It all started the day my favorite book went missing from the
library.
I didn’t know it was missing. Not yet. In my mind, it was
still sitting there all alone on the shelf like a kid in the cafeteria waiting
for her one and only friend to come and find her. Waiting for me to
find her. All I wanted to do was run to the library and check out my favorite
book before homeroom, but Rebecca, my one and only real-life friend, was still
talking about trademarking our names.
“Have you ever thought about registering AmyAnneOllinger.com?”
Rebecca asked me.
“No, Rebecca, I have never thought about registering
AmyAnneOllinger.com. I am nine years old. Why in the world would I bother to
register a Web site with my name on it when my parents won’t even let me use
Facebook yet?”
That’s what I thought about saying. What I said instead was,
“No.”
“You should,” Rebecca told me. “You’ve got a unique name, but
even so, somebody could register it, and then what would you do?
RebeccaZimmerman.com is already gone! I’m ten years old, and already my future
intellectual property is being snapped up! Jay Z and Beyoncé trademarked their
baby’s name less than a month after she was born. You’d think my parents would
have known enough to do the same.”
Rebecca’s parents were both lawyers, and she wanted to be one
too when she grew up. I couldn’t imagine a more boring job.
Instead I said, “Yeah.”
I was still itching to get to the library and check out my
favorite book. I opened my locker to stuff my backpack inside and gave my
mailbox a quick look. Nobody knows how it got started, but everybody at
Shelbourne Elementary has these cardboard boxes taped to the inside door of
their lockers, just below the little vents they put on there in case you get
stuffed in your locker by a bully. If you want to leave a note for somebody you
just slip the piece of paper in the slot and it falls right into the little
cardboard box. It’s such a tradition that Mr. Crutchfield, the custodian, just
leaves the boxes in the lockers from year to year.
As usual, my mailbox was empty. Which I’d expected. My one and
only friend doesn’t believe in writing notes. “Never leave a paper trail,”
Rebecca says. More advice from her lawyer parents.
“Did you hear about Morgan Freeman, the actor?” Rebecca asked.
“Somebody who wasn’t named Morgan Freeman registered his name at
morganfreeman.com, and he had to sue them to get it back!
Now that’s an interesting case—”
“I can’t imagine anything less interesting, Rebecca!
I don’t care anything about trademarks or registering domain names. I have to
go check out my favorite book before somebody else does!”
That’s what I wanted to tell her. Instead I held up a handful
of books like a shield and said, “I have to return these books to the library
before class!” and backed away before she could tell me more about the court
case. “I’ll see you in homeroom!” I called.
Normally I would already have my favorite book checked out and
in my backpack, but our librarian, Mrs. Jones, has a rule that you can only
renew a book two times in a row, and then it has to sit on the shelf
for five whole school days before you can check it out again. She
says it’s to make sure other people get a chance to read it, but I think she
made that rule up just to make me read other books, which I would have done
anyway.
I dumped last night’s books in the book return and waved good
morning to Mrs. Jones on the way to the fiction shelves.
“Amy Anne,” Mrs. Jones called. “Honey, wait—”
“Just let me grab my book,” I called back. I turned into the
H–N shelves and hurried to where I knew my favorite book would be waiting for
me.
Only it wasn’t there.
I looked again. It still wasn’t there. I looked behind the
books, in case it had gotten pushed back and was hidden behind the others like
they sometimes do, but no. It really wasn’t there. But my favorite book
was always on the shelf. Could somebody else really have checked it
out?
I was about to go and ask Mrs. Jones when she turned down the
row. Mrs. Jones is a big white lady with short brown hair and rhinestone granny
glasses that hang around her neck on a chain when she isn’t reading. Today she
was wearing a red dress with white polka dots. Polka dots are her thing.
“Where’s my book?” I asked her.
“That’s what I was trying to tell you, honey,” Mrs. Jones
said. “I knew you’d come in for it first thing.”
“It’s been five days,” I told her. “I marked it down on my
calendar. I get to check it out again after five days. You said so. Did
somebody—did somebody else check it out?”
“No, Amy Anne. I had to take it off the shelf.”
I frowned. Take it off the shelf? What did she mean, take it
off the shelf?
“Why?”
Mrs. Jones sighed and wrung her hands. She looked like she was
about to tell me my dogs had died. “Because some parents got together and said
they didn’t think it was appropriate for elementary school, and the school
board agreed with them.”
“Wasn’t appropriate? What does that mean?”
“It means I can’t check it out to you, honey, or to anybody
else. Not until I talk to the school board and get this nonsense overturned.
“It means, Amy Anne, that your favorite book was banned from
the school library.”
