Page 23 of Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Book
Beau felt the blood draining out of his face. “I was going to do some research.”
“Research on what? Being a girl?”
“Yeah.” The word flipped a switch. Beau saw his father was about to explode. “No—on why they need those things,” he added quickly. “I don’t want to be a girl.”
“I would hope to hell not. You should thank God every day you weren’t born one of them. And be glad you don’t need to know what these nasty things are.”
After that, the pad haunted him. Until then, Beau hadn’t spent much time thinking about girls and women. He knew they were different from boys and men. Women had babies and took care of the house. Men went to work and shot things on the weekend. Women smelled better and had less body hair. Men had penises and could pee wherever they wanted.
He knew men and women were different. That much was obvious. But it hadn’t occurred to him that the females he knew might all be hiding a horrible secret. Something so awful that even his dad—the mayor of Troy—couldn’t bear to discuss it. Beau asked around at school. A lot of boys wouldn’t go anywhere near the subject. His friends, with varying degrees of reluctance, shared what they knew. The blood came out of women’s vaginas. They called it a period. It meant a female was ready to make babies. That was the most terrifying thing of all. Beau did not want any babies. He started keeping his distance from girls.
But try as he might, Beau couldn’t avoid them all. He had to sit next to girls in class. They flirted with him at recess. They grabbed french fries off his tray at lunch. In the past, he’d enjoyed the attention. He liked all the girls in his class, aside from Tiffany, who was mean as a copperhead. Now he couldn’t stop thinking about what they were hiding.
Then one day he was turning in a math quiz, when he accidentally knocked his teacher’s handbag off her desk. As they both scrambled to collect the contents that lay scattered across the floor, Beau came across a little white cotton bullet in a clear plastic wrapper.
He snatched it up and handed it straight to Ms. Throgmorton. Beau was convinced that he was her favorite. And he knew for a fact that she was his.
“Is this protection?” he whispered. “Are you all right?”
The teacher laughed and blushed. For the first time, he wondered if the secret might not be that bad. “It is. But I’m fine. Thank you, Beau.”
Beau stood there. He couldn’t waste the opportunity. “I’ve never seen one of those before. What is it?”
“Your mom and dad haven’t told you?” She was still smiling.
“No,” he said. “We don’t talk about stuff like that in our house.”
That was when Ms. Throgmorton’s face got all serious. “Then I’m afraid I can’t, either.” She must have seen how disappointed he was. “I’m sorry. It’s against the rules for me to discuss these things without your parents’ permission. I could lose my job.”
Beau turned and headed for his chair. If the secret was awful enough to make a teacher lose her job, he wasn’t sure he wanted to continue his investigations.
“But hey.” Ms. Throgmorton waved him back. “You know there’s a place you can go with all your questions. The public library. That’s what it’s for.”
“I’m not sure if I want to know any more.”
Ms. Throgmorton leaned closer. “The truth isn’t as bad as you think,” she whispered. “It’s just human biology.”
After school, Beau headed for the library, but people from the television station were blocking the front steps. Someone had found something terrible in the baking section. An eighth grader watching from the sidewalk was telling everyone it had to be a book about cannibalism. What else could be so bad?
When Beau got home and switched on the TV, he found out it had been a book about dirty cakes. When the cover flashed quickly on the screen, Beau thought it looked a lot like something one of Peter’s friends had brought over.
The library was shut down for two days after that. Not that it mattered, anyway. Beau was no longer allowed to go to the library by himself. He could only use the family computer when his parents were in the room, so that was another dead end. And then, one day, God smiled on him. Lula Dean opened a library right across from his house.
Right from the start, Beau knew there was something unusual about Lula’s library. People liked to visit at strange times. The postman often addedbooks instead of taking them out. And then, a little over a week after the library opened, Beau was sitting on the window seat in his room one night when Bella Cummings stopped by. He watched her look around all sneaky-like and slip a book onto the shelves. He couldn’t read the title from a distance, but he could see the spine was pink. The next morning, he set off for school thirty minutes early. He needed to see the book before anyone else could get their hands on it. When he laid eyes on the title, he knew his prayers had been answered.Secret Keeper Girl,it was called.
“Did you find something you like?” a woman called just as Beau began to reach out. Lula was standing on her front porch in her speed-walking gear.
Beau had shrieked and sprinted for school.
The book sat there for the next twenty-four hours, taunting Beau from across the street. He had never wanted anything so bad in all his life. But someone had always seemed to be watching him. Until now.
Moments after his parents sped off in their cars, Beau was down the stairs and out the door. He stopped on the stairs and ran back inside to get a plastic bag. Then he casually walked around the side of the house, whistling a peppy tune. He made a point of looking both ways before he crossed the street. As he stood in front of the little library, he heard Lula pass by an open window, talking on the phone.
“They’re saying what happened back in high school was an open secret, but I swear to you, Jemma, no one ever told me!”
Beau opened the library door, took out the bright pink book, and dropped it into his plastic bag.
His heart was racing as he walked back to his own front door. Only when he was inside and the door closed behind him did Beau breathe easy. He took a moment to recover, then he raced up the stairs and into his room.
