I walked into the Maple Grove Elementary gym Monday morning at 8:14 a.m. and I knew before I rounded the cardboard castle that something was deeply, chemically off. It smelled like a UPS Store inside a nail salon inside a brand-new Kia. Cleo was already three feet into the tent, vibrating, with what I would later learn were six (6) free pencils clutched in her fist.
Those pencils, for the record, smell like a tire. Not metaphorically. Like a Goodyear. I held one to my nose in the parking lot and got an instant pressure headache behind my left eye, which my sister-in-law Tessa — who works the front desk at a pediatric office and has been around enough sick kids to basically be a nurse — says is one of the first signs of acute VOC exposure in moms who have not yet had coffee.
Here is the part nobody at the PTA meeting wanted to talk about. The Scholastic truck rolled in Friday afternoon. The cardboard castle, the foam standees, the seventeen vinyl banners, the laminated bookmarks, the little plastic erasers shaped like avocados — all of it sat sealed inside a closed elementary school gymnasium from 4 p.m. Friday until 8 a.m. Monday. That is sixty-four hours of off-gassing in a room with no airflow and a wood floor that absorbs everything. The kindergartners walked into a chemistry experiment and were handed a tote bag.
I posted in Bookfair Mamas Reading the Fine Print (3,200 members, very tight community) and within twenty minutes a mom in Tulsa named Lindsey had taken a photo of the back of one of those scratch-and-sniff bookmarks. The ingredient list said “fragrance.” That is it. Just “fragrance.” Lindsey’s pediatric chiropractor told her “fragrance” is a legal umbrella term for up to 3,000 unlisted compounds, and I am sorry, but if I cannot pronounce what is making my third grader’s bookmark smell like buttered popcorn, my third grader is not licking it.
Now, before anybody emails me — yes, I let Wyatt buy a book. Two, actually. But I want to be very clear about my reasoning, because consistency matters. Used books from the school library are fine. Those volumes have been releasing their VOCs into open classroom air for, in some cases, four decades. They are essentially inert. A 1994 copy of Hatchet has nothing left to give. It is the brand-new glossy hardcovers, sealed in shrink wrap and stacked next to a foam castle for a long weekend, that I am asking questions about. This is the same logic as sourdough. Time is not an ingredient. Time is a remediation.
Tessa told me that on Tuesday afternoon a third grader at her office came in with a nosebleed and the mom mentioned, just in passing, that he had spent forty-five minutes at the book fair the day before browsing the gel pen wall. Tessa is not allowed to draw conclusions in her professional capacity. I am, because this is my blog. The gel pen wall is doing something.
I tried to raise this gently with Karen from the PTA in the pickup line and she looked at me like I had asked her to cancel Christmas. Karen said, and I quote, “Brooke, they’re books.” I said Karen, the cardboard castle has a smell. She said all cardboard has a smell. I said not like that, Karen. Not like a freshly resurfaced parking lot. She rolled up her window. That is fine. Karen and I are going to be okay. Karen has her path.
So here is what we did. I let Cleo keep one (1) of the six pencils, which is now quarantined in the garage in a Mason jar with the lid off, and I told her it had to “breathe for a season.” She cried. I get it. I bought her a paperback Boxcar Children from the church basement sale for a dollar — yellowed pages, slight mildew, perfect — and she is reading it on the porch right now, completely fine, and Wyatt is on his second chapter of a 1987 Beverly Cleary that smells the way a book is supposed to smell, which is like a grandmother’s attic, not like a Jiffy Lube.