Page 22 of Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Book
You didn’t need to be a kid detective to know something big was going down. Beau Sykes was at his bedroom window when he heard the front door slam. That alone would have beenextremelysuspicious. Slamming doors was forbidden in the Sykes house. He set his binoculars aside and looked down to see his mother heading for her car. She was in a rush, though she was trying hard not to look like it. A second later, his father raced across the lawn after her. When he reached the driver’s side, he grabbed the door handle. There was only time to try it once before Melody Sykes sped off down the street, almost taking her husband’s hand with her.
Beau took a step back from the window and grinned. There was nothing he loved more than seeing something he wasn’t meant to see. Everyone in Troy thought his parents were perfect. Only Beau and his brother knew any different. He’d been keeping tabs on them for almost eleven years, taking note of all the things they tried to keep hidden. Like the bottle his mother had stashed away behind the beans in the pantry. Or the time his father slapped his mom for sticking her nose in his business. But when Beau heard the sound of a car firing up in the driveway, he knew what had just happened was bigger than the other stuff. Beau returned to the window and watched his father scrape the paint off the mailbox post as he backed out of the drive. Beau couldn’t believe his good luck. They’d left him all alone.
It might be his only chance. He couldn’t miss it. There was no tellingwhen he might get another. Beau lifted his binoculars and trained them at the target—Lula Dean’s house. He could see the lady in her kitchen, talking on the phone as usual. His mother’s friends whispered about her like she was some kind of monster, but Lula never seemed to run out of people to talk to. Beau’s mom had hauled him over for a visit at least once a week since Lula started her committee. If you stayed quiet and kept your ears open at Lula Dean’s house, you could hear secrets about everyone in Troy. It was too bad Beau still had no idea what most of them meant.
“What’s a hysterectomy?” he’d asked his mother after he heard Lula fake whisper that Beverly Underwood had gotten one.
“It’s a lady thing,” his mom had responded. Then she’d looked worried. “Don’t say that word in front of your father. He doesn’t want that kind of talk in his house.”
Beau’s father had a lot of rules, and Beau was always discovering new things they couldn’t discuss in their house. He tried his best to be careful, but only days later, he had a question he just couldn’t keep to himself. “So if a woman has a baby, but she doesn’t have a husband, does that mean her baby came from God?”
His mother spray-painted a wall with a mouthful of sweet tea. He’d patted her on the back while she coughed up what she’d inhaled.
“Where on earth are you getting these ideas?” his mother demanded once she’d wiped down the wall with a wet paper towel. “Has Peter been telling you things?”
Peter was Beau’s teenage brother and an endless font of information. But like all the best secrets, that one had come straight from Lula Dean. Beau figured it was best not to tell his mom he’d heard Mrs. Dean talking about someone in town. A detective never reveals his sources. So Beau shrugged and said he didn’t know where his ideas came from.
He kept quiet for a long time after that. But then, one day, he was reading in the living room while his mother chatted on the phone with a friend and he picked up on a snippet that scared him to death. “Mama, I heard you say you were bleeding like a stuck pig. Are you okay?”
He couldn’t understand why that question got him marched across the kitchen and sent straight up to his room.
“It’s something gross that happens to women,” Peter had confided later that evening. “Their cooters bleed for a few days every month.”
Beau wasn’t 100 percent sure what a cooter was. But if it was anything close to what he imagined, the idea was ridiculous. “What?Why? No, you’re kidding. Stop joking around!”
“No joke,” said Peter, clearly delighted to have shocked his brother so badly.
“Where does the blood come from? Does it hurt? Does is spurt out or just ooze? Do they have to wear Band-Aids on their butts?” Beau had so many questions, but his brother didn’t have any answers.
“Hey,” Peter whispered. “Have you ever seen a naked lady?”
Beau shut up and shook his head. He figured it must have something to do with all his questions. Why else would Peter ask?
Peter pulled out his phone and scrolled through his saved pictures. Most were selfies, with a few group shots of Peter’s equally dumb friends. Then he stopped at a photo he’d swiped off the internet and turned the phone to face Beau. A woman in a fur coat and boots stood beside a snowman with a huge pecker. Beneath the coat she was completely naked. “What does this make you feel?”
Beau stared at the picture. He felt a lot of things. Fear, fascination, and concern that the lady might freeze. He’d never made a snowman before, and he wondered if it was normal to give one a penis. “What do you mean? What am I supposed to feel?”
“You’ll find out soon. Unless you’re gay. Then Dad’s gonna kill you. Don’t tell anyone that I showed you.”
“Okay, but what about the blood?”
“Oh, right. That.” Peter didn’t seem keen to return to the subject. “Part of them falls out every month. If you don’t believe me, just look under the bathroom sink. That’s where Mom hides her bandages.”
That night, Beau quietly locked the door as his bath ran. Then hecrouched down and carefully opened the cabinet beneath the sink. His brother hadn’t told him what to look for. He figured it probably wasn’t bleach or drain cleaner. Then he spotted a pink plastic bag toward the back, partially hidden behind rolls of toilet paper. Pink was the lady color. Boys were supposed to avoid it. He’d hit the jackpot.
Beau reached in and pulled the bag out, careful not to knock anything over. The writing on the front said,Soft, Breathable, 100% Protection.
Protection from what? Beau wondered. He opened the bag and removed a thick pad of cottony material with stickers on one side. He couldn’t imagine what it might protect someone from, but it had to be bad if it was making them bleedthatmuch.
Beau wrapped one of the pads up in his dirty clothes. After his bath, he planned to continue his investigations. But as he walked back toward his room, the pad slipped out of his bundle of laundry. It made no sound at all when it landed on the hallway carpet. Beau hadn’t even realized he’d lost it.
“Excuse me, what is this?”
Beau turned to see his father. He had the personality of a giant if not the stature. He held the pad pinched between two fingers—like something revolting that he’d rather not touch.
“I don’t know what that is,” Beau said, and that was the truth. No one in the family would have dared lie or talk back to Randy Sykes when his face was that red. “It was in the cabinet.”
“Why was it mixed up in your clothes just now?”
