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Why? I got a third of the way through the book, and I just don’t see what’s so objectionable about it. There’s no sex. It’s not anti-religion. “Why not?” I ask.

He studies me, his brow furrowed. “Because I said so. That’s why. Since when do you think it’s appropriate to question my decisions?”

He expects me to hang my head, but I just stare at him. For the first time in my life, because I said so is no longer sufficient.

“Grace,” my mother says softly, “your father and the community school board went over hundreds of books and had specific reasons for those they banned. You can’t expect him to remember the reasons for each of them. Sometimes you just need to accept that we are acting in your best interest.”

I nod. But if they were acting in my best interest, would I be here, or would I be back at New Hope? If they were acting in my best interest, would I spend my days being shoved and taunted?

I’d always want to be brave enough to keep asking the questions, no matter how much the answer scares me.

Maybe I should be brave enough to ask if this move wasn’t made in our best interest but their own.

Upstairs, I get out my notebook and begin sketching him, just as he was when he said it: eyes blazing, jaw set as if he expected an argument, broad shoulders hunched in, hands in the pockets of his khakis.

There’s another sharp tug in the center of my stomach, half pain and half something else. My body is tight and hot and eager in a way it never has been before. I would like to stop thinking about him entirely, but I can’t.

Sometimes it seems that if I can just paint something well enough, I can bring it to life. But Ford remains there in my notebook, a dozen versions of him sandwiched between notes and other drawings.

And that, much like my father’s answer tonight, is entirely insufficient.

8

Ileave for school early the following morning, telling my mother I need to do some reading.

It’s not a lie—I do have some reading.

I’m so engrossed in Fahrenheit 451 that I barely notice the warning bell and wind up running to make it to first period.

Ford is where my gaze wants to go, but I refuse to allow it. My feelings about him are too jumbled to make sense of. He’s awful, and it was his family’s protests against my father that led to me moving here. Yet something has changed inside me because of him, possibly in a good way. I’m scared that I’m questioning things...but I don’t think it’s entirely bad.

When every other person in the class has presented, I’m forced to carry my notecards about Jane Eyre to the front of the room. I chose it because I liked it, but nothing I’m about to say is true. And sure, a lot of the presentations sounded like AP English kids trying to impress a teacher, but a lot of them, like Ford’s, did not.

Some of these people were genuine, honest, open, vulnerable. I owe it to them to do the same.

“I chose Jane Eyre as the book that changed my life,” I begin, my voice quiet and unwilling. I put the note cards down. “But it didn’t really. I guess the one book that comes to mind is Beloved, by Toni Morrison.”

I hid it under my mattress for two years before I read it. I’ll get in so much trouble if my father finds out about this...and yet, why? Why should I be punished for reading a book that won awards, that is a part of every high school and college curriculum?

I wish I’d planned out my speech in advance. It’s such a complex story that it would be hard to summarize even if I had time, and I don’t. I do my best, though, and all the while Ford is watching me, as if he’s trying to peer through my skull to the real thoughts beneath it.

“I guess the book’s intent is to show how cruel and dehumanizing slavery was, and it did that, but it’s not as if I wasn’t aware going in,” I say quietly. “It was the main character’s heartbreak over her daughter that got me. It was this whole level of feeling I’ve never even experienced in real life, and I had nightmares about it for weeks afterward. It was the first time I realized a book was capable of making you feel things you hadn’t ever experienced before. That even if you never get to leave your country, or your town or your home, in a way it allows you to exist in an entirely different life for a little while, and maybe so convincingly that you really think you’re there.”

I sense, as soon as I’m done, that I’ve said too much. But Ford’s gaze meets mine, and I’d swear I see surprise there instead of disdain.

“You have got to read Outlander,” Kappy says as we walk out of class. “Enough with all the smart people books.”

I glance at her with a smile. “Unless it’s about the Bible or obedience, I doubt my parents will let me.”

Suddenly a girl shoves me so hard from behind that I fly into the lockers in front of me, my glasses swinging to the floor in the process. The pain of the impact echoes down my forearm with such force that I drop the notebook in my hand. “You fucked with the wrong family, bitch,” she says.

Across the hallway, a girl standing beside Ford laughs.

Kappy hands me my notebook and glasses, which are now slightly crooked. “Are you okay?”

I can already feel the bruise where my left arm struck metal. A bruise isn’t a big deal, but as I nod and tell her I’m fine, it feels like a lie—I’m not fine.

I’ve suffered more abuse over the handful of weeks I’ve been here than I had during all the preceding years of my life. I’m missing out on the senior-class events I spent a decade looking forward to, and the only boy I ever found attractive from my cohort will be snapped up by the time I return to New Hope for mission orientation.