I Kill the Mockingbird (8 page)

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 point at the description that Wil Wheaton has written about himself. “It says here that he’s just a guy.”

“Just a guy who used to be on
Star Trek
!” says Michael.

I study the profile page more closely. “This guy has two-and-a-half million followers online!”

“Did I mention the
Star Trek
?” Michael asks.

“You mentioned it,” I say.

“How did we get an I Kill the
Mockingbird poster aboard the starship
Enterprise
?” asks Elena.

“We should reply,” I say.

Michael’s mouth drops open. “To Wil Wheaton?”

“To everybody.”

“That’s why it’s called
social
networking,” adds Elena.

“What would we say?” asks Michael.

“Thank you?” I suggest.

Elena thinks for a moment. “Now that people have noticed us, we’ve got to keep it going.”

Outside, the sun is heading toward
the horizon. A sliver of orange moon floats high in the summer sky. In the distance, red and white lights atop giant broadcast antennas blink on and off like gods that do not know we exist. I want people to know that we exist. “We can share the list of places that we’ve hit so far,” I suggest.

“Do you want to get caught?” asks Michael.

“Or,” I say, “we can list all our targets whether we’ve
hit them or not. We want people to know that I Kill the Mockingbird is big—”

“—and that it’s coming to your town soon!” says Elena.

Michael shakes his head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Elena and I push him away from the computer then open the document containing our roster of Connecticut libraries, retailers, and booksellers. With a couple quick clicks, Elena pastes the list onto a
new page called OUR TARGETS.

“Thanks for considering my input,” says Michael.

“We considered it,” says Elena. “And then we rejected it.”

On the record player, a new song begins to play. According to the singer, he’s been down so long that up don’t make sense no more.

“From now on,” Elena continues, “we reply to every note, every comment, and every tweet, and on all those replies, we add a
link back to the OUR TARGETS page. We never say what the list is for. We never communicate directly with any of the targets. We just make sure that people know about it. Pretty soon they’ll start thinking that they are all part of the conspiracy.”

Michael throws his hands in the air. “Since it’s just a list, why limit it to Connecticut? Why not tell the whole country that we’re coming to get
them?”

Elena and I both get stunned looks on our faces. “That’s a great idea!” I say.

“I was kidding!” he says.

“If we’re lucky,” I say, “people will start to believe that this is huge!”

“What if we’re not lucky?” asks Michael.

“The only way this thing works is if we get noticed,” I tell him.

“We are creating a monster,” Michael says.

Elena hunches over and rubs her hands together. “But
it will be a very good monster!”

Michael shakes his head. I laugh out loud. “You sound like Dr. Frankenstein,” I say to Elena.

“No,” Elena replies. “This is what Dr. Frankenstein sounds like.” She stands on her chair, pulls her hair into a crazy mess, and then screeches in her best horror movie voice, “IT’S ALIVE!”

“God help us,” says Michael.

Elena goes back to the computer and starts to
type. Michael and I stand behind her and read the various comments. Without thinking, I reach over and take Michael’s hand in my own. “Don’t worry,” I tell him. “It’s going to be all right.”