Marci, Denis, and I go to the main office first thing on Monday and stand outside. None of us knows how to make an appointment with the principal but it seems like it should be easy. She’s in the same building as us, for one thing, and we’re her students, so she should be excited to talk to us.

“We should talk to the secretary,” Denis says.

“As soon as possible so we can see her today,” Marci adds.

Denis nods.

“Who’s going to do it?” I ask.

They look at me.

So I go into the office and ask the secretary if I can make an appointment to see the principal today. “It’s for three of us—me, Denis, and Marci,” I explain.

She’s looking at her computer screen. “Sixth grade, right?”

“Yep.”

“How about just after lunch?”

That’s recess, but I don’t mind.

“Sure. That’s perfect,” I say.

“Great! She’ll see you here at ten after twelve.”

I say thank you and then walk with Marci and Denis to Ms. Sett’s room.

“The first step is finding out who did it,” I say.

“Then why they did it,” Denis says.

“Then we fight it,” Marci says.

Ms. Sett is outside her classroom door giving high fives and fist bumps to welcome everyone. Part of me still feels wrong for going over her head and going to the principal first, but the three of us agreed it would be best.

“Good morning, three musketeers,” Ms. Sett says. “I hope you had a great weekend!”

“We did!” Marci replies.

Denis smiles. I feel like a liar because my weekend was … complicated. No one knows this except for me. I aim to keep it that way.

By the time lunch comes, Denis is nervous and jiggling his leg.

“Don’t worry,” I tell him. “She’s going to be nice.”

Marci says, “She’s always nice!”

Denis jiggles his leg anyway and we wait for the bell to sound and slowly walk to the main office. We wait for a few minutes and then the secretary tells us we can go in. We say hi and sit down in the chairs in front of Dr. McKenny’s desk. There’s a handmade desk plate with an apple drawn on it that reads DR. PEGGY MCKENNY, PRINCIPAL.

“So,” she says while giving us a double thumbs-up. “What can I do for you three?”

Marci pulls out her copy of The Devil’s Arithmetic. “In two areas of this book, the words have been censored.”

Dr. McKenny looks at the two pages Marci has marked with Post-it notes. “Whoever crossed this out sure meant it!” she says. “I’ll get you a new copy, Marci.”

“Ours have the same crossed-out words,” I say. “All the copies are blacked out that way.”

This clearly surprises Dr. McKenny. “Huh,” she says.

“Do you know who might have done this?” Marci asks.

All of us, including Dr. McKenny, stay quiet because it feels obvious—Ms. Sett writes all those letters and makes all those rules. But we have to make sure, I guess.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Dr. McKenny says. “It’s only a few words.”

“The word is breast,” Marci says, “and it’s not nothing. It’s an insult to our intellectual freedom.”

I’m impressed. Denis looks at his feet.

“As a taxpayer, my mom paid for those books,” I say. “And this weekend we had to buy a replacement so I could read the book as it was meant to be read, not in a censored way that someone else thinks I should read.”

“I’m sure it’s just a mix-up,” Dr. McKenny tells us. “No one wants to take any of your freedoms away. Or waste your mom’s tax money, Mac.”

Very hesitantly, Denis adds, “I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but you seem to be acting like this isn’t a problem. This is a problem. All the books have been censored. This is not just a mix-up. Someone did it on purpose.”

“Please don’t treat us like we don’t know what we’re talking about,” Marci adds, the whole time staring shyly at Denis. “We’ve spent the entire weekend researching what to do when a school restricts our right to read. We know there should be a protocol when someone challenges a book. We know that we can protest like the students did down in York.” York, Pennsylvania, just over the river, has been in the national news more than once for censoring things.

“Just because we’re twelve doesn’t mean we’re dumb,” I say.

Dr. McKenny sits back in her fancy leather desk chair and smiles and nods. “I’m so proud of you guys,” she says. “Good for you for being so smart and using resources and planning how to fix this problem.”

“So you didn’t know these books were censored?” Marci asks.

“No. But I’ll find out who did it and we’ll go from there,” Dr. McKenny answers.

“We all need new books,” I say. “Greg at Tad’s Books said he’d be happy to order however many you need.”

Dr. McKenny puts her hands up and says, “Whoa, guys! Slow down. I’m sure this is all going to be fine.” She keeps talking but it sounds like blah-blah-blah to me because I realize she’s still pretending like this is okay. I can see it in her face. She’s smiling in that way adults do when they think kids are doing something cute.

Fact: Being treated like a child makes me angry.

Fact: Being angry makes me scared that I might be like my dad.

On our walk back to class, I don’t tell Marci or Denis that I don’t trust Dr. McKenny. I pretend along with them that she’s going to get to the bottom of the mystery and replace the censored books. I pretend she cares about the truth.

By Wednesday, Marci gets impatient.

“I don’t know why it would take this long to find out who censored the books.” She walks up the steps to the second floor and rounds the corner to go up the next flight. “We’re all in the same building, right? It can’t take that long to ask.”

Marci must be mad, because she can usually go fast up these stairs and seem fine, but now she’s breathing heavy. When she frowns, there’s a dimple on her cheek that comes out, and even though I don’t want her to frown, the dimple is, well, cute.

Anyway.

In the two days since our meeting, we’ve already read the first three chapters of The Devil’s Arithmetic in lit circle and completed the worksheets Ms. Sett gave us. The story is about a girl named Hannah and what happens to her during Passover Seder. I don’t want to spoil anything in the book, but it’s not a historical novel, like you’d think due to the scenes that are censored and the subject matter. It’s really a time-travel story—my favorite kind. Time travel is something I think about a lot because sometimes I feel like I was born at the wrong place in history.

I should have been born at a time when adults didn’t pretend something is okay when it’s not. I don’t know if that time ever existed.

Maybe I needed to be born in the future.