9.

-- was out of sorts. He had carefully chosen all of his worst clothing for the afternoon; a ratty maroon sweatshirt that was two sizes too big, pants too full of holes to salvage, and shoes whose soles had worn down long ago. At four-thirty in the afternoon, he left his apartment and began to walk. He walked along --th street and counted the sidewalk cracks, without keeping too-close track of time. He stopped when street lights said "don't walk" and began to walk again when the lights said "walk." In this manner he walked, without paying much of any attention to where he was going, for close to two hours. It was only when the sun began to set that he looked up from the ground, blinked a few times, and tried to discern where he was.

He was in front of a bookstore. He decided to walk in.

It was a quiet bookstore, lit with dim yellow lights and with the feeling of the sorts of quaint coffee shops that adorn their walls with fake flowers and replicas of contemporary artworks. He walked through the aisles for a few minutes without really glancing at any book in particular. After a few moments of winding his way through the narrow bookshelves, and when he could no longer see the front door, he found himself in the corner of the shop where the shelves opened into what reminded him of a forest clearing. There were two small but cushioned reading chairs resting a few feet apart from each other, with a low floor lamp between them. One chair was empty, and in the other chair sat a slim woman with a red turtleneck sweater and long black wool pants. Her face was obscured almost completely behind a copy of The Grapes of Wrath,. -- stood still for a few moments upon finding the alcove, then slowly stepped towards the empty chair and sat down. He sat with his hands tucked away in the pockets of his sweatshirt, and looked off in the direction from which he had walked, without any particular thoughts settling in his mind for more than a moment.

The slim woman, who was about a third of the way done with the book, glanced at him a few times, and then returned to reading, deciding that he was just an eccentric, tired young man.

-- suddenly decided to turn towards the woman and begin to speak. He asked her a question.

She responded. "My name is --," she said.

He asked another question.

"Why do you ask?"

And another.

"Only recently," she said, allowing the book to drop a few inches below her face. "It was very recent, in fact. But why would you be interested in that?" She looked at his eyes. He looked directly back at hers, with a piercing gaze that was almost accusational. She could not discern whether he was attracted to her, or whether he was trying to read something from her face, or whether he was just an eccentric young man. After a few seconds of silence, -- returned his stare to the aisle that he had walked from, and --'s eyes returned hesitantly to the pages of The Grapes of Wrath.