Suggested Reading

by Dave Connis

  And Then I Immediately Touch the Banned Books

  I didn’t have time to walk several piles of books out to the car, and my locker was closer. It was a dilemma. Did I risk keeping them in the school and sneaking them out later? The answer, of course, was yes. I was no stranger to literary skullduggery. I’d been sneaking books for most of my life, and it had always gone well.

  The halls were filled with people now. Classmates doing the normal student thing, getting books and supplies for the day, mostly all the things that were not smuggling books about to be banned from the school library. I knew I was running out of time, so I bolted to my locker, which was right around the corner and half a hall down from the library. I opened it for the first time that year and immediately started to stack books inside.

  Then, praying that no staff would roll up on me, I ran back to the school library again, pulling more freshly banned books. Luckily, all the time I’d spent in the place guided my hands. Having packed the books away for the renovation and then unpacked and reshelved them box by box, I knew the shelves like I knew the alphabet, letter by letter.

  I’d pull about five or six, run to my locker, shove them in, then go get more. I filled my locker up in four trips, then I ran out of room in mine, so I opened my best friend, LiQui’s, empty locker, which was only three down from me—she didn’t use it—and started filling hers, too. Then, when I was only three-quarters of the way through the list, I suddenly noticed I was the only one in the hall, and, as if telling me that this year was truly going to kill me, the school bell rang.

  I groaned and banged my head against the book pile in LiQui’s locker.

  I sighed, then went back to the library to get the last of the books, wondering if it was even possible for the day to get any worse.

  The Answer

  Yes.

  Yes, it could.

  Four Years, Five Books, Fifteen Minutes Late

  It wasn’t a secret I was a very bookish person. I’d been accepted to Lupton Academy, one of the best schools in Chattanooga, with bountiful scholarships, because I wrote a giant application essay paralleling my desire for academic excellence to the appetite of the protagonist in The Very Hungry Caterpillar (i.e., the caterpillar) by picture book author/illustrator Eric Carle.

  I’d built my entire—albeit relatively short—existence around books. Not because I didn’t have friends, but because, since I first learned to read, books had separated my years. Where some people defined their years by grade, I defined mine by the book that had changed me the most that year. So far, in high school?

  Freshman year: Speak.

  Sophomore year: The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

  Junior year: The Catcher in the Rye.

  Senior year: Going out on a limb here, but . . . Don’t Tread on Me.

  Each book built me. Each page assembled me piece by piece.

  Here’s a quick rundown of book ripple effect. I found A House of Wooden Windows on a Writers of Color list in the Chattanooga Library my last year of middle school. Reading it made me want to work in a library, so I volunteered when I got to high school. Because I worked in a library, Mr. Caywell recommended Speak when I was considering quitting LA because freshman year was filled with bullying and feeling out of place. Because of Speak, I stayed at LA and went on a binge of reading all the books known for making people cry. Of course, I found Perks quickly after. Perks woke me up to the idea that maybe I wasn’t the only one who hurt, and maybe every single person had their own cocktail of hurt, just like me, which changed how I thought about the world. I talked to Mr. Caywell about it, and he had this rant that Charlie, the main character from Perks, was basically “a chiller version of Holden Caulfield,” which obviously brought me to Catcher in the Rye. Catcher in the Rye combined with Perks inspired the idea of LitHouse, and because of it, I was now a Founders Scholarship finalist. One book domino after another.

  There was literally no nook or cranny of my life that hadn’t been guided by a book, and, for the most part, it had been an uninterrupted journey. No one, especially my parents, had ever told me it was weird, or that books sucked, or that I should really consider what books I put into my brain.

  I couldn’t understand why LA could overlook all those years. How they could tell me that these books weren’t good, or that their content was somehow “inappropriate” for me. Or, if not that, that there was some reason that it was better for me not to read them. That what they had to say wasn’t useful or was maybe even harmful. But I was just a kid, right? Just a teen with a tiny brain that couldn’t comprehend anything but CW shows, French-kissing, OMGs, and being on my phone.

  I never got how the adults at Lupton could tell me, “You’re a responsible adult now; you need to act like it. Come in a uniform. Engage in classes.” And then at the same time say, “Actually, you’re too young to deal with books about rape, kids being bullied because they’re gay, the intricacies of the human condition, and racism.” The ridiculous flip-flopping between “you’re just a kid” and “you’re a grown-up now” depending on the whims of adults was exhausting and infuriating.

  It was because I was a bookling that I was incredibly late to my first class of the school year. I ran across school, a method of travel not approved by the school board, bolting toward Honors Lit. The class I had dreamed about since freshman year. Good books as education. But I imagined even the class that I’d been looking forward to would be affected by the ban in some way. Maybe all the books I’d learn about were dirty too.

  I burst through the door fifteen minutes late. Ms. Lauren Croft (often confused with the tomb-raiding Lara Croft) was discussing her first book choice of the semester, Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston. A book that, coincidentally, though not surprisingly, was now sitting in my locker.

  I’d had Ms. Croft for English freshman year. If a faculty or staff member at LA did raid tombs, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was her. She was demanding. Fast-paced. Not one of those teachers who taught the first forty minutes of class like they had all the time in the world, but then realized in the last ten minutes of class how far behind they were and did an info sprint that would be the main cause of varicose veins in Chattanooga teens.

  She was a pillar of confidence, and it was very intimidating. Outside of that one English class, we’d sent emails back and forth sometimes when she was looking for books in the library stacks, so she knew me. I wasn’t a random LA student. I’d also run into her before at Bookies, the local bookstore, grading papers and drinking a dirty chai latte.

  When she turned to see what hooligan was coming through the door fifteen minutes late, the look she gave made me feel like I hated literature and I should drop any sense of book camaraderie we had.

  “Sorry,” I said out loud, looking for an empty chair. As luck would have it, the only one open was the one right next to Ashton Bricks and Jack Lodenhauer. Both of them were Founders Kids. By Founders Kids, I mean great-grandkids of various historical Chattanooga magnates, whose ever-reaching family trees never ceased to show up in the most important places of Chattanooga. These were the kids I’d hated since day one of Lupton Academy.

  The Founders Kids (lovingly referred to as F**Ks in text messages with Qui, or as “star-stars” in conversation because “F-star-star-Ks” was a lot to say) were not warm people to be around. They had this smug, puffy aloofness, a sign that no one but those they deemed acceptable was worthy of their words. With the F**Ks, if you weren’t chosen—i.e., if you weren’t from a Chattanooga power family or generally drowning in money—their hellos weren’t greetings, but charity. Their attention wasn’t offered; it was given, with the attitude that it was a net loss. A useless transaction that gained them nothing, but lost them the precious time it took to acknowledge that you were there. The fact that they could pay Lupton tuition with pocket change and afford books? Ugh. It made me so mad. Mad that despite my financial aid, my parents still had to stretch to send me there.

  There were Ashton
and Jack (the former doodling boobs all over a cafeteria napkin), feeling no pressure to make their private-school tuition money go far. They could go home with a few Cs and it wouldn’t cost them anything. They could get a job anywhere with all their connections. If I went home with a few Cs, it’d cost my parents’ last three years of hard work and the shot at scholarships at my choice colleges. My parents hadn’t been on vacation since I’d started at Lupton. Jack’s parents were at the beach every other weekend. The unfairness of it all pissed me off every time I saw them.

  I sat down in a flustered huff, attempting—but failing—to not be distracting as I pulled a pen and a notebook out of my backpack. But the pen got caught on the zipper, and it dropped to the bottom of my backpack so I had to fish it out of the pit of darkness. Then, when I grabbed my notebook, the metal binding got caught on the cloth around the zipper and wouldn’t come out. Every pull I made unraveled the metal coil, turning my notebook into note pages, which were suddenly flying all over the floor like a blizzard.

  Ashton turned to me, raised his eyebrows, then mouthed, What is happening over here?

  I waved him off and started taking notes on a napkin I found in my pocket until he held out a piece of paper from the floor pile that used to be my notebook. I looked at it, then at him. I didn’t want to take it. I really didn’t, but I did.

  That was it.

  I called it then.

  Senior year was going to suck.

  Face-to-Face with a Slayer of Bears

  Have you ever tried to get to your feet with a sprained dignity?

  —Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

  Ms. Croft started talking, bless her heart, but my mind was drowning in the fog of war. I drifted from thought to thought about the banning and what, if anything, I should do about it. I was mad about the whole thing, but the mad that hung around the most was because I’d just been told that my last four years of life were dirty. Somehow, and I didn’t really understand how, it felt like there’d been a switch. Like, before the books were banned, they were meaningful words on innocent pages. But now the meaningful words had dirt on them. Like, since they’d been banned, I should feel guilty for having them as part of my own story.

  I was even mad about the pure absurdity of some of their choices, like Don’t Tread on Me. How could you ban a book about the consequences of banned books and not have any thought like, Hey, this is super ironic—maybe I should reconsider this?

  It made it worse that they were being sneaky about it. That they’d been doing it for years. I mean, I hadn’t even noticed that the library stacks didn’t include Alice Walker and Mark Twain, and I was the volunteer librarian. How was I supposed to know the difference between the stacks not having a book because we didn’t have it, and the stacks not having a book because it was banned?

  I can’t say how long I thought about stuff, how long I kept saying, What do I do? over and over in my head, or how frustrated I was that the banning made me zone out in a class I’d been looking forward to for three years, but when I zoned back in, Ms. Croft’s voice was strained, and the room felt smaller—cramped, uncomfortable.

  Suddenly the bell rang, but no one moved. Ms. Croft looked at the clock hanging above the door and rubbed her temples. She grabbed a stack of papers and started handing them out. “This is the first two chapters of Their Eyes. Read them and then get me a written summary by Wednesday. Don’t even think about using SparkNotes; I have their summary memorized. Clara, can you stay for a second? I’d like to talk to you.”

  I’d already gathered everything and was about to leave when she asked. It sounded ominous. “Yeah, sure.”

  Strangely, Ashton gave me a peace sign as he left. Of course, Jack didn’t even look at me, which felt more normal than Ashton being all buddy-buddy.

  I clutched my books to my chest, as if they’d protect me from her fiery glare, and walked toward Ms. Croft.

  Ms. Croft was in her early thirties and had these big tortoiseshell brow-line glasses. Tattoos spilled like water down her right arm and peeked through dress necklines, cardigan Vs, and spaghetti straps. Her bangs often pushed to the side, but the rest of her deep-black chin-length hair was pulled back into a short ponytail that curled in on itself rather than floof straight out. She had her head in the universal I’m so tired and bothered pose: elbows on the desk, hands over her eyes. She rubbed her eyes, took a deep breath, then sat up in her chair. “You were late on the first day of class. Is this going to be a thing?”

  Bad day: 10

  Clara: −8

  “No, sorry,” I said. “I was caught up with a . . . project when the bell rang. It was my fault; it won’t happen again.”

  “What project? This is the first period of the day. Actually, this is the first period of the entire school year. There are no projects.”

  “Something library-related. Mr. Caywell can confirm. I swear. I’m rarely late to class. I was late to chemistry once, but it was because I’d spilled chicken-noodle soup on my binder and wanted to get all the noodles untangled from the little metal things. Plus, I didn’t want to get chicken all over the beakers.”

  A few moments of awkward silence passed, and right before I was about to ask if I could leave, Ms. Croft sighed again. “I’ve taught this class for four years,” she said. “As a teacher, I know that’s not a very long time, but with every class that’s come through that door, there are fewer and fewer interested students. Not to mention students willing to let literature tear them to shreds or speak to them. If something happens to these books I’m pushing, are they going to even care? You didn’t even care today, and you have the reputation of liking books. Am I doing something wrong?”

  She looked at me, and the whole situation, intimidating teacher asking late student what she was doing wrong, just struck me as funny.

  I laughed. “Sorry, this isn’t funny.”

  Ms. Croft smiled. “It kind of is.”

  “I do care, FYI. Ironically and admittedly, I wasn’t paying attention because I was thinking about books the whole time.”

  I looked at her. I didn’t know if she was referencing the ban or not with her “if something happens” line, but I knew she knew because the email had gone out to all staff. Did the banned books bother the staff? If it had been happening for years, then the staff had been complicit for just as long. Even Ms. Croft. I wanted to ask her why she didn’t do anything, but she was giving off the vibe that she could skin a bear and make a stylish necklace with its teeth, so I decided to not provoke her.

  “Why should people care?” she asked.

  “About books?”

  “About anything? About life outside of what’s required of you? About anything that’s not panem et circenses?”

  My mouth dropped. I knew that usage of Lukas Latin. It had been rattling in my brain all morning.

  She beamed at my recognition. “You’ve read it?”

  “Of course I’ve read it. Lukas is my favorite—” I stopped mid-sentence. I had so much else to say, but the book was banned and, despite her being the Honors Lit bear-hunting teacher, I didn’t know if she was for or against the ban. I guessed she was against, but simply discussing the book could be a strike and probably a detention, though the email said nothing about it.

  Our eyes locked, staring. Wondering. Sewing together mental volumes of translation and interpretation. Her brows narrowed with some sort of distant recognition.

  “Wait,” she said, an unmistakable edge to her voice. “You’re not supposed to know.”

  “Know what?” I said.

  Way.

  Too.

  Quickly.

  She crossed her arms.

  It hadn’t even been two hours.

  A Complex Lasagna

  “Well, it was nice talking to you,” I said, slowly backing away. “Good luck getting the students to care. I mean . . . not that they don’t, but I mean, maybe they don’t. At least, I’ll do better next time. Because I care. Okay. Bye.”

  “Cla
ra, hold on—I’m not mad that you know. I just don’t understand how you know. Especially considering that the information was supposed to be confidential.”

  I sighed. “Because I was raised in a barn. I found out this morning.”

  She stared at me, one brow raised.

  “I accidentally, but sort of on purpose, read Mr. Caywell’s email. You can’t tell Mr. Caywell I told you. You can’t. I don’t want to be banned from the library.”

  “Banned from the library?”

  “Just”—I held up a hand—“don’t tell Mr. Caywell you know that I know. It’s imperative.”

  “I won’t. Don’t worry. Isn’t this absolutely ridiculous?” she said, shaking her head. “It was so out of the blue. Communication to staff has never been great, but this is unprofessional. I have half a mind to quit.”

  “Same,” I said. “Except then I’d fail senior year and end up living in a box.”

  She let out a small pity laugh. “How are you taking it so well?”

  “Am I? I’m really mad and confused and I don’t know how to handle any of it.”

  “Your mad is a lot different than my mad.”

  “Well, you should know, the ban is the reason I was in a far country during class. I couldn’t focus. It was frustrating enough learning they’d already banned three books, let alone that they wanted to add fifty more.”

  Ms. Croft’s nose scrunched. “I’m sorry, what do you mean?”

  “They already banned The Hunger Games, The Color Purple, and The Adventures of Huck Finn. Apparently, like, years ago.”

  She said nothing.

  “Mr. Caywell refused to pull those from the shelves, but they ended up disappearing from the stacks.”

  “And it’s going to happen again?” she asked.

  “I guess,” I said. “You really didn’t know about the others?” I asked, relieved that she hadn’t ignored the earlier banned books. But was that the case for most of the staff? Did they not know?