Lessons from the Book Room
- 5 days ago
- 8 min read
By Karen Wilfrid
"Go check the book room." In the public middle school where I teach, this suggestion is enough to instill dread in any English teacher's heart. Less of a room and more of a shelf-lined passage, the book room connects the main hallway to the teachers' lounge, and houses a highly frequented staff bathroom. In addition to being awkwardly located, it's also poorly maintained—or, rather, it defies maintaining. Boxes that were labeled and counted in June are, by September, somehow missing. In their place are scrappy paperbacks from the nineties and overly enthusiastic social studies textbooks called History ALIVE!
Over the years, the English department has purchased new texts, replacing authors embroiled in scandal and stuffy Newbery winners with more diverse and recent titles—but though we continually added, we never culled. Apparently, a bureaucratic process governed the discarding of good-condition texts, and that process was too demanding for anyone's time. In other words: Can't teach 'em, can't toss 'em. So for years these books filled the shelves, collecting spiders and dust.
Until last spring, when our English department coordinator Liz announced that she was cleaning out the book room for real this time. She e-mailed us a list of titles: "Does anyone actually teach these??"
I e-mailed back in a panic. "Please don't get rid of Bamboo Grove!!!"
I didn't teach Yoko Kawashima Watkins' So Far from the Bamboo Grove. I hadn't taught it since my team and I decided, eleven years ago, that it was too one-sided a portrayal of the Korean-Japanese conflict in World War II. In the time since, our curriculum had moved on, but five hundred copies of Bamboo Grove had remained packed up on a top shelf in five plastic bins. And eleven years ago, one of those five hundred copies had belonged to a student of mine who now was no longer living.
I already had a collection of mementos from this student, Tyler, who died by suicide at the age of twenty-one. His introductory index card from the first day of seventh grade. A scrap of paper where he'd once signed his name. A photograph from our field trip to the zoo, where, in front of five geese and a sign that said, "Do Not Scare the Geese," he'd held the edges of his jacket wide like wings and shouted, "HAH!"
At the time, I hadn't had any good reason to keep these artifacts. I only knew that I kept them because I missed him. I missed his messy scrawl responding only "yes" when my question had three parts; I missed his frank assessments of group activities "It went horribly"), and I missed the relationship I had spent a year building with him, only to have it end just because it was June and he wasn't my student anymore. "You're the only one I'm going to miss," he told me on his last day of seventh grade, before disappearing into the chaos of yearbook signing and the ten-second countdown to dismissal. Teachers understand this: Some students are just special. Eight years later, after he died, I delicately leafed through everything, looking for clues. Looking to understand how this could have happened.
As time went on, every once in a while, something of his would turn up. I found his worksheets in long-lost piles of ungraded materials that, as a first-year teacher, I had been too overwhelmed to organize with any kind of sense, much less grade and return. In the summer, flipping through an old notebook, I found the construction paper hand turkey he had made me for Thanksgiving, and which I had tucked in there to keep it flat: "Thank-You-Ms.-Wilfrid!" the four fingers read. His hand, his fingers.
Each time I found something, the elation I felt was edged with fear. Eventually, the trickle of artifacts would run dry. Nothing more of him to find. Nothing more to know.
He had been gone for three years when Liz e-mailed about the book room. It hit me immediately: I had taught Bamboo Grove to Tyler. Which meant that somewhere, in those dusty bins, there was a copy with his name on the inside cover.
The idea of a school-issued book is a novelty to most of my students today. With the proliferation of online texts, plus the COVID pandemic upending so many of our customs for digital versus paper curriculum materials, my seventh graders today are unaccustomed to the idea of a book that another student has briefly owned.
"Is this mine?" one of them will invariably ask, when I hand them their copy of The
Outsiders.
"Only for the next month," I say, wanting to make sure it's clear. "Then you have to give it back."
They are similarly unfamiliar with the concept of the former owners' names being written inside. "Who's Melanie Smith?" they'll demand, usually with some level of disdain toward the hanger-on. There's also glee: "Hey, Jake, I have your sister's book!" Sometimes it gives them pause to think about how old their copy is—an explanation for why the back cover is falling off, or why the pages are rippled from water damage and, somehow, pink. What they don't feel is reverence. In seventh grade, who would? I, the teacher, am the keeper of those sentimental feelings toward all the students who came before them. When I hand out books, I glimpse the list of names and remember faces, voices, and useless details, like a quiet girl who once told me she had a collection of rubber ducks.
By the time of Tyler's passing, the other books I had taught him had been through so many circulations, changing hands between the other four English teachers and me, that I had little hope of stumbling across a copy that had been his. But So Far from the Bamboo Grove had sat on that upper shelf for eleven years. Five plastic time capsules, one of which might contain a whisper from Tyler.
There aren't many opportunities in a busy school day to go through five hundred books one by one. I made time in the early morning, before the day had officially begun, and brought the first box back to my classroom, sneezing at the cloud of dust that blew up when I disturbed the lid. One at a time, I removed each book, scanned the names on the inside cover, and set it in a stack. The stack became small towers as I checked book after book. I recognized some last names—siblings I had never met—but no names of students I had taught. I would have liked to continue, but I only had time for one box before I needed to make photocopies and start the day. I returned it to the shelf, disappointed but hopeful for the four that remained.
Over the next two weeks, I stole time when I could to search. The third box was promising, turning up books belonging to about half of my own students, whose names I studied fondly—Maddie, Ani, Alex, Robbie—before adding them to the pile. No Tyler.
The task was not without its own pleasure. While most of the inside covers contained a smattering of names (very few stayed in any kind of vertical list), every so often one turned up with an amusing message:
hi people of the future
This book is NOT good. JK good book
This book is the property of the half-blood prince
Hahaha this is mine now!
U shall not pass
Bunnies are awesome
I briefly thought I'd found the copy owned by our local celebrity, Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman—but after finding multiple copies with her name, I realized it had to be some seventh-grade hoax.
Each morning that I hauled another box into my room, a voice in my head would tell me, You're not going to find it. It isn't there. Of course, I'd had this misgiving from the beginning. Tyler hadn't been what you would call organized. On Poetry Day, when parents came to hear students read their original poems aloud, he came to me just as class was about the start and said, "So, I thought my mom was going to bring my poem for me, but..."
"Tyler!" God, I loved him. We figured it out; he shared his poem. But now, as I narrowed down the boxes that might still have his book, a voice in my head kept saying, He might never have given it back.
I came to the fourth box. The top layer yielded only unknown names, but then I hit a vein of gold: not only the names of students I knew, but students who had been in his class. Ava. Brenna. Andrew. Sam. My heart beat faster. I reached for the last book in the box. The dreamer in me, the writer in me, thought this would have to be the one. The realist knew it probably wouldn't be, but still hoped.
It wasn't. Just somebody else.
One of the most shameful thoughts I had after Tyler died was, Why him? Not "Why him?" in the universal sense, but why specifically him, out of the nine hundred students I had taught by that time? I didn't want any of my students to die—but the fact that I lost Tyler, my favorite student whom I had prayed for and cried for and loved, the first student who had truly touched my heart—it felt like a personal attack from the universe, one that I was still struggling to make sense of three years later as I searched through those boxes. As I opened book after book, reading name after name, was his really going to be the only one I couldn't find?
That left the fifth box. I put it off, postponing disappointment, but I knew Liz was itching to toss books now that she finally had permission from the district. So, on a Thursday morning, I reached for the last box on the shelf, dusted off some dead moths, and brought it back to my classroom.
It's fine either way, I told myself with each book. It's fine. I'm fine.
It would be nice to have it.
It could be here.
Why shouldn't it be here?
First book to last, I checked them all.
It wasn't there.
I let out a shaky breath, telling myself it didn't matter as I calmly returned the books to their bin.
In the years since his passing, Tyler's mom has become one of my dear friends. I texted her, barely holding back tears. I recognized my other students from that year mixed up in all the boxes but I didn't find his. Why is that?
I meant the question in the huge unfairness of it all, but when she replied, his mom gave me the down-to-earth truth. Tyler probably didn't write his name in his, she wrote, with a little wink. But you have something much better. You have him with you all the time.
I believe her that Tyler's spirit is with me in some way. Maybe he watches over me as I teach, the way I once watched over him. Still, it's hard not to think about how much it would have meant to me to find his book. To hold something he had held. One more message from him.
The book room is clean—for now. Liz cleared out all the books we no longer use or teach, made the Social Studies department find another place to store their outdated textbooks, and sent a forbidding e-mail to all staff instructing them not to add or remove anything without first consulting her. As always, when I hand out books to my students, I'll remind them to write their names on the inside cover, and I'll ask if they recognize any of the names before theirs. Then we'll begin to read. They won't know; but I will, that when they inscribe their own name wherever they find space, they are leaving behind a piece of themselves that someone, someday, might want to find.
Karen is a writer and seventh-grade English teacher based in Newton, Massachusetts. Her first novel, JUST LIZZIE, was published in November 2023 and went on to become a Lambda LGBTQ+ Award finalist and a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection.
