We were singing the round, the same canon perpetuus that your parents used to sing and you listened to from inside your mother’s belly. As our voices merged with all the other unbound books who came and went like specters through the Bindery, the overlapping verses confused the ears of the intruders, and that was the point. We sang so that beneath the lyrics of that eternal lullaby, our murmured conversation would be indiscernible to them. Our words that night were for each other. Every boy has a book in him, Benny, but not every boy can hear it when it speaks. Not every boy is willing to
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