by Alan Gratz
“But it was just one person—Mrs. Spencer,” I wanted to say. “She didn’t like one book, and she got the school board to ban it. Then she helped other people who didn’t like other books do the same thing, when there might be lots more people out there who do like them. Or just don’t care.”
But this time I didn’t say anything. Blurting out an objection was one thing; arguing with the principal was another. Still, I didn’t see what the difference between banning and removing was. Either way, kids couldn’t read them.
And that’s when I remembered why I started the B.B.L.L. in the first place. Good books shouldn’t be hidden away. They should be read by as many people as many times as possible. But that wasn’t exactly true. It wasn’t just good books that shouldn’t be hidden away. It was all books. Any books. It didn’t matter what they were about, or whether I liked them, or Mrs. Spencer liked them, or the school board liked them.
I was lucky. My parents would buy me any book I wanted if I asked them to. But not everybody’s parents would do that. Not everybody’s parents could do that. That’s what libraries were for: to make sure that everybody had the same access to the same books everyone else did. That’s why I started the Banned Books Locker Library, and that was why I was going to get every last book Mrs. Spencer had banned. Even Captain Underpants.
“I think it’s the same thing,” I said. Out loud. My voice got a little shaky as I spoke, but I kept going. “Banning and removing. Either way, people can’t read them. And that’s all that really matters.”
Principal Banazewski took a deep breath. “Regardless,” she said, “the school board is the ultimate authority here, and they’ve made their decision and the books have been removed. There’s no reason to go advertising it.”
“If there’s nothing wrong with it, why do you care if anybody finds out?” I wanted to ask her. I didn’t say it though. I’d said enough already. But as I thought it, I realized I could be asking myself the same question. If there was nothing wrong with the B.B.L.L., why was I keeping it a secret? I blushed, feeling guilty about the B.B.L.L. all over again.
“So,” Principal Banazewski said, “you’ll take it down by the end of the period.”
It wasn’t a question.
B.B.L.L. Inc.
I took down the list of banned books by the end of the period.
In its place, I hung up a construction paper sign I’d drawn that said, GO EAGLES! #1!
The Eagles were the Shelbourne Elementary mascot.
Principal Banazewski would be happy to see my sign. She likes school spirit. She would not be happy to see what was on the back of it. That’s where I taped my old banned books list. If you flipped up the GO EAGLES! #1 sign, the list was right there.
After all, I still had to have some way to let people know what books I had.
I wanted more books for the B.B.L.L. though. I wanted all the books Mrs. Spencer had banned. I wanted a giant tower of books that filled my locker. And I wanted everyone to read them.
Rebecca said that to do all that, we needed to incorporate.
“I hereby call to order the first meeting of the B.B.L.L. Board of Trustees,” she announced officially, even though it was just me and Danny sitting with her at one end of a table in the cafeteria. She had an extra-long pad to take notes on, which she used only because it was called a legal pad. “Present are Rebecca Zimmerman, Esquire; Danny Purcell; and Amy Anne Ollinger.”
I liked how I came last, even though I was the one who started the B.B.L.L.
“Do we really need to do this?” I asked.
“We do if this corporation wants to grow,” Rebecca said. “First, we need to elect officers. I nominate myself as chief financial officer and legal counsel.”
Danny and I stared at her.
Danny shrugged. “Okay.”
“You’re supposed to say, ‘Second’ if you agree,” Rebecca said.
“Second,” Danny and I said.
Rebecca huffed. “You’re not both supposed to say it. Just one of you. Then I say, ‘All in favor?’”
Danny and I looked at each other.
“Me?” Danny said.
“You’re supposed to say, ‘Aye,’” Rebecca said.
“Eye like eye?” Danny said, pointing to where his eyes would have been if hair wasn’t covering them.
“Aye like ‘A-Y-E,’” Rebecca said. “It means yes.”
“Then why don’t we just say yes?” I asked.
Rebecca looked like she was going to explode, so Danny jumped in. “Aye then! Aye,” he said quickly.
Rebecca looked at me.
“What?” I asked.
“Well? Aren’t you going to vote?”
“I thought only one of us was supposed to say it!”
“That’s when you second something!” Rebecca said. “When I say ‘All in favor,’ everyone votes ‘aye’ or ‘nay.’”
“Can we just skip all that?” I asked. “You’re the one in charge of money.”
Rebecca sagged, and I felt bad. She just wanted to play at being a lawyer, I knew, but if she kept this up we’d be here for the rest of lunch period and never get anything done.
Danny flicked his hair into place. “So what do I get to be?”
“You’re in charge of alternative acquisitions,” Rebecca said. “That means getting the books that we can’t afford to buy.”
“Sweet,” Danny said. “I’ve got some ideas about that. So far, I’ve only been asking fourth graders and their brothers and sisters. But I know some kids in third grade, and in fifth grade. If I put the word out, I’ll bet I can dig up a lot more books.”
“Just don’t put the word out too much!” I said. I’d already told them both about my meeting with Principal Banana. The only reason I was still living and breathing was because she hadn’t found out about the Banned Books Locker Library.
“You want people to check out the books, don’t you?” Danny asked.
“Of course. Just don’t go hanging signs for the B.B.L.L. in the hallway.”
Rebecca finished writing Danny’s title down. “All right. That leaves Amy Anne.”
“What’s she?” Danny asked.
“President and chief librarian,” Rebecca said.
President and chief librarian! I liked that. Even though we’d been calling the Locker Library a library, I hadn’t thought of myself as a librarian. Just the person with the locker. I didn’t know anything about being a librarian, except for what I’d seen Mrs. Jones do, and I said so.
“Well, you’re going to have to learn,” Rebecca said. “And the first thing you’re going to have to figure out is how to keep track of how long people have the books.”
Danny ran his fingers through his hair. “Yeah! I’ve been waiting forever to read that Shel Silverstein book, but T.J. still has it!”
“I don’t want to have due dates and library fines and all that,” I said.
“Well, you need to consider it. At least due dates. Or some of the books are never going to come back again.”
Rebecca and Danny went on talking about more bake sales, and which books he thought he might be able to get, but I was still thinking about a better way of keeping track of who had what book, and how long they’d had it. The clipboard with the list in my locker was getting to be lots of pages long, and every time I got a book back in I had to skim through all the names and holds to find out who wanted the book next. The B.B.L.L. was getting too big for its britches, as my grandmother liked to say. I was going to have to figure out a better system, and there was only one person I knew to ask.
Tools of the Trade
I stopped at the library’s front desk before heading for my spot in the corner after school. I watched as a second grader checked out a small stack of books. Mrs. Jones scanned the little bar codes on the back with her laser thing, and the computer recorded what book it was the kid was checking out, and when it was due back. That was no help. I didn’t have a computer, or a scanner, or whatever program she had that k
ept track of it all.
Mrs. Jones noticed me watching. “Thinking of becoming a librarian, Amy Anne?” she asked.
I jumped. People were always reading my mind! “What? Oh. No! I was just interested in how it all worked. You know, the way you keep track of what books get checked out.”
Mrs. Jones ran the boy’s books across the bonky thing that made them safe to take through the detectors at the front door without setting off the alarm. “It’s all automated now,” Mrs. Jones said. “Certainly a lot less trouble than it used to be.”
“What did it used to be like?” I asked her.
“Let’s see,” Mrs. Jones said. She looked over at the paperback spinner racks. “Bring me that copy of The Witch of Blackbird Pond.”
It was an old, beat-up copy of the book, with clear cellophane tape holding the covers on. Mrs. Jones flipped to the back of the book.
“Ah. I thought this one might still have it in there! We’ve gone all digital now, of course, but I never got around to taking these out of the older books.” She turned the book around for me to see.
There, in the back cover, was a little manila envelope with a card sticking out of it. Mrs. Jones pulled out the card.
“It’s a date due card,” she explained. “Used to be, we would have to take the card out of every book, stamp it with the due date, and then the person checking the book out would sign the card.”
Of course! I had seen these in the back of some of the books I checked out, but never paid much attention to them. The card had the book’s name and author at the top. Underneath that were two columns—one for the date, and another for the borrower’s name. The dates in the book were all from the 1980s. The names on this date due card had to be adults by now.
“They took the books, and we kept the card,” Mrs. Jones said. “We put the cards in order by the date, and then every day we would check to see what books had come due.”
“How did the person checking the books out know when they were due?” I asked her.
“Oh. We put a little slip of paper in each little pocket in the back, with the due date stamped on it. The whole thing was an absolute headache for a large library.”
I was excited. My library was tiny. This was exactly what I needed!
“Do you have a different stamp for every day?”
“Oh heavens, no. There was a neat little gizmo that could stamp any date. I wonder if I still have one.”
Mrs. Jones disappeared into the back office. I could see her rummaging around in a drawer through the windows.
Envelopes. I could use a bunch of envelopes, and tape them into the backs of the B.B.L.L. books. Then I could stick index cards down inside the little pockets, with places for people to sign their names! When the books were due, I could even slip a reminder notice into the borrower’s locker mailbox.
“Aha! Found one!” Mrs. Jones said. “Just goes to show you, we never throw anything away around here.” She came back with a complicated little hand stamp that was stained red from years of use. It had a black knob on the top where you held it, and on the bottom were four rotating rubber pieces—one for the month, two for the numbers in the date, and one for the year. It was set for May 27, 1988.
Mrs. Jones laughed. “I suppose that was the last day we ever used it.”
I clicked the month forward and back. What an awesome gadget! I tried stamping it on my arm, but it was dry, of course. It only left a faint imprint of the date on my skin.
“Where can I get one of these?” I asked.
Mrs. Jones looked surprised. “Oh. Well, I suppose they still sell them somewhere. Office supply stores, maybe? Though I don’t know how much call there is for them today. You can have that one, if you want it.”
The little hairs on my arms tingled. “Really?”
“Well, I certainly don’t need it anymore,” Mrs. Jones said. “And it is a little out of date. It only has the years 1980 to 1990 on it.”
I didn’t care. The date due stamp was too amazing. I would make it work somehow. “Thanks!” I said, and I ran off to my corner.
All I needed now was a pair of glasses on a chain, and I was ready for my official librarian membership card.
Nowhere to Stomp To
The index cards and envelopes I found in my mom’s home office, which doubled as the treadmill room, and tripled as the guest bedroom, and quadrupled as the place where we dumped all the holiday stuff and anything else we didn’t have a place for. Angelina’s room had a glue stick, and there was a pair of scissors in the kitchen drawer. Now all I needed was a place to work.
My bed wasn’t a great place to cut and paste. Alexis was in there using my bedpost for a ballet barre again and playing her music too loud. The kitchen table would have been perfect, but Angelina had turned it into a pony barn. She’d used the paper shredder in mom’s office to make hay again, and it was scattered all over the floor. I went to the living room instead, where Mom and Dad were watching something with knights and swords on TV.
Dad paused the show they were watching as I came in. “What’s up, kiddo?”
“Just school stuff,” I said. I set my things down on the coffee table and settled in.
“Oh—I’m sorry, hon. We need you to find someplace else to work tonight,” Mom said. “We’re watching something you’re not old enough to watch yet.”
“And where do you expect me to go?” I wanted to ask them. “Alexis has turned my room into a ballet studio, and Angelina has turned the kitchen into a stable!”
I sighed heavily instead. I snatched up my things as angrily as I could and stomped into the kitchen.
“I need the kitchen table,” I told Angelina.
“Neigh,” she said.
I plunked my things down on the table.
“You’re just playing. I have a school project to do,” I told her.
“Neigh!” Angelina said.
I pulled out a chair and sat down, messing up her piles of shredded paper.
“No! No! I was here first! I was here first!” Angelina screamed. She grabbed the chair I was sitting in and yanked on it. When she couldn’t move it, she tried pulling me by the arm out of the chair.
“Let go! I’m working!”
“You’re ruining it! You’re ruining it!”
“Angelina! Amy Anne!” my father called from the living room. “Enough!”
Angelina stopped trying to pull me out of the chair and collapsed onto the floor, where she rolled around kicking her legs and screaming at the top of her lungs.
“Girls!” Dad bellowed from the living room. “I do not want to deal with this right now!”
“I was here first!” Angelina wailed. “I was here first!”
“Amy Anne,” Mom called. “Your sister was already using the kitchen. Find someplace else to work!”
I pushed my chair back from the table with as much noise as I could, picked up my things, and stomped out of the kitchen, kicking Angelina’s piles of shredded paper into the air as I went. She wailed even louder, which made me feel good even though I was steaming mad.
I still needed somewhere to work. I wasn’t going to fight another battle with Alexis in my room. Not after Angelina had already gotten my parents angry. And I needed more room than my old hideout, the bathroom. Angelina’s fit and my parents yelling at us had woken the dogs and sent them scurrying into the hall, nubby tails down and unhappy. They didn’t like it when we yelled, and they were looking for a place to hide like I was.
Flotsam and Jetsam followed me into Mom’s office. The bed was covered with boxes of Christmas decorations and blankets and camping gear we had never used, and Mom’s desk was piled so high with papers and folders and boxes that it was useless. There was room on the floor though. I plopped down with as much frustration as I could and spread out my envelopes and note cards.
Which Flotsam and Jetsam proceeded to step all over.
“No! No!” I told them, but they kept moving around, their tails wiggling in happiness as they bent my cards a
nd envelopes. They weren’t trying to be bad. They were just trying to get as close to me as possible, and since I was on the floor they thought I was down there to pet them and play with them.
I dodged the dogs’ big legs and collected all my things again and pushed past them into the hall. There wasn’t a single place in this house I could work. I stomped through the kitchen again, where Angelina eyed me warily from underneath the table. I didn’t even bother kicking her shredded paper. I went straight to the back door and outside.
Where it was raining.
I dashed to Mom’s car and jumped into the front passenger seat. There was no flat space to glue, and the car still smelled like sour milk, but at least I could work there in peace. If only I could drive—then I would have started the car and driven far, far away from there.
I ran the back of my arm across my eyes, and I couldn’t tell if I was wiping away rain or tears.
The Right to Bear Arms
Trey had already pulled our desks together when I got to class the next day. It was time to work on our Bill of Rights project together. Not that I expected him to do any of the actual work. All he did in class was draw pictures.
I heaved my swelling backpack up onto my desk with a thunk.
“Whoa,” Trey said. “What have you got, like every schoolbook you own in there?”
“Yes,” I said. I unzipped my bag and pulled my social studies textbook out from the rest. It hit my desk with another thunk. “It’s very heavy.”
“Why don’t you keep all your books in your locker?” Trey asked.
I froze. Stupid, Amy Anne! Stupid! The reason I had all my textbooks stuffed in my backpack was because all the space in my locker was taken up by banned books, but of course I couldn’t tell Trey that.
“I hate having to go out to my locker,” I lied.
“But I see you out at your locker all the time,” Trey said. “You’re always meeting people there.”
He was on to me. There was no question. He was trying to catch me in a lie, but I wasn’t going to fall for it.
“Can we just get to our project?” I said. “We missed a whole day because I had to go to the office.” I dug in my stuffed backpack for the notes I’d made on the First Amendment.
