When I get home from school, Dad is in the garage working on Grandad’s old car. It’s a bazillion degrees in there because he never opens the garage door and he’s welding. He’s a day early—this is usually what we do on Saturdays. Then, sometimes, if he’s in a good mood, he takes me for flights in it in the middle of the night.
I’m too tired to work on the “spacecraft” today. Mom is at work, so I plop myself on the couch and turn on my favorite anime. The one in my brain.
It’s about a boy with an alien dad and how they fly around in a spacecraft a lot before the boy has to go to middle school. That sounds like a boring anime, but there are secret aliens everywhere and the boy and father have special powers. The boy can change history. The father can melt your whole body just by looking at you a certain way.
That’s the way Dad looks at me when he wakes me up from my accidental nap on the couch an hour later.
“Have you been home long?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Can you help me in the garage?”
“Sure.”
For the next thirty minutes, I help Dad fix the dashboard. I hear the phone ringing in the house, but I’m holding a piece in place while he tightens something underneath with what looks like a weird space wrench. When we’re done, we cover it with a tarp and he leaves right before Mom gets home.
She thinks it’s just a vintage car. Specifically a 1967 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia convertible. I don’t ever tell her what Dad says because he made me promise not to.
Before he catches the bus to his apartment, Dad says, “Maybe we’ll take a ride again soon!”
“But what about tomorrow?”
“Can’t make it tomorrow until late, sport. Something came up.”
“Oh.”
“Doesn’t mean I don’t love ya!” he says, and walks down the sidewalk.
Fact: Aliens lie. All the time. I can’t find grace for that yet, but I’m trying.
When I come inside, Mom tells me, “Marci called and wants you to call her back and have your book with you.” She’s making dinner and has a wooden spoon in one hand and a spatula in the other.
“Which book?” I ask while I wash the grease off my hands.
“Something about a circle?” she says. “Lit circle book. That’s what she called it. Can you set the table?”
I set the table but don’t get the book. I’ll call Marci back after we eat.
Over dinner, Mom asks what book we’re reading, and I tell her. Then I say, “It’s about the Holocaust.”
“Tough topic,” Mom says.
“Damn tough topic,” my grandad says.
Mom scolds him for cursing.
Things get quiet at the table.
Grandad adds, “I’ve been to the camps. You can barely breathe there, even half a century later. Horrible. And I know horrible.” Grandad served two tours in the Vietnam War and has a Purple Heart medal. He knows horrible.
We go on eating and Mom tells us a little about her day. She’s developing a new program for grieving kids and she has her last campfire group next week—they make s’mores and sing songs, and she says she loves every minute of it.
“I’m proud of you,” Grandad says.
“Just doing my job,” Mom replies.
“You help a hundred people every week. Just take the compliment, okay? Your mom would back me up on this,” he says, laughing.
Mom smiles at him and then me, and then the three of us get up and clear the table and load the dishwasher.
When I call Marci back after dinner, I don’t bring the book.
“I left a detailed message to save us time,” she says.
“It’s a Friday night. Who cares about time?”
“When you see what I’m about to tell you, you’ll understand.”
I walk to my backpack in the hallway and get the book. I roll my eyes the whole time. Leave it to Marci to expect efficiency on the weekend. “Got it.”
“Open to page ninety-three.”
I do. And I see it right away. “Oh.”
There is an ugly black rectangle over some words.
“I talked to Hannah an hour ago and her book has the same stuff. Go to page one hundred seventeen,” she says.
I turn the pages. There’s another ugly black rectangle over more words.
“The library opens at ten tomorrow,” Marci says. “Want to meet me there?”
I’m still staring at the black rectangles. I thumb through to see if I can find any more places that are like it, but this is it—two areas of the book that are blacked out so well that the ink bleeds through to the other side. “Why would anyone do this?” I ask Marci.
“I don’t know,” she says.
“It’s even the winner of the National Jewish Book Award!”
“Yeah,” she says. “Whoever did this has some nerve.”
“I mean, it’s not like a kids’ book would have anything that bad in it, you know?”
“Read around the black parts,” she says. “Can you figure it out?”
Page 93 is a really hard page to read. It’s a scene in the showers at a concentration camp. There are girls our age there and they’re naked in the shower room. Surrounding them are Nazi soldiers. When the water turns off, the soldiers yell at the naked girls to move. When they move to the next room, they aren’t given clothes to wear and are freezing. Even with a few words crossed out, it’s a terrifying scene and my stomach hurts.
Page 117 is harder to figure out. I’m not sure what the scene is about, but it has something to do with little children having to hide in enormous piles of garbage at the concentration camp. Disgusting but not as terrifying as the shower scene.
I say, “I can’t figure it out. What could be worse than this scene?”
“I don’t know,” Marci says. “But tomorrow, I’m going to find out.”
“I’ll meet you at the library at ten.”
“Bring Denis,” she says.
“Why?”
She sighs hard. “Because we’re all best friends since first grade and I think he should be there.”
“Best friends?”
“Yeah,” she says.
When Mom first told me about grace and how to use it, she said never to agree with anything important that isn’t true. But I can’t figure out if what Marci said isn’t true.