My mom came and stood in front of the TV.
“What is this?” she said, holding out the book I’d left on the counter.
“A book for school. I’ll start reading it later.”
I figured I was in trouble for choosing TV over a book. So I was definitely surprised when my mom said, “I’m not so sure about that, Donovan.”
I honestly thought I’d misheard her. This couldn’t possibly be my mother, telling me not to read.
She went on, though, asking me, “How far have you gotten?”
“We read the beginning in class.”
“Which class?”
“Um … English. I mean, language arts. Which is the same thing as English.”
I thought, okay, she must have started reading it, and probably felt it was too violent for fifth graders. Or maybe it was too fun. I could see her objecting to that. Sometimes Mr. Howe made us read these old classics that had cobwebs between each of the sentences, but other times he’d have us read a more recent book, even one that didn’t have any shiny award seals on the cover. With this book, he’d said we were starting an adventure unit, and what better place to start an adventure unit than with a book called The Adventurers?
“I would like to read some more of it, and would like to understand some things about the author before you continue,” my mother told me now.
She almost made it sound like she was asking my permission.
She was definitely not asking my permission.
I figured, I guess I’ll just go back to watching TV. But instead she turned off the TV and told me to do the rest of my homework. She actually said, “Go do your math homework.” Because maybe she figured that was the opposite of language arts.
I went to my room … but I kept the door open so I could hear her getting on the phone, calling some of my friends’ moms, the ones she was friends with. Like Sean’s mom. And Tarah’s mom. But not Allison’s mom. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, exactly, but I could hear the names Rick and Oliver coming up a lot. From the chapter Mr. Howe had read to us, I remembered those were the names of the characters from the book. I expected to hear my mom talking about the bullets flying and the fact that two twelve-year-olds were clearly driving a motorcycle without a license. (At least they wore helmets. I definitely would have understood her screaming if they hadn’t worn helmets.)
But that wasn’t what she was angry about.
The thing is, my mom doesn’t read books like I read books. I like to be surprised, so I try to avoid even the summary on the back. My mom, though, doesn’t like to be surprised. So she’ll read a few pages at the start, to get a sense of what the book is about, and then she’ll read the last page, so she knows where it’s going. If she’s happy with that, she’ll return to the beginning and keep reading.
It wasn’t until right before dinner, when my dad got home and she asked him if they could talk for a second in private, that I remembered the last-page-first thing. That’s when I knew: It wasn’t the start of the book that had made her take the book away from me. It must have been something about the ending. But I didn’t have the book anymore, so I wasn’t able to read the ending myself to see if I was right.
It wasn’t until the next day, when I was back in Mr. Howe’s class, that I’d read the sentence the whole town would soon be arguing about.