The cover was the hard pebbled kind that schools buy because it survives, and it had survived — corners bumped soft, spine reinforced once with cloth tape gone amber. I opened it for the price and got the bookplate instead.
Printed right on the pastedown, a little box with ruled lines. THIS BOOK BELONGS TO. GRADE. TEACHER. And it was filled in, in pen, in the careful upright hand of a kid who had been told this mattered and believed it. The name sat dead center on its line, each letter formed on its own, no joins yet, the confident block printing of someone still being graded on penmanship. The grade said a number I won’t give. The teacher’s name was there too, in the same hand, spelled the way the kid heard it, which may or may not have been the way it was spelled.
The pen had bitten in. You could feel the name from the back of the pastedown, raised, the way carbon paper leaves a ghost. Whoever they were, they had pressed the way you press when a thing is new and official and yours.
The book had come a long way down from that. From a desk to a locker to a box to a shelf here, a dollar, demoted out of school entirely, no longer teaching anyone anything. But the line still held. The book still belonged to the name in the box, by its own printed word, long after the kid had grown past it or quit it or forgotten they’d ever pressed a pen so hard into the front of a thing.
Under the amber tape on the spine, where it had lifted, the original cloth was still the bright unfaded color it left the bindery.