by Dave Connis
“Is this a bribe so I slip your name to my mom in order to get you further up the Founders Scholarship list?” he said, sort of joking, sort of not.
I felt defensiveness bubble into my throat, but instead I shoved the bag closer to him. “It’s because I want to give you a Twizzler.”
He stared at the bag for a minute, then finally reached inside and pulled one out. “Twizzlers are weird. They’re bland, but I can’t stop eating them.”
I laughed. “I was just thinking that! How do they do that?”
Ashton reached over, shoving his whole hand into the Twizzlers bag, talking to LiQui in depth about every season of The Real Housewives of New Jersey. He pulled out a firewood-size clump of Twizzlers without even a look. I squeezed my near-empty bag, feeling its crinkly emptiness. I was suddenly overcome by a dose of sad. “My Twizzlers,” I said, not really to anyone.
And Jack started laughing. Hard. “That was the most tragic thing I’ve seen in forever. Your face. Oh. Ash!”
Ashton whipped around, two Twizzlers sticking out of his mouth. “What?”
“You just took half of Clara’s Twizzlers and she’s over here ready to break.”
Everyone turned to look at me, and suddenly my Twizzler sadness was making everyone laugh, and then I was laughing, and before I knew it Ashton was making his way back from the SnackBox with three bags of Twizzlers, dropping them all in my lap.
Between Jack and me, we ate them all.
Mojo Plus Two
I was shocked at how normal it felt to have two star-stars eating queso with us. LiQui sat next to Jack, Ashton next to me. And, halfway through, Resi came and sat with us. Despite Ashton’s earlier reports of everyone being mad at everyone, they didn’t seem to be. It was an integration that should’ve been awkward, but it wasn’t. They were humans. They were like me and LiQui, their own crew, and I couldn’t stop thinking about that.
I’d thought that LiQui and I were such a singularity, that no one else in the school could’ve ever matched how tight we were, but watching Ashton, Jack, and Resi interact was like turning a light on.
These two weren’t star-stars because they wanted to be exclusive jackholes. They were the star-stars like LiQui and I were me and LiQui. It was just how it was. I couldn’t say this about all the star-stars, but these three? Their exclusivity was a front at worst, or imagined by everyone else at best, and all it took to learn that was looking instead of assuming.
The Death of a Battery: A Memoir
The Monday after Mojo with the star-stars, the news hadn’t broken, Mr. Caywell wasn’t back, and the library closing had set in at LA. Students weren’t just whispering; they were feeling its lack. They were making it a problem for Mr. Walsh, which I felt pretty good about. I especially felt its absence. I didn’t know what it was about the library’s closing, but simply that it was gone made everyone want books. Books I didn’t even have. Books that weren’t even banned. Classic greener-grass syndrome.
We always wanted what we couldn’t have.
The week before felt like a vacation compared to the amount of Unlib work I was doing now that the library was closed and it made the week go ridiculously fast. So fast I couldn’t keep up. I didn’t eat lunch. I was nearly late to every class. If I wasn’t sneaking people books in the halls, I was meeting them at my locker. By a water fountain. In the bathroom. Behind a locker door. That week, I did so much app tapping that the fresh, 100-percent-charged battery I’d start the day with went sub–30 percent by lunchtime.
I’d mastered the quick exchange of book and information. I felt well-oiled, but it was so exhausting. I didn’t see LiQui at all. And every day, I’d planned on using my free period to write some sort of bad draft speech for the Founders Scholarship Dinner that was barreling toward me. But I didn’t. Instead, I scrambled to finish homework mere minutes before it was due. On Wednesday, the ink on a five-page paper about the origins of the black-pepper trade for history class was still warm and smudgeable as I turned it in.
By the time I walked out of school on Thursday, LiQui’s and Ashton’s lockers were empty, and there were only four books left in mine. Four. Cuatro. The same amount of letters in most cuss words was how many books I had left. I’d loaned out sixty-six books. Despite the confusion I’d had about running the Unlib, I was happy that, in its last days, it was maxed out. People were reading. And it was good. I was everyone’s book girl. There was maybe one degree of separation between Lupton Academy’s weed guy and me. I considered reaching out for a partnership.
No, I didn’t.
That was a joke. I didn’t do that.
What I did do after that Thursday was go home, talk to my parents about the Founders Scholarship Dinner, which caused a minor freak-out between the two of them, understandably, considering it was the first they’d heard of it and the event was a paltry two days away. I grabbed a granola bar from the pantry and then excused myself from dinner in order to write my speech, or, if nothing else, stare at a wall and consider the universe. Maybe deal with the self-loathing that would come up when I couldn’t think of anything to write about. Luckily, I didn’t have to deal with any self-loathing, because I was so exhausted from the day I fell asleep on the desk in my room.
The Catcher Wasn’t There
I felt so lonesome, all of a sudden. I almost wished I was dead.
—J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
My phone buzzed against the desk. My eyes snapped open. It took a few seconds for me to come around to the fact that it was dark, and that I’d drooled all over the piece of paper that was supposed to be my speech, which felt right.
I rubbed my eyes. My phone started buzzing again. I picked it up.
“Hello?”
A panicked Ashton was on the other end, his breath heavy, filled with fear.
“Ashton?” I said, feeling my brain light on fire and adrenaline trickle into my chest. “Ashton?”
“I’m just standing here,” he said through the tears. “I called 911, but they’re not here yet. I’m just standing here and he’s lying on the floor.”
I stood. “What? What is going on?”
“Jack, I think he’s, like . . . I don’t know. He’s not breathing. There are pill containers everywhere. I think he’s dead.”
I felt heavier. My head felt twice its size.
“You called 911? Where are you?”
“I’m at school.”
“What?” I asked.
“He broke into school and sent me a text about ending it. Something about having no catcher in the rye.”
My heart sank. Deep. Deepest. “Ashton. I’ll be right there.”
“No. Don’t come.”
“I’ll be there soon. Stay on the phone with me.”
I ran down the stairs, grabbing the keys from the hook by the door and jumping into my car. If I hadn’t handed Jack Catcher in the Rye, and we’d simply had the Twizzlers the week before, would we have still ended up here?
The phone was just the sound of Ashton breathing, and maybe a minute after I got in my car, the sounds of paramedics. Ashton talking to them. I drove and listened. The whole world felt cavernous. I was engulfed in pulsing terror. I remembered the night we’d had last week. Eating Twizzlers at the football game. Laughing. But I also remembered our conversation in the processing room.
I’d done this.
I sped to school, arriving to a scene of swirling lights, the darkness a flashing mash of red and blue. Principal Walsh and Jack’s mom and dad stood on the stairs. Ashton sat on a small patch of grass off to the side of the paver path. Watching from the shadows as the paramedics wheeled Jack out of the door, down the path, through the roundabout, and into the ambulance.
“Ashton?” I said softly.
He looked up. “Hey.”
I sat down next to him.
“He spray-painted something above the library wall, where I found him,” he said. “‘To Holden Caulfield, from Holden Caulfield. This is my statement.’
“What does it mean?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I lied, as guilt oozed out from every pore.
It felt like a knife in the gut, twisting and cutting all the way to the dustiest corners of me. It was the statement written by Mark David Chapman, the shooter of the Beatles’ John Lennon, in a copy of Catcher in the Rye he had in his pocket when he was arrested for murder. But for Jack? It meant something else. It meant that this was his solution. Holden’s was to check into a mental hospital. Jack’s was to end it all. This wasn’t like in Queso, where people simply disagreed about a book; this was bad. This was damage.
“This was my fault,” I said. “I gave him that book. I thought it would help. I didn’t think it could do this. I didn’t know.”
I started crying. Ashton pulled me into him and held me there. He started crying too. Neither of us knew what to say. I was unsure how a book could convince separate someones of both murder and suicide. The thought, the situation, was so jarring that when I glanced at Mr. Walsh, I wondered if he’d been right all along and I’d finally seen what he saw when he looked at books. Unpredictable power.
And I was afraid.
For the first time in my life.
I was afraid of books.
White Cover Uncovered
A new sickness invaded Jerry, the sickness of knowing what he had become, another animal, another beast, another violent person in a violent world, inflicting damage, not disturbing the universe but damaging it.
—Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War
It was Friday morning. The last day of the Unlib. I hadn’t gone back to sleep when I got home. I should’ve used the time to write a speech for the Founders Scholarship Dinner, but every time I tried to think of something, drawing on the experience of my short life, I saw Jack on a stretcher. Every consideration of LitHouse, every attempt at writing about the Tiny Little Libraries, made me feel surrounded by creatures made of shadow and teeth.
Books were all I had. I mean, I had LiQui and my parents, but outside of them? I was made up of books. Now nothing about my life felt right. It had been swallowed in a sea of questions without answers and I felt selfish for thinking it unfair, but I did. When I needed it most, my foundation was missing. I felt like I was floating in outer space. No bearing. No tether. Just there, and those weren’t the sort of feelings that won you scholarships.
I was getting into my car to go to school when my phone rang. It was Ashton.
“Hello?” I said.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“So, Jack is okay. He’s at the hospital and will need to go to a juvenile rehab center for a few days to be supervised.”
“Okay. When can we see him?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m trying to figure that out.”
“He told me. Last week. He told me.”
“He came out to you?”
“Yeah.”
He took a giant breath of relief. “Clara, I’ve been sitting with this since the beginning of high school. In the last three years he’s been miserable. Downright miserable. And he’s so afraid and feels so alone. I pushed him to come out. To come out to his family. And he did. It went horribly. And he’s been hurting ever since. I didn’t think he’d ever tell anyone ever again.”
“He told me Resi knew.”
“Yeah, but Resi thinks Jack should do what he feels comfortable doing and doesn’t want to push him. That’s why we were all in that big fight last week. I was pushing Jack to come out in general because he’s destroying himself trying to make it go away. Resi got mad at me for pushing Jack. I yelled at Resi for watching a friend disintegrate and not doing anything about it. She got mad at me for pushing. Jack got mad at the two of us for fighting about him. Anyway. Before this school year started, he told me he wanted to go to your book club. I didn’t know why, but I had a guess. I think he had this idea that everyone there was obviously reading stories with gay kids and that you weren’t bashing them. So he wanted to go a few times to see how you responded to those stories. I think, if he felt safe enough, he was going to come out there. With people he knew wouldn’t be like his family.”
I shook my head. “And I yelled at him before the first night was over.”
“Yeah, that wasn’t great, but in your defense he was mocking you guys. I think he felt like he’d dragged me along and needed to entertain me or something.”
“Did I do this, Ashton?”
“I don’t know. I mean, maybe, but a lot of people did this. Not just you.”
“What can we do for him?”
“I think . . . I don’t know. Be there. Accept him? I don’t know what else to do. Being around and acceptance is all I’ve got.”
“Okay. I’ll see you soon.”
“Yeah. See ya.”
I hung up, and I kept telling myself it wasn’t my fault, but, God, the correlation was too strong. It had started with my hands. I picked out the book. I had Ashton give him the book.
The school had already been cleaned. No sign of the event that had taken place the night before. I walked into Honors Lit feeling stunned. Sluggish. So lost in the expanse that I wondered why I’d even come. I sat next to Ashton. I knew he felt the same. I reached over and grabbed his hand. I knew LiQui would’ve freaked out, thinking I was about to start making out with him, but it wasn’t like that—despite the number of books I’ve read where, right then, if my life had been a book, Ashton and I would’ve gotten together. Then, instantly, everything would have gotten fixed. Pigs would have flown. And all the readers would be rooting for a kiss a few pages later. This wasn’t like that.
It was just . . . gender sort of took a back seat, replaced simply by the fact that he was my friend and I wanted to be there for him and that was the best way I knew how.
Class had barely started when someone knocked on the classroom door, then pushed it open. It was Ms. Borgen, the school administrator.
Ms. Skirty SkirtSkirt turned toward the door. “Yes, Mrs. Borgen?”
“Principal Walsh would like to see Ashton Bricks.”
My head snapped to Ashton.
He looked right at me, and then at his bag.
My heart sank. I’d checked out A House of Wooden Windows and Speak—again—to him yesterday after school. Speak because he wanted to grab some quotes from it. House because he wanted to read Lukas’s other book. It wasn’t lost on me that the Unlib was going to fall because of the book that had made me want to work in a library in the first place, and that burned fierce.
“Can’t it wait, Mrs. Borgen? We’re in the middle of class.”
“Principal Walsh said it was urgent.”
I wanted to bolt toward an exit. Jump out a window. Faint, maybe.
Ashton grabbed his backpack and gave me another look. This one said, I’m so sorry.
I returned one that, I hoped, didn’t say what I felt.
After he left, panic, not the fog of the night before, kept me from paying attention to class. Was Mr. Walsh reaming Ashton out for being a burr in the blanket of school pride? Was Ashton spilling all the secrets of the Unlib? I knew he wouldn’t, but maybe it didn’t matter if he did. If Mr. Walsh knew about the white covers, the operation was no longer covert. Incognito was out the door.
For the first time since I’d started it, I realized how stupid I’d been. Not because of my romantic hope of winning Mr. Walsh over with quotes, or even of—quotes aside—just winning the battle of books against him, but because I’d put my Founders Scholarship chances at risk the moment I started. I hadn’t thought I’d end up here. It was all supposed to be a silent war. Running in the background. None of it was what I’d thought would happen, but, at the same time, I hadn’t known what I thought would happen. Why had I done this to myself?
Then, in the middle of Honors Lit, the same place I’d been inspired to start the Unlib, I realized something.
Books had always been such a positive part of my life, an only-ever-good thing I was praised for being into. So when s
omeone else said, “No, these aren’t good for you,” I got angry. Now that anger had been replaced by worry and confusion, I wondered for the first time what reason someone could’ve had to say they weren’t good for me.
I’d felt off about the Unlib from the day it started because I’d never questioned books before. I’d always thought that if it was book-shaped, it was good. My mom and dad had affirmed as much. In the same way, I’d never questioned what books actually did to me. For me. With me. My whole life, I’d only seen the world open its arms to books. But suddenly I had Mr. Walsh saying that they weren’t good for me to read? I’d had no idea someone could look at a book and think it would make them, or anyone else that read it, worse off. I’d had no idea someone wouldn’t want someone else to read something.
And it had bothered me.
Why?
Why?
What was I missing?
And now I finally saw it.
Damage.
I wasn’t Levi.
I wasn’t Joss.
I wasn’t Katniss.
I wasn’t Guy Montag.
I wasn’t Lila.
I’d thought I was when all of this started. Instead . . .
I was naive.
I was wrong.
The Everywhere of Friends
Oh, Celie, unbelief is a terrible thing. And so is the hurt we cause others unknowingly.
—Alice Walker, The Color Purple
I was walking toward my next class after Honors Lit when the PA sparked to life. Every single student stopped, eyes fixed on the ceiling as if we could find some sort of hint of what was about to be said in the metal mesh covering the speakers.
“Attention, staff and students.” It was Mr. Walsh. “There will be an emergency assembly held in the gym in ten minutes. I repeat, there will be an emergency assembly in the gym in ten minutes. All staff and students should make their way there as soon as possible. Attendance is mandatory. Again, there will be an emergency rally in the gym in ten minutes. Attendance is mandatory. Thank you.”