All the librarians are asleep, tucked into their coffins, their scabbards, priest-holes, button holes, pockets, hidden cupboards, between the pages of their enchanted novels. MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS FOX IS A television character, and she isn’t dead yet. But she will be, soon. She’s a character on a television show called The Library. You’ve never seen The Library on TV, but I bet you wish you had. In one episode of The Library, a boy named Jeremy Mars, fifteen years old, sits on the roof of his house in Plantagenet, Vermont. It’s eight o’clock at night, a school night, and he and his friend Elizabeth should be studying for the math quiz which their teacher, Mr. Cliff, has been hinting at all week long. Instead, they’ve sneaked out onto the roof. It’s cold. They don’t know everything they should know about X, when X is the square root of Y. They don’t even know Y. They ought to go in. But there’s nothing good on TV and the sky is very beautiful.
