jeep Wrangler as usual, wearing the novelty lime-green sunglasses he insists are “fashion” and offering her a Wendy’s vanilla shake in commiseration for her crappy day.
since her parents are at a psychologist training conference in New Haven this weekend, and Ezra is planning to throw some kind of post-prom-apalooza at their house that she would much rather avoid. Instead, she wants to heat up leftover matzo ball soup with her bubbe—who’d made it because she could tell from Autumn’s recent downbeat texts that she’s in dire need of comfort food—and watch a few episodes of CSI: New York together before diligently going over her remaining homework assignments. (Although, truthfully, most of her teachers are phoning it in now that AP exams are over.) Then she’ll change into her comfiest llama pajamas, complete her nightly skincare routine, and climb into bed with the new Ocean Vuong novel all by the reasonable hour of 11 p.m.
“I figured it might take you a while to pack up,” she says to Tara now, smile still locked in place even though it feels like there are screws on either side of her mouth, tightening and tightening. Tara’s own features, however, remain impassive as she pushes up the sleeves of her green canvas jacket, revealing the tattoos on each of her birdlike wrists. A black chess piece on one and a white piece on the other. Both queens.
“Nah.” Tara’s voice remains casual despite her battle-ready stance. “I’ll wait until you actually close. Thanks for your weird concern, I guess.” She hunches back over her book, and a desperate sound claws up Autumn’s throat, escaping before she has a chance to stop it.
“But that’s my chair!” she blurts, and Tara glances up, her arctic-blue eyes losing their apathy and becoming something much more dangerous instead—they become intrigued. “I mean, it’s the library’s chair,” Autumn recovers hastily. “Which means it’s actually the public’s chair. Which means there are unspoken rules about courtesy and sharing that you need to respect.”
Oh no, no, no.
WHY did Autumn choose to go with a finger-wagging librarian lecture when she’s perfectly aware that’s playing straight into Tara’s hands? Tara Esposito is known throughout St. Bernadette’s, and the entire town of Lyndhurst Cove, for her ability to—how can Autumn put this delicately?—find “creative ways” around things like “school policies” or “the law.”
Are you in the market for a fake ID? Give Tara Esposito a call! Want to procure some illegal-to-purchase-according-to-Massachusetts-state-law fireworks? Tara Esposito’s your gal! Planning to pull a prank at Lyndhurst Cove High School that requires on-campus access after hours? No problem, Tara can arrange that for you!
Tara doesn’t hyperventilate or have existential crises at the thought of letting down authority figures the way that Autumn would if their roles were reversed. Oh no. Tara Esposito? She eats authority figures for breakfast.
“You mean this chair?” Tara pats the cushion she’s sitting on. “This belongs to you, Red?”
“To the library,” Autumn clarifies, fidgeting with her glasses while Tara folds both hands behind her head, growing more comfortable by the moment.
“Right.” She nods sagely. “You want me to clear out for the good of the library, which, as far as I can tell, is empty.”
Autumn begins to grind her teeth, something she does a lot of whenever Tara is around. If Tara had somehow applied and gotten into Wellesley next year, Autumn would’ve worn her molars down to sawdust by the time she was twenty. In fact, she’s probably already done permanent damage to them since everyone at St. Bernadette’s knows they’ve been locked in a metaphorical wrestling match from the moment Tara moved to Lyndhurst Cove at the beginning of their junior year.
It started on Tara’s first day of school, although the embarrassing truth is that Autumn’s initial hope was that they could be friends. Tara was the new kid, after all, and Autumn has always been involved in every aspect of life at St. Bernadette’s, taking it upon herself to make sure that no one feels lost or uncertain in the hallways that have become a second home to her. And okay, it didn’t hurt that there was something fascinating about Tara, too; this magnetic and mysterious energy that made Autumn’s palms sweat and her words jumble into knots before she could jam them into sentences. Which was why Autumn spent the first half of that day planning the perfect way to introduce herself until, in the afternoon, she caught Tara vaping on a bench in the school courtyard and then proceeded to ruin everything. She let forth a torrent of panicked rambling, and although she can’t quite remember every nonsensical thing
she said, she knows she quoted the student handbook at some point and went on a long tangent about the uncertain health complications of vaping.
Tara said nothing throughout this entire speech, simply puffing vanilla-scented smoke into the air before hopping off the bench and moving on, leaving Autumn to make a silent promise to herself that she would apologize for her rant the very next day. Except in first-period Spanish class, every time Autumn raised her hand to answer a question about verb conjugation, Tara started having these loud coughing fits, blatantly fake ones that made everyone in the class giggle except for May, who got defensive on Autumn’s behalf and asked Mr. Rodriguez if Tara could be excused to the nurse’s office.
“Sorry.” Tara caught Autumn’s eye while she thumped dramatically at her chest. “Maybe I’m having uncertain health complications,” she said, making humiliation crest over Autumn in waves. She spent the rest of the class slunk down in her seat, ignoring the concerned note May flicked onto her desk, her body hotter than a furnace as she realized that apologizing to Tara would be pointless.
In that same class a week later, when they were paired on a group project about the Maya civilization, it infuriated Autumn how Tara refused to take their work seriously, how she snuck in an AirPod and drummed a pen against her desk while Autumn tried to divide up research responsibilities. It was obvious that Tara felt active contempt toward St. Bernadette’s and the academic pursuits that defined Autumn’s existence, and so Autumn cracked, ratting Tara out to Mr. Rodriguez for listening to music instead of contributing to the assignment.
The gauntlet had officially been thrown. From that day onward, the back-and-forth continued.
That month, Tara replaced all Autumn’s student council election posters with ones for “SpongeBob, a gay icon.”
Then Autumn took a picture of Tara’s car in the staff-only parking lot and emailed it to the front office.
Then Tara pulled the fire alarm while Autumn was prepping the debate team for an important tournament in Mattapoisett.
Then Autumn planted fake facts on the October Revolution Wikipedia page—a website that Autumn would, of course, never use for
research purposes, while she knew that Tara was probably devoted to it—and called Tara out when a few of those made-up details showed up in her world history presentation.
There were some people (namely, May and Ezra, plus a few of Autumn’s debate teammates) who questioned whether Tara was worth the stress and mental effort that Autumn poured into their escalating feud. Ezra even came to Tara’s defense sometimes since he knew her from the Lyndhurst Cove High party scene and was convinced that, deep down, she had “a melty, chocolate chip soul.” But Autumn knew that Tara’s soul was as barren as her answer bubbles on a multiple-choice exam.
And Autumn could never seem to make anyone understand how Tara had become a shadow over her entire comforting life at St. Bernadette’s. Tara was the snort that Autumn heard over her shoulder every time she got a paper with a bright red A on it or when the student council faculty adviser complimented the concise PowerPoints she made for their weekly meetings. Tara was the gremlin who whispered constantly, even in Autumn’s dreams, that all the things that gave Autumn her sense of worth and stability were total bullshit.
But Autumn knows these things aren’t bullshit, and she needs to prove that gremlin wrong. Even with graduation only a couple of weeks away, she’d give everything she has to best Tara Esposito once and for all.
“How can you be so sure the library is empty?” she says to Tara now, refusing to lose this battle in their long-standing war. “What if a pregnant person arrives? What if they need to sit down?”
Tara twitches an eyebrow, the one with the piercing in it. “Are you trying to tell me something here, Red?”
Damn it. Autumn feels her pale, freckled skin burning as easily as paper. “Why do you have to make everything so difficult?” she hisses, her veneer of professionalism vanishing altogether, which makes Tara even more relaxed, of course. She stretches her arms above her head and gives Autumn a grin that shows off her white teeth, including her two slightly sharp canines. She looks like a queer vampire on the cover of a paranormal romance novel May might press into Autumn’s hands, claiming that Autumn needs to explore some of literature’s hornier genres.
gotta be honest here, Red, seems like the kinda thing you’d approve of. I figured you’d eat this shit up.”
Autumn scoffs, but inside, she’s crumbling. This is the final straw in a week full of straws—the straw of May essentially accusing her of being a clingy best friend; and the straw of Ezra laughing at his group chats whenever Autumn tried to talk to him, interrupting her with questions about corsages and cummerbunds instead.
Ezra and May are the two people Autumn loves most, but in a few months’ time, they’ll be gone and this life that fits her like a cozy cable-knit cardigan will be over for good. She’ll be starting college at Wellesley, while Ezra heads to the University of Chicago and May to Northwestern, which is also Chicago-adjacent. And May might have only just told Autumn that she needs more space, but as far as Autumn can tell, that space has been growing for a while now, a gulf widening the closer they get to graduation.
Of course, Autumn knows deep in her bones that nothing in life is guaranteed and that your entire world can change in a single moment, but knowing isn’t the same as being okay with it, and right now, Autumn feels anything but okay. Right now, her thoughts are a pressure storm of loneliness and fear of the future that make her feel like she’s being pulled into the sea beyond Lyndhurst Cove. She’s trying to kick and thrash her way back to the shore, desperate to prove that there’s something in her life not slipping beyond her control—to show there’s still some sliver of solid ground where she can plant her feet and stand strong. So, as she reaches down to pick up the book she knocked over earlier, she takes in Tara’s coffee cup, still taunting her with its endless spill potential. Illuminated by the strands of twinkle lights strung along the shelves, surrounded by the faded paperbacks Autumn has loved since she was a child, this cup shimmers with possibility. It whispers to her its plan.
“We don’t allow coffee in the library,” Autumn says ferociously, grabbing the cup and tipping it into her mouth, ignoring the fact that she never drinks caffeine after 11 a.m., and that she’s always been a germaphobe and won’t even share a soda with her twin brother, with whom she once shared a womb. No, Autumn’s mind is stuck on autopilot now. It’s telling her to press this cold, used cup to her lips and chug down every last drop of its maple-sweet caffeinated contents. Once she’s done, Autumn gasps, as if she just tumbled out of the ocean and is crawling across the sand, gulping for air. The library is always silent, of course, but it seems even more silent now, with Autumn’s fingers squeezing the cup and her heart roaring like an ambulance siren.
A single dribble of coffee snakes down her chin, and Tara stares at her open-mouthed, all her blasé snark finally lost to the wind.
Oh god, Autumn thinks as autopilot fades and reality takes over. What have I done?
Hands shaking, she places the cup back where she found it, turns on the heels of her polished brogues, and races down the main library stairs, the motion-sensor lights clicking on above her.
Click, click, click.
She feels as if she’s dangling from the end of a long, fraying rope. If Tara wanted to, she could get Autumn fired for this. She could post something on social media about how St. Bernadette’s consummately poised class president is, in actuality, a trash-eating raccoon. She could find a way to torment Autumn for the rest of the school year, if not the rest of her life. So now Autumn has no choice but to barricade herself inside the closet behind the help desk and quietly break down. She can’t call May, she can’t call Ezra, but hopefully, she can sustain herself on emergency water bottles and Miriam’s stepdaughter’s Girl Scout cookies until at least graduation. Or maybe even until the fall, when presumably someone will have to physically drag her out of the closet like the mistreated wife from the attic in Jane Eyre and cart her unwillingly toward Wellesley.
But when Autumn rounds the corner to the help desk, her plan pops like a soap bubble in front of her, and she skitters to a stop.
Because Tara, as it turns out, was very, very wrong. The library isn’t empty after all. In fact, despite all evidence to the contrary, there’s a light at the end of this tunnel, and it’s a light that makes Autumn’s breath hiccup and hope bloom in her chest like she’s reading a Jane Austen novel and the heroine just ran into a dashing gentleman, waiting for her in the rain.
Except this gentleman is actually a girl wearing a corduroy overall dress and chunky Doc Martens, despite the summer warmth outside. She’s gripping the straps of a mini pleather backpack pinned with an enamel
Shakespeare head and a button that reads Hija de Inmigrantes, and she’s swishing aside a cloud of dark, curly hair that plays a recurring role in almost all of Autumn’s night and daydreams.
The girl studies the books on a nearby display, presumably waiting for Autumn to arrive and give her some library-related help when, in reality, it is she, Nova García, who has just swept in and saved Autumn’s entire day.
Tara Esposito didn’t move to Lyndhurst Cove, Massachusetts, to make friends, but even if she did, she sure as hell wouldn’t put Autumn Povitsky on that list.
In Tara’s eighteen years of life, she’s encountered a boatload of Autumn Povitskys, usually lurking in the front rows of classrooms armed with sharpened pencils and judgmental expressions, ready to loathe Tara with every holier-than-thou fiber of their future-Ivy-League beings.
Tara grew up moving around the world, her mom’s academic job taking them from Portland to Hong Kong to Sydney to Amsterdam, and in that time, she’s learned that she is pretty much the exact opposite of an Autumn Povitsky. She’s got ADHD, so she’s too restless, too easily bored, and too used to the disappointed sighs of teachers when she forgets to do her homework or gives in to the impulse to toss paper airplanes across the room during a pop quiz. And without fail, there’s always an Autumn Povitsky there, ready to call Tara out for her sloppy behavior, determined to shrink Tara down to her teeniest, tiniest size—which would be pretty dang small, by the way, considering Tara’s already five foot one.
In Sydney, for example, an Autumn Povitsky type tattled on Tara for leaning over to copy her Earth Science homework even though Tara was just trying to watch this baby lizard that was crawling across the floor. And in Amsterdam, another Autumn Povitsky accused Tara of bringing weed gummies to school even though they were just regular gummy bears, a twist that made Esther—Tara’s on-again, off-again girlfriend—laugh so hard, she choked on the actual weed gummies they were sharing later.
But this particular Autumn Povitsky? She might be the Autumnest Povitsky of them all.
Because from the moment Tara began her reluctant two-year sentence at St. Bernadette’s after her mom got engaged to Ben and moved them both to Lyndhurst Cove from Amsterdam, Tara could sense that Autumn wanted to personally sanitize Tara’s presence from every immaculate inch of St. Bernadette’s hallways. It started on day one, when Tara was still smarting from her mom’s decision to send her to a private all-girls school, probably crossing her fingers that its high academic standards would rub off on Tara, a hope that Tara knew was futile. Marinating in despair, she had snuck out of class to inhale one of the vanilla vapes she had stashed in her backpack, craving the hit of nostalgia that would make her feel, even for a minute, like she was back in Esther’s bedroom, lying beneath the smudged skylight of her houseboat and listening to Fiona Apple on vinyl while the canal rocked them in place.
Then Autumn Povitsky had shown up and shot Tara’s entire plan straight to hell.
She’d subjected Tara to some rambling monologue about the St. ...
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