"Well, okay, Little Scholar," he said. "Here's the thing. I got a whole square here I'm responsible for, and I got people coming through this afternoon from City Hall to look at it, and what I don't need is a twelve-year-old sitting by herself on a bench all day reading the Encyclopedia Britannica when she's supposed to be in Room 214. You see what I'm saying? It doesn't look good. It doesn't look good for you, it doesn't look good for me."
"It's The Odyssey," she said.
"The what?"
"Not the encyclopedia. It's The Odyssey. Homer. The Robert Fagles translation." She still had her finger on the line. "It's about a man trying to get home from a war. It takes him ten years."
"Ten years." Lloyd shook his head. "And you're going to sit here till you finish it."
"I have eleven pages left."
"Eleven pages."
"Out of five hundred and forty-one. Not counting the introduction or the notes or the pronouncing glossary." She looked up at him then, for the first time. Her eyes were very dark and very steady and did not seem to be afraid of him at all, which was unusual; most kids were at least a little afraid of the uniform, even the ones who pretended not to be. "I'd like to finish it, if that's okay. Then I'll talk to you about whatever you need. I'm not trying to be rude. I've just been waiting a long time to get to this part."
"Waiting a long time," Lloyd said. "Little Scholar's been waiting a long time to get to the end of her homework."
"It isn't homework."
"Then what is it? Fun?" He hooked his thumbs in his duty belt. "Let me tell you something about books, kiddo, because I was you once, believe it or not, I was the kid with his nose in a book while everybody else was out doing things. And you know what the books were good for? Getting out of doing things. That's all. Nobody ever read their way out of anything. Nobody. You want to know what's going to happen in the last eleven pages? He gets home. That's what happens. The guy always gets home. That's why they write them."
She looked at him a moment longer. Something moved in her face, there and gone, and he would think about it later, for a long time, trying to name it. It was not hurt. It was not anger, exactly. It was closer to a kind of recognition, the expression of someone who has been waiting for a bus and sees, far off, a bus coming, and is not sure yet whether it is the right one.