I used to get in trouble in sixth grade. All of the time. Unfortunately, I didn’t get an interesting reputation for it. I wasn’t the class clown, or one of the girls who got caught trying to sneak a bottle of cooking wine into the Halloween dance, or even the kid that nobody really paid attention to until they were stuck doing a group project with him and he promptly blew off doing his part.
Nope, nothing so thrillingly clich? for me. Instead, I was a goody-goody, a teacher’s pet, and, let’s not mince words, a dork. But I did get in trouble. I swear. Of course it was for reading a book while I was supposed to be doing some other asinine assignment, but still, it counts.
For starters, why would a middle school teacher get angry with one of her students for reading? And to stave off the predictable response to that, I must say in my defense that I showed great discretion in deciding when to whip out my book. I should have been a teacher’s dream!
When I was even younger, I’d spend an insane amount of time in our town’s public library. The library’s old building was fantastic, a bibliophile’s dream. It was a converted old home, complete with winding staircases between the two levels and narrow catwalks that led from one wing to the other through a tunnel of stuffed bookcases. That building was the crack dealer to my various book obsessions and willingly gave me the fix I needed at the moment. China, Nancy Drew, Egypt, the Babysitters’ Club-all my manias were nurtured by that building.
One of the last books I remember reading before the city shut the space down to start working on its “new and improved” facility (a building that rivals Lauinger in ugliness) was Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I could have survived on nothing but air as I read that book. Its pages entranced me, even the ones in which Francie’s father, to put it delicately, “gets it on” with her aunt. Those, of course, caused me great distress as I hurried to get through them lest my bookmark stop in an accusatory position, my mom happens to walk into my room, pick up the book, open it, find the exact sentence I’d just finished and realize that I knew that more than just trees were popping up in the outer boroughs.
Francie became my hero when she discovered her neighborhood library and vowed to read every book in the joint-starting with A and plowing through until she’d finished with Z. Unlike Francie, though, I couldn’t care less about the flowerpot near the door that changed its contents with the seasons. Forget the goddamn plants, give me some books!
Things weren’t the same after they closed that building and, combined with my rebellious, troublemaking sixth-grade experiences, I began to read less and less. One day I stopped altogether.
Me, of all people, had to scrambl to get all the reading points I was supposed to have accumulated throughout the quarter. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to read. I was tired of being the bookworm and getting along better with the elderly school librarian than I did with my classmates. I didn’t want to be the nerd anymore. (Although stopping reading didn’t vault me from my throne in the kingdom of nerdhood, if you couldn’t tell.)
And then one day I stood in line to check out a book that would get me the reading points I needed to save my grade, which was good, pending the addition of those points that were due in two days. In front of and behind me were the other cool kids who had slacked. Behind them, though, was the senior newspaper editor who I, being the stellar one to judge on this subject, had always labeled a geek. I didn’t see him, but his voice traveled and I heard him saying how sad it made him that nobody read for fun anymore. I don’t know to whom he was talking-in a way, it was me-but I got an outrageous urge to turn and throw my arms around him. I didn’t snicker at what he’d said like the guy behind me. I didn’t move either. I looked straight ahead and kept my mouth shut.
Thinking about it now, it seems as if I subconsciously slipped back into my bookish ways starting at that moment. I was still a dork, but at least now I knew that I was not the only one: T.J. and I would lead our dork brigade armed with reading glasses and booklights against the wannabe illiterates of the world.
So where does that leave our fine heroine now? I like to think that I’m not so much dorky as endearingly quirky, but I have no trouble embracing my nerdiness. And as for the books? Well, let’s just say that when I went out dancing the other day, my purse was weighed down by the novel in it. No, I didn’t pull it out to read in the middle of the club and, yes, I took much grief about it from my friends. But then again, when you’re bookworm royalty it takes more than a bit of teasing to get you down. Yep, it’s good to be queen.
Rachel Sierminski is a senior in the College.
