I'm working the evening at the library; my evening of course. It's about an hour 'till closing. It's nice and quiet. A couple clickity-clacks of some keyboards, but not much else.
A young group of girls come in. There are three of them; they look like they may be anywhere from 12 to 14. They ask for tickets to get on the computer.
When I give a ticket to first girl, she looks at me, speculating.
"You young," she tells me. "You 18?" She's got that Southern black-girl twang in her dialect. Fitting, of course, because she is a Southern black-girl.
"Nope," I say. "Nope, I quite a bit older."
"Like what?" says one of the other girls. "Like 30?"
"Maybe," I tell them with a laugh. I don't like to tell people my age. If folks know how young I am, I worry that they'll attempt to take advantage of me or refuse to see me as an authority figure.
The girl that was talking the most says, "You know I look older than I am."
Coming from a girl still wearing her training bra, it was a cute comment. She was a sweet little kid.
"Do you have kids?" one of them inquired.
"Ha; uh, no."
"Then you ain't no thirty," the talkative one says. This made me laugh really hard. There are some things you just can't keep inside.
For the sake of my friends who are thirty and do not have kids, I inform the girls that it is possible for women that age to not have children.
"Oh," they say, then they ask if they can use the computers. I tell them yes and hand them computer tickets to log on. When they left that evening, they wished me goodnight.
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