Ban This Book

by Alan Gratz

  “If Mommy makes more we can help you fill them out!” Angelina said.

  “No, you don’t understand,” I said. There wasn’t any way to explain to them that lists of ponies and ballet positions weren’t going to help. “They have to be filled out at school. And even if Mom was able to copy a thousand of them, we would need every kid at Shelbourne Elementary to fill one out tomorrow by the end of the day.”

  I suddenly got goosebumps again—but the good kind, like R. L. Stine goosebumps. That was it. That was the answer!

  “Could you?” I asked Mom. “Make lots of copies tonight? Make a thousand copies?”

  “Well, yes,” Mom said. “We can go right now.”

  Angelina and Alexis started jumping up and down, sensing my excitement, and the dogs yipped happily.

  “Okay. Okay, let me print one up from online and we can go,” I said. “No—wait. I need to make a phone call first.”

  I ran to the kitchen and called Trey to tell him what happened.

  “She shredded every single one of them!?” Trey said. He forgot he was supposed to be quiet so his mom didn’t hear him. “She shredded every single one of them?” he whispered. “But we needed those for tomorrow’s school board meeting! The four of us can’t fill all those out again in time, and by next month it will be too late. There won’t be any TV crews there next time. Nobody will care by then.”

  “I know,” I told him. “Which is why we’re going to get everybody in the school to fill them back out for us.”

  “How?” Trey asked. “We could only fill those out when we were in the library. Even if we got library passes, we’d have to be in class the rest of the day.”

  “Which is why we’re going to run away from school,” I said, butterflies flittering in my stomach. “Like Claudia and Jamie in From the Mixed-up Files!”

  “Play hooky from school?” Trey asked in an excited whisper. “And go where?”

  I laughed. “Where I always run away to,” I told him. “The bathroom.”

  Malaria from Watermelons

  Trey and I explained everything to Danny and Rebecca on the bus, and we hid behind them as we came into school the next morning, making sure no teachers saw us before we slipped into the bathrooms—the girls’ bathroom for me, the boys’ bathroom for Trey. I scurried into the last stall, hung my backpack on the hook, and locked myself in.

  My day of playing hooky from school at school had begun.

  In From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Claudia and Jamie leave their band instruments at home and pack all the clothes and money and toothbrushes and things they’ll need when they run away in their empty instrument cases. I wasn’t in the band, and neither was Trey, so we couldn’t do the same thing. But we weren’t staying overnight anyway. All I had packed in my backpack was the huge pile of Request for Reconsideration forms my parents had printed off for me the night before, and enough snacks to make it through an entire day.

  The first bell rang, and I felt the first pangs of guilt for breaking the rules. When the second bell rang, the one that said I was now officially late to class, I actually shook, afraid that at any moment Detective Banazewski was going to come into the girls’ bathroom with a sniffer dog and discover me.

  The door to the bathroom opened, and I lifted my legs up and held my breath. What if it was Principal Banazewski, come to look for me? But wait—did that mean I should put my feet down, so I just looked like a regular girl going to the bathroom? Maybe I should rattle the toilet paper around and flush the toilet. No—then she’d expect me to come out of the stall!

  “Amy Anne? Are you in here?” somebody whispered. I recognized the voice right away—it was Janna Park! The girl who’d called me AA!

  “Here,” I whispered, opening the stall door and peeking outside.

  Janna had every one of the Little House on the Prairie books stacked up in her arms.

  “Whoa!” I said. “You even checked out the doubles they had on the shelf.”

  “Rebecca said to,” Janna told me. “She said if we didn’t, we might accidentally double up, and we didn’t have time for that.”

  Rebecca. So smart! “Okay,” I said, pulling one of the Request for Reconsideration forms from my backpack. “Now I just need you to fill out a form for each book before you go back to class.”

  Janna began to fill out the first form. “But what do I say? There’s nothing bad about Little House on the Prairie.”

  She was right. But no—that was true about all the books. I had to think like Mrs. Spencer. Better, I had to think like Rebecca.

  “They get malaria in that one,” I said. “That’s scary, right? And the settlers think it’s because they ate bad watermelon! But that’s not how you get malaria. That’s deliberately misleading. That could make a kid think you get malaria from watermelons!”

  Janna giggled and wrote it in.

  This was the plan. We were going to do exactly what Mrs. Spencer had done when she wanted to ban books but didn’t want to wait for the School Board to say yes. We were going to check out as many books from the library as we could, and then turn in Request for Reconsideration forms for them all tonight at the School Board meeting. Rebecca and Danny stayed on the outside, slipping notes into everybody’s lockers that told them to check out books and bring them to me in the girls’ bathroom and Trey in the boys’ bathroom. That’s why we were “playing hooky” from school—so we could be here all day to help them fill out Request for Reconsideration forms for all the books. If even half the kids at Shelbourne Elementary did it, we’d have hundreds of books banned by the end of the day.

  The door opened, and a third grader I didn’t know came in with a stack of Bunnicula books. “Is this where I go to ban books?” she asked.

  “Right this way,” I told her. “Let me get you a form.”

  When You Gotta Go, You Gotta Go

  Rebecca came to see me right before lunch, which was good because I needed help. The bathroom was full of girls from third, fourth, fifth, and sixth grade, all carrying stacks of books and filling out forms. They’d all gotten bathroom passes from their different homerooms and come to the bathroom at the same time!

  “It’s hysterical,” Rebecca told me as she helped a third grader fill out her form. “Every time somebody comes back from the bathroom, somebody immediately raises their hand to ask if they can go. And you should see the library. Half the books are gone from the shelves! There’s a line of kids checking out armfuls of books. The new lady, the Not–Mrs. Jones, she’s about to have a heart attack! She hasn’t had any time to read her celebrity magazines, but she can’t get mad because checking out books is her job!”

  A library without books in it. Just the thought of it gave me the shivers, but that was exactly the point. We were going to show them that once you banned one book, you could ban them all, and then there wouldn’t be any books left to read.

  “Check them out. Check them all out,” I told Rebecca. “Oh, and we need more copies of the Request for Reconsideration form.”

  That meant we had already challenged almost a thousand books! That was way more than Rebecca and Danny and Trey and I had been able to do by ourselves.

  “I’ll get Danny on it,” she said. “He checked in with Trey. He’s over there banning as many books as you are! You know Jeffrey Gonzalez? Space Cadet Jeff? I helped him come up with reasons to ban each and every one of the Star Wars books.”

  “For what?”

  “Are you kidding? The Rebel Alliance are basically terrorists. They blow up the Death Star at the end of Star Wars. You know how many people must have been on that station? Thousands. That’s mass murder!”

  The bathroom door clunked open, and the voice I’d dreaded hearing all day boomed loud to be heard over the chatter.

  “What’s going on in here?” Principal Banazewski said.

  I squeaked and dragged Rebecca with me into the last stall on the end. We could hear the sound of footsteps as half the girls in the bathroom hid in t
he stalls and the other half ran for the exit.

  “Every teacher tells me there’s a sudden run on the bathroom today,” Principal Banazewski said, walking up and down in front of the closed stall doors. She knocked on one of the other stall doors. “What are you doing in there?”

  “Um, just going to the bathroom,” Sophia Marin said from inside the stall.

  The principal’s footsteps came closer to our stall. I pushed Rebecca down on the toilet seat and hopped in her lap in case Detective Banazewski started looking under the stall doors. Rebecca winced.

  Principal Banazewski knocked on the door of our stall, making us both jump. “Who’s in here?”

  Rebecca and I looked at each other in horror. Finally I nudged her. She had to be the one to talk. I was supposed to be home sick!

  “Um, Rebecca Zimmerman,” she said.

  “Rebecca, I think it’s time you got back to class.”

  Rebecca and I shared a panicked look.

  “But … I have a pass,” Rebecca said.

  “I think you’ve been gone from class long enough,” Principal Banazewski said.

  The lunch bell rang, making us jump again, and the hallway outside filled with the sound of squeaking shoes, slamming lockers, and laughing students.

  “Well, now that it’s lunch period, I’m not technically missing class anymore,” Rebecca said. She really was going to make a great lawyer one day.

  Principal Banazewski sighed as more girls poured into the bathroom. Like Mirror Mrs. Jones in the library, she really couldn’t get mad at students using the bathroom during lunch. That’s when we were supposed to use the bathroom.

  “From now on, please wait until lunchtime to use the bathroom if you can, Miss Zimmerman.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Rebecca said in her sweetest voice.

  We waited until Principal Banazewski was gone, and Rebecca and I slumped back against the toilet in relief.

  “Tell everybody to cool it with the bathroom requests,” I told her as she slipped out of the stall and the next book banner slipped inside. “And don’t forget to get me more forms!”

  Good Intentions

  When Trey, Rebecca, and Danny and I met up after school, we had so many Request for Reconsideration forms we had to split them up between us to get them home.

  “There must be five thousand banned books here, easy!” Trey said.

  “Count them up tonight. I want to know,” Rebecca said.

  “Dude, the library looks like a tornado hit it,” Danny said. “There’s hardly anything left in the fiction section.”

  It was crazy. The four of us had only been able to fill out five hundred forms in four days. In one day, with the help of all the other kids at school, we’d blown the roof off that number. We were going to be plunking down a three-foot-tall stack of Request for Reconsideration forms in front of the school board members. Mrs. Spencer wasn’t going to know what hit her.

  “So we’re all going to be there tonight, right?” I asked. We made sure everyone had a ride and said our good-byes until tonight. Even though I carried ten pounds of paper in my backpack, I felt like I was walking on air as I made my way down to the second grade hall to meet up with Alexis. She usually took the first bus home while I took the late bus, but all that was over now that my parents had figured out I wasn’t really staying behind to be part of an after-school club. I was going to have to start taking the early bus with Alexis. But that was next week. This week, Mom and Dad were taking turns picking us up from school.

  Alexis was on the little kids’ playground, climbing around on the monkey bars. I hadn’t been out here since I was little, and everything was different. All the old junky equipment had been replaced by new stuff. It was like a little playground city. New swings, two new slides—one double wide—a curlicue to climb up and a pole to slide down, monkey bars to swing across, and a little gazebo-like thing with a spinning tic-tac-toe game on it. There were even these little speaking tubes sticking up out of the ground. You could talk into one side, and hear it across the playground. And covering the old hard dirt ground that used to turn to mud when it rained was a thick layer of chopped-up rubber pieces. It squished when you walked on it.

  The new playground was pretty great. I wished we’d had it when I was in second grade. I read the sign next to the entrance. Donated in memory of Mrs. Emily Briggs by the Shelbourne Elementary PTA, Mrs. Sarah Spencer, President.

  Mrs. Sarah Spencer. Trey’s mom. The book banner. She’d raised money for a new lower-school playground as president of the Parent-Teacher Association. I stood and stared at the sign for a long time. How was the woman who banned books from the library the same person who bought the little kids a new playground?

  Dad pulled up and honked the horn. I waved to him and yelled, “Alexis! Dad’s here!”

  Alexis ran up, red faced.

  “Cool playground,” I said.

  “It’s the best playground ever!” she said.

  “Got your book bag?” I reminded her. She found it, and we climbed into Dad’s truck. I stared out the window at the shiny new playground equipment as we pulled away.

  Donated by the Shelbourne Elementary PTA, Mrs. Sarah Spencer, President. It had been so easy to think of Mrs. Spencer as a villain, but coming up with all those reasons to ban books had made me start to see things from her point of view. It didn’t mean I thought she was right. But I was beginning to see how she must have thought she was doing something good for us, even though she was wrong.

  In Which I Speak Up

  The room where the school board met was a very different place this time.

  All the seats on both sides of the aisle were filled, and a partition had to be taken down and new chairs brought in to fit everybody. Most of the kids from my class were there with at least one of their parents, and I saw kids from other classes and other grades there too. Two local camera crews were set up along the back wall, and they were already doing interviews with some of the kids who came. One of them recognized me when I came in with my family, but Dad put up a hand and said, “No comment.”

  I did have a comment. Lots of comments, in fact. But I was saving them for the meeting.

  Mrs. Jones was there, wearing a big pink-and-white polka-dotted dress, and she broke away from an interview she was doing with a reporter to come over and swallow me in a giant hug.

  “Oh, Amy Anne! It’s so good to see you,” she said.

  I immediately teared up. “Mrs. Jones—I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to get you fired!”

  “It’s not your fault at all,” Mrs. Jones said. “I couldn’t go on the way things were much longer anyhow. I knew it was coming. I’m very proud of what you did, and I don’t want you to regret it one bit.”

  “But I got in trouble. I got a lot of people in trouble,” I said.

  “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” Mrs. Jones said with a smile. “Consider this your first taste of behaving badly in the name of what’s right.” She hugged me again. “Are you planning on talking tonight?” she asked me.

  “I’m already signed up,” I told her.

  She nodded her approval and then excused herself to go back to her interview.

  On the far side of the room, I saw Mrs. Spencer take a seat. She was wearing another pretty skirt and jacket, light blue this time. And right beside her was Trey—wearing a tie! I couldn’t believe it. He caught me looking at him, and gave me a little thumbs-up sign where his mom couldn’t see it.

  Rebecca ran up to me while our parents said hello to each other. She’d dressed up too. She was wearing gray slacks and a gray jacket, with a white button-down shirt underneath.

  “You have a suit?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Rebecca said. “Every lawyer needs a good suit.”

  I was feeling distinctly underdressed. I was just wearing one of my sundresses, with a ribbon tied around one of my braids.

  “You got yours?” Rebecca asked.

  I patted the backpack sitting in my chair. “
Yep,” I said. “You?”

  Rebecca hefted a big briefcase and smiled.

  The meeting was called to order, and Mom, Dad, Alexis, Angelina, and I found seats. Mom and Dad had decided to bring all of us, and Alexis in particular wasn’t happy about it. She was missing ballet practice to be here, and she plopped herself down in her seat with her arms crossed to show us how she felt. She was a grouch, but after my blowup last night she at least wasn’t complaining out loud about it.

  The school board read out what had happened last time (when I wasn’t there) and talked about what they were going to talk about tonight.

  Then it was time for public comment.

  I took a deep breath. My name was first on the list. I’d made sure of it. I stood, my legs shaking worse than when I’d been called to the principal’s office that first time, and my mom squeezed my hand in support. I hadn’t been able to do this the first time I’d been to a school board meeting, but I was going to do it now. I nodded to Rebecca and Danny, and they stood to join me at the podium. Mrs. Spencer was shocked when Trey stood up and joined us too.

  “Only one speaker at a time, please,” one of the school board members said.

  “I’ll do all the talking then,” I told them. My heart felt like it was in my throat and it was hard to squeeze the words out past it, but it got easier the more I did it. “I’m Amy Anne Ollinger, president and chief librarian of the B.B.L.L.”

  “The B.B.L.L.?” a school board member asked.

  “The Banned Books Locker Library.”

  That caused a ripple of comment throughout the audience, and I could feel the bright lights of the television cameras on me. It was almost too much. I wanted to duck down underneath the podium and never come out again, but I clung to the sides of it instead, using it to hold me up.