Page 48 of Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Book
Sitting in the waiting room at the clinic had felt like a vacation. Shooting the shit with the Wright brothers (who confirmed that theyhadheard that joke) was the best time he’d had in days. They’d been sent out to the reception area while the doctor finished up with Bella Cummings, and once they knew she was going to be fine, the brothers spun the craziest story he’d ever heard. Keith told Isaac—who turned out to be some kind of genius—that it would make a great book.
“I mean, it’s got everything,” he’d marveled. “A beauty queen, a star football player, a famous general, a backward-ass little Southern town’s gay Black valedictorian, and to top it all off, an international movie star with a giant gash on his head who’s waiting in the parking lot for a doctor to finish treating the prom queen he knocked cold.”
Andjustas Keith finished saying it, in walked the Wright brothers’ fancy-pants new cousin and right behind her was an old woman who looked pissed as hell.
“May I speak with you two alone for a moment?” Beverly Underwood asked the Wright brothers while Keith sat there spellbound. “Pardon the interruption,” she told him. “These gentlemen and I have matters to discuss.”
Isaac looked like he might pass out.
“I’d like to see Bella first,” Elijah insisted. Keith was impressed. If the kid could postponethatplot twist, hehadto be crazy in love.
“Don’t you worry. I’ll wait here for Bella,” said the old lady, who turned out to be Bella’s great-grandmother. “But before you go, which one of you two took Mitch Sweeney down?”
“That was me, ma’am.” Elijah held up his hand.
The old lady kissed him on the cheek. “You need anything in the future—don’t matter if it’s a lawyer, a new car, or a piece of pie—you come see me, you hear?”
“I will,” said Elijah, who was not at all shy.
Then the exam room door opened, and out came Bella Cummings, looking totally lucid and holding an ice pack to the back of her head. While everyone asked her all kinds of questions, the doctor gestured to Keith. Hehobbled into the room, the door closed, and suddenly everything was silent again.
“Dude.” For a minute, that was all Keith could say.
“I concur,” said the doctor, who was much younger and cooler than the last physician. “Dude.”
“So Bella told you the whole story?”
“She did. Very sorry it took so long to get to you. I wasn’t sure at first if Miss Cummings was hallucinating.”
“Dude.”
This time the doctor laughed. “You’re Ken and Kari’s boy, am I right?”
“That is correct,” said Keith.
The doctor began preparing the shot. “Your parents are sweet people. They’re always worried to death whenever I head home to New York. I wonder what they’re going to think about all the excitement here in Troy this evening.”
“Probably lock me in my bedroom for the rest of my life. They’re already nervous as hell about me going back to Atlanta.”
“Were they always so anxious?” The doctor lifted Keith’s shirtsleeve and swabbed a patch of his skin with iodine.
“Nope,” Keith said. “They keep saying the world’s changed. But I’m pretty sure it’s them. I don’t remember them being so scared when I was a kid.”
After his shot was administered and his wound cleaned and wrapped, Keith hobbled out of the exam room to find three men sitting side by side in the reception area. One was the county sheriff. One was an international movie star. The third was a younger man with blond hair and a beard who couldn’t have been more than a few years older than him. He was holding the book that Keith had brought with him.
“Mind if I grab that?” Keith said. “I forgot it out here when I went in for my shot.”
He held out his hand, but the man didn’t pass the book to him.
“You know this ain’tContract for America.” The man took off the dust jacket and held up the spine for Keith to read.
“Excuse me?” Keith replied. “What do you care what it is?”
“Your parents know you’re reading this CRT crap?” the man demanded.
Keith glanced over at Sheriff Bradley, a well-weathered man of fifty with granite-colored hair and cold eyes. He folded his arms and said nothing.
“Last I checked, this was the United States of America,” Keith said, snatching the book from the man’s hands. “I can read whatever the hell I want.”
