Ban This Book

by Alan Gratz

  “Wait wait wait,” I said. “First of all, Mrs. Jones is at the front desk.”

  “So we’ll distract her,” Danny said.

  “And,” I said, “there’s an alarm that goes off if you try to take a book out without checking it out, remember?”

  “Oh,” Danny said. “How do we get around that? Chuck ’em over it?”

  I doubted that would work. And I could just see myself trying to catch books out in the hall as Danny tossed them over the scanners. If it was anything like trying to catch a football in gym class, there would be busted books all over the floor. The only way we were going to be able to get away with it was to run the books over that machine at the front desk that demagnetized them, or whatever it did. For some weird reason, that made me think of the picture Trey had drawn for the right to assemble, with the person holding a sign up that said, MAGNETS: HOW DO THEY WORK?

  “We’ll use the thing on the desk,” I told them. “The thing Mrs. Jones runs books over so the alarm doesn’t go off. But that means we need a long distraction.”

  “I got this,” Danny said. He pulled a book off one of the shelves around us, opened his messy backpack, and buried it as far down inside as he could.

  “What are you going to do?” Rebecca said.

  He hefted his backpack onto his shoulder and headed for the door. “I’m going to set off the alarm!”

  Rebecca and I hurried around the aisle to where we could watch the entrance and the front desk. My heart was in my throat. I couldn’t believe I was about to do this. What kind of person had I become that I would ask an author during a school visit what he thought about his books being banned? Who would steal books from the library to loan them out of my own secret locker library?

  Danny stepped between the two white plastic pedestals at the door and the alarm went off. Wonk-wonk! Wonk-wonk! Even though it wasn’t very loud, the sound of it and the flashing red lights made me and Rebecca both jump. Danny jumped too, even though he’d been expecting it.

  Mrs. Jones stirred from her seat at the front desk. “Danny? Do you have a book in your backpack you haven’t checked out?”

  Danny flicked his hair out of his eyes. “Geez, I don’t think so, Mrs. Jones,” he said. He tried to go back through, but the alarm went off again.

  Mrs. Jones came out from behind her desk and went to him. “Here, let’s take a look.”

  Danny’s eyes flicked to mine. It was now or never. I motioned for Rebecca to wait for me and hurried behind Mrs. Jones’s desk. I was the one who knew what books we needed, and she could holler if Mrs. Jones was coming back.

  I ran to the shelf at the back, my whole body shaking. I skimmed the titles on the spines once all the way through before realizing that I hadn’t really read a single word. I was freaking out. I needed to calm down. Think. Reread the titles.

  I frowned. Not all of these were on the banned books list. Then I saw the label on the shelf: REMOVE/REPLACE. Some of the books were just old and worn out, and Mrs. Jones was going to order new copies. That would help disguise the fact that I’d taken a few.

  I glanced over my shoulder. Rebecca glanced at Danny, who I couldn’t see, and back to me. Her eyes told me to hurry, but not to run.

  Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Matilda. Luv Ya Bunches. The Midwife’s Apprentice. Harriet the Spy. The Great Brain. More Adventures of the Great Brain. And Tango Makes Three. The Diary of a Young Girl. The Giver. In the Night Kitchen. Coraline. The Golden Compass. The Face on the Milk Carton. A Day No Pigs Would Die. I went through the list in my head, ticking off all the books that didn’t already have little green marks on the sheet hidden behind the GO EAGLES! #1! sign on my locker. When I was finished, I had a stack that reached up to my chin.

  I hurried back out to the front desk with them. I was shaking so bad I was sure I was going to trip and spill all the books. I made it to the front desk just as the books were tipping over, but Rebecca helped me catch them. I glanced over at the entrance. Danny was there on the floor, pulling things out of his backpack one at a time for Mrs. Jones.

  “There’s that language arts assignment!” he said. “I meant to turn that in. And hey! I’ve been looking for this hairbrush forever!”

  “Hurry,” Rebecca whispered.

  I took the first book to the demagnetizer thing. I didn’t really know how the thing worked. Did you have to push a button or something? I didn’t see any buttons on it. Instead I just did what Mrs. Jones always does. I stuck the spine of the book into the corner of it and moved it around.

  The machine made a little sound—bonk—and a light lit up green. Success! I let out a big breath I hadn’t realized I’d even been holding. I shoved the book at Rebecca, glanced over at Danny. He pulled a plastic food container out of his backpack. “Oh man, what’s growing in that?” he said.

  I hurried and rubbed more books over the machine.

  “My backpack’s full!” Rebecca said when I’d gotten about halfway through.

  “Go, go,” I told her, and she jog-walked toward the door.

  I took a second to watch her go, half afraid Mrs. Jones would somehow psychically know she had the banned books in her bag, and half afraid I hadn’t demagnetized them the right way. Rebecca probably had the exact same fears, because she slowed down when she got to Danny and Mrs. Jones. Mrs. Jones had lost her patience with Danny and was looking in his backpack for him. Rebecca shot me a last look, and skipped through the alarms.

  It didn’t go off! Rebecca was out!

  “Here we are,” Mrs. Jones said, pulling a book from Danny’s backpack. “Big Wig: A Little History of Hair,” Mrs. Jones read.

  “What?” Danny said. He flicked his hair out of his eyes so he could read it. “Oh. Yeah. It’s, um, for a project I’m doing. About hair.”

  “Well, you’ll need to check it out if you want to take it from the library,” Mrs. Jones said. Danny looked my way in panic. I still had a small stack of books to demagnetize!

  I took a handful of them and stuck them in the machine all at once. The light lit up green. I took the other handful of them and did the same thing. Green. I would just have to hope it took care of all of them. I piled the books in my arms and scurried out from behind the desk just as Mrs. Jones and Danny came over. She hadn’t seen me! Now to just stuff these in my backpack, and …

  But my backpack was already full. It was filled to the top with all the textbooks that wouldn’t fit in my locker! What was I going to do?

  I looked at the clock. I had to get back to class. Danny was already gone from the front desk. With no other choice, I slipped on my backpack, turned the books around so the titles all faced me, and headed for the exit. Just a few more steps—and then I remembered that I had demagnetized the books in handfuls. Where they all clean, or would one of them give me away?

  I held my breath again and stepped between the sensors. Nothing! I was free!

  “Amy Anne?” Mrs. Jones called.

  I froze. She knew I’d heard her. I couldn’t pretend I couldn’t.

  I turned.

  “No good-bye?” Mrs. Jones said with a smile.

  I let out a sound that was something between “Oh!” and a frog croaking, then managed a wimpy little “Good-bye” before hurrying away.

  The Golden Hoard

  I sat on my bed surrounded by books.

  I stacked them by size, then stacked them alphabetically, then stacked them by books I’d read and books I hadn’t read. I loved the weight of them, the feel of them, especially the hardback books with the clear plastic coating that crinkled and crackled as you opened the book. Some of them were old—older even than I was. Some of them were brand new.

  And all of them had been banned.

  It was a treasure trove, these stacks, and suddenly I had the idea that I was Smaug the dragon sitting on my piles of gold and jewels, and I would do anything to keep that hobbit and those dwarves from taking them back.

  How had I not seen books as treasure before? I loved books. I coul
dn’t imagine living without them. But I had never seen each book as such a valuable thing before. Even the books I wasn’t interested in reading were like gold. It didn’t matter what was inside them. One man’s junk was another man’s treasure, as my grandmother said. The same thing was true with books. One person’s Captain Underpants was another person’s From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.

  I didn’t have time to sit around thinking about it for too long though. The house was quiet—beautifully, unbelievably quiet—but it wouldn’t last. Mom was in the kitchen on her laptop. Angelina was at Gymboree running around like a racehorse, and Alexis was at ballet. In an hour Dad would bring them home, and it would be chaos again. Even the dogs were quiet, curled up and sacked out on Alexis’s bed. For the next few minutes my world was all mine, and I had work to do. Work I didn’t want anyone else to see me doing.

  Some of the books were new enough that they needed card slots pasted into the back. Some of them already had envelopes, and all I had to do was take out the old Shelbourne Elementary library due date card and replace it with one of mine. The old cards were fun to look at. I loved the typewriter font at the top, listing the title and author, and the long lists of scribbled signatures with red due dates stamped beside them. Sometimes you’d see the same name over and over again. I imagined what the card for From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler would look like if they still checked books out like this today. My name would be in every slot, and onto the back by now. One girl had checked out Harriet the Spy three times. I saw her name again on the Matilda card. If I had gone to Shelbourne Elementary in 1985, she and I might have been friends.

  I pulled the card out of the next book and skimmed down it, looking for a familiar name. And then I saw one.

  A very familiar name.

  Was it…? No. Could it…? No, it couldn’t be. But the more I stared at it, the more I thought, It has to be.

  That card was a keeper.

  Princesses One through Nine

  Jeffrey Gonzalez was back from his suspension.

  He sat in his seat in our classroom, arms folded, staring at his empty desk. Everybody else stayed clear of him, but I went up to him before class.

  “Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry you got suspended.”

  Jeffrey shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “I just—I didn’t know if you did it for us, or—”

  Jeffrey frowned. “What?”

  “You know.” I lowered my voice. “Because Coletrane dropped that book in the cafeteria. Principal Banazewski was about to pick it up when—”

  “I didn’t do it for you,” Jeffrey said bitterly. “I didn’t do it for anybody. He was in my seat.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Well, anyway, thanks. Um, live long and prosper.”

  Live long and prosper was a thing Jeffrey liked to tell people. It was from Star Wars or something.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Right.”

  I left Jeffrey under his little black cloud. What was wrong with him? Usually he was drawing spaceships all over his notebook or using the force to try and make the papier-mâché planets that hung from the ceiling spin backward. Now he was just angry all the time.

  “All right, everybody. Language arts time,” Mr. Vaughn said. “It’s Free Reading Friday, so get out whatever you brought to read. I’m going to do the same.”

  Free Reading Friday was my all-time favorite thing about Mr. Vaughn’s class. Every Friday for language arts, we all got to sit around the room and read anything we wanted to—as long as it wasn’t a book for school. Even Mr. Vaughn read. He’d been reading an Agatha Christie mystery called Murder on the Orient Express. I pulled out The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner’s Dilemma and opened it to my bookmark. I was just starting the part where the Mysterious Benedict Society falls into a trap when I heard Mr. Vaughn ask someone across the room, “The Seventeenth Princess? What’s that about?”

  I looked up with a squeak. Danny and Rebecca were gawking too. The Seventeenth Princess was one of our fake covers. Someone was reading one of the B.B.L.L. books in class, and Mr. Vaughn had caught her!

  It was Lacey Edwards. Lacey was the tallest girl in fourth grade. She looked up at me in horror. The book wasn’t about seventeen princesses, of course. Inside, it was Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

  I gave her a look that said, “Make something up!”

  Lacey had to look at the cover again to see what the title was.

  “It’s about … the seventeenth princess,” she said.

  Mr. Vaughn laughed. “Well, I gathered that. What happened to the first sixteen?”

  “Well, the first one … fell into a pot of boiling oil,” Lacey said.

  “Ouch,” Mr. Vaughn said.

  “The second one … ate a poisoned apple.”

  “Always a classic,” said Mr. Vaughn.

  “The third one … got sat on by a giant.”

  Some of the kids around Lacey laughed. People were starting to pay attention to her.

  “The fourth one … turned into a werewolf. The fifth one … was eaten by a giant shark. The sixth one … choked on her own snot.”

  “Ewwww!” the class said, half-laughing and half-gagging.

  I sucked on a braid. Why in the world did we have to make it seventeen princesses?

  “The seventh princess got kicked in the face with a soccer ball,” Lacey said. She was really getting into it now. “The eighth princess … she stuck her tongue in an electrical socket!”

  The other kids cheered for that one. Mr. Vaughn looked around at them, amused and concerned at the same time.

  “The ninth princess accidentally sat on her crown,” Lacey said. “The tenth princess—”

  “All right, all right,” Mr. Vaughn said. “I’m afraid if we go all the way to seventeen, language arts will be over before anyone’s done any reading.” He shook his head. “That’s a strange book you’ve got there. But it sounds fun.”

  Mr. Vaughn left Lacey’s desk to go sit in the big chair at the front of the room and read his book, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I saw Danny and Rebecca do the same thing. That had been a close one. I guess we should be lucky the cover hadn’t been Smell My Finger.

  I was about to go back to my book when I saw one other person looking across the room at me: Trey McBride. He glanced over at Lacey, then back to me, then disappeared behind an Amulet graphic novel.

  New Customers

  At lunch, Jeffrey sat by himself. He’d had friends before, other kids who liked talking about the same kinds of movies and shows he did. But no one wanted to sit with him now. Jeffrey seemed to want it that way. He picked fights with anybody who hung out with him too long.

  I stared across the room at Space Cadet Jeff, feeling sorry for him. He’d always been a nice guy before. He’d been like this for a while now. Ever since …

  Ever since that day we both got called to the office. He wasn’t angry before that. What had Principal Banazewski been telling him as they came out of her office? Something about how she was sure his grandmother had been a nice person.

  Jeffrey’s grandmother must have died. Was that why he was so mad? I could understand him being sad, but why was he so angry all the time? Then I remembered the books I’d read where people die. Sometimes the characters refuse to believe it. Sometimes they just got to where they shut down and didn’t want to do anything. And sometimes they got really mad.

  I had a book like that in my locker, in fact.

  After lunch, I wrote a note that said I wanted to talk and left it in Jeffrey’s locker mailbox. He met me at my locker after school with the note in his hand.

  “What?” he said.

  “Hey Jeffrey,” I said. I didn’t know where to start. “I—I know your grandmother died.”

  Jeffrey looked away, staring at the lockers. “So?” he said.

  “I just wanted you to know that I know what you’re going through,” I said.

  His eyes flashed to mine, and I s
aw the Jeffrey who’d gotten suspended for fighting. “Oh yeah?” he said. “Did your grandmother die?”

  “N-no,” I said.

  “Then you don’t know,” he said.

  “But I’ve read about it,” I said. “In a book.”

  Jeffrey snorted and looked away. I opened my locker and showed him the book.

  “Mr. Bear Opens a Bank Account?” he said.

  “Oh. No. That’s just the fake cover we put on it to fool the teachers.” I opened it up to show him. “It’s called Bridge to Terabithia. I think you should read it.”

  Jeffrey looked at the book in my hands but didn’t take it.

  “It sounds stupid,” Jeffrey said.

  “It’s not. It’s really good,” I told him. “It’s about these two kids who invent this pretend kingdom and become the king and queen. I think you’ll really like it.”

  I held the book out to Jeffrey, and he finally took it.

  “I’ll maybe read it,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. I hoped he would.

  Jeffrey walked away and I turned. Trey McBride was standing right behind me. I jumped out of my skin, then remembered to slam my locker shut and slip on the lock.

  “Hey,” Trey said.

  “Hey,” I said back. I tried not to sound nervous, even though I was. Every time I turned around, there he was! He stood there for a few seconds, just looking at me but not saying anything. What did he want? Our First Amendment project was already finished.

  “I want to borrow a book,” Trey said.

  What!? I swallowed. Hard. “The school library is right down the hall,” I told him.

  “I want to borrow a book from you. From your locker.”

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “I want to borrow Captain Underpants,” he told me. “I know you have it.”

  Trey flipped up the GO EAGLES! #1! sign on my locker and pointed to the list of banned books on the back. “The green dots mean you have them, right? I want to read this one.”

  My own little patch of quicksand was opening up underneath me again. Trey knew all about the B.B.L.L. Did that mean his mom knew too? Maybe she did. Maybe Trey had figured it out, and told his mom, but instead of going right to the principal, she’d sent him here to check out a book. As evidence.