The school library was the place where books went to collect dust and cobwebs. It was always desolate. It’s possible that some of the students spent all six years of their lives without bothering to find its location. And they couldn’t take a good guess if their lives depended on it.

The librarian Dan was a man of many talents. By talents, I mean his eyes, his smile, his size, his height, his skin complexion…okay let’s just say that as far as molding goes, that man was God’s perfect work of art.

The male teachers at our school were, on their own already void of all physical attraction, each new teacher worse than the predecessor. If optical nutrition is a real thing (yes, I know it isn’t), we had learnt to live in deficiency.

So when we saw Dan walk with the Headmistress side by side into the library on that blessed February morning, we naturally assumed that he had come to donate some books.

It wasn’t often that handsome strangers walked into our lives so we weren’t about to deny ourselves the opportunity to take a closer look.

To this end, instead of waiting in class for Mr Kamuli to come and bore us to death with his non-dynamic voice, teaching us things he himself didn’t seem interested in learning, we decided to revise our books. And what could possibly be a better environment for revision than a library?

Within minutes, we had stormed the place, pretending to read but all the while ogling Dan. On learning that he was our new librarian, our raging hormones agreed that it was about time we spent more time reading our books.

Thenceforth, the library was always beyond capacity. Teenage girls were fighting and pushing and cursing each other for a chance to ‘study.’ And they sought his attention on the tiniest library-related problems. Hard words, slightly faded words, no problem was too small.

Some girls even went as far as borrowing books and then clinging onto them just to get the thrill of having Dan read their names. It didn’t matter that when he read their names, he always irately referred to them as defaulters.

By September that year, there had been at least six separate episodes of hysteria. They all happened in the middle of the night, disrupting sleep and causing embarrassment to the sufferers. Then one of the students made use of the suggestion box to write an anonymous love letter to Dan. It was a disturbing, way-too-detailed description of her feelings. The girl made use of words like murder, suicide and life in one too many sentences.

Another girl wrote to herself a love letter and claimed it was from Dan. Rumor spread like wild and in a smidge of time, the school administration got wind of it.

In October, Dan left us behind. He must have left at night because we didn’t watch him leave. For days, we faithfully packed the library to see him but he didn’t show up. Eventually, we gave up.

Slowly the school returned to normalcy. And by normalcy, I mean that the library went back to being the desolate place where books went to collect dust and cobwebs.