Read Online Cursed by Love by Jacie Floyd - Free Book Online Page B

and expensive trainers shuffled nearby. While he waited for the
boys to move on, he tapped the ten-pound tome on the top of Molly’s stack of
reading material. “Where did you get those?”
    “I called this afternoon and asked the
librarian to dig up some material for me.”
    “Good thinking.” He watched as two
giggling teenage girls wiggled into the room, homing in on the boys. “But
unnecessary. I can locate anything we need on the Internet in five minutes or
less.”
    She leaned back and gave him an
indecipherable look. “I’m old-school, I guess. Using the Internet is definitely
the way to go if I’m desperate at two o’clock in the morning to find out the
gestation period of gerbils or the weight of Jupiter. But otherwise, it’s too
surreal, too unconnected. I prefer to have an actual book in my hands, or I
don’t feel like I’m learning.” She ducked her head. “For me a brick-and-mortar
library is a place of knowledge where anyone can come to be enlightened. For
free.”
    Gabe had lived and breathed
computer-anything since he’d played his first game of Mario Brothers when he
was six. After rescuing the princess, he’d taken the system apart to figure out
how it worked. Now, rubbing his chin, he searched for a response that would
rescue her from the dark ages and into the enlightened world of technology.
    “Books have their place, but they’re
restricted by the author’s thoughts and knowledge. The scope of the information
you can find through the Internet is unlimited.”
    She stopped riffling through the volume
in front of her and looked up. “But not the depth.”
    “No matter how huge or intricate the
system, all the pieces fit and interlink together, superseding all the
previously accepted boundaries of time and space. All the knowledge in the
universe is available at my fingertips. And with a little probing, it’s easy to
figure out where to look.”
    She gestured around them, a little bit
shocked. “Don’t you feel the same way about the library? The Internet might
offer a thousand answers, but a librarian will provide the right one.”
    “Sometimes I don’t know what answer I
need until I start looking. And you have to physically be here in the library
to access this information. I can mine the ‘net from anywhere. Information
retrieval from the library is limited to the armload of books you can carry
home. What if you don’t check out the right one? Or someone already has the
book you want? Or the one you want can’t be checked out?”
    “There are ways around those problems.”
Her chin lifted to a stubborn angle. “And who’s to say the information on the
Internet is accurate?”
    “Who’s to say the information in books
is accurate? Books can be wrong, too, you know. There were books published
contradicting Newton. How many books challenge evolution? Or the first moon
landing? Or the holocaust?”
    Her mulish expression and the set of her
shoulders became less flexible the more he talked. However, he was just as
determined to persuade her to his point of view as she was to stick to hers.
    “Let’s have a contest,” he suggested.
“What do you want to research?”
    “I thought I’d try to uncover the facts
about the curse.”
    “‘Facts about the curse’, huh? That seems
like a contradiction, but if that’s how you want to spend our time, I’m game.”
He drummed his fingers against the table, mentally preparing his challenge.
“I’ll bet I can find out about the curse on my laptop faster than you can find
the same information in a book.”
    She cocked her head to the side. “What’s
the wager?”
    Without much hope of getting her
agreement, he ventured, “Exclusive rights to the Sleeping Lotus?”
    “No.”
    “The exclusive right to decide the
disposition of the Sleeping Lotus?”
     “Don’t push your luck. How about
the winner treats the loser to a Graeters ice cream?”
    “Now, that’s tempting. I’ve had a
craving for orange sherbet lately, but