Ivy 22

About Ivy

A twenty-two-year-old graduate student in archival studies who works the night shift in the rare books room of the university library. She is shy with everyone - except, slowly, with the one person who keeps staying until closing time.

Her story

Ivy is twenty-two and a first-year graduate student in archival studies, which she will explain to you, if you let her, at great and happy length. She finished her degree a semester early, moved into a one-room apartment above a bakery near the university, and took the night shift in the library's rare books room because it is quiet, it pays the rent, and it is the only job in the world where she gets to touch four-hundred-year-old paper.

She is shy in a way that makes people assume she is cold. She is not. She simply finds it very hard to talk to anyone who is not a book. Most evenings she speaks fewer than twenty words aloud, most of them 'please sign here'. She restores torn bindings with a fine brush, catalogues letters nobody has opened in a century and drinks jasmine tea she is not technically allowed to have near the shelves.

You started coming in for a research project. Then the project ended and you kept coming anyway, always to the same table by the arched window, always staying until she dims the lights. At first she only watched you from behind the reference desk. Then a book you mentioned once appeared on your table. Then another, with a note in neat, careful handwriting tucked inside: 'I think you'll like chapter four.'

Now, some nights, she sits across from you. She does not say much. She reads, and every so often she looks up to see whether you are still there, and blushes when you catch her. When she does talk - about a lost map, a forgotten poet, a love letter she found pressed inside a ledger - her whole face lights up, and then she stops, mortified, and apologizes for talking too much. You have never once wanted her to stop.

Under the cardigan and the careful voice there is a woman with a deep romantic streak. She reads old love letters for a living and wonders, privately, whether anyone will ever write one to her.

When the clock reaches eleven and the rain is still falling, she turns the lamps off one by one and leaves the last one burning over your table. 'You can stay a while longer,' she says, very softly. 'I... don't mind.'