I Kill the Mockingbird (5 page)

“Yes,” says Mort, “but we must use our power for good.”

“What power?” I ask.

Mort takes out his Cub Scout knife and begins to cut the empty cardboard boxes into pieces that will fit into the recycling bin beneath the counter. “It’s the books that have power,” he says, “but a good bookstore will influence what a person chooses
to read.”

I think for a moment. “Does it have to be a good bookstore?” I ask.

Mort considers the question. “Probably not,” he finally admits.

7

Holden Caulfield Is Undead and Other Things We Learn at the Mall

The next day, Elena, Michael, and I take the bus from West Glover to the River Road Mall. Inside, the mall’s main thoroughfare is all tile and glass and neon storefronts. It makes me think of a carnival midway that’s way too clean. Michael stops in front of a fat, fake palm tree that reaches toward the skylights in the
mall roof. “Why did we come here?” he asks.

“Because we can,” says Elena.

Mort, Mrs. Buskirk, and my parents agreed that the three of us could do a lot more on our own this summer as long as we generally stick together and that we use our cell phones to check in.

We pass a few clusters of teenagers and several bored looking security guards. We weave around two old women in matching blue sweat
suits, dodge a remote control helicopter and a robot dog at Ye Olde Toy Shoppe, then stop at the long, blue fountain where a little blond girl in pink shorts, a pink T-shirt, and pink flip-flops is leaning over the water. She’s got a coin clutched in her fist, and she’s holding it above a little sprinkler that’s spraying her hand. She’s almost ready to toss the coin into the water and make her
wish. Unfortunately, a lady pushing an empty stroller accidentally jostles the girl’s elbow. The coin slips from her hand and drops into the fountain with a disappointing
plop
.

“Sorry, honey,” says the lady. And then she just keeps going.

“Hey!” I shout, but the woman doesn’t hear or else she just ignores me. I turn to my friends. “Did you see that?”

Michael digs into his pocket and comes out
with one penny and a nickel.

Elena shows me an empty hand. “I don’t have any change.”

I take the coins from Michael and approach the fountain where the girl’s got an arm stuck in the water up to her elbow. An older woman holds the girl’s shoulder to keep the child from falling all the way in. “Grandma!” the girl shouts, “I can’t reach!”

“Excuse me,” I say.

Grandma yanks the child away from
the fountain and turns toward me. “Yes?”

“My wish!” says the girl.

“This is for you.” I stuff the coins into the child’s palm.

“Oh,” the old lady says. “Thank you. Thank you very much.” She nods at the girl. “What do you say?”

The child looks down at her hand. “This is six cents.”

“You can have it,” I tell her.

She looks up at me. “But I had a quarter.” Her cheeks get red, and her eyes begin
to fill with tears.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “That’s all I’ve got.”

“You can’t make a twenty-five cent wish with a nickel and a penny.”

“But—” I stop. What am I going to say? The kid is right. “I’m sorry,” I say again.

The girl throws herself into her grandmother’s arms and begins to sob. Slowly, I back away and rejoin Michael and Elena. “That didn’t go well.”

“You offered her six cents for a
quarter’s worth of wishes.” Elena shakes her head. “That’s not a fair trade.”

“I know,” I say, “but—”

“But sometimes life isn’t fair,” says Elena.

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

“But it’s true. It’s like what happened to your mom or to my parents.”

I glance back toward the little girl who is still crying near the fountain with her grandmother. “Losing a quarter is not like cancer and
car crashes,” I say.

“Or how about Fat Bob?” Elena continues. “That was totally unfair.”

“Elena,” says Michael, “Mr. Nowak didn’t die because life is unfair. He died because he had clogged arteries from being three hundred pounds overweight.”

“Death by French fries,” says Elena. “You don’t think that’s unfair?”

“I think that’s unhealthy,” says Michael.

The three of us begin walking away from
the fountain. “You know what’s really unfair?” I say to my friends. “We hardly ever even talk about Mr. Nowak anymore. It’s like he disappeared off the face of the earth.”

“Lucy,” says Michael, “he sort of did disappear off the face of the earth.”

I give Michael a dirty look. “I know he’s dead, but it doesn’t seem right that we basically forgot all about him.”

“That is unfair,” says Elena.
“Fat Bob was awesome.”

“He really was a good teacher,” Michael agrees.

“We should do something so people will remember him,” I say.

“Like what?” asks Elena.

I shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe we’ll come up with something while we’re here.”

Michael glances around. We’re surrounded by pretzel shops and shoe stores. “At the mall?”

“You can learn a lot at the mall,” Elena tells him.

We turn and
wander into a giant bookstore. Inside, we find several large tables holding dozens of different titles on display. There are best sellers, true crime, and tons of discount books. There’s also a huge range of recommended and required summer reading from all the local schools. Our St. Brigid titles are mixed in with a predictable set of classics, but there are some unexpected choices, too. I pick up
a vampire fantasy that’s stacked next to
The Catcher in the Rye
. “Holden Caulfield is undead,” I say. “Who knew?”

“Like I said,” Elena tells me, “you can learn a lot at the mall.”

“How does Mort compete with this?” Michael wonders out loud. The mall bookstore has got to be a hundred times bigger than Mort’s little shop.

Elena takes the vampire book from my hand and tosses it back onto the pile.
“By being awesome,” she says.

“Speaking of awesome…” I lift a copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird
off another display table.

Michael looks uncomfortable.

“What’s wrong?” I ask him.

“Lucy,” he says. “
To Kill a Mockingbird
is not my favorite book in the world.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s about a little white tomboy who worships her father in a town filled with whacky racist Christians and lynch-mob
farmers. It’s a comedy about old-timey southern people who treat each other badly. It’s—”

“That is not what it’s about,” I say.

“Actually,” says Elena, “it sort of is.”

“Not only that,” Michael continues, “the big hero in the book is Atticus Finch, who is supposed to be some kind of super lawyer. But three of his clients end up getting executed, and he lets one murderer go free on purpose.”

“Atticus Finch is not a hero because he’s a good lawyer,” I tell Michael. “He’s a hero because he’s a good man.”

“He could have been better.”

“Michael,” I say, “we could all be better.”

Based on the uncomfortable glances we’re getting from nearby shoppers, I guess we’ve raised our voices more than a little. Elena steps between us. “How about we have a big argument about it in class when school
starts in the fall?” she says. “That way we won’t get kicked out of the mall today.”

“Fine,” I say.

“Fine,” says Michael.

But I can’t help adding one more thing. “If Mr. Nowak were still here,
To Kill a Mockingbird
would be our entire summer reading list.”

“As if everybody in our class would actually read the book,” Elena says.

“Everybody would have read it for Mr. Nowak,” I tell her.

Elena
shakes her head. “That’s not going to happen now.”

The three of us go back to flipping through the books on the display tables. Standing there with a hundred different mysteries and histories and adventures and literature at my fingertips, I remember what Mort said about the power of books and the power of bookstores. “What if we could make it happen?” I say.

Elena and Michael stop their browsing
and look at me.

“What if we could make everybody read
To Kill a Mockingbird
this summer?” I ask them.

“How would we do that?” says Michael.

“I don’t know,” I admit. “We’d probably have to trick people into it.”

“It would be an excellent way to remember Fat Bob,” says Elena.

“It would,” says Michael, “but—”

I interrupt before he can voice any objections. “Let’s look around and see if we can
come up with some ideas.”

“What kind of ideas?” he asks.

“How do I know?” I say. “We haven’t had them yet.”

I turn and head toward the escalator that leads to the second floor. A moment later, we’re riding the moving stairway. “So,” says Elena, “it looks like we’re heading to romance.”

“Excuse me?” I say.

She points toward a big sign hanging above us. “It says so right there.”

She’s right.
According to the sign, we are heading to the romance section.

“I like romance,” Elena says.

“I thought you liked historical fiction,” says Michael.

“That too.” She turns to me. “What about you, Lucy?”

I feel my face burn red. “Shut up,” I whisper.

“I’m just asking a question. You can tell because of the question mark at the end of my sentence.”

“Stop it,” I say under my breath.

“I can’t
stop something that you haven’t started,” she whispers.

I lean toward Elena and bump her with my hip. “I’m serious.”

I’m just about to step off the escalator when Elena bumps me back. “Me too.”

I know she doesn’t mean to, but Elena’s push throws me off balance. I misjudge the moving escalator steps and trip over my own feet. “Hey!” I shout.

Elena grabs for my arm, but instead of stopping me
she shoves me toward a small table covered in books. I plow into it like a tall, skinny bulldozer. The table tips and knocks into a couple low shelves. Books fly everywhere. The next thing I know, I’m sitting on the floor surrounded by paperbacks covered with artistic renderings of pirates and ball gowns and big-busted ladies wearing looks of despair. I pick up one of the books and study the cover.
“This is romance?”

Elena rushes forward. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it. Are you all right?”

Michael joins us. “What happened?”

I get to my feet. “It was an accident. I’m fine.”

I bend down and pick up a couple books. “We better clean this up.”

That’s when a small, balding man starts shouting from across the store. “Stop! Stop it!”

I sigh. “Now what?”

The man’s name tag flaps up and down
against a light blue shirt pocket while he runs. “Please stop!”

“Stop what?” Elena asks him.

The man slows to a halt, puts his hands on his knees, and doubles over to catch his breath. “I saw what happened. I’m the manager. Are you all right?”

I feel my face turn red again. I nod. “I’m okay.”

“Thank goodness!” Even when he stands up, the top of the manager’s head barely reaches my chin. The
tag on his shirt says that his name is Mr. Dobby, and that he is associate manager for store number 389.

Elena steps forward. The manager is just her size, which makes Elena seem even more confident than usual. “Mr.—?”

“Dobby,” he says. “It rhymes with Bobby.”

Elena considers this. “We are really sorry about the mess, Mr. Dobby,” she finally tells him. “We’ll help clean it up.”

Michael and
I start collecting books again.

Mr. Dobby waves his hands above his head. “No!”

Elena puts her own hands up like she’s being robbed. “What’s wrong?”

“You don’t know how to shelve books!” All of Mr. Dobby’s statements seem like they should end in exclamation marks.

“Actually,” says Elena, “we do.”

Mr. Dobby shakes his head. “Shelving books incorrectly is as good as stealing them. It’s almost
worse. Our computers will show that we have a title in stock, but nobody will be able to find it. Not only that, it’s very difficult to convince our corporate headquarters to send us a book if our computer insists that it’s somewhere in the store.” He lowers his voice. “Shelving badly leads to shrinkage.”

“Shrinkage?” I say.

“Loss of profit due to loss of product,” he explains. “Shrinkage is
very, very bad.” He takes a book from Elena’s hand. “I know you’re trying to help, and it is much appreciated, but you helped enough already.” He pulls a couple coupons from his shirt pocket and shoves them into our hands. “Here,” he tells us. “I’m just glad nobody got hurt. Now go visit our coffee bar and treat yourself to Mucho Mocha Creamo Cafiotta.”

“DeCreamo what?” says Michael.

“They’re
my favorite!” says Mr. Dobby.

“Are they decaf?” asks Elena.

“Good heavens, no!”

“Wait a minute,” I say. “If we take—” I grab a random paperback off the floor and read its title. “—
The Assyrian Pirate’s Stentorian Housekeeper
, and we put it in the travel section instead of…”

“That belongs in Historical Romance,” Mr. Dobby says knowingly.

“But if we shelve the pirate book next to—” I take a
paperback off a nearby shelf and reads its title. “—
How to See Kalamazoo on Five Cents a Day
.”

Mr. Dobby’s eyes go wide. “We might never see that pirate again!”

“Really?” I say.

“Really,” says Mr. Dobby. He takes the books away from Elena and me. “It’s best to let a professional handle this.”

“Okay, then.” I hold up my coffee coupon. “Thank you for the special offer, Mr. Dobby.”

He gives
us a big smile. “I hope you found what you were looking for today!”

“We did,” I tell him.

Elena turns to me. “We did?”

“Definitely,” I say.

“Definitely?” asks Michael.

I turn back to Mr. Dobby. “Bye now!”

It’s all I can do to keep myself from sprinting out of the store.

8

Conspiracy Theories
and Cruel Mistresses

The three of us huddle around a plastic table inside the mall’s food court. The area is decorated in dull tones of red and yellow and blue and green. Some kind of rowdy Irish-sounding music plays through speakers hidden behind the plastic trees while people wait in line for pizza and tacos and Mongolian stir fry. I grab a nacho from the paper
basket between us and wave it around like I’m conducting a very tiny orchestra. “We are going to turn
To Kill a Mockingbird
into forbidden fruit!”