Treasure Island!!!

portion of it, when it was over a hundred years old and I was nine. Mrs. Buskirk had assigned the first few chapters to our fifth grade Reading Lab. Dimly I recall the sensation of sitting at a kidney-shaped table and reading a paragraph out loud; in fact, it was the part where Billy Bones shows up at the inn where Jim is living a quiet life with his parents:
“This is a handy cove and a pleasant sittyated grog-shop . . . Here you, matey, bring up alongside and help up my chest . . . What you mought call me? You mought call me captain.”
Obviously I bumped my shins against a few phrases like these and decided the book was too alien to interest. I don’t blame me. Book aside, by the end of that Reading Lab, I do remember being keyed up and excited. Not because of Jim Hawkins, but because we girls sat with our hands below desk level, passing around Patty Pacholewski’s bracelets and rings. She had
amazing
jewelry.
    At age twenty-five, you can’t read a rip-roaring book like
Treasure Island
and not feel adventure tug on your hand, even if your hand is firmly planted in your pocket, fingering a pigment-dense tube of lip gloss. You waken to the possibilities of bravery and you chafe a good deal at that thing other people call security. (My mother happened to call it health insurance, a 401(k), and opportunity for advancement. My stay-at-home mom!) But Rena was right; for a long time I’d been dissatisfied with my job, even though The Pet Library was a better gig than the things I’d done before: part-time office assistant at an insurance company; full time scooper at Pignut Ice Cream . . . I could but won’t go on.
    The Pet Library job had fallen into my lap—six months before this story properly begins—when a friend of a friend of my mother’s, having heard I was looking for meaningful work, sent along the phone number of a “lady seeking an assistant.” I was to meet Ms. Wang at The Donut Hole and, after scanning the tables for the Chinese-American equivalent of my matronly mother, I discovered an angular woman in her forties, wearing a sweater dress with a shawl collar and (I need make no secret of it now) gladiator-style wedge boots that would have looked just as right on me. She quickly dismissed my work experience and asked me soul-searching questions along the lines of “what is your principles? What is your values in life?” The more indistinct my answers were, the more she liked them, and after two apple fritters and a large quantity of coffee, her manner gave every indication that the meeting had been a success. “You come to Pet Library?” she said, and I answered, “Sure.”
    A week later, on an unseasonably cold day, I pushed open the glass door to a smell so high that, had I come by car, I would have turned back immediately; but knowing the next bus wouldn’t come for an hour, I felt bound to carry through. I remember thinking, I hope Ms. Wang won’t mind that I’m dressed casually—and then, having heard the door chime, a figure flung itself out of the back room, enveloped in a hideous, ankle-length smock of waxed cotton. She took my hands; the intimacy was mildly thrilling. Soon I was trailing her around, asking breathless questions about the collection’s history. She seemed grateful for my questions; the acquisition of a tree squirrel swelled, plot-wise, into a triple-decker Victorian sensation novel: “Wow,” I kept saying. “You’re kidding! No! And then what?” I can’t account for it, but before the hour was over, I’d signed on to do four shifts a week.
    She didn’t ask me to wear a waxed smock and I had limited contact with humans: I soon learned that pretty much covered the perks. Nancy Wang had created The Pet Library in a strip mall out of her own scrappy savings and seemed to think that she had paid her dues by whatever she had suffered in China. The level of passion she expected from me about menial duties I doubt I could have mustered even if I’d been raised by a low-born family in Beijing. One day, just after dipping into Chapter XXII: How My Sea Adventure Began, I was trimming the rabbits’ nails and thinking how if Jim Hawkins got himself into a stupid job, he would find a way to wriggle out of it. Jim was always dashing away, sheering off, giving someone the slip. A model of boyish energy! Meanwhile here I was, cravenly struggling with grunting mammals. One particularly solid rabbit, a Flemish Giant named Bobby, kept squirming out of the towel and