Homework.

She hid behind the bookshelf. Her small body fit perfectly in the space between the wall and the rows of books her mother collected and picked through often. Soon she would come home from work. The girl usually waited for her in the kitchen, but this time she wanted to create a little surprise.

“Surprise mamma!” She jumped out of the shelf and showed her a drawing she made at school that day. Then she wrapped her arms around her mother’s waist and squeezed her.

“Not now, hun,” her mother said tiredly, weakly hugging her back before walking purposefully towards the kitchen.

She had just come back from her 10-hour shift at the hospital. It was no easier being an ER triage assistant than any of the doctors and nurses working there. Her stress was equal to anyone else’s at that hospital, but her work was thankless, unforgiving, and unrewarded — not to mention the pay was awful. But she had dreams, big ones.

Yet there was still a long road ahead. She was saving up to go back to her state college to finish her bachelor’s degree on a pre-med track. Then the plan was medical school. How she would manage this with a seven-year-old to feed and rent to pay was anyone’s guess. Maybe she worked so hard just avoid those little discomforts her daughter would face, like showing up to class with clothes straight out of donation boxes, or the second-rate school supplies. She was a kid once. Not even that long ago, truthfully. She knew what it would be like for her daughter to come to school feeling “less-than.”

“Med school is far, far away, isn’t it,” she sighed to herself, playing that same story again in her mind about how she was going to manage.

The girl didn’t think too much about her mother’s grumpiness, she was used to it by now. And she had a brain full of good ideas on how to cheer her up.

“Mamma, I wrote something special for my homework today.” She said confidently, sitting at the table, pushing away her almost finished mac n cheese plate. “I wrote a poem! About all those books on your favorite bookshelf.”

Her mother started making her own dinner that she dutifully ate while standing at the kitchen counter. The faint thud of the screen door signaled their neighbor leaving for the day.

“So, you wrote a story about my books?” she asked, distracted by her attempt at food preparation. On the menu: stale tortilla chips with cheddar cheese, sour cream, and hot salsa. She added some fresh cilantro to make sure she got her greens for the night.

“Yep! I know you really, really like your books,” said the girl. “So, I wrote something about the secrets that live on your bookshelf.”

“What was your homework assignment again?”

“The teacher asked us where we keep our secrets. You know, the stuff we don’t tell anyone. Or at least what we try not to tell anyone else, you know? I know I’m not allowed to look at your books…so obviously there’s secrets in there.”

Secrets. “Crap, what are they teaching her at school?” she thought. Maybe it was some new-age teaching methodology. What kids learn changes as quickly as lightning these days.

Then she thought about that bookshelf. Her most prized possessions were her books. They stood there upright, lovingly organized and categorized, their heights perfectly matching up and separated by width, just so. There were books of all kinds. She thought about her favorite fantasy novel series from when she was sixteen, all twelve of them lined up at the far right corner of the bottom shelf. Above them were some of the classics she had to read in her English Lit class: Steinbeck, Hawthorne, Lee, Salinger, Fitzgerald. The top shelf held the books she tried to read nowadays. They were mostly to prepare her for premed. She Googled “top ten books a premed student should read while not studying,” and ordered five from the list.

“Secrets? In my books?” she thought about it for a moment. She was struck by how her daughter could put that idea together, so poetic in its own right. For her, books were her hiding place. She always thought of herself as a nerd who preferred books to anything else. Well, except for the time when she fell in love with the guy from her “Intro to Biology” class.

The nameless one, the one she pushed away deep in her memory. The guy who committed to nothing yet all the same who gave her everything — her little world sitting in front of her. Was there something that snuck its way onto her bookshelf that gave him away? Was there a note or a photo stuck between the pages that had fallen out? Nonsense thoughts swirled around in her head, and she started to panic.

“Sooo, don’t you wanna know what I wrote?” reeling her back into the kitchen. She sat there in the exact same way she herself would do when she was young. Legs crossed at her ankles, feet dangling, head slightly tilted to the left, her fingers tapping at the side edges of her chair and bouncing ever-so-slightly up and down. She waited.

“Yes hun, of course.” She tried to hide her fears of being somehow confronted with the nameless one. “Please read it to me.”

“Secrets are like books.
They can be big or small, boring or funny, happy or sad.
They can be new and exciting, like the smell of clean pages.
Or they can be old, catching dust because no one likes to open them anymore.
Maybe we keep all those books on the bookshelf in front of us,
so we still remember what we’re not supposed to remember anymore.
Can you keep a secret? I’ve got a book that can hide them.”

She finished reading and looked up, wearing her pride with a smile. After a moment, her smile faded and her face fell. Her mother’s eyes were wide open and she was frozen.

“Um, I uh…that was really nice, hun.” she said finally. “Thank you for sharing it with me.” She turned to the counter and finished the last Tortilla chip, finishing off with two big gulps of her diet coke. She tried not to catch the girl’s embarrassed look. She knew her own reaction was awful. And she knew her daughter deserved real praise. But still, she couldn’t face her.

That old book. Buried for seven years, a phantom hiding between all the others, trying to find its own, rightful place on that bookshelf. Its secret story was written in ink.

“But I wouldn’t erase any of it,” After all, it needed to be exactly as it was in order for it to be exactly as it should be now. Would she go back and change anything?

“Sometimes… I wish I could rewrite all those naive and reckless chapters,” she thought. “But then, where would I be? Without my little one to teach me, what would I even know of this world?”

She kneeled in front of her little world and looked straight into her eyes. “I’m sorry.” she said, “For my reaction earlier just now. Your poem is perfect. It’s beautiful.”

“But why did you get sad? What did I do wrong?” her daughter asked.

She placed one hand on her daughter’s lap and the other caught on the small curls of the girl’s hair. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I was just surprised, is all. Because I have a secret that I want to tell you. I do keep a secret or two in those books. And there’s a couple of them that’ve been gathering dust. Maybe we can both sit down and read through them some time. What do you think?”

“Ok!” Her daughter smiled as she leaped out of her chair. She walked to her room to listen to her favorite songs. The moment was over, and the next would be for another time. It was after all, just some homework.