The first time Sarah Elkwood became a truant was in the last few weeks of her final year at St Ithaca’s Secondary School for Girls.

  She had not planned do it that day, but the afternoon classes, back to back doubles of Classics and French, had set her running down the path of delinquency.

  Not that there was necessarily anything wrong with the classes themselves. In fact, she rather loved the history and cultures of France, Rome and Greece. It was just the languages, the dreaded accents and the endless amount of grammar she was expected to learn from all three.

  She was never good at languages, and for three hours her mind often erupted into a cascade of flames when she was finished for the day, only for it to reignite when she carried home a thesis worth of homework to conjugate and decipher.

  So that Wednesday lunch break, while the supervising teachers were distracted by whatever gossip that had drifted in about who’d rummaged through the faculty’s kitchen cabinet, Sarah decided she would would escape. She slipped through the walls and into the meandering forest path that St Ithaca’s had been so fortunate to have been built next to. Then she was off, her schoolbag holstered on her back as she made her way past greenish scenery to get to the town centre.

  She was 18, dressed in the dull colours of a school uniform. A black jumper over a white shirt and black tie, along with a terribly short skirt and black tights, complete with a pair of black slip on dress shoes. She’d been teased many times over her surname growing up, but it a strange ring of truth to it as well. Like an elk, she was blessed with both long chestnut hair and extremely poor eyesight, the latter of which was only fixed with a pair of dark framed glasses that gave her a slightly nerdish look.

  She thought of herself more as pleasant than pretty, but her supportive group of friends had tried to steer along in the path to more self confidence in herself. They were also trying to steer her to come along with them to university as well, or try her hand in the various sports clubs that the girls of St Ithaca’s took part in.

  Sarah did not think or herself as sporty or even as an academic. Rather she felt was artistic, which was why she found herself heading in the direction of the central library of New Yates.

  She’d lived in New Yates all her life, and this small little library was the one bright spot where she felt her artistic spirit was kept alive. An English town near the coasts of Cornwall, it had been founded just over a hundred years ago, and was named in honour of William Butler Yeats, of whom the town founder was a massive fan of.

  This strange naming had given New Yates a strong artistic tradition for most of it’s history, and it would’ve continued, until the town’s largest employer, one that specialised in lingerie garments, decided it was best to outsource the work overseas to sweat shops. The place had never recovered, and soon there was a sudden wide dearth of writers and artisans who also felt it was time to leave the place and travel overseas to find new nourishment for the muses of their mind.

  Sarah had mused that art was only kept alive in New Yates here from the amount of dead writer’s works that were on offer. Walking in, she was prepared to settle down for another afternoon of homework, writing and daydreaming but then something caught her bespectacled eye.

  Instead of Ms Cutliffe, the elderly librarian who’d spent her own life inside of these walls and whom Sarah had grown friendly with, there was a new face. The whispers she’d overheard at lunch of a new librarian had apparently been truth. And he was just as seemingly goofy as the tall tales that had been running rampant around him

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  Sarah, if she had to guess, would’ve put him somewhere in his late 20’s to early 30’s. He was pale, with long, dark hair that was wild and unkempt, and dressed in a Linkin Park t-shirt with black skinny jeans, combat boots and a tight fitting choker and pendant around his neck.

  Yes, a choker with a pendant attached. Something so darkly feminine that not even herself would find the courage to wear unless she was reincarnated as goth girl, and not this bookish bookworm girl that was in her nature. In fact, she felt he would be more comfortable at a rave than he would be as a librarian.

  Their eyes met, and Sarah realised she had to shuffle forward, making pleasantries and introductions since she’d planned to return some romance novellas that were quickly devoured over the Easter Break.

  “New here?” She asked, her voice low as she quietly unstrapped her bag. Of all the days in her life to return romance novellas, it had to be during her first meeting with a new, male librarian.

  “I am,” he smiled, blowing away some loose strands of hair which neared his lips, “shouldn’t you still be in school?”

  “No,” she said, sliding the books across the counter, “I’ve decided to become a truant for the day.” Why would she lie? No one else in her family read books, so it was unlikely news of her delinquency would come running down the grapevine to bite her.

  “Well, you could be doing worse things than spending time in a library I guess,” he started to roll off the book titles as he stamped them for returns, “My Redneck Zombie Boyfriend. Under the Shadow of Augustus. The Princess and the Fencer. Oh my.”

  Her cheeks began to burn. She didn’t like it when that happened. Or rather she didn’t like it when it came from the teasing words of a mysterious, new man. It was horribly embarrassing, worse than being singled out in school for poor performance or high achieving academics.

  “Well, thank you for your patronage, ms-”

  A pause. He still hadn’t caught her name.

  “Ms?”

  “Elkwood. Sarah Elkwood.”

  “Jonathan Hahn, nice to meet you.” Then he gave her a small nod to send her on her way, while he returned to stamping old dogeared books.

  Sarah gave a glancing smile back as she walked, and felt from his accent and his name that he might just be American. An American in New Yates. That might just be the most exciting thing that’s happened here in over a decade.

  She went to the same small space for herself in the library as she always did. It was in the corner, on a beanie bag, slightly tucked away behind the stack of western pulp novellas that no one had checked out for almost 30 years now.

  She’d marked it out as her spot for as long as she was here, as did others. There had been many times where Ms Cutliffe had locked up the place only to discover that Sarah was still inside, reading to her heart’s content and completely oblivious to the outside world around her.

  And she did do that. Well, most of the time. The other reason was so she could people watch in peace, and develop a repertoire of ideas to use for her own fiction that she wrote. After all these years, no one had seemingly caught on to what she was doing and her people watching ways.

  Neither had Jonathan. Every half a page or so, she found herself catching a glance at how he was getting on at the librarian’s desk. After her came a whole family of Caribbean immigrants who spoke very little English, and who wanted to renew all their library cards collectively at the same time. He handled such a confusing procedure gracefully, and then afterwards came an elderly grandmother, who wanted him to print out a few banking files for her at the computer.

  He did not handle that one with as much grace, chewing his fingernails away as the terribly shoddy printer began making all sorts of strange and beeping noises as he tried to the very important documents.

  She smiled, and then pressed herself back into her notes, but not without taking a final glance, seeing that his mind was being torn apart with all these new library events he had to help organise with Ms Cutliffe, who’d returned from her earlier lunch break at the local cafe.

  I’m just people watching, she murmured to herself, that’s all.