“Shhh, turn your music down, I can hear it from my desk young man!” Mrs. Gilligan snipped at the guy a few tables away hunkered down in a gray hoodie. He pushed his black heavy duty headphones off to the side and gave the tiny old librarian a condescending look. She swept her cream colored woolen scarf over her chest and put her hand on her hip made the ‘shhh’ gesture with emphasis.
“What’s your problem lady I wasn’t sayin’ anythin’. He grumbled with slurred enunciation.
“Well your music was!” She mocked a few lines of his rap with a faux rapper attitude. “Come on have some respect for your peers, that boy over there hasn’t been able to write a word since you turned that trash on.” Mrs. Gilligan pointed three tables down to where another boy had set up shop in a burrow of book covers and papers. He was glaring out from the side of the books at the boy with the headphones, a heavy brass pen frozen over a notebook page in his right hand. The boy with the headphones grabbed his underfed binder and sauntered away from the table with a quaint “Screw libraries!” not quite under his breath. The boy at the table smiled a silent thank you to the old woman. She was right; he hadn’t been able to write since that guy had sat down and started to blast his music.
Admittedly he hadn’t been able to write a word since he had come into the library. He knew he had to get his assignment done but that other guy’s intrusion had completely snapped him out of the writing frame of mind. He was too hyper aware of what he no longer felt like doing. He dropped his prized pen down onto his writing journal and took off his black wayfarer glasses. His exasperated sigh fluttered through the edges of the journal’s pages. He uttered a mental coarse thank you to headphones-guy for setting him off of his motivated train of thought. He avoided looking directly at his writing journal as he reluctantly gathered himself.
A fumbling of books and pencils onto a nearby table signaled the arrival of someone else. He didn’t look up; he just hoped they would be quiet. Reluctantly he looked back to the blank pages of his journal and took pen in hand. He had to tackle this assignment, disturbances or not. He couldn’t avoid thinking about it any longer, it was due tomorrow. He’d scribbled down an idea or two from the prompts in class and told himself to make something out of them later. Being honest with himself, now, as he sat there, he knew that meant he had no inspiration. He shot down those ideas with practiced precision. This one will take too long to explain itself; it’s more novella than short story. There’s too much open ended descriptions and not enough actual plot in this one. That one would just be a page and a half  long descriptive essay on how many different ways he can use figurative language to describe the same thing using other things. There wasn’t much substance to any of them. There wasn’t any inspiration.
“How’s it going?”
He was snapped out of his stasis by Mrs. Gilligan standing by the corner of his table, holding a few books in her arms.
“Oh…writers block. I can’t settle on anything, not even a main character.” He groaned.
“Why don’t you pick someone here in the library? I see plenty of characters walk in here day in day out. Pick a few, stick ‘em together and see what happens!” The librarian patted him on the shoulder and tottered off down the aisles with a knowing smile. His gaze hung blankly in the space where Mrs. Gilligan had been as he mulled over what she had said. His first thought was to do something with headphones-guy and the subject of improper social etiquette but that wasn’t enough to write with. So he glanced up from the table.
The alcove he was sitting in was off to the side behind Mrs. Gilligan’s desk which sat in the middle of the library. Bookshelves stood like a forest on three sides with the reading tables nestled in the middle like a glade. From his angle looking out into the main area of the library there really weren’t any other students about. If they were in the library they were probably in the aisles or at the other section of tables on the opposite side and out of view. His eyes flicked over the tables in front of them. They were all empty save for the green reading lamps on the corners.
Looking beside himself he found one of the tables occupied, and its reading light switched on. The person who had sat down at a table beside him earlier was using it to illuminate the likes of a sketchbook. She was hunkered over the sketchbook, her loose curly brown hair sweeping over half the page like willow leaves. Eraser shavings peppered the paper and desk in the immediate vicinity of her hand. From what he could see of her face she was intently squinting down at her work like she was on a mission. The pencil fell from her hand and she snagged the eraser, and then looked up in his direction. Freckles covered her face like paint speckles. For a second she appeared to be evaluating something but her eyes jerked off to the side, then back to her work. Her eraser sluggishly swept over the page as if she had become distracted but was still trying to work.
She immediately struck him as a potential character, a spy, or a detective. The way she was so focused on whatever her work was. Maybe it was notes on a suspect, or a sketch. The way she looked up almost as if to check if her cover had been compromised. His mind was already going off about how to approach the story.
The following hour and a half wafted by as he wrote. When he had to pause to think he would make a quick glance over at the girl who had remained there drawing. Sometimes she was pouring over her work; other times he noticed her hastily looking elsewhere or back to her sketchbook as if startled. From Mrs. Gilligan’s seat at her desk it was almost like a visual dance. The boy would look up, then go back to scribbling while the girl would pause her work and take a short look at him. Then he would look up and she would grab her eraser or pencil and edit something in her drawing. Back and forth it seemed to go between them, a steady rhythm with neither quite figuring the other out. It was mighty endearing to Mrs. Gilligan, who was watching secretively from the other side of a chintzy romance novel.
The rhythm stuttered though when the girl went for her eraser and accidentally knocked it off the table. Mrs. Gilligan twiddled the end of her scarf in her fingers as she watched the eraser bounce erratically between the table legs and get stuck neatly under the boy’s navy blue converse. The girl half rose from her seat to go after it yet he had already picked it up and was walking it back over to her. Mrs. Gilligan held the book higher over her face to shield her smile as the boy noticed the girl’s drawing. She knew who it was of; she’d nudged the girl into giving it a try after all. He looked so flattered when the girl handed him her sketchbook. They talked a little, then suddenly he was picking up his writing journal and going to bring it to her. As he made his way back over to the girl he caught Mrs. Gilligan’s eyes. She winked at him.