The noise was impressive.
Books hit the floor in a collective clatter. Books hit the adjacent shelf. Books hit Sloane: a paperback across her forearm, a mystery novel against her shoulder, and then, arriving last with the unhurried authority of something heavy and hardbound, a thick blue volume that caught her directly on the crown of the head.
She sat down.
This was not a choice. Her knees simply collaborated to lower her to the floor, and she was sitting, and the books were still settling around her - not many now, just the last few sliding off the edge - and there was a hot, specific pain at the top of her skull and a brief, spectacular constellation of white at the edges of her vision.
She sat very still for a moment.
A paperback slid off the final edge of the shelf and dropped neatly into her lap. She looked down at it. Love in the Time of Cholera.
"Apt," she said. Her voice came out slightly unsteady.
She reached up with two careful fingers and pressed at the top of her head. There it was. Already tender. The kind of lump that would be there tomorrow and the day after. She pressed it again - she didn't know why people always pressed injuries, it was never information that improved anything - and she pulled her hand away and looked at her fingers.
No blood. She was fine.
She looked at the book that had hit her. It was still in her hand, apparently - she had picked it up without consciously deciding to. Dark blue cover, gold lettering on the spine. STATISTICS: AN INTRODUCTION. Third Edition. Thick. Very thick. The kind of thick that explained a lot.
She stared at it with the specific feeling of someone who has been wronged by an inanimate object and is fully aware of how irrational that is.
"You," she said.
At the front of the store, she heard the rustle of a newspaper. She looked up through two rows of shelves and could just see the white-haired man behind the register - reading glasses, brown cardigan, the bottomless patience of someone who had seen everything a used bookstore could produce. He had lowered his paper. He looked toward her aisle with the squinting assessment of a man determining whether the situation required him to get up.
He determined it didn't. He raised his newspaper again.
Sloane found she couldn't argue with this. She had made the mess. She would clean it up. She didn't need anyone to come out here and see her sitting on the floor in a dress she'd dry-cleaned on Thursday. She would get herself up, she would stack every single book back where it went, and she would carry the dignity of this moment quietly to her grave.
She got to her feet.
Her knees had dust on them. Her right index finger had a chip in the gel manicure from where she'd braced against the shelf. She noticed both things. She didn't mention either thing to herself, because there was no one to mention them to and also because mentioning them would not make them different.
She tucked the Statistics textbook under her arm. She started picking up books.
She was halfway through the floor when Margot appeared at the end of the aisle.
Margot Ellery had one of those faces that didn't know how to hide anything - it was part of what made her a wonderful friend and a terrible poker player. She appeared around the corner of shelf six at a brisk walk, clearly having heard the noise from wherever she'd been absorbed, and she stopped when she saw Sloane, and she looked at the scattered books, and she looked at Sloane's hair, and she looked at the Statistics textbook cradled under Sloane's arm.
The pause lasted about three seconds.
"What happened?"
"The shelf happened."
"Your hair."
"I'm aware of my hair."
"What did - how did -"
"I reached for a book, the stack on top came down, one of them hit me on the head, I'm fine." Sloane placed a paperback back on a shelf and held out a geography atlas without looking up. "Are you going to help me or are you going to stand there?"
Margot took the atlas. She was doing something very particular with her face - a controlled expression that was working against itself. Sloane could see the specific moment it stopped working. Margot bent down to pick up a book and made a sound that was not, technically, laughter, but was identical to laughter in every functional sense. She pressed her fist to her mouth.
"Don't," Sloane said.
"I'm not."
"Margot."
"I'm not laughing. I am - I'm concerned." Her voice was not steady. "I'm very concerned about your -" She looked at Sloane's hair again and completely lost it.
She didn't laugh loudly. She was too decent for that, mostly. She folded forward at the waist with her hand over her mouth and her shoulders shaking, and Sloane straightened up and watched this with the composure of someone who had expected it and had time to prepare.
"Get it out," Sloane said.
"I'm sorry." Margot surfaced, wiping the corner of her eye. "I'm so sorry. Are you actually okay? I need you to tell me you're okay."
"There's a lump but nothing is broken."
"Okay." Margot took a breath and composed herself into something resembling a helpful person. "Okay. Good. What goes where?"
"I have no idea. Sciences, somewhere."
They worked. The store owner came around the register with the shuffling gait of a man with a bad hip and restacked the phone directories on top of the shelf without comment. Sloane handed him the geography atlas. "Sorry about this," she said. He said, "Happens," and went back to his counter.
She appreciated that he left it there.
Ten minutes, and the floor was clear. Sloane's knees were dusty. The manicure was chipped on two fingers now. She had picked up every single book, stacked them where they seemed to belong, and the Statistics textbook had ended up back in her arm because she'd picked it up and set it aside repeatedly without being able to figure out where specifically it went, and eventually she'd just stopped setting it aside.
She looked at it.
It looked back with the impersonal authority of a book that contained a great many formulas.