What I Found on the Floor of the Benjamin Branch Library ( Brad Barkley)
My mother used to drop me off at the Benjamin Branch Library in Greensboro, NC and leave me there for the afternoon. I’d start out on one of those gray, wheeled stools in the stacks, a book open in front of me, trying to sit the way you’re supposed to. But before long I’d drift down to the carpeted floor, hidden behind tall gray shelves, my back against the brick wall, a small pile of books beside me. I didn’t think of it as reading so much as settling in. The hours would pass without my noticing.
I don’t remember all of the books I read back then, but I remember the feeling when one finally hit me, really got to me. It was A Separate Peace, by John Knowles. I was probably a little young for it, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was the sense, as I read, that something true was there beneath the surface of things. The boys in that book said one thing, did another, felt something else entirely. Their friendships were not what they looked like. Their motives were not what they claimed. There was a kind of pressure cooker under everything, and I could feel it even if I couldn’t name it. There’s a quote I’ve always liked: “There is another world, but it is in this one.” That was the feeling. Not that I’d found some different world, but that I was seeing the hidden things of this world more clearly.
At home, we had our own version of that pressure, though no one would have called it that. If we’d had a family motto, it might have been: everything’s fine, like an early version of the cartoon-dog-in-a-fire meme. We didn’t talk about the hard things. We didn’t talk about my father’s struggles with his mental health, not directly. Or my older brother’s inexplicable hatred of me. We kept the surface intact. And I understood, even then, that there was a difference between what was said, what was seen, and what I was living and feeling. I just didn’t have the language for it yet.
That’s what that book gave me. Not answers or solutions, exactly. Just recognition. A sense that the world was more complicated than I knew at that age, and that other people knew this too. It began for me the process of peeling back the surface. That what went on inside a person—fear, jealousy, anger, longing, love—didn’t always line up with what showed on the outside. Sitting there on the floor of the library, back against the brick wall, I felt something shift and start to seep in. A quiet epiphany, one that would stay with me.
Libraries make that kind of shift possible. They put books like that within reach of a kid who might not know what he’s looking for, only that something feels off, or hidden, or unresolved. They make it possible to wander into a story that clarifies a feeling you’ve been carrying around without knowing how to name it. And they do it without asking anything in return. You walk in, you take a book off the shelf, and for a while, you are not alone in whatever it is you’re trying to figure out.
Years later, when I was writing The Reel Life of Zara Kegg, I found myself thinking about that kid on the library floor more than I expected to. Zara has her own version of that space. For her, at 16, it’s the Palace Theater, an aging movie house she ends up running in the midst of grief following her mother’s death. Instead of gray shelves, she has a plywood projection booth. Instead of stacks, she has reels of old films—black-and-white monster movies, B-movies, things that might seem, on the surface, like pure escape. But for her, they become something else. A way of getting at what she can’t quite say out loud.
Zara and her father love each other. That’s never in question. But there’s a silence between them, a shared grief they don’t know how to talk about. They circle it, and live their lives around it. If there were a motto in that house, it might be the same one: everything’s fine. And of course it isn’t. At all. The question becomes how to live with that gap between what’s felt and what’s spoken, and how, if at all, to bridge it.
She sees something similar in her new friend Zachary, though it looks different on the surface. He’s not exactly lying, but he’s not telling the truth either—about how he’s doing, about what he needs or wants. There’s always something just out of reach, and she feels herself getting pulled into that space, losing her balance as she falls in love.
One of my favorite moments in the book comes when Zara ends up showing a movie to absolutely no one. The theater is empty on a rainy Wednesday night. She decides she can’t stand the idea of the movie playing to nobody, so she takes her popcorn and coffee downstairs, sits in the audience like a regular customer, and watches. Her logic is simple: if someone went to the trouble to make a movie—even sixty years ago—then it seems sad for no one to see it. Everything, in its own way, wants to be seen.
The movie she’s showing is The Hideous Sun Demon, which is exactly the kind of movie the title suggests. A scientist is exposed to radiation (of course) and turns into a scaly monster whenever sunlight touches him. To avoid hurting anyone, he decides the only solution is to stay out of the sun and live in the dark. By the end of the film, Zara finds herself crying in the empty theater.
Mostly, the movie is ridiculous. The effects are awful, the dialogue worse, and it looks like it was filmed for about ten dollars. But she ends up feeling bad for the scientist, because all he really wanted was to be left alone, in the dark. As she sits there, in a theater that is empty in more ways than one, Zara recognizes something in that, though she might not quite articulate it.
One more thing I discovered at the Benjamin Branch: I love genre fiction. I grew up on it and still return to it from time to time. But the world is not all dystopias and vampires, just as it’s not only quiet, realistic novels. Teen readers, like all readers, need a range of stories. They need books that are funny, books that are hopeful, books that offer some light. But they also need books that refuse to look away from what’s hard. The trick, I think, is not choosing between those things, but keeping them together. Let a story be warm and strange and entertaining, let it be funny yet still honest about grief, about loneliness, about the complicated ways people fail yet try again.
The first place I learned that this was possible was on the floor of a library, with a book in my hands that didn’t match the surface of my life but somehow matched its underside exactly. That’s what I hope for readers of Zara’s story, not that they’ll see themselves in every detail, but that somewhere, in the spaces between what’s said and unsaid, they’ll recognize something true.
And that they’ll have a place—a library, a classroom, a worn-out theater—where they can sit with that recognition for a while, back against the wall, and let it quietly seep in.
~
Brad Barkley is the author of the novels “Money, Love” and “Alison’s Automotive Repair Manual,” named as Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post and Library Journal. He has published two story collections (“Circle View,” “Another Perfect Catastrophe”), and his short work has appeared in 40+ magazines including The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Oxford American, Glimmer Train, Fractured Lit, Flash Frog, and Virginia Quarterly Review, which twice awarded him the Emily Clark Balch Prize for Fiction.
Before becoming a Professor of Creative Writing, he worked a string of odd jobs—from short-order cook and roofer to telemarketer, dairy bottling line worker, and even hang-gliding instructor—work that keeps his fiction grounded in real places and people. He has received multiple Maryland State Arts Council awards and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in the mountains of Maryland with his wife and their dog. Find out more at www.bradbarkley.com.
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