The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy (20 page)

But, I thought, at least now I have a tricolon of botched romance. What rhetorical flair. Plus, I figured that this would have to be the last one.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth braced her legs against the strut and grabbed me at the armpits.

“Ready?”

She tugged. With difficulty, and pain, I extracted my leg and collapsed. Now the beam was what I wanted to kiss. Firm land! The joy!

“Andrezejczak,” she said. She began to giggle again.

“Don’t talk to me,” I groaned.

Still laughing, she pulled up the destroyed tile, shone the flashlight down, shrugged, and lowered herself by the beam.

“Big clear desk below the hole,” she called up to me. “Even you should make it okay.”

I didn’t have much of a choice. The crawl space had not been kind to me, and I wanted to leave it behind. She flipped on the overhead light just as I gingerly lowered myself onto the desk. The mauled fiberboard settled into place.

We looked around. Two things struck us immediately.

The office was blanketed with bits of ceiling, sprinkled like pixie dust from on high.

And the office belonged to Willis Wolfe, Principal, Selwyn Academy.

It wasn’t hard to tell. Framed photographs, hundreds of them, covered all available wall space, waist level to ceiling. They featured Willis Wolfe smiling his toothy smile with Beyoncé, with George Bush I, with other people too shiny not to be famous.

“He’s an egomaniac,” I said.

Elizabeth was perched on the edge of the desk, still letting out intermittent spurts of laughter. I tried to distract her.

“Well, Baconnaise is doing fine.” I had him on my palm. Even he seemed to be regarding me with a smirk. “We have to meet Jackson in twenty minutes. And we need to repair, um, the accident.”

She looked in the closet. “Ha. I knew Willis Wolfe would have one of these.” She’d found a miniature vacuum cleaner.

“Yeah, he’s a bit OCD, isn’t he?”

“Could explain the whiteness of his teeth.” She began Dirt-Deviling. “Don’t just stand there. Do something. The outline of your leg is immortalized in the ceiling.”

I inspected the hole. “Uh, Elizabeth? Do you see any, like, tubs of wet plaster?”

“No, Ethan. Would Scotch tape do?” She was being sarcastic, but it gave me an idea.

“Actually …”

I grabbed the tape, pinched some computer paper from the printer, and climbed on top of the desk. I couldn’t quite reach. So I heaved the swivel chair up first, but I couldn’t bring myself to climb onto it. One mortifying fall per night was my limit.

“Uh, Elizabeth? Want to hold the chair?”

She rolled her eyes, hard, but she held the chair, and even took over tape-tearing responsibilities. Then I saw it.

“Holy crap.”

“Are you referring to the ceiling? Because I’d call that a crappy hole.”

“Too soon. And seriously, Elizabeth, look.”

She must have heard the urgency in my voice, because she clambered up on the desk and looked at the photograph. It was high on the wall.

“Holy crap indeed,” she said.

Willis Wolfe is freakishly timeless, but you could tell this picture was fifteen or twenty years old just by the mottled quality of the light. On the other side of the photograph was a guy whom I immediately recognized as Coluber. He looked like himself with more hair.

In between them stood a little kid, ten or eleven years old. Chubby. Familiar. Red-blond hair. I had no doubts, and neither did Elizabeth.

“It’s BradLee,” she whispered.

“It has to be.”

“Look at that baby face.” BradLee was essentially unchanged from his ten-year-old self. It was as if a fifth grader had grown stubble.

Elizabeth started snapping photographs of the photograph. “Meta,” I told her.

“We need to show Jackson. We might not be able to get into this room”—she glanced at the hole in the ceiling, half-covered with flapping computer paper—“the proper way.”

“No wonder he spies for Coluber,” I said. “He’s known him for years.”

“He lied.”

How many times had BradLee told us he had no link to the school? How many times had he joked that he’d chosen Minnesota with a dartboard?

“Let’s get out of here,” I said. The bald-faced lying was creeping me out.

“That looks like a kindergarten art project. Finish first.”

I did a crummy job on the rest of the hole and clambered down. “Not bad,” said Elizabeth. “I wouldn’t have even tried.”

The patch was approximately the same color as the ceiling tiles, but the join was obvious if you were looking for it. I climbed back up, rubbed my hands on my shirt, and transferred some dust onto the paper so it wouldn’t shine as much.

“Getting perfectionistic, are we,” muttered Elizabeth.

Too bad the dust would waft down over the next few days. Probably right onto Willis Wolfe’s gleaming blond hair. Or onto the hair of anybody who was in here having a clandestine meeting. Like BradLee.

“Tell me there’s a way out that doesn’t involve going back into that ceiling,” I said.

“You don’t want to go back up there?” she said innocently. She tested the office door, and it opened. Thank goodness. She clicked the lock on the inside of the knob and flipped the lights off. We were out in the hallway.

“I hope Coluber actually left,” murmured Elizabeth. I was thinking the same thing. In the ensuing brouhaha, I’d almost forgotten why we’d had to hide in the ceiling in the first place. Now, alone in the hall, the darkness encroaching, I was suddenly scared. Was he still around? Had he suspected something? Was he lying in wait to trap us?

Then we heard footsteps. Loud. Hurrying. In mutual terror, Elizabeth and I clutched each other. We couldn’t move. We didn’t even try to get away.

This all lasted about a second. Because then the footsteps turned the corner and we saw Jackson.

“Fricking deer in a fricking forest my ass,” said Elizabeth very quickly.

“I didn’t anticipate a reason to be quiet.”

“You caught us at a bad time,” she said.

“I can see that.”

We dropped each other as if we’d been transmogrified into hot potatoes. “Not like that,” said Elizabeth scornfully. She gave Jackson a brief recap while I tried to rewind to the moment I’d been too scared to appreciate at the time: what it felt like to hold Elizabeth in my arms, to be held in hers. I’d brushed a chunk of dreadlocks. They were surprisingly soft. That’s all I could remember.

You pretty much have to go to Dinkytown if you want to go anywhere after eleven in Minneapolis, so we went to Annie’s Parlour. We nabbed a corner booth and watched trashed U students inhale greasy food. I had a chocolate-banana malt. Jackson got a half order of fries. Neither one of us could finish. Elizabeth had claimed she wasn’t hungry, but she polished off both orders by dipping the French fries into the malt.

Girls are so weird.

The waiters were too busy to notice, so I let Baconnaise hang out on an empty plate. He had a French fry as a personal salt lick and seemed very pleased with life. Meanwhile, we shared the results of our investigation.

R
EPORT FROM
E
LIZABETH
(abridged): “We photographed Coluber’s financial documents. Ethan fell through the ceiling. [Here I redact their mocking repartee. It went on for ages. I sucked industriously at my malt and did my best to ignore them.] BradLee has known Coluber and Willis Wolfe since he was about ten. And Ethan is a wizard with Scotch tape.”

R
EPORT FROM
E
THAN
(unabridged): “What she said.”

R
EPORT FROM
J
ACKSON
(reported as I heard it—i.e., as gibberish): “I found the external drive that stores the RAM terabits of the X-Pro Lotus footage, but unfortunately, given their inaccessible plaintext software, it’d be difficult for an adversary to access the data even from the room itself much less from a cold-boot non-authenticated elsewhere locale.”

“Explain that in regular-person language,” said Elizabeth.

“Sure. A basic port scan revealed—”

She cut him off. “You are so irregular you don’t even know what regular is. Skip the details. You can’t get into the footage from afar, correct?”

“Correct.”

“Damn.”

“Indeed.”

“There goes that idea.”

“It wasn’t really an idea,” I pointed out.

“It was the seedling of an idea,” Jackson said.

“An idea-fetus,” I said.

“More like an idea-embryo.”

“An idea-zygote.”

“True. Just diploids.”

“Does that have anything to do with dipshits?” That was a
disgusted Elizabeth. Jackson and I grinned at each other. And I missed Luke with a sudden pang that hit me right in the gut.

Though maybe that was just the load of chocolate-banana malt.

Jackson started perusing the images on Elizabeth’s camera, using the arrows and the zoom with the deftness of someone who’s devoted years of his life to video games. Elizabeth and I picked at fries, and watched the college kids stumble and guffaw, and said things when there was something to say.

“Did VORTEX even do anything?” she said at one point.

I hadn’t let myself ask that, yet.

“We don’t know anything more than we used to.”

“Yeah we do.”

“Nothing useful.”

Then Jackson lifted his head. With a glassy stare at a guy with pumped-up pecs and a Sigma Pi shirt, he said, “Idiot!”

“He may not be terribly smart,” I said in a quiet rush, “but you shouldn’t antagonize that type, Jackson.”

“I’m an
idiot
!” he said with the same intonation, still gazing at the frat-ass. “He encrypts the bite-protocol VWD with app-safe Norton anti-RAM Intel Duo PGP public key!”

Or something like that.

Jackson’s eyes refocused. He saw us staring at him. “I can get into Coluber’s files now.”

“What are we waiting for?” said Elizabeth. She slapped a twenty on the table. “Pay me back later. Let’s get to the Appelden. And I’m driving.”

*   *   *

Of course, after all that brake-slamming and going up on two wheels at every sharp turn, Elizabeth and I had to wait around for Jackson to de-RAM the bites or whatever. He was working on one monitor and using the other to research problems. I’d briefly attempted to watch, but he was tabbing so spastically that it made me seasick. I sunk into the couch and let Baconnaise run free. After spending a long evening in my pocket, he was more energetic than Elizabeth and I put together.

“Want to see his circus tricks?” I asked her.

“Nothing sounds more appealing,” she said, but she didn’t have anything else to do.

“You can choose,” I said magnanimously. I love captive audiences. “Tightrope walk? Yarn choice? Or a new one.”

“Although it
is
fascinating to watch a gerbil always choose green yarn, I feel like I could do that myself. Let’s mix it up. New one.”

“I give you: Baconnaise the Tumbler! Doo-doo-
doo
!”

“What was
that
?”

“Somersault!” I ordered Baconnaise as I surreptitiously pulled his tail. The command was all for show. I’d discovered the link between “tail-tug” and “gerbil somersault” through pure serendipity, much like when Fleming discovered penicillin.

“Can he cartwheel?” said Elizabeth.

I was miffed that she wasn’t appreciating his somersault, which was extremely endearing. “Can
you
cartwheel?”

“Of course.” She did a nice one, although she almost kicked Jackson in the head. He didn’t notice. “Can
you
?”

She’d made it look easy, but that’s what always happens
with those impromptu gymnastics meets. Then you’re the guy who’s like, “I did it! Perfect ten!” while everybody else is like, “Your feet did not even clear your head.”

“Ha,”
said Jackson.

Elizabeth shot to his side. I scooped up Baconnaise and followed.

“Exhibit A,” he told us. “Electronic check from kTV.”

The screen was full of tabs and slashes and those < > things.
The font was ancient.
Jackson started pointing at various figures.

“See? Fifteen thousand. That’s what kTV is paying for each episode. Paying to Selwyn—via Coluber.”

“But,” said Elizabeth, “according to the budget—”

“Yep, Selwyn gets ten,” said Jackson. “Coluber is embezzling five thousand dollars per episode. That’s ninety thousand for the season. Tax-free.”

“I can’t believe this file is just out there,” said Elizabeth.

Jackson cackled. He was practically rubbing his hands together in maniacal glee. “ ‘Out there’ is an inaccurate description of the original location of this file.”

“Huh?” I said.

“I had to use some sophisticated black-hat stuff. Packet sniffing, SQL injection.”

“Are you taking drugs or hacking his files?” said Elizabeth.

“I wish I could see his personal bank account. I’ve got a new theory. Ninety thousand isn’t all that much. And if he’s only getting a flat fee, why would he be so invested in making the show a hit? But say he gets a percentage of the revenues.”

“So the better
For Art’s Sake
does, the better Coluber does?”
Elizabeth slammed her body against the den wall. “But it’s making a fortune!”

“Correct,” said Jackson darkly. “And I dare say Coluber is too.”

“We have no proof,” I reminded them.

The spell broke. Elizabeth sat down, and Jackson took off his glasses to wipe them clean. “And we’re not going to get any,” he said. “I could land in prison if I tried to invade the system of an accredited financial institution. More importantly, we don’t know where he banks.”

“We could steal his checkbook,” mused Elizabeth.

“That’s a terrible idea,” I said.