The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy (13 page)

Then we saw Luke.

He was talking to Trisha Meier.

She had him pinned against the wall. She was gesturing dramatically. Granted, she gestured dramatically all the time.

I stared at him. Jackson and Elizabeth saw him too. The force of our collective gaze was enough to make him notice us. His eyes lit up. He refocused on Trisha Meier, but I knew that he’d seen us and I knew to watch his expressions. His eyes flicked back and he gave me an almost imperceptible nod, an eyebrow twist, a light lift of his right shoulder.
Go ahead
, he meant.
Pretend not to know me. I’ll catch up as soon as I can
.

I nodded at him. We walked onward. We didn’t dare speak until we’d dumped the contraband
Contracantos
into the back of the Appelvan and sunk into the familiar, stained seats. I heaved the sliding door closed.

“Do we leave?” said Elizabeth.

“I think we leave.” Jackson turned the key in the ignition. Rattle, cough, silence.

“It’s faster for him to walk anyway,” said Elizabeth.

Jackson turned it again and the engine caught. “Not quite,” he said. “But a difference of ninety seconds. One-twenty, max.” The Appelvan had issues navigating Luke’s street, which is on a Himalayan hill. Once we had to get out and push while Jackson floored it.

“I’ll text him.” I felt better now that we’d seen him. I got out my phone.
We’re out. Wtf going on with you and Trisha?!

“Tell him that if he wants a ride, his pickup time tomorrow is six-forty-seven,” said Jackson. “Six-forty-one for you, Ethan. Elizabeth, you’re six-thirty-five.”

“That’s the asscrack of dawn,” she said.

“Actually, it’s thirty-five minutes before sunrise.”

“So it’s up dawn’s ass.”

“We need to get these things distributed. I don’t want them in the van over the weekend.”

“Yeah, much safer if they’re out to all Selwyn.”

I conducted a wrestling tournament with the triplets (I lost) and played some
Sun Tzu
(I lost) and argued with my mother about whether her prohibition against microwaving aluminum foil was based in fact or myth (I lost). I finished my Latin, started my bio, and blew off my calc. I read some
Cantos
. I brushed my teeth. I got into bed. I did some thinking.

I was weirded out.

Luke was still incommunicado. I’d texted him again once I got home, asking whether he wanted to walk or catch a ride. No response. The whole thing was so weird. He’d been stuck there with Trisha for thirty minutes. That was at least twenty-eight minutes too long to spend with her. And Luke despised Trisha Meier. He was real, and she was fake. He never would have chatted with her for half an hour.

But he had. Laughing and joking and gesturing right back at her. I saw it.

And he’d known that we were stuck in the subbasement, waiting for the all clear.

And anyway, why was Trisha at Selwyn? Even if the filming downtown was finished, why return to the building and chitchat with a high schooler? Didn’t she have a life? She could
have watched kTV in her hotel room, or explored wintry Minneapolis’s cultural offerings, or gone on a hate-date with Damien Hastings. I’ll say it again: it was weird.

It took me forever to get to sleep.

6:32. Phone alarm plays maddeningly cheerful tune. I fall out of bed and spend thirty seconds rubbing my eyes on the floor. No texts.

6:33. Shower.

6:35. Drape wet towel over toilet. Reconsider given mother’s recent ragefest re wet towels on toilet. Drape towel on rack.

6:36. Pull on jeans, a Twins shirt, and over that, a T-shirt that has been Sharpie-emblazoned with T
HE
I
MAGISM
C
LUB
.

6:37. Brush teeth while simultaneously stuffing books in backpack. Drip white froth all over Latin homework. Hope Ms. Pederson knows it’s toothpaste.

6:40. Stumble to kitchen. Accept granola bar from mother. Triplets are chatting perkily; give them the stink-eye. Ignore mother’s admonitions to wear coat.

6:41. See headlights. Forget lunch. Leave. Return for lunch. Leave.

Jackson and Elizabeth were slumped in the car. Every morning, Jackson adjusted his seat so he could drive while basically lying down. It was probably harrowing to be driven by a teenager who’d been awake for less than fifteen minutes, but I was always too groggy to care.

“I guess Luke is walking,” I said. “He never texted me back.”

“Odd,” said Elizabeth. “Jackson? You awake? Drive by his house to check.”

“Murmph,” grunted Jackson. That means yes. No is more like “nurmph.”

But Luke wasn’t waiting on his porch, and he didn’t spring into the car, and he didn’t roll down the windows to blast us with cold air, and he didn’t serenade us with one of his obnoxious morning songs.

“We can’t linger,” said Elizabeth. “We’ve got to get into our positions.”

“I was really hoping for some ‘Rise and Shine’ today,” I said mournfully.

“Ethan, you always claim ‘Rise and Shine’ makes you carsick.”

“I’d even go for ‘It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.’ ”

“He’ll meet us at school. He knows the plan.” But Elizabeth sounded anxious too.

Once we got our schoolbooks in our lockers, the covert operation began. I should mention that at Selwyn, everyone wants to start clubs for college applications. The problem is that nobody has time to join clubs, so you really have to grovel for members. That’s the impetus behind the Selwyn tradition of students standing at the front doors, wearing club T-shirts, and passing out informational brochures, which everyone takes since they often include a coupon for an upcoming bake sale. (Then the bake sale doesn’t make any money due to the coupon glut, and the club has to hand out more coupons so that people will patronize their next bake sale. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle. I’ve enjoyed many a free muffin in my day.)
We’d invented a Pound-inspired club, and we’d brought in full-head balaclavas. We stood at the door handing out brochures, which—in case you need it spelled out—were
Contracantos
.

“Where’s Luke?” hissed Jackson, who was at last fully conscious.

He hadn’t been by our lockers. Now he wasn’t at the doors.

“Forget it,” said Elizabeth. “And shut up, someone’ll recognize your voice.”

“He probably overslept,” I said, but shut up myself when I noticed that her eyes, through the balaclava, were slits.

Once I’d convinced myself that Luke was asleep, I started to have fun. I liked the mask part. It was a lot easier to shove leaflets into people’s hands when they didn’t know who I was. Some people just flat-out rejected them, but they circled back once they realized what they were. It’s strange how much people will ignore you if you’re (1) masked and (2) giving them something illegal that (3) they desperately want. I felt like a drug dealer.

Jackson gave the call of the cerulean warbler, the prearranged two-minutes-to-the-bell signal. We dumped the few we had left by the doors, rushed to the bathrooms to pull off the disguises, rushed to our lockers for our books, and rushed to our first-bell classes.

I slammed into my seat ten seconds after the bell rang. Mrs. Garlop gave me a pursed-lip glare. “Missed the bus,” I said. I tried to pretend that my heavy breathing was because I was stressed out about parametric equations, not because I’d sprinted from the front doors under a heavy load of breaking-the-rules
adrenaline. I remembered I hadn’t done my homework, so I found an old assignment, wrote “PARAMETRIC STUFF” really big on the top, and hoped it would pass. I finally relaxed. My heart rate subsided enough for me to look around.

I saw the telltale margins of blue-gray newsprint underneath papers, inside books, protruding from backpacks. I smiled. I wished Luke and I could smirk at each other, but his desk, next to mine, was empty. He must really be oversleeping, I thought. I was surprised that his super-intense mom was allowing it. Maybe his whole family was asleep. Struck down by sleeping sickness. Except wasn’t that a tropical disease? Our November snowstorm still hadn’t melted. But perhaps he had some other illness. He definitely wasn’t at school; you had to come in the front doors unless you were “requested elsewhere,” either by the administration or kTV.

He
must
be sick, I thought. He was already feverish last night, which was why he hadn’t been able to squirm out of Trisha Meier’s clutches. And that explained why he hadn’t texted me; he didn’t want to contaminate his phone with barf particles. He was probably really upset that he was missing the big distribution day for Issue II.

Yep. I bought it. I bought my own spiel.

I started to text him an update under my desk, but the Garlopian harpy radar started bleeping and she swooped down upon me. So I wrote down some nonsense about
dx
and
dy
and
dt
, hoping that wouldn’t inspire her to give me a real DT.

Morning Practice: trumpet, because I wanted to be alone
in a cubicle. Bio: notes on electrophoresis. Latin: Ovid encourages lovers to be pale and skinny (like me!). And all throughout, rumors whistling through the air, winging from one classmate to another:

It was finally lunchtime. Elizabeth and Jackson and I staked out a corner table, surrounding ourselves with a menacing siege-wall of books so that nobody would be tempted to join us. They had also heard. I don’t know what stage they’d reached, but I was firmly ensconced in denial. Jackson was the closest to realizing what had happened. He was a math genius for that reason: he could put together the known information in a way that led him to the truth.

“He’s absent because he’s sick,” I said. I was already wishing I could go back to calculus, when I’d actually believed myself. “These are just rumors.”

“I don’t think we can write them off as ‘just rumors,’ ” said Elizabeth. “There’s a surprising amount of truth in them.”

“There is not.”

“But there is. As of this morning, nobody knew he was involved with the
Contracantos
. Now everybody knows it.”

I began to maim my corn dog. “He must be furious. If he’s missing class because of kTV, I mean. We’ve got English. And he was going to spend Morning Practice and creative writing on Issue III. He must be so angry. He hates them.”

“They can’t force him to be on the show,” said Elizabeth.

“They must have,” I said. I remembered how sparkly he’d looked while talking to Trisha Meier. I remembered my phone’s empty in-box. “He was definitely forced.”

“If it’s true,” said Elizabeth, “he chose.”

“She’s right,” said Jackson.

“Luke wouldn’t choose kTV!” I cried. “He
always
chooses right. He hates kTV more than anyone.”

Every time, I was the one who didn’t get it, the one who believed too hard.

“There he is,” said Jackson, sounding resigned.

Already Luke seemed like a mythical figure. I’d spent the past four hours obsessing over him, wondering about his motivations, wondering where he was, and I’d almost forgotten that he existed, that I could just ask him. I jerked around to see the cafeteria door.

There he was, the real Luke, looking so comfortingly normal, so familiar and nonchalant in his jeans and flannel button-down, that I jumped up and began waving my arms as
if I were directing a jet’s landing. I was practically wearing an orange vest. “Luke!”

He saw me and gave a compact wave, a flip of the hand. He turned to the girl behind him and said something. It was Maura Heldsman. She laughed. They dumped their bags on a table and headed for the food lines.

I sat down.

Jackson and Elizabeth were staring at each other, doing their cousin-telepathy thing.

My corn dog was in crumbles on my plate.

I lifted my head again.

Jackson and Elizabeth were still looking at each other. I felt like I’d slipped into a state of being in which I no longer existed on the same plane as the rest of the world. I could see them, but they couldn’t see me.

“He chose,” said Elizabeth again. Her face shone fiercely from behind her dreadlocks.

Jackson nodded.

That was the first time I remembered that he was their friend too.

English class, last period. Luke and Maura weren’t there. I’d heard from Cynthia Soso that there’d been an announcement on the kTV website: tonight’s scheduled episode was pushed back to next week, and they’d have a rerun instead.

“So that’s why Trisha was here,” said Jackson. “They needed more time downtown.”

“Or else they wanted to work in Luke,” I said.

“Maybe both.”

Elizabeth was watching us from across the room. I almost gestured for her to come sit in Luke’s empty seat. I don’t know why I didn’t. Instead, with no Maura to gaze at, with no Luke to talk to, with Jackson mired in his “Guess the Square Root” calculator game, I actually paid attention. And I was in that zone where all emotions are heightened. You know? One of your miniature sisters starts chanting, and you want to stuff her PB&J into her face. When you can translate a line of Ovid, you feel utter joy. Then you can’t define any word in the next line and you’re crushed by despair. You tear up at a sappy TV commercial. (Then you realize it’s an ad for tampons and you feel like crying again, though for a different reason.)