by Alan Gratz
Hot tears poured down my cheeks, and I turned away so Dad couldn’t see. I tried to swallow a quiet sob, but Dad heard me.
“Are you crying? Oh, Amy Anne, I—dang it. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I know how hard it is for you to speak up.” He pulled a bright red bandana out of his pocket and handed it to me. “Here, what’s the book?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t look at him. I was still crying.
“Come on. Mixed-up Mrs. Frankfurter or something.”
He was trying to get me to laugh, but I was too upset. He was right. Everybody had changed their plans for me and we’d come all that way downtown on a school night, and I’d sat there too afraid to say something.
Dad didn’t say anything else, but a few minutes later we pulled into the parking lot of the bookstore. I hadn’t even noticed we weren’t driving home.
“Come on,” Dad said. “Clean yourself up now and let’s see if they have your book.”
Inside, I told the lady at the register the name of the book, and she knew it right away. A few minutes later, Dad bought me my very own copy of From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
“There you go,” Dad said. “Now it doesn’t matter whether they have a copy in the library or not. You’ve got one of your own.”
On the way home, I held the book in both hands in my lap. The cover was a little different from the one in the library, and the Newbery Medal on the front wasn’t real like the library one. It was just a picture of the medal, not a sticker you could run your fingers over and feel the bumps, even through the clear plastic cover. But that didn’t matter, really. The book and the pictures inside were the same.
I was glad to have my own copy, but I couldn’t help thinking about that book that wasn’t on the library shelves anymore, and how I would never have known From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler was my favorite book if I hadn’t found it there in the first place.
The Girl with the Mullet
Sometimes I like to pretend I’m the main character in a book. My mom and dad and sisters and Rebecca are all characters too, and Mrs. Jones maybe, and Mr. Vaughn, my teacher, and the other kids in my class. But I’m the main character. I’m the one who explains everything that’s happening in my own voice, the one things happen to. The only problem is, the best books aren’t the ones where stuff just happens to the main character. The best books are the ones where the main character does something, like run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And that’s why I could never really be the main character in a book.
I never do anything.
I stuck my bookmark in From the Mixed-up Files right at the point where Claudia and Jamie collect $2.87 in coins from the restaurant fountain in the museum, and watched out the window of the bus as it took me to school. I’d already read all the way through my new copy of From the Mixed-up Files once already, before I went to bed.
We stopped at Rebecca’s house, and she flopped down in the seat next to me.
“How was the school board meeting?” she asked.
I shrugged. “You would have liked it. They said ‘make a motion’ and ‘I second that’ a lot.”
“Robert’s Rules of Order,” Rebecca said. “That’s what they’re called. It was written by Robert Somebody-or-other.”
“No kidding,” I thought, but I didn’t say so.
“Did you read the thing you wrote?” Rebecca asked.
I looked out the window. “No.”
“Amy Anne! You worked all week on that!”
I shrugged.
“Mrs. Jones talked though, right? What happened?”
“Nothing. All the books are still banned.”
Rebecca saw the book in my hand. “Isn’t that one of them?”
“Yeah. My dad bought it for me.”
Rebecca took the book from me and looked at the cover. “You’re all the time talking about what a great book this is. What’s so bad about it?”
“Nothing!” I told her. “That lady said it teaches kids to lie and steal and cheat, but they don’t do any of that stuff.” Only, now that I thought about it, they do lie about running away to the museum. And Jamie does cheat at cards. And I guess you could call it stealing when they take the coins from the fountain. “Well, they kind of do, I guess,” I said.
Rebecca’s eyes lit up. “Cool. Can I read it?”
I was surprised. All the times I’d talked about From the Mixed-up Files, Rebecca had never once been interested in reading it. Until now.
“Okay,” I said. I pulled my bookmark out and gave it to her. “Only, don’t lose it.”
Rebecca looked pleased with herself. She started flipping through it to look at the pictures. I grabbed the book and closed it.
“Don’t look ahead! You’ll spoil it.”
Danny Purcell leaned over the back of our seat. “Hey! Are you guys talking about the books Trey’s mom got banned?”
Rebecca blushed the way ladies do around my dad. She liked Danny, only she never said so. But sometimes when I was talking to her in class and I realized she wasn’t listening, it was always because she was watching Danny. I didn’t get it. Danny was nice, and he was good at sports in gym class, but all he really seemed to care about was his hair. He had a big football helmet of hair that he wore down to his eyes like the frosting on a cupcake, and he was all the time combing it down with his fingers to make sure it was swirling the right way.
“I saw the list in the newspaper,” Danny said.
“You read the newspaper?” I thought, but I didn’t say it.
“I read that list,” Danny said, “and I realized, I know one of these books, you know? Like, not from class. It took me a while, but then I remembered why. We own one of them. It’s on this bookshelf in my house. It’s been there like forever.”
I perked up. “Which one?”
Danny threw his head back to flick his hair into place. “Something about waiting for a girl? I don’t remember. But the cover has this girl with a mullet talking to a ghost.”
“What’s a mullet?” I asked.
“It’s when your hair’s short in the front and the sides but long in the back,” Danny explained. The hair expert.
“Girls don’t wear mullets,” Rebecca said.
“Well, this one does.”
I tried to remember the other books on the list. “Is it … Wait Till Helen Comes?”
“That’s it! Mom said it was like her favorite book when she was a kid. Man, I hope she never had a mullet. That is not a good look.”
Wait Till Helen Comes was one of the books on the list I hadn’t read.
“Can I borrow it?” I asked.
Rebecca and Danny both looked at me in surprise.
“Um, sure. Yeah,” Danny said. “I’ll bring it tomorrow.”
Rebecca looked lasers at me, like I was interested in Danny too.
“I just want to read the book,” I told her.
“I want to read it too!” she told Danny.
I squinted at her. Did she really want to read it, or was she just saying that because of Danny?
Danny shrugged. “Okay. Sure. I’ll bring it tomorrow.”
“You can read it after me,” I told Rebecca. “You’ve got From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler to read first.”
“Why do you guys care so much?” Danny asked. “Are these books really good or something?”
“They have to be,” Rebecca told him. “Why else do you think they banned them?”
It took a few seconds, but the truth of that finally got through Danny’s thick helmet of hair. He nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I bet they’re full of good stuff. Like all those channels my parents block on the TV.”
“You can borrow this one when I’m finished with it,” Rebecca said, waving From the Mixed-up Files under his nose.
Now it was my turn to shoot lasers from my eyes. Who said she could loan my books out to other people?
“All right, cool,” Danny said, and he sat back in his seat.
I lifted my hands at Rebecca as if to say, “What gives?” but she just blushed again. Whatever. At least now I could be sure she would actually read it.
The bus pulled up to the school and I hauled my backpack into the aisle. That’s when I saw who’d been sitting in the seat in front of us. Trey! He must have gotten on while I wasn’t watching. How long had he been sitting there? Had he heard us talking about his mom and the banned books? Had he heard me loaning mine out, and asking to borrow Danny’s?
Trey flipped a sketchpad closed, put it in his backpack, and slid out past me. He gave me a quick look as he went by, but didn’t say a word. What was that supposed to mean? That he had heard us? Was he going to rat us out to his mom?
Danny nudged me along, and I followed Trey off the bus. I was being stupid. So what if we were reading the books Trey’s mom had banned from the library? They weren’t library books. They were our books. And nobody but my parents could tell me what books I could and couldn’t read. Mrs. Jones had said so.
Which gave me an idea.
The Big Idea
Like the main character in a book, I was finally going to do something. I was going to read every book Mrs. Spencer and her friends had banned from the school library.
I found the list in the newspaper in the library, just like Danny said:
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
Matilda by Roald Dahl
Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn
It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie H. Harris
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg
All the Junie B. Jones books by Barbara Park
All the Captain Underpants books by Dav Pilkey
The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
All the Goosebumps books by R. L. Stine
It wasn’t exactly eleven books, like Mrs. Spencer said. It was way more than eleven books when you counted all the gajillion Goosebumps books and the big shelf of Captain Underpants and Junie B. Jones books.
I had already read five of the books on the list, if you count reading a couple of Goosebumps and a couple of Junie B. Jones books. The others I’d read were Matilda (awesome), Harriet the Spy (awesome), and From the Mixed-up Files (super-awesome, of course). I’d never heard of It’s Perfectly Normal or The Egypt Game, but The Egypt Game sounded especially good. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Wait Till Helen Comes I’d seen on the shelf, but I’d never checked them out because they looked scary, and I’m not a big fan of scary books. But I was definitely going to read Wait Till Helen Comes now. I hadn’t read Captain Underpants either, and I didn’t want to. Captain Underpants was stupid. I would read that one last.
The only book I was worried about was Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. I knew that book, of course. It was on the shelf right beside Judy Blume’s other books, like Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (awesome) and Superfudge (awesome). Shelbourne Elementary goes up through sixth grade, so some of the books in the library are for older kids. Are You There God? had a cover that said sixth grade to me and I’d heard older girls whispering about it in the school bathroom, so I’d always stayed away from it. But I was resolved. I was going to read each and every one of the books Mrs. Spencer said I couldn’t, just to spite her. I knew she’d never know, and that it wasn’t like I was doing something that would help Mrs. Jones get the books back on the shelves. But I still felt a secret thrill at doing something an adult told me not to do.
That afternoon I emptied my piggy bank out (not breaking it like Jamie did in From the Mixed-up Files) and counted it up. Twenty-one dollars and seventy-six cents. That was enough for two paperbacks at least. I asked Mom and Dad if we could go to the bookstore that night, and their reaction was exactly what you’d expect:
“Are you sure that’s what you want to spend your money on?” Dad asked.
Why do parents always say that when you tell them you want to buy something with your own money!? I knew what he really meant. He meant, “I don’t think that’s how you should spend your money.”
“Yes. That is what I want to spend my money on,” I thought, and this time I actually said it.
Mom and Dad had one of those silent conversations with their eyes again, and Dad sighed and said he’d run me to the bookstore after dinner.
“I need new shoes at the ballet store,” Alexis said.
Angelina hopped up and down. “I want to go for frozen yogurt!”
“I need to hit the office store,” Mom said. “If we left now, we’d just have time to grab tacos and do all four.”
Suddenly my trip to the bookstore had become a family outing. Before I could even think something I wasn’t going to say, Dad was fishing his keys out of the bowl by the door and the dogs were barking and whining about us leaving.
Alexis, Angelina, and I climbed into the back of our car. Angelina’s car seat was in the middle. I squeezed into one of the other sides, pushing toys and Cheerios onto the floor. The whole car still reeked of spoiled milk from the drink Angelina had spilled a month ago, and before we had even left the neighborhood Thing 1 and Thing 2 were whining.
“The sun is on me!” Alexis said. “I’m hot!”
“You can sit on the other side when we leave the office store,” Dad told her. Which meant I was going to have to sit on the hot side in the sun, but no one cared about that.
“Amy Anne is touching me!” Angelina whined. “Mom, Amy Anne is touching me!”
“Amy Anne, please don’t touch your sister,” Mom said.
“Her car seat takes up half the backseat! How am I not supposed to touch her?”
“Amy Anne,” Mom said.
I crossed my arms and slouched against the car door, trying to get as far away from Princess Angelina and her throne as possible. Now do you see why I never say anything? Nobody ever listens anyway.
“We’re not going to be at the bookstore too long, are we?” Alexis said.
“Not too long, no,” Dad said. “Not if we want to get all the other things done and be home before bedtime.”
Going to the bookstore was the whole reason we were going out in the first place, and now it was something we had to squeeze in so there’d be time for frozen yogurt! I closed my eyes and breathed deep. It didn’t matter. I had enough money in my pocket for two paperbacks at least, and I already knew what books I wanted. Danny was going to loan me Wait Till Helen Comes, so I was going to buy The Egypt Game and It’s Perfectly Normal, whatever that was, and I was going to read them both that very night.
NOT A NOVEL
So, it turns out It’s Perfectly Normal is not a novel.
It’s a nonfiction book all about S-E-X, as Mrs. Spencer would say.
With pictures.
The Wendigo
I was so embarrassed when I saw what It’s Perfectly Normal was about. I had even asked somebody at the bookstore to help me find it! I could have died. As soon as I saw what it was, I put it back on the shelf really fast and ran away. I mean, there’s stuff in there I do have questions about, and Mom and I have already talked about some of it, but I was not going to buy that book with my family right there!
Instead I bought The Egypt Game (which was a novel) and Scary Stories (a bunch of short short stories), and read them both that night.
Wow.
The Egypt Game was great. It’s about these kids who build this pretend Egyptian altar in a creepy guy’s backyard, and then mysterious things start happening. Like, maybe the Egyptian god is leaving them messages. I guess it got banned because somebody didn’t like the kids worshiping Egyptian gods, even if it was pretend. And there’s somebody attacking kids in the neighborhood too, which is kind of scary. But the book was really awesome.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark I read in the dark, in bed, which was a mistake.
Oh. My. Gosh. I’m still shaking. There’s a story in th
ere called “The Red Spot,” about a girl who has a spider crawl on her face. That’s bad enough (Aaaaaaah!), but the spider bites her or something, and it leaves a big red spot on her cheek. Her mom says it’ll go away, but it doesn’t—and a few days later it explodes and hundreds of baby spiders come crawling out!!!!! Of her face!!!!!! And even worse, there are these creepy pictures!!! I called the dogs to come and sit with me in bed while I read it, but even that didn’t help. In another story called “High Beams,” a woman driving a car at night can’t figure out why the car behind her keeps flashing its high beams at her. It turns out a killer snuck into the backseat of her car and the other driver saw it, and every time the killer rises up to attack her the car behind her turns on its high beams to stop him!
“Mom! Amy Anne still has her light on and I can’t sleep!” Alexis called, making me jump. Mom appeared at our door looking tired. “Amy Anne, you know I don’t mind you reading, but Alexis needs her sleep, and you do too.”
I nodded and pulled my blankets up high over me. I was shaking so badly I could barely hold my flashlight, but I still wanted to read another story. I turned to one called “The Wendigo.” It was about a man and his guide hunting in a part of Canada where nobody else ever goes. One night the wind starts calling the name of his guide, and something comes swooping down out of the dark and snatches him up and flies away with him! The guide screams something about his feet being on fire, and then he’s gone. The hunter splits, but later on he’s by a campfire when a strange man wrapped up in a blanket sits down next to him. The hunter is sure it’s his old guide, the man who disappeared that night. The hunter can’t see his face, and the strange man won’t answer any of his questions. The hunter decides to lift the man’s hat off his head, and underneath he sees—
“Mommmmm! Amy Anne is reading with her flashlight!” Alexis cried, and I screamed and exploded out from under my blanket. Alexis screamed because I’d surprised her, and the dogs went crazy barking like the mailman had suddenly appeared in the room, and the whole ruckus brought Mom running.
