Suggested Reading
Page 1
Dedication
To Clara
For being someone I’m honored (and proud) to name main characters after
Epigraph
Do I dare disturb the universe?
—Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War . . . sort of.
More like T. S. Eliot if we really want to get technical.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
The Annual Evans Highlighter All-Nighter
The Inside Flap Summary of Don’t Tread on Me
The Blurbs
The Author Bio on the Back Page
Feelings, Time, and Don’t Tread on Me
Panem et Circenses
The Probabilities of Having Been Raised in a Barn
The Email Sitting on a Missing Mr. Caywell’s Computer
The Stewing of Clara Evans
Tiny Little Libraries
And Then I Immediately Touch the Banned Books
The Answer
Four Years, Five Books, Fifteen Minutes Late
Face-to-Face with a Slayer of Bears
A Complex Lasagna
The One with the LiQui
Friends in High Places
The Letter
A Lack of Coping Skills
Queso . . . What Are We Reading Next?
Mr. Walsh
Summary of the Rest of the Day
On-Brand
Black-Market Tactics and Best Practices
How to Handle Run-Ins with Authority Whilst Moving Contraband (Tactic Two)
When Issues Arise, Involve Your Friends Whilst Giving Them Vague Assurances That Everything Will Be Fine (Tactic Three)
What Could Possibly Happen in Des Moines, Iowa?
Apparently, We’re All Members of Jeff Goldblum’s Book Club
A Fancy Letter for Clara
A List of Potential Speeches
A List of Potential People I Could Bring as Guests
Texts from That Night
A Cryptographic Bookstore
Lost in the War
I Solemnly Swear to Not Understand Football
All the Wrong Fires
Lonely Noodles
Non-Lonely Noodles
The Light Switch
More Attempts to Figure Out What to Speak About at the Founders Scholarship Dinner
Running on Banana-Muffin Fumes
Loop-De-Loopholes
McSkirtyLackofJoy and All the Other Stuff
Fit in Little, Belong Much
Not a Walsh to Be Found
Questions from Strangers About Strangers
A Celebratory Announcement
Tomayto, Tomahto, Prohibited, Banned
Lest You Be Circus Trash
All-American Idiot
Mojovation
Honors Censorship for the Angry and Ill-Informed
And Then Your Hero Hid in the AC Nook Outside
Don’t Tread on Me, Chapter 43: Joss
Can the Day Be Over Already?
An Unseen Text at Midnight
Responding to an Unseen Text in the Morning
A Series of Some Sort of Events
Runners, Jumpers, Racers, Tinkerers, Grabbers, Snatchers, Fliers, Swimmers
Book Honey
The Librarian Is Hanging Out with His Mom
The Second Star to the Right Finds Lost Boys
Number of Texts Received Having to Do with the Unlib/The Closing of the Library, A.k.a. Make It Stop!
A Fancy Email for Clara
Four on a Bleacher
Mojo Plus Two
The Death of a Battery: A Memoir
The Catcher Wasn’t There
White Cover Uncovered
The Everywhere of Friends
That’s My Quote
And Your Hero Goes Home Early
The First Group Text
Mojovation (Part Two)
A Not-Fancy Email for Clara
The Dreary-Wearies
Surprises Over Magnolias
Torn to Threads
A Quick Napkin List of the Dominoes That Fell
The Unmasking of Fear
A Wild Librarian Appears
Brother Leon
All the Right Fires
Goodbye, Lupton Academy
A Legacy of Dominoes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Dave Connis
Back Ad
Copyright
About the Publisher
The Annual Evans Highlighter All-Nighter
Four years.
48 months.
1,461 days.
35,064 hours.
2,103,840 minutes.
126,230,400 seconds.
That’s how long I’d waited for the new book by my favorite author, Lukas Gebhardt: Don’t Tread on Me.
To put it in perspective, I was graduating middle school when I read Lukas’s last book, A House of Wooden Windows. That one I’d had signed by him. The gorgeous man took my breath away with his words on the daily, and the thrill of knowing I held a very real book-shaped Don’t Tread on Me in my hands made me question even getting out of my car and walking in my house before starting, but the pull of the couch was stronger than the pull of sitting in a running car. Shocking, I know.
I chanted, “Don’t Tread on Me, Don’t Tread on Me, Don’t Tread on Me,” as I walked inside, fresh from the land of marvel and mischief, spells and superlatives, counter curses, cultures, love-baked digressions, rabbit-trail wisdom, symphonies of folly and fable, illumined reality, and glow-in-the-dark wonder: the local bookstore.
It was ten o’clock. There was nary an Evans parent in sight. Both in bed, for sure; they were early risers, which was the point. There were very few things I kept from my parents, but the Evans Highlighter All-Nighter tradition, which I’d held since freshman year of high school, was one of them. The Highlighter All-Nighter was the highest point of my rebellion. I stayed up on a school night—the first school night—to read a book and drink fruit juice out of a carton. On the Spectrum of Safety for Renegade Youths, I was unchartable. The highest of percentiles.
It was a silly secret, but it was a secret nonetheless.
Besides, regardless of tradition, I needed to read DTOM anyway. My long-running book club—Queso . . . What Are We Reading Next?—was meeting in less than twenty-four hours to discuss the first few chapters of DTOM, and I needed to be ready to lead it. No, I didn’t need to read the whole thing, but that wasn’t the point, was it?
I pulled a carton of mango nectar, the official drink of EHAN, out of the fridge.
I cut up a block of cheddar cheese and put the slices on a plate filled with water crackers.
I walked into the living room, grabbed the orange highlighters out of my pockets (yellow highlighters are overrated), and stood them on their flat ends like pillars to hold up the time and night. Lighthouses to remind me of my direction when the gales of sleepiness came.
I plopped on the couch.
Ready.
The Inside Flap Summary of Don’t Tread on Me
Sixteen-year-old Levi lives in the neutral zone of the Second Civil War, on a farm harvesting cash crops for military rations, but when his town is swallowed into the borders of the Western Forces, he’s shipped off to the front lines, leaving everything behind.
Seventeen-year-old Joss has never known anything but the Eastlands, Dixie. Born in a house on the Mason-Dixon line, he’s been raised to fight for the restoration of a long-forgotten nation. His grandpa is a general; his dad, a high-ranking medic. And now he is a newly promoted second lieutenant.
In a meeting orchestrated by the bloody injustices of war, the boys are thrown together when they’re forced
to kill an innocent civilian. With nothing but the idea that there has to be something better, the boys run away. Traveling the Deserters’ Corridor, the closely monitored northern path of the neutral zone, they stumble on an old limestone mining tunnel, where they build the first library without war-side bias since before the first gunshot was even fired, bringing together literature and cultural items from underground artifact dealers.
As they attempt to fuse the splintered world back together, Levi and Joss find themselves leading a new movement. With an army at their command, they become enemies of both sides of the war, and when the neutral zone is declared forfeit and new battle lines threaten to unravel everything they’ve worked for, they must decide if the library, and all it stands for, is worth their lives.
The Blurbs
“A balm for those brave enough to look for common ground during the Great Unrest.”
—Colt Cax, author of the New York Times best seller Strange Astrophysics
“Lukas Gebhardt paints a poignant picture of the bleeding heart of America.”
—Ishmael Aventu, author of A Country for Thieves
“Nothing like reading a classic book for the first time.”
—Keri Limonhouse, author of Goody Blu’s Shoes
The Author Bio on the Back Page
Lukas Gebhardt was born in Namibia and now resides in Houston, Texas. He received his doctorate in philosophy at Harvard University and now serves as a professor of philosophy at the University of Houston.
Feelings, Time, and Don’t Tread on Me
10:34 p.m.
The cover: Design genius. A straight re-creation of the Don’t Tread on Me flag. The only exception is that Lukas Gebhardt is inked into the diamond pattern on the snake’s body. The snake looks less like clip art and more hand-sketched. Though I’m not sure why I think the original snake looked like clip art, considering it was designed in 1775. Which was back when clip art wasn’t that advanced.
10:35 p.m.
The acknowledgments (I always read them first): disappointed. My name didn’t show up once. I even read through a few more times to make sure.
10:37–10:51 p.m. | Pages 1–13
A civil war. A smart, compassionate boy fighting because he didn’t know better. I’m already drowning in vicious heartbreak.
10:52–11:08 p.m. | Pages 13–34
Less engulfed by heartbreak. More engulfed by feelings in general. Such a dark world. Reminds me of Fahrenheit 451, but with more executions and less TV.
11:08–11:53 p.m. | Pages 34–66
Good.
Lord.
Lukas never disappoints. My highlighter highlights furious and frequent. Blocks of orange everywhere, like a game of page Tetris. Things like “And just like that, it came over me. I wasn’t even a cog. I was a number on a clockface. I had no mass apart from the machine. Everything was panem et circenses, bread and circuses. The formula for a happy kingdom. Food and pleasure. Pleasure and food. As this was also my diet, this was my fear: If I somehow could comprehend how to leave this place, I’d simply dissolve into the atmosphere. Particles in the wind.”
12:05–12:20 a.m. | Pages 66–78
Terrified. Terrified. Terrified. I pace back and forth while reading. How had I lived without this book?
12:20–12:24 a.m. | Pages 78–80
What . . . ?
[MANGO NECTAR REFILL INTERMISSION]
12:24–1:08 a.m. | Pages 80–102
Still recovering from pages seventy-eight to eighty. Feeling guilty for getting more mango nectar because I feel like I’m playing into panem et circenses. Am I constantly in need of food and entertainment? I look at the plate of cheese. The new glass of mango nectar. I curl into myself. Will I disappear if I don’t drink it? What am I made of? My God. The book made me question cheese. I mark my place with a bookmark and toss it on the table, staring at it as if it could kill me, and actually wondering if it might if I keep reading. Should I keep reading?
1:09–2:06 a.m. | Pages 102–200
Incredible. Haven’t felt so invested in a revolution since The Hunger Games. Lukas, you have my bow.
2:06–3:30 a.m. | Pages 200–300
A hard weep is coming. I can feel it. I’m eating some cheese.
3:30–4:53 a.m. | Pages 300–488
Plate of cheese and crackers has been reduced to crumbs and, not coincidentally, I’ve been reduced to tears. Wow.
Panem et Circenses
Let the wild rumpus start.
—Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are
I was silent as I drove to Lupton Academy for my last first day of high school.
Normally, I’d listen to a morning-drive mix on my phone and mumble along with the words in an effort to feel like I had some musicality, but I couldn’t. That was the cost of reading Lukas Gebhardt. He supplied words, but he demanded tears and being torn apart as payment.
I was wrecked. Undone. Shredded. My soul replaced with a tornado. Hurricane Clara. Category: Emotionally Distraught.
To be fair, I wasn’t entirely sure how much having stayed up until five played into my wreckedness, but . . . I hadn’t been wrecked by a book so hard since last year, which told me that DTOM was a contender for this year’s Book That Changed My Life.
I turned onto Bottlers Avenue and passed under a wrought-iron archway that proclaimed I had, in fact, arrived at Lupton.
Bottlers Ave. was a straight shot into campus. No curves. No hills. Just a median separating the two sides of the road. I drove all the way to the end of it, past the stadium, the gym, and the maintenance building, and turned right into the faculty, staff, and senior parking lot.
One of Lupton’s borders was an old train track, and the train track separated us from a fancy shopping center that also contained an Earth Foods Market. If you were anything but a senior, you had to park in a lot behind the Earth Foods and then walk across a little greenway connecting the lot to the paved path at the back of the school.
LA was notoriously cramped, which was actually how LA became the working name for Lupton Academy instead of Lupton. On the corner of two busy roads in the dead center of Chattanooga’s North Shore, we’d expanded as far as we could without buying fifteen homes and a few businesses (junkyard, recycling center, and a self-storage place) behind us. These fifteen home and three business owners, also known as the Stringer and Peerless Alliance, a.k.a. SPA, knew we needed more room, hated the fact that LA was taking over their space, and had banded together to ask for a total of sixty-seven and a half million dollars for everything. Each of the fifteen 1950s two-bedroom, two-bath houses would get three and a half million, and each of the businesses would get five million. So we were in a gridlock. The school didn’t have that sort of money to pay for expansion, and SPA wanted no less.
The campus had gotten lusher and greener over the summer and, as always, it looked beautiful. The parking-lot borders were filled with bushes and flowers, professionally cut and pruned within an inch of a Better Homes and Gardens photoshoot. Parking grid lines a fresh, pure white. Not a sliver of trash caught in the drainage inlets. The line of serviceberry trees separating LA from the SPA lands was a thick binding of pruned and intermingled leaves, a green fence whose leaves turned to fire in the fall.
I turned off the car and sat there for a while, drinking coffee and contemplating. I was early, and the campus was just starting to echo with the dewy cicada yawn of morning.
I sat and rehashed every molecule of Don’t Tread on Me, from its beginning on a swaying cornfield to its end in the dark of a cave. I didn’t want to speak too soon, but I thought it was one of my favorite books of all time. All its other merits aside, simply the concept of panem et circenses was like a pair of glasses I hadn’t known I needed, and I was still adjusting to my new sense of sight.
I hopped out of the car and spun around, arms outstretched over the kingdom of the on-campus parking lot. And then it hit me. This was it. There’d be no more walking the underclass passage from the Earth Foods
lot. This was my last year of volunteering for Mr. Caywell, LA’s librarian.
It was the last first day I’d ever have.
So I took it all in.
I made myself listen to the birds chirping in the crepe myrtles across the lawn. I made myself smell my last first day’s air. A crisp and fresh wet, and then an old and ancient dampness. The former a remnant of dew from the morning irrigation-sprinkler session, the latter a scent that occasionally floated in off the Tennessee River, which was only about a mile or so away. After that, I caught an urban cologne of gas mixed with the floral and savory smells of Earth Foods baking, cooking, stocking soaps and spices, and, thankfully, only a tiny hint of thick, sunbaked tarmac.
Suddenly it felt like it’d be a day where the wind would finally pick a color. Where the doors of LA, made of recycled Coke bottles, wouldn’t gather fingerprints, where cars passing by on Cherokee Boulevard would sing songs instead of honk horns. And I knew:
It was going to be a beautiful day.
A beautiful year.
“‘Let the wild rumpus start,’” I said to myself innocently, and sometimes I wonder: If I’d quoted something else, would my senior year have gone differently? Because, indeed, a wild rumpus did start.
The Probabilities of Having Been Raised in a Barn
It was only fifteen steps from one of the main stairwells of LA’s flagship building, Lupton Hall, and my second home, LA’s library. The library was housed in the front of Lupton Hall, the side of the building that most Chattanoogans would see if they were driving around the North Shore.
Light poured in from the outside through the colonial copper-topped dome, illuminating a wide-open space that Mr. Caywell and I had practically designed ourselves when the library underwent renovations my sophomore year. It was a clean space. Organized—well, except for the processing room, through a door behind Mr. Caywell’s desk—but the white walls were devoid of posters, and I’d chop a patron if they even hinted at putting a poster anywhere but the community board.
A dark and rich walnut-brown stain coated chairs and shelves. Vintage black pendant lights—which used to hang in the factory the building had at one point been—hung above tables and the computer bar.