She could hear them outside the door, discussing what to do with her. She could only make out a few actual words: "Joanie," "Handbook," "gunpowder." The rest was muffled by the thick steel door, turned into two unintelligible but distinct tracks of noise. One was low and clipped, each syllable punched and distinct, with frequent long pauses. The other was higher, more fluid, a bow drawn across slack strings. Rhythm and melody. They played a duet while Joanie froze.

The room they'd put her in was cold and spare, with an exposed concrete floor and unpainted drywall. No windows. An unfinished basement, maybe. Or a cell. The floor was icy to the touch, and the cold entered her body through the soles of her bare feet (she thought she had been wearing shoes, but now she couldn't remember) and rose all the way up her legs and into the rest of her until it found a home in every cell and set her teeth chattering. She gathered her legs up into her chest and hugged herself tightly to keep herself warm.

It wasn't working. A thin, piercing wind blew in from somewhere, frustrating her efforts to conserve body heat. The room had a draft. She crawled over to the steel door, keeping her feet in the air, letting her jeans provide some insulation to the contact points of her knees. She felt along the bottom and sides of the door, but they were airtight. The draft was coming from the other side of the room.

Joanie crawled across the room to the blank back wall. Down on the bottom right corner there was a hole, just big enough for a couple of fingers. A column of frigid air poured through the hole. Joanie looked over her shoulder at the steel door. The two voices kept up their duet. Joanie stuck two fingers into the hole, gripped the drywall, and pulled.

With a crack and a groan, the entire sheet of drywall started to swing out on stiff, protesting hinges. Joanie stood up, gingerly planting her feet on the cold floor, and pulled the false wall out, until there was enough room for her to slip in.

The space behind the wall was dark, but as she crossed the dividing line where the drywall used to be, fluorescent lights hummed to life. The room contained nothing but row after row of bookcases, stacked flush as in a research library. There were arranged in two columns, with an aisle between them. The room was just wide enough to accommodate the shelves, but Joanie couldn't see how far back they went. It was even colder in here than in the other room, nearly a walk-in freezer. It was the kind of cold that preserved dead things.

The shelves of the two bookcases at the head of the columns were filled with neatly arranged books of identical size and color. Each had the same phrase stamped in gold on the purple cloth of the spine: LIFE MEANS NOTHING TO THE DEAD.

A beige cart, the kind librarians used to reshelve books, sat in front of the first case. Nine Handbooks rested on its slanted top shelf. Joanie pulled them out, one by one, and read the names on the covers:

RICHARD CHRISTOPHER GIBBONS

STEPHEN CHESTER MOSS

AUDREY HALE JACOBSON

ALEXANDER HENRY PRATT

LATA KHAN

RENEE MARIE GOLDSWORTHY

KENYA DIANA CASSIDY

TIMOTHY JAMES LEVITT

JOAN AGNES MCKITTRICK

Joanie recognized about half the names: Kenya and Audrey, two of the most important people in her life. Alex, one of the doofy twins that Audrey started hanging out with. And Tim, the boy in the tunnel.

They always said not to read anyone else's Handbook. That if you did, you were likely to find out some shit you really didn't want to know. That you especially didn't want anybody else reading your own Handbook. That what the Handbook had to say was only for the person whose name was on the cover. That you should treat it like a diary: private, a little embarrassing, potentially explosive.

On the other hand, everybody took a peek in somebody else's Handbook at least once. Usually only once, because once you got a glimpse inside, you didn't want another. Last year, Joanie and Audrey couldn't help themselves. That first Saturday before classes started, they stole up to the cupola atop Mary Rutherford and traded Handbooks, giddy at the prospect of learning what lay in store. But when they both read about the Halloween party at the Dollhouse and what would happen there, the giddiness ceased, and a wary silence descended that lasted for the next two months, until the Halloween party itself, where no amount of alcohol or body paint could prevent the inevitable.

Joanie didn't want to read Audrey's Handbook again. But she did want to know who some of these other people were. With shivering fingers, she pulled LATA KHAN off the cart and searched the index for her own name. No dice. But a little farther down in the Ms there was this: "Mirror-self." Joanie wasn't going to pass that up.

Renee is sprawled out on the bare mattress of your roommate's bed, her black hair splayed across the pillow like spilled ink. You gave her your comforter, so you have only a thin sheet as covering. With the air conditioner going full blast, at Caroline's insistence, it is laughably insufficient. You find yourself scooching closer to Caroline, reaching for contact to transfer some of her body's heat to yours. She shed the silver dress for one of your biggest T-shirts, the 1992 National League Champions Braves shirt that your dad bought you. You didn't care much for baseball, but you'd take any opportunity to stay up late, and Game 7 was as good an excuse as any. You got pulled into the game despite yourself, and by the time Sid Bream was chugging around third in the bottom of the ninth, trying to beat the throw from left field, you were on your feet alongside your dad.

When the celebration on TV ended it was past midnight, but you and Dad went into town anyway. A guy had set up a stand in the Walmart parking lot to sell commemorative T-shirts. Where he or the shirts came from, you had no idea, but it seemed like half of Pasley was there, doing the Tomahawk Chop and chanting "Ooooh-oh-ohohohoh" and breathlessly recounting The Slide. Even with the casual racism, it was the first, maybe only time you ever felt like you were part of the community in that town. The only shirts the guy had left were XL, but Dad bought you one anyway, and you slept in it for a year. It was one of the few things you had that Asha didn't.

Now it's stretched over the ludicrosities of Caroline's body. The hills and valleys. The shimmering dress is hung over the closet door, directly across from you as you sit in the bed next to Caroline. Even in the dark you can see yourself in it, or so you think, but it's not you that you see. The dress ripples in the cold air blasting from the air conditioner, and as the fabric shifts and catches whatever light there is to be caught in the dim room, the reflection changes: first you, then another. A white girl, with short light hair.

Renee's camera is next to the bed. You pick it up, point it at the dress, and press the release. The shutter opens and stays open, gathering light, building an image.

Joanie heard a noise behind her. She shut the Handbook and peeked around the open drywall panel, ready to close the library back up if the men outside started to enter. Their conversation continued, and Joanie turned back to the books.

Joanie had always been meticulous about keeping books organized – a minor rebellion against her parents, who left teetering stacks all over the house. She felt an almost magnetic pull from LATA KHAN's Handbook to the bookcase. There were a number of open spots on the exposed shelves, and she found one between JODY BURGWYN KEITH and SHANNON REED KITZMILLER. She returned LATA KHAN to its home, but the space was wide enough for two books, and a blank spot still remained.

Joanie pulled another Handbook from the cart: STEPHEN CHESTER MOSS. There actually was an entry for "McKittrick, Joanie" in the index.

You don't like climbing up that high, both because you don't trust the stability of the loft, and because you know what Dick likes to do up on the highest level, but he insists. He pushes himself up onto the plywood platform, and you ascend up the ladder just high enough to look over the lip and see an array of magazines and a box of Kleenex. You keep your hands on the ladder. "See? Check it out." Dick points to a Volleyball Lady Ambassadors poster tacked to the wall just below the ceiling. The whole team is on there, sixteen towering girls in action poses against a white backdrop. You find Kenya, pushed to a corner, but Dick is pointing at the blond girl in the center of the poster, her body curved into a parenthesis as she jumps for a spike. "That's her roommate. Joanie McKittrick. You've got to set me up, man."

Dick's optimism is both disgusting and touchingly naïve. You haven't even met Joanie yet, for reasons you don't really want to think about – and if Kenya won't let you meet her, there's no way she's letting Dick get near her.

Another noise. Joanie glanced at the door, less urgently this time. Probably the drywall or the hinges it's on. Just the house settling. That's what people always said. When Joanie tried to think about whose house she was in, her mind went a little staticky.

She put STEPHEN CHESTER MOSS on the shelf in the empty space next to JOSHUA FORD MORRIS. "Dick" might be RICHARD CHRISTOPHER GIBBONS, she figured. She grabbed it from the cart. As she opened the Handbook, a stray scrap of paper fluttered out. Some pages had been torn from the book. There was something painful about their ragged edges. She picked up the sliver of paper from the floor. It just had the word "sanctuary," highlighted in red. After a second she realized what the red was, and she shuddered and dropped the scrap. She decided she didn't want to read Dick's Handbook after all. She slid it into its spot on the shelf in the Gs. There was another empty space a few books to its right, probably belonging to RENEE MARIE GOLDSWORTHY.

You pull the pictures one by one from the chemical bath and hang them from the line to dry. Even in the red light of the darkroom you can tell that they're mostly wasted film. The shot of you, Caroline and Lata on the roof is a keeper, the static Kouros poses given a sense of life by the slight blur around the edges of your bodies, from your inability to keep still. But after that it's all just a succession of smears and blobs. You must have been trashed at Taylor's party.

But the final three shots on the roll are different. You don't remember taking them. One is a shot of the Tower through the window of a bus, framed by the out-of-focus heads of two girls. Your lips have always curled into a sneer when you mention the Tower, but here you see it differently: a lighthouse, calling you to safety.

The next picture is of Xander, and though you have taken hundreds if not thousands of photos of the twins, you have never taken one like this. Xander is completely exposed, unguarded, in a way that not even Alex has been in front of your camera. His face is contorted, a little blurry, his open mouth bigger than it should be, a deep hole of wounded anger. But his eyes are sharp, and whatever they are looking at, they are filled with love.

The last shot is almost solid black. You have to lean in close and break out the loupe to see the light that has been collected, in the center: a few points of gray and white that your brain wants to turn into a face. It almost looks like Joanie.

She put the book in its waiting slot on the shelf. She vaguely remembered Renee now – Joanie had seen her hanging out with Audrey and the twins. ALEXANDER HENRY PRATT. She wasn't sure if that was Alex or Xander, though from what she could recall they were pretty interchangeable.

Russell carefully sweeps the crystals onto a slip of paper, then folds it and pours them back into the vial. "Come on, man," you say. "Just one line?"

Russell puts the vial back in the locker. "Sorry. There's a limited supply." He turns the key in the lock.

"But you were going to let Tim take it."

"He had a need. I suspect your interest is purely recreational."

Well, he's got you there.

She had just opened the book to a random page, and there was Tim. That's what was so seductive and so dangerous about the Handbooks. They made you feel like everybody was connected, like there was such a thing as destiny.

Joanie put the Handbook on the shelf. Her fingers were starting to turn blue. The illicit thrills of other people's Handbooks had kept her from feeling the full effects of the cold, but she was no longer able to ignore it. She couldn't spend much more time in here. And when the two men outside decided to come in, she had to be ready.

She pulled Audrey's Handbook off the cart and shelved it without even bothering to open it. She wouldn't betray her friend again by reading her secrets. Audrey would tell her when she was ready.

TIMOTHY JAMES LEVITT was next. The boy in the tunnel. What had he called her? "The girl on the bus."

Her name is Joanie. You see her, briefly, in the window of a Blue Line bus as it drives past Weston Dining Hall, and something about the way the fading light hits her face makes you think: this must be what love feels like.

She closed the book. She didn't want this. She didn't want to be the object in some child's fumbling attempts to understand adult emotions. She thought about following her own advice and ripping the pages out of his Handbook, but she couldn't make that decision for him.

She reached down and picked up the bloody scrap of paper from the floor. She opened Tim's Handbook to a random page and put it inside. Whatever sanctuary he was seeking from her, he could find it somewhere else. She put his Handbook on the shelf.

Only Kenya's Handbook and Joanie's own were left on the cart. She opened Kenya's to the index. The entry for "Your roommate" listed dozens of instances, from page 1 to the end of the book. Joanie didn't need to know anything else. She shelved the book in its proper spot.

There were three open spaces left on the shelves. One was for Joanie's own Handbook. One was the space next to LATA KHAN. And the third was in the Bs, between MICHAEL WILLIAM BOND and QUENTIN REGINALD BROWN.

Joanie picked up her own Handbook. Her hands were so cold now, she couldn't feel the familiar texture of the cover. It was like someone else was touching the book, and she shivered as she felt someone else's fingers on her own skin. She had to get out of here.

She found what she wanted in the index. "Library, escape from."

You turn to page 218 to find a way out of this freezing room, but before you can find the information you need you hear the door opening behind you. You turn and see the two men enter: one lean and hard, old-fashioned somehow, the other a big bear of a man with hair like a Marine. "Fuck, she found the library," the big man says, and as he lumbers across the room you pull the drywall panel shut.

Joanie's brain went staticky again. This was too much to take in. The words on the page started to blur, and the room dimmed, as if a sheer black curtain fell over her eyes.

She heard the door open and saw the men enter. "Fuck, she found the library." Joanie scrambled to her knees and found the handhold at the bottom of the drywall. She closed it just as the big man ran into it. "Goddamn it," he said.

Joanie grabbed her Handbook and ran down the center aisle of the library, hoping for an exit. She couldn't feel anything below her knees. She heard the men cursing as they pulled open the drywall behind her. The library seemed never-ending. She couldn't see a rear wall, or anything except the endless stacks of Handbooks. She flipped through the pages of her own, looking for anything that would help, but she couldn't read any of it.

"Joanie!" bellowed the big man. "There's nowhere to go! You can stop this nonsense and come on back." He didn't want to chase her. She had that, at least. But she could still hear his heavy footsteps behind her.

Flipping through the Handbook as she ran, she almost missed it – a gap in the stacks to the left. She turned and shouldered through a door into a stairwell. She could go up or down. She chose up.

The stairs ended at a landing with a heavy wood door. She pushed through and found herself in a parlor. Purple flowers covered the walls and the floor. She looked to her right and flinched from a taxidermy of a bear, convinced for a second it was the big man.

There was someone else in the room. Tim. His back was to her, and he was looking through a closing door on the opposite side of the room. She ran up to him, flipping through the pages. She held up the book to him. "What does it say, Tim?"

Tim turned, and through the dark glass of her eyes she could see the fear on his face. He read the book, but as he did his body flickered in and out, and then he was gone.

The two men approached from her left, entering the parlor through a set of double doors. She looked behind her, at the door to the stairs. She had expected them to come from there. The big man wasn't sweating or huffing and puffing, as if he hadn't just been chasing her through an endless library. "Miss McKittrick," he said. "We've been expecting you."

The thin man behind him looked like a skeleton when he smiled. "I can take that, if you don't mind." He held out his hand and nodded toward her Handbook.

She looked down at the book, still open in her hand. The text was still blurry, but one word came into focus: "Anthony."

That was his name. This was his house. "Where's Anthony?" she said.

The big man sniffed. "Anthony's taking a much-needed vacation. We're taking over his duties for the foreseeable future."

Joanie closed the Handbook. It felt solid, heavy in her hands.

The Handbook is a tool, to be used as you see fit.

That's what Anthony had told her. She raised the book over her head. "You're not supposed to be in here," she said. Then she brought it down on the big man's head.

She woke up in a tub of ice water. "You're back," said Kenya.