Page 2 of No Offense

Molly eyed Elijah sternly as she went on to describe his skintight denim jeans, black hoodie, camouflage backpack and baseball hat, shaggy brown hair, and general height and weight.

Elijah, meanwhile, began rapidly to eat the evidence against him.

“The po-po,” he exclaimed, spraying cookie crumbs everywhere. “The po-po’ll never get me!”

“Wouldn’t it make more sense,” one of the weary-looking fathers asked Elijah, “for you simply to leave?”

“I got as much right to be here as you do, man,” Elijah said, biting into the head of his male cookie.

“No, you don’t,” the father said. “I’m here with my four-year-old. And I’m not subjecting the rest of us to pornography.”

“Pornogwaphy,” echoed one of the toddlers at the activity table in a delighted voice.

“The First Amendment defends my right to free speech,” Elijah cried.

“Not in front of my child,” said the mother of the child who’d repeated the wordpornography. “At a cookie-decorating program in the children’s section of a public library.”

Molly felt as if she’d barely hung up the phone before Henry from the reference desk came running in, looking pale but determined.

“I got your call,” he said to her. His gaze focused on the back of Elijah’s head. “This the kid?” Then, when Elijah turned around, Henry’s enormous shoulders slumped. “Oh, it’syou.”

Elijah, who’d been licking icing off his fingers, looked similarly disappointed.

“Wait,” he said, throwing Molly a disgusted look. “You calledHenry?”

“I didn’t want to,” Molly said. “But you pushed me too far this time.”

Elijah laughed. “I should have known you’d never call nine-one-one on a kid.”

“No,” Molly said. “I wouldn’t. But next time, Elijah, I will call your mother.”

He rolled his eyes, unimpressed. “I can’t believe I ate all that frosting forHenry. I feel sick.”

“Serves you right,” Molly said.

Henry placed a heavy hand on Elijah’s shoulder. “Come on, kid. You’re going back to YA.”

All the fight had left Elijah. He and Henry, the reference librarian, had tangled often in the past, and Henry always won, due not only to the nearly one hundred pounds—most of it muscle—he had on the boy, but to his endless patience.

“Fine,” Elijah said, rising from his chair. “But I want all of you to know that what you witnessed back there was oneof Elijah Trujos’s finest performances, and one day, when I have my own comedy special on Netflix, you’ll say to yourselves, I knew that boy back when he did cookie porn at the library.”

“I’m sure we will, Elijah,” Henry said, still keeping a hand on Elijah’s shoulder. “Don’t forget your backpack.”

“I enjoyed the show, Elijah,” Molly couldn’t help calling after him. “It just wasn’t appropriate for a younger audience.”

“Ingrates,” Elijah said, allowing himself to be steered from the children’s section just as a voice called, “Miss Molly?”

One of the younger children’s mothers waved to Molly from the direction of the restrooms.

Molly wondered what could possibly have gone wrong now. This was not the first time, of course, that a parent had expressed concern to her about the condition of the restrooms, although there was something more urgent than usual in this particular young mother’s expression.

“Yes, Mrs. Cheeseman?” she asked.

“Oh, Miss Molly.” Mrs. Cheeseman steered her five-year-old daughter, Bella, back toward the play table. “There’s something wrong with the last stall in the girls’ room. The door is locked, but no one is in there. I couldn’t see anyone’s feet, and no one answered when I knocked.”

Molly forced a smile onto her face.

“Of course, Mrs. Cheeseman,” she said. “I’ll take care of it.”