For whatever bullshit reason, some of the kids who hang around Bill’s Bookshop take Rosalina for a sucker. If she’s on shift, they loiter and shoplift. If she tries to intervene, they laugh. If she ignores them, they stare at her chest. They are bad kids! It’s 2009 and Rosalina has graduated into the financial crisis. She wants to move to London, but she doesn’t have the funds. All she can get with her English lang BA is part-time retail. When she complains to her friend Molly, Molly suggests that it’s too simplistic to think of them as bad kids, that plenty of people are having a much harder time than Rosalina right now, and that in light of punitive national austerity, shoplifting, in particular, might be considered entirely justifiable. Rosalina agrees — she agrees.
“But?” Molly says.
But it’s not like she works in a grocery store, or a pharmacy, or even a real bookshop. Eponymous Bill is long dead. For thirty-five years he sold secondhand paperbacks and loose VHS tapes and allowed his grumpiness to become famous and beloved. The shop’s new owners have retained the legacy brand and turned “Bill’s Bookshop” into what Rosalina’s brother calls a “nerd cave”: expensive board games, expensive trading cards, X-Men, Catan, Hogwarts, Warhammer. These bad kids are not stealing medicine for their ailing mothers; they are not lifting cabbages for their starving siblings.
What have they got against her, anyway? Frizzy, pale, half Polish, Rosalina suspects her problem is that she’s not quite nerd enough to pass and not quite hot enough to intimidate. The kids think she’s a normie. They stare at her but they drool over lustrous manager Lucy. Worse: They assume Rosalina doesn’t know the difference between a Shivan Dragon and a Charizard.
The truth is she does know the difference between a Shivan Dragon and a Charizard. Grow up with a younger brother and you pick up some stuff. Grow up paying special attention to that brother because your dad’s dead and you pick up a lot of stuff. Charizard is a Gen 1 Fire-type Pokémon. Shivan Dragon? A Magic: The Gathering card. Twenty-one printings. Next question. How come no one ever asks her? And if Molly’s right and it’s not the worst job in the world, how come Rosalina spends the next two years wishing literally anything would happen?
Then it does. One afternoon, a kid approaches the counter hoping to sell a binder full of trading cards. Rosalina’s seen him around. Seems all right. Skittish. Not one of her tormentors. She takes him to a table in the back office.
“It’s Ben, right?” she says.
“Tim,” Tim says. He avoids her eye and hands her the binder.
“We offer 45 percent of listed median in cash,” Rosalina says, as she flips pages. “Fifty-five if you want store credit.”
Tim doesn’t say anything.
“Which were you thinking?”
“Oh . . . credit. Been saving up.”
“Mm, oh yeah?”
Tim explains that Spellplunger, the game, does these models and he wants the Morgoloch. Rosalina nods without taking her eyes from the binder. It used to take her ages to look up prices, but now she can do it by sight. This is an unserious collection. One or two middling hits, mostly bulk. No way there’s enough trade value for a Morgoloch, which is an eighteen-inch resin figurine that for some reason retails at £549.99. She’s about to reject the whole thing when, on the penultimate page, she sees it, and makes a small involuntary noise.
“What?” Tim says.
Rosalina clears her throat. “It’s nothing,” she says.
But she has seen it. In its little pocket. An older card. Black-bordered. Artwork depicting a black flower. The image is familiar to Rosalina. Her hand wobbles a little when she takes it from its sleeve. She checks the card against the light. She looks at Tim, but Tim is picking at a scab on his nose.
Crazy, isn’t it, what some people will pay for a piece of cardboard?
Already Rosalina has decided. “How much,” she says, “were you hoping to get for all these?”
Tim looks at her like he doesn’t understand the question. “They’re my brother’s old cards,” he says.
“I just meant in total. How much would be a fair price?” Rosalina hears herself depart from the approved employee script. “A fair price that you’d be willing to accept right now?”
“He said I could have them,” Tim says, and then he shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m trying to get Morgoloch.”
“So, somewhere in that region would be good for you?”
“I’ve got eighty quid of my own money too.”
Rosalina closes the binder and covers it with her palm. “I think we might be able to swing a direct trade,” she says, speaking quickly. “For a Morgoloch. You might get more on eBay if you listed the cards individually, so it’s up to you. But if I can?”
Tim looks taken aback, and then his eyes widen. “That’d be sick!” he says.
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