Ava Fletcher
September 10, 2014 4:00 AM
The hidden essay of Malvac Theobrum by Ava Fletcher
Ava walked into the library, habitually checking the notice board when she saw a schedule for Library Helpers out of the corner of her eye and she felt a sinking feeling inside of her stomach. She had meant to sign up for it but the pen she’d had on her the day she saw it hadn’t been working and so had told herself to remember to sign up later. She never had, of course, and it was well into the semester by now so it only made since that a schedule sheet was already made. She briefly scanned the list, wondering who was on it She recognized most of the names-- Emery and Keme especially as they were the only ones she could remember having a discussion with.A noise made her start though and she suddenly remembered the reason for coming to the library in the first place. She was looking for a specific speculative essay about the healing properties of chocolate and their usefulness in recovering from a dementor attack. She had looked for it in the library before but hadn’t had any luck with finding it and instead ordered a collection of essays from a book catalogue the week before with the hope that this essay would be amongst them. However, it hadn’t been there either and so she had decided to hit the library once more-- perhaps someone had taken it out and had returned it since. The chances of that were slim as she was almost certain she was the only one in the student body interested in reading medical texts in her free time but it wasn’t completely out of the realm of possibility.
Ava adjusted the strap of her book bag and headed towards the section of the library that she most frequented, the one that contained interesting medical readings and unconventional Healing methods. As she walked down the aisle, she began to pull certain titles from the shelves; Dr. Ubbly: a biography , Vanishing Sickness and Other Unusual Ailments, and Murtlap to Lupin: Controversial Medical Preventatives were among the titles and she soon had a stack of books large enough that she needed to find a table to set them down on.
Luckily she found an empty table not too far away and she deposited her stack of books along with her bookbag before going back to the shelves to check one last time for the essay. She knew for sure that it had been published in a collection of essays written by Malvac Broma, which was why she had purchased that last collection of essays. There was a chance that it (or something similar) would be in Murtlap to Lupin: Controversial Medical Preventatives, but she really wanted to find the original book that she had read it in. She was almost certain that she had read it in the Sonora library though it could have come from her mother’s collection in which case she would need to write home and ask.
As Ava turned around to peruse the other side of the aisle, she saw someone out of the corner of her eye. “Excuse me,” she said, going over to them. “But you wouldn’t happen to have seen anything by Malvac Theobrum in here have you? Only I’ve been looking for one specific essay by him that I could have sworn I previously got from this library but I can’t find it any more. Instead I found a load of other books,” here she gestured towards her stack on the nearby table and sighed. “It’s okay if you haven’t, I don’t think he’s really that well known an author and I could have just as easily read it out of my mother’s collection.”
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