While we’re waiting, I retrieve the mockingbird drawing from my back pocket and spread it out on the counter so that Elena and Michael can see. “What do you think?” I ask.
“That’s excellent,” says Michael.
“You really think so?”
He nods. “I do.”
Elena stands behind him and makes kissy faces at me.
“Shut up,” I say.
“What?” says Michael.
“Not you.”
He turns to face Elena.
She gives him an innocent look. “I want to borrow Lucy’s drawing for a second.”
“Fine,” I say.
She takes the sketch and brings it to the desktop copier near Mort’s computer. She hits a button, and now there are two drawings. She gives the original back to me then takes a thick, black marker. “What if we do this?” she asks. Slowly and carefully, Elena draws a set of rings around the copy of my mockingbird. Now it looks like the bird is sitting at the center of a target. At the top of the page, Elena writes, HOW TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Below the mockingbird’s feet, she prints WWW.KILLaMOCKINGBIRD.com, then she pushes the paper back toward Michael and me. “There.”
We both study the little poster. I take the marker. “May I?” I ask.
“Of course,” says Elena.
When I’m done, the sign says, I KILL THE MOCKINGBIRD, and the web address is www.iKILLtheMOCKINGBIRD.com.
Elena grins. “You’re right. That’s better.”
“I kill the mockingbird?” Michael finally says.
“It’s the name of our conspiracy,” I tell him.
“All good conspiracies need a name,” adds Elena.
“Is that so?” he asks.
“Area 51?” says Elena. “Watergate? Roswell? Fluoridation?”
Michael looks at me. “Do you know what she’s talking about?”
“Mostly sometimes.”
Michael just shakes his head.
I point to the web address below the mockingbird’s feet. “How are we going to get a website?”
“How hard can it be?” says Elena.
Michael clears his throat. “I took a web design class at the community college last summer.”
“Seriously?” I say.
“See,” says Elena.
Above us, we hear Mort moving back toward the stairs. Elena leans forward and sticks a hand out in front of her as if we are in a huddle. “What do you say?” she asks Michael and me. “I kill the mockingbird?”
I place one hand on top of hers. “I kill the mockingbird,” I say.
Michael glances back and forth between the two of us.
“Come on,” I tell him.
“This is crazy,” he says.
“No mockingbirds will be hurt in the making of this conspiracy,” Elena promises.
Michael puts his hand over the top of mine. “I kill the mockingbird,” he says, “but it’s not the mockingbirds I’m worried about.”
11
Literary Terrorists Need Office Skills
Over the next few days, I look for an opportunity to spend some time alone with Michael, but between baseball games and helping Mom and working at the bookstore, we just don’t get a chance.
In the meantime, Michael, Elena, and I are able to bike, bus, and walk to various libraries in West Glover, Windsor, Simsbury, Bloomfield, and a few others, too. We wander around the stacks, identify our targets, and then place To Kill a Mockingbird copies on new shelves where nobody will ever look. Back at the River Road Mall, we revisit Mr. Dobby’s store and assign new locations to his books as well. In their places, we leave I Kill the Mockingbird flyers and then hope for the best. In fact, we use so many flyers that we’re going to need more. That’s why we sneak into the empty St. Brigid’s School building while my dad is away for lunch.
“You’re sure the building is empty?” Michael whispers. We are creeping up the stairwell that connects the basement cafeteria to the first floor. Our footsteps echo like drumbeats inside a cave.
“Positive,” I say.
“Really positive?”
“For the millionth time,” Elena growls at Michael, “she is absolutely certain. All the teachers are on vacation. The school secretary is away on a cruise. The janitor is in the hospital having cosmetic surgery.”
“Back surgery,” I correct her.
“Whatever,” snaps Elena.
Michael stops at the doorway that leads into the main part of the building. “And the principal?”
Elena leans into the door, which swings wide open. She grabs Michael’s sleeve and pulls him through. “He is at home having lunch with his lovely wife. We. Are. Alone.” Elena punctuates the last three words by poking Michael in the chest. “Okay?”
“Okay,” he says.
“Good. Because—” Elena is interrupted by a loud clatter and banging from somewhere nearby. “Somebody’s coming!” she cries.
The three of us throw ourselves into the closest classroom. We scatter and hide behind anything we can find. I drop my backpack to the floor and squeeze beneath a folding table while Elena tries to press herself against a wall. Michael ducks behind the teacher’s desk at the front of the room. The three of us hold our breaths while we wait to see what happens next.
“A folding table is not a good hiding place,” Elena finally whispers at me.
“It’s better than a wall!”
“Shhhh!” says Michael. Of the three of us, he’s the only one who’s really concealed.
Elena edges toward one of the tall classroom windows and peaks outside. Her shoulders sag and she starts to laugh.
“What is it?” I say.
She points outside just as a big old garbage truck rolls past. “I don’t think Majewski’s Sanitation Service is after us.”
Michael peeks his head around the side of the desk. “Are you sure that’s what we heard?”
“I’m sure.” Elena leads us out of the classroom and down the hallway toward the main office. When we get there, I pull Dad’s set of spare keys out of my pocket and unlock the door. The three of us slip inside where I open my backpack and pull out an updated version of our flyer. I hold it up so that Michael and Elena can see.
“What do you think?”
The paper holds my stick figure mockingbird drawn on top of a black-and-white target. I also snipped letters from magazine titles and newspaper headlines to create a sort of ransom note. At the very bottom of the page, fat block letters spell out our web address.
“That’s awesome,” says Elena.
“I updated the website last night,” says Michael.
“The links to Facebook and Twitter and Instagram all work?”
“I’m doing my best,” he says. “It’s not easy setting all this up under my mother’s nose. If she finds out what we’re up to, I am dead.”
“We’re not breaking any laws,” says Elena.
Michael gestures at the dark office around us. “We are breaking and entering. We are trespassing. We are about to use school office equipment in order to create an impression that West Glover has been targeted by a group of mysterious literary terrorists.”
Elena grins. “When you put it like that, it sounds even better!”
“Let’s just make our copies and get out of here.” Michael approaches the big duplicating machine against the back wall. “Do you either one of you know how to turn this thing on?”
I join him and punch a couple buttons on the machine’s front panel, but nothing happens.
“We are pitiful,” he says.
Elena walks past us, reaches a hand behind the copier, and pushes a switch. The machine begins to hum and glow. “Speak for yourself.”
I lift the cover and place the mockingbird poster onto the glass. “How many copies should we make?”
“Five hundred?” Elena suggests.
“Sounds good.” I punch the number into the machine’s keypad. Nothing happens so I punch in the numbers again. Still nothing.
“Now what?”
asks Michael.
I glance around and notice a crucifix on the wall. “We could use a little help here,” I say to Jesus.
“I can’t believe you two.” Elena reaches between us and pushes another button. A blue-green light glows beneath the copier lid. A moment later, mockingbird posters begin pouring out as if the machine is possessed by Gutenberg’s ghost. Together, we start gathering copies and stuffing them into my bag. Soon, we’ve filled my backpack as well as a few plastic grocery bags we find laying around the office.
“I think we have enough,” Michael says.
“This seems like more than five hundred.” I glance at the clock on the wall. It is twelve fifty-five. My father will be back soon, and the machine is still going strong. “We really have to go.”
“Uh oh,” says Elena, who is staring down at the copy machine.
“What’s wrong?” asks Michael.
“The machine isn’t making five hundred copies. It’s making five thousand copies!”
“How can that be?” I ask.
“Who punched in the numbers?”
Michael and I join Elena at the copier. According to the display, there are still several thousand copies to go. “We’ve got to stop it!” I say.
Michael points out the window. “We’d better stop it soon,” he says, “because here comes your father.”
I glance outside. Michael is right. Dad is heading toward the building from the parking lot. In a panic, I start punching random keys on the control panel. This time, there’s a strange clacking and grinding noise. Now the machine is printing double-sided copies with two staples in each corner.
“That’s pretty cool,” says Elena.
“Shut it off!” I say.
Elena begins stuffing the new copies into anything that will hold them. Michael looks as if he’s about to pass out.
“Do something!” I yell.
Michael looks up at the crucifix on the wall.
“Michael,” says Elena, “Jesus does not know how to operate office equipment.”
“He helped before!”
“Get out of the way.” She ducks behind the machine and grabs the power cord. “Stand back!”
Michael and I move toward the door and Elena yanks the plug out of the wall. There’s a loud CLACK! and the machine sputters to a halt.
“Why did we have to stand back?” I ask.
Elena shrugs. “It seemed like the right thing to say.”
I take a chance and look out the window. I don’t see Dad on the sidewalk which means he must be about to enter the building. “We’ve got to go!”
The three of us gather up our things and head for the door. “Wait!” says Michael.
Elena is struggling with several plastic trash bags filled with mockingbird copies. “Now what?”
Michael doesn’t answer. Instead, he races back into the office, lifts the copier lid, and whips the original poster off the glass. From there, he leads us into the hallway and pulls the office door shut behind us. The three of us sprint all the way back to the empty cafeteria where Michael hands me my artwork. “I didn’t think you wanted to lose that.”
I shake my head and try to catch my breath. “Thanks.”
Elena plops into a plastic cafeteria chair. “I don’t know about you,” she says, “but I learned something new today.”
“What did you learn?” Michael asks her.
“Literary terrorists need office skills.”
12
How to Eat an Elephant
By mid-July, I Kill the Mockingbird is in full motion. Thanks to cheap student passes for the transit buses that make hourly stops in West Glover, and because Connecticut is so small, we can get to almost any spot in our state and still be home for supper. “We’d never be able to pull this off in Texas,” Michael says while we study maps and bus schedules in the back room at Mort’s.
Elena points at the fancy seal stamped on one of our transit flyers. “This caper is made possible by the State Department of Transportation.”
“That’s our tax dollars at work,” Michael adds.
Meanwhile, we’ve discovered that Connecticut is home to over six dozen bookstores and nearly three hundred public libraries. We’ve also learned that To Kill a Mockingbird is on sale at Target, Toys “R” Us, Sam’s Club, Wal-Mart, Kmart, QuickMart, GasMart, DairyMart, MiniMart, and more. It’s going to be impossible to hit them all. “We’ll deal with it as if we are eating an elephant,” Elena says.
“How do you eat an elephant?” asks Michael.
Elena gives him a big grin. “One bite at a time.”
That makes us laugh.
“And remember,” she adds, “we don’t have to eat the whole thing. It only has to look that way.”
“Just the same,” I say, “we better get hungry.”
We continue re-shelving the books in nearby libraries, and that’s pretty easy. Local department stores are simple, too. We collect To Kill a Mockingbird copies then shove them behind auto supplies. “You’re not looking for literature when you have car-care needs,” says Elena.
“What makes you think that?” Michael asks her.
“Simple common sense,” she explains.
Michael and I have known Elena long enough to understand that her common sense is rarely simple or common, so we don’t argue.
At gift shops and grocery markets, we slip copies of To Kill a Mockingbird behind posters and planters and greeting card racks. We do the same at the giant bookstores that live inside our state’s mega-malls. Connecticut is also home to about three dozen different college and university bookstores. They turn out to be the easiest targets of all. We simply place the books under baseball caps and football jerseys. I honestly don’t know why the college shops aren’t called sweatshirt stores that just happen to sell books on the side.
It’s the small bookstores like Mort’s that give us the biggest headaches. Those places believe in customer service and personal attention, which means that you can’t get away with anything. More than once we end up actually buying books to avoid raising the owners’ suspicions. Finally, so that we won’t go broke, we admit that independent booksellers are just too smart for us, and we decide to leave most of them alone.
In the midst of our creative shelving efforts, we also place I Kill the Mockingbird flyers in as many locations as possible. We tuck them into the empty spots that used to hold all the books we’ve moved. We tack them onto community bulletin boards and tape them onto shop windows. We take our flyers and use them to wallpaper the state. And yet, despite all that, it hardly seems like anybody has even noticed our work.
Until now.
After a long day trying—and failing—to find a bookshop called Mark Twain’s House, Elena brings us back to Mort’s. Inside, Mort is getting ready to close up. “I’m glad we didn’t find the place,” Michael says as we head inside. “Mark Twain made black people look like buffoons.”
Mort looks up. He doesn’t know what we’re talking about, but that doesn’t stop him from joining the conversation. “Michael,” says Mort, “Mark Twain made everybody look like buffoons. He was an equal opportunity buffoon maker.”
Michael sighs. “I guess you’re right.”
Mort shuts his cash register. “I know I’m right.”
“The king has spoken,” says Elena. She turns toward her uncle. “Can we hang out in the shop for a while?”
“This is a place of business,” Mort says. “It is not your own private clubhouse.”
“We’re going to listen to loud music, surf the Internet, eat junk food, and make plans to take over the world. We can do that upstairs in the apartment if you’d like.”
“Don’t stay up too late, and be sure to lock the door when you’re done,” Mort tells us.
Once he leaves, the three of us head to the computer. Elena fires up the machine while Michael flips through a set of vinyl records that Mort’s got stacked beneath his desk. Michael finds a record he likes, places it on the turntable, and drops the needle
onto the disk. A driving, bluesy harmonica blares from the big speakers, and a man with a deep, rough voice howls that he’s got his mojo working.
“Check this out!” Elena hollers.
Michael and I look over her shoulder at the computer. Elena’s got the screen split between several different social networking sites. We’ve created anonymous I Kill the Mockingbird accounts on all of them. In the top corner, she’s also opened the web page we created at WWW.iKILLtheMOCKINGBIRD.com. That’s anonymous, too.
“People are talking about us!” Elena announces.
“No way,” I say.
“What are they saying?” asks Michael.
On Facebook, I Kill the Mockingbird’s got several hundred Likes and bunches of comments. On Tumblr and Instagram, we find snapshots of our flyers; and on Twitter, we’ve become #ikillthemockingbird as in:
WHO STOLE MY MOCKINGBIRD? #ikillthemockingbird
What’s up with the mockingbird conspiracy? #ikillthemockingbird
This is a little scary and a lotta cool. #ikillthemockingbird
FINALLY SOMEBODY’S GOT A GOOD IDEA FOR MY SUMMER READING BOOKS! #ikillthemockingbird
Michael points at that last comment. “That’s not funny.”
“How did it finally get started?” I wonder out loud.
Elena starts clicking and scrolling through snippets of conversations and posts.
It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird. #ikillthemockingbird
THIS IS A NOVEL HOSTAGE SITUATION! HA.HA.HA. #ikillthemockingbird
“Whoa,” says Michael.
“What is it?” I ask.
Michael shakes his head in disbelief. He points at the screen. “Wil Wheaton saw an I Kill the Mockingbird flyer and tweeted about it.”
“Wil Wheaton?” I say.
“Wil Wheaton!” Michael says again. “Wil Wheaton!”
“Who is Wil Wheaton?”
“Wil Wheaton!”
“Michael,” says Elena, “no matter how many times you say his name, we still don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“He’s a gamer!” Michael takes the mouse from Elena and clicks on Wil Wheaton’s profile. “He’s a total geek hero! He’s an author and an actor. He used to be on Star Trek!”
I Kill the Mockingbird Page 6
