Claire Osbrook
January 26, 2022 6:59 PM
The Paper Book by Claire Osbrook
The technical term for Helen Osbrook's workplace was probably 'laboratory,' but Claire preferred to think of it as something more akin to an artist's studio. A tall cabinet was divided into a hundred little drawers, filled by sample after sample of pigments and dried herbs. Crates of bottles of different sizes, all insulated from each other with straw, lurked against the walls, under the work bench and the table where an alembic was running at almost all hours. That was kept carefully away from both of the two doors; there was no real good that a gust of air either from the front of the store or from the tiny glass house where Helen grew colorful and aromatic plants and herbs year-round for her concoctions.A sheen of sweat broke out on Claire's forehead almost as soon as the store door closed behind her, and she immediately reached around to grab the end of her short ponytail and flip it up onto her head, where she could pin it up away from her neck with a barrette. Her grandmother, who had been decanting finished samples into vials, looked up and smiled.
"Ah, Claire," she said. "Name three trees which are good for collecting gums from."
And so, for ten minutes, Helen asked question after question about things a stationer might need to know, and Claire answered them. She knew her grandmother hoped that she'd take over the family business someday, just as she also knew that her parents hoped she'd be a Healer. She just wished she knew why they were all hanging their hopes on her and not Graham - wasn't that backward to how it was normally done? Sure, Graham wasn't really all that good at anything, or at least not interested in many useful things, but even if people didn't want to play the 'only boy in the family' game, he was also still the eldest. What, she wondered, had everyone done with themselves before she was born?
Finally - and none too soon; the routine of question-and-answer was familiar, almost rhythmic after a while, at least when the air was heavy with rose vapors meant for scented inks, and Claire was starting to feel sleepy - the interrogation drew to a conclusion. "Very good," her grandmother declared. "Now come here."
She extended her arms, and Claire obediently went over to give her a hug. "Good to see you, kid," said Helen. "How were exams? And the Ball?"
"Os in Potions and Herbology, Es in everything else," said Claire, aware that this was the part her grandmother was really interested in, something which was quickly confirmed by a flicker of a guilty smile on her grandmother's face. "The Ball, now that was fun. I spent the whole night looking for chances to get a picture of Graham looking stupid, and I think I might have pulled it off a time or two."
Helen laughed. "So I suppose you've come to see me for some developing solution?"
Claire hesitated for a moment before she answered. "Now that I think about it, yes," she said. "But what I came to ask is if I - could read the paper book."
Helen raised an eyebrow. "The paper book?" she repeated. "What do you want with that old thing?"
Claire shrugged. "Idle curiosity," she said. "I was telling another girl about the business at school a while ago, and I realized, wow, if she asks me anything about paper, I'm not going to know nearly enough things to say."
Her grandmother studied her for a moment, and Claire had to suppress a flash of irritation. She hated it when people did that, as though her thoughts were something she owed to other people. She must have done a good job, courtesy of all the time she'd spent teaching herself to lie because her boarding school novels had led her to believe it would be an extremely useful skill at school, of looking bland, because after that moment, Helen nodded.
"I guess if you're old enough to be trusted with a wand, you're old enough to be trusted not to ruin an old book," she said. "I'll put it in your room later."
Claire smiled. "Thank you," she said.
Her grandmother wasn't, by adult standards, usually too disappointing, but Claire kept it in mind that it was possible she'd lied, and would spin delay into eventually never doing what she had said she would. That was, when the requested volume did appear on the small desk in Claire's bedroom, she only got a pleasant surprise.
Hurrying over, she sat down at the desk and very carefully lifted up the dusty, cracked cover. One of the quirks of the paper book was that it was made of samples of most of the things it taught the user to make. On the bright side, this gave a good idea what the end product should look like. On the not so bright side, this also meant it had been taken apart and fitted back together several times when it was expanded, and the pages weren't totally even, either on their surfaces (she spent several minutes just running her fingers over different papers, comparing textures; she'd never gotten to touch the paper book before) or on their edges, and the last thing Claire wanted to do was return it to Helen damaged. This was also why she was careful, as she lifted pages and began to read, not to touch surfaces with words on them if she could help it, in case the oils of human fingers could damage any of the disparate inks. Several inks, after all, looked unfamiliar, and as she read, she found little notes on some pages about which inks were good to use on that kind of paper, and about which inks were not so good to use. So the type of ink used could affect the magical properties of some papers? She'd known that was true of parchments, because every now and then they got some oddball in the store who wanted something ridiculously specific that they had to special order in, but she'd never thought about it in relation to paper....
She began to swing her feet back and forth under her chair without noticing as she kept reading, sinking into the book so thoroughly that she didn't hear the first two times her mother called her down for dinner. After the third, she rushed downstairs, flushing and trying to wordlessly will the others into not saying anything.
Naturally, her mother immediately said something.
"Everything okay, Claire? That was the third time I called you."
"Yeah, sorry," said Claire, slipping into her chair; her father and Graham were already seated. "I was reading."
"And this is why I was kind of surprised they didn't throw you in Aladren," said Graham. "Maybe the potion thought too many nerds in one place would blow something up by their power combined or something."
Claire reflected for a moment on the two Aladrens who were in her year before she said, "Yes, Graham. A potion was totally afraid of what I could do if I befriended a guy who wears sunglasses indoors and a guy who annoys all the portraits a lot. We would have shaken the foundation of civilization."
"Claire," her mother said admonishingly. "And you, too, Graham - be nice."
"Sorry, Mom."
"Yeah, sorry. So - what've we got for supper?"
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Claire Osbrook
The Paper Book
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