The Storatorium opens promptly at 9 a.m. daily. On this cloudy and drizzly Saturday morning, twelve-year-old Sarah Beasley walked in the front door, her Indian head penny hidden in the secret compartment of her
favorite backpack. Waving at her stepdad, she pulls open the tall, heavy oak doors and steps into the

library.

Before she can enter, Sarah hears her stepdad shout, "See you in an hour and a half, Squishball. Call me if you need more time."

Sarah has been waiting an entire week to read another story about Mungie. She can't wait to find out what that sassy, precocious little boy does in today’s episode.

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"Happy Saturday morning, Sarah. What can I do for you today?" Sarah doesn't know the librarian’s proper name; she only knows him by sight and has made up a name for him. She calls him Bob. He doesn't seem to mind at all.

"Hi, Bob. I've been waiting all week, and I found another penny." She leans in to whisper her secret message, so close that she can even smell his aftershave. It's the one with the little ship on the bottle —a smell she is reminded of because her real father used to smell like that when she leaned into him when he came to wake her up on Saturday mornings.

"I remember the rules, Bob. I need to be a little mouse quiet. No one is supposed to know that there's a
room with unwashed stories." Sarah lives in a time where ALL stories are specifically crafted to fit a generic "approved" theme and an approved storyline criteria. This library is not one of the recently built government-controlled and government-designed libraries. This is one of the few that has a history of old-school architecture and, with it, old-school flavor. Everything Bob does officially follows the government guidelines, but unofficially, the old library is home to secret rooms and magic catalogues. As he does every Saturday, from his weathered desk in the lobby, Bob takes the buttery smooth glance around the room. When the seemingly ancient librarian is satisfied no one is watching, Bob casts a little side-eye look at Sarah.

"You know the drill, my sweet little monkey. Where's the entry fee?"

She leans into Bob's face as if ready to tell him a secret. She can feel him smile when they both hear the clinking happen as she drops the Indian head penny into the railroad train bank on his desk. Bob reaches under the desk and pushes a concealed button. Somewhere on the second floor, she hears the familiar click of the release latch for room 9.

Sarah runs up the stairs two steps at a time, sprinting to get there before someone finds it open. She pushes on the heavy, soundless door, and familiar smells of real life hang in the air with no intention of escaping the boundaries of the doorway. Walking to the second section, she nervously looks to the right and left.

Pretending that she's casually checking for just anything at all, she has only one thing in mind: the book called Mungie. It's a unique, in fact, it's a magical book. It only has one chapter every week. You can't go back and reread an old story in the Mungie book looking for clues to the new story. Every week's chapter is about a boy who has no tight buddy friends, no real parental guidance or supervision, and has no idea he's a constant target of the enemy who wants him dead. In his childlike innocence, he doesn't realize the nefarious intent of the one who creates the opportunities for disaster and just how Mungie survives those circumstances.

Sarah gently grabs the book, caresses the red spine, and quietly steals away to her favorite corner—the one she always sits in so no one can read over her shoulder. She excitedly opens the chapter for this week.

What a great day. Mungie smiles as he leaves Mike's house with the card he's been looking for for so very long. His glassy eyes are mesmerized, as distracted as he's ever been in his life, while he walks out of Mike's front door and heads across the lawn to Leonard's house.

"Tommy Davis' rookie card. Now I have Tommy Davis' rookie card. Yes. Leonard is just gonna be sick that I own the entire 1960s Dodgers baseball card set". Mungie only needed the final two baseball cards of the Dodgers outfield, and yesterday he traded for Willie Davis.

Walking across the street, his shoebox is full of baseball cards. Cards from his favorite players, Dodgers players. His favorite is Wally Moon.

The home field for the new Dodgers is the Coliseum in LA, and there's a strange layout feature that makes LA fans laugh: a short fence in left field. Really, it's only 200 feet, but it features something crazy—a 30-foot high net. Wally Moon played in left field and had perfected a trick to play balls hit into the stands. When the ball was hit into the net by another team's player, Wally knew just how to grab the net at the bottom and snap it, which would send a ripple up to the top and kick the ball out. Instead of watching the ball slowly roll all the way down the net, the ripple pops the ball away from the net, allowing him a chance to throw the runner out at second base. He was magnificent at the maneuver.

Mungie doesn't pause at all and just jumps off the curb to cross the street to get home. Not paying attention to anything, he picks through all of his cards, thumbing through them in his quiet residential neighborhood, sorting them in order as he walks. But something unfortunate happens, he tripped and his cards went flying into air, plopping and fluttering to the ground, unceremoniously and quite messily littering the street with his precious treasures. Oblivious to any possibility of danger, Mungie got on his hands and knees, down in the street and frantically started picking up his cards, even putting them in order back into his shoebox.

A young man driving a blue Chevy came flying around the corner on the east end of the street. That young man had been drinking, and with that, impaired as he was, didn't spot the kid in the middle of the street collecting his cards. It was too late when Mungie stood up and realized the danger. The center grill of the Chevy struck Mungie like it was a perfectly planned and timed impact, only this time it wasn't only the cards that went flying through the air.

Mungie landed on his feet, and his neighbor said he shouted at the top of his lungs, "I'm invincible!" But as the words came out of his mouth, the young man who had jumped out of the car, realizing what terrible trouble he was in, started to run away. The car kept moving and hit Mungie again. This time the blue Chevy wrapped him around the fire hydrant, breaking his pelvis and his right arm. As a wobbly and broken Mungie soon found out, he wasn't quite so invincible​ after all.