“What are you doing?” Annamae’s mother sounded horrified.
“Art.”
“No. No. Absolutely not. Put the knife down.” Her mother’s face was pink from the shower and she wore only a towel. She had just happened to catch sight of Annamae on her way from the bathroom. “What are you doing?” she repeated.
Annamae had been trying to cut into the pages of a book with a paring knife. It was much harder than she’d expected. But she had taken proper precaution. “I’m using a cutting board,” she pointed out.
“Yeah, you’ve got”—pause for a dramatic exhale—“you’ve got the blade facing your stomach. Annamae.” Her mother’s shoulders, still wet, gleamed.
Annamae, twisting her bottom lip between finger and thumb, said nothing.
Then, with fresh annoyance: “What book is that?”
“Just an old one.” Annamae held it up: a collection of fairy tales no one had looked at in a million years.
“But why cut it up?”
“Leslie showed us.”
It was amazing, the images Leslie had shared with them during Book Bonanza. While the kids worked on making their own books from scratch, the teacher had pulled up on her phone examples of the opposite: art that started with already-made books and turned them into sculpture. Some of them you could barely tell had started out as books, that was how transformed they were. Some had been cut so that things—wagons, forests, ships—rose up out of the pages. Others had been cut so that things—ladders, honeycombs, tunnels—led down into the depths. One artist had even carved a book to look like rows of bookshelves that led farther and farther into the shadowy recesses of a library that seemed to go on without end.
“But she didn’t tell you that you could do it yourself?”
“No.”
“Well, you can’t. I’m sorry. I don’t want you doing this. That book I guess you can cut with scissors if you want—although you should have checked with me first—but you cannot use a knife.” Annamae’s mother took the knife, put it in the sink, and went to get dressed.
Annamae, with a crumpled feeling, bent to examine her handiwork. It was pathetic. She’d barely managed to make an inch-long gash go through a single page.