Tad’s Books on Main Street is the perfect place for a cool nerd like me. It has the best collection of manga and a whole shelf of books about Dungeons & Dragons. It’s wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling books—every kind of book, too. From cookbooks to helicopter pilot manuals to books of love poems Grandad would like. Tad’s is also full of board games, and over winter, Grandad and I go to game night there and play all different stuff with whoever shows up. Sometimes it’s old people or random adults, and sometimes it’s kids my age, like Denis.

No one is named Tad, by the way. Tad is a mix of the original owners’ names—Tony, Ann, and David. I think they’re all dead now. Grandad knew Tony Farisi and he always uses the same word to talk about him: sanctimonious. When I asked him why he always uses that word, he said, “He owned a bookstore and I was all over the place with PTSD from the war. About fifteen years after I got back, you know? I mixed up the names of two rivers in France. He never let me forget it. Sanctimonious turd.”

Turd is a word old people use instead of a curse word. Sanctimonious means smug. Smug, which is one of my favorite words, means superior. PTSD is post-traumatic stress disorder, and it can mean a lot of things, but for Grandad it means he had some trouble adjusting after he came back from the Vietnam War.

I know my way around Tad’s Books, so it’s easy to find a used copy of The Devil’s Arithmetic while Marci and Denis are drawn to the new release table. I skip to page 93 to find out what was so bad that someone had to black it out in our school copies.

I find it.

I read it.

I read it again.

The whole scene—the Nazi soldiers and the young girls in the concentration camp shower and how naked and cold they were and how the Nazi guards were standing right there with big guns and screaming at them to move … it’s such a hard scene and it really shows how scary and impossible it all was.

I read the phrase again.

I shake my head.

Marci and Denis come over and I sigh. “You guys aren’t going to believe this,” I say. “I don’t even know how to tell you.”

I hold the book out. I point to the sentence. Head down, hands over her breasts, Hannah walked through the line of soldiers …

Marci reads it once, then reads it again. Denis reads it and frowns.

Marci holds her school copy of the book up for comparison.

Head down, Hannah walked through the line of soldiers …

Marci says, “Breasts?” and the three other people shopping at Tad’s look over and then go back to browsing books. “They censored the word breasts? Are you kidding me?”

“In that scene, too. I mean, wow.” I feel dumb for not being able to say anything more daring or definitive.

Marci almost yells it this time. “BREASTS! Seriously?”

Greg, the manager of Tad’s, comes over. “What’re you guys up to?”

Denis shows him our school copy. “They censored our reading book,” he says. “About the Holocaust.”

“Oh. I love that book,” Greg says. “And who’s they?”

“We don’t know yet,” I tell him. “They crossed out the word breasts—as if we don’t know what breasts are.”

“What grade are you guys in again?” Greg asks.

“Sixth,” Marci answers. “Old enough to have actual breasts, so I don’t understand the problem.”

Greg nods. “People can be weird.”

“Especially in this town,” Denis says.

“Guys,” I say. “My tongue is all twisted in my mouth and I can’t see right. I think I’m going to pass out.” I stumble a little. Greg steadies my elbow. “It’s the word. It’s just not right for me to read. It’s just not …”

Marci and Denis and Greg all look like they’re about to call 911. So I stop and say, “Just kidding. Trying to make a point.”

Sometimes cool-nerd funny is not easy to understand. Grandad warned me about that, too.

We look up the other passage that’s crossed out. Page 117.

Marci says, “Wow.” She points to the book.

Denis and I lean in to read. Page 117 has a scene where the older girls are explaining to the main character something about how the little kids have to hide in garbage dumps when the Commandant comes to the concentration camp to visit. One girl is explaining how the older girls don’t have to do this, but how she is assumed older even though she may not look it physically.

She motioned toward her own undeveloped chest.

That’s what’s crossed out in our books. The whole sentence—gone.

“Undeveloped chest,” I say.

Greg the manager says, “That’s just weird.”

Denis says, “Whoever censored this book has something against basic human anatomy.”

Marci says, “Whoever censored this book has something wrong with their brain.”

I say, “We have to find out who did this.”

“It’s like they think we’re stupid,” Denis says.

“They do think we’re stupid,” Marci says.

Greg nods, but then has to go wait on a customer.

By this time, more weekend shoppers have come in. Mostly tourists. As they look at me and see a sixth-grade kid, I wonder what words they would cross out to protect me.

“How do we find out who did this?” Marci asks.

“I don’t know,” I reply. “But we should start with Ms. Sett.”

Denis says, “I wonder why she’d do this to books, though. She loves books.”

It’s true. Ms. Sett can’t stop talking about how much she loves books, and her classroom library is the biggest I’ve ever seen.

“I told you she isn’t what she seems like in school,” Marci says.

The question is: If that’s true, what can we do about it?