The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy (3 page)

“Hey, Mom,” I said.

“You heading home, Luke? Want a ride? Front seat’s open!”

“It’s your son, Ethan,” I said.

“Thanks, but I’ll walk. It’s just a couple minutes.”

“Yep, great to see you too,” I said.

“You sure? That backpack looks heavy.”

I got into the front seat. Luke stuck his head in the window and looked back. “Lila? Olivia? Tabitha?”

“LUKE!” they screamed with joy.

“How are my favorite four-year-olds?”

“I’m the oldest,” said Olivia.

“You’re still four,” said Lila.

“But I’m a bigger four than you.”

“We just got our teeth cleaned.”

“Except for Tabby,” said Olivia. “She bit Dr. Pohlman.”

Tabby had her entire fist in her mouth and was staring out the window, sulking.

“Tabby doesn’t like Dr. Pohlman,” explained Lila.

“He doesn’t like her either,” said Olivia. “He said only little girls with clean teeth got to pick from the treasure chest.”

“Then he said she’d get cavities.”

“No, he said he
hoped
she’d get cavities.”

Tabby looked like she was about to bite Olivia. Luke must have noticed too. “All right, girls, see you!” he said hurriedly. “Bye, Mrs. Andrezejczak. See you tomorrow, Ethan. Call me if you can’t figure out the calc. I already know I can’t.”

“Thanks,” I told him.

“Don’t mention it,” he said, grinning.

My mom pulled away, shaking her head. “You’re so lucky to have Luke as a friend.”

She didn’t even try to hide the fact that she liked Luke better than me. I stretched out my stiff legs. “Yeah,” I said. “Best friend I’ve ever had.”

Let’s leave the locker debacle shrouded in the mists of the future. Rewind, if you will, to the beginning of that week.

We were back to school after the holidays. The school year was turning out like an ill-constructed burrito: a few bites were interesting, but most were just rice. All our teachers’ jokes had started to seem recycled. Even the kTV cameras seemed normal. Yeah, it was still thrilling to watch Maura Heldsman on
For Art’s Sake
, but it was an established thrill. It was part of what we did. There was no longer much self-consciousness in the act of flipping to a big national station and seeing the scene shift from Laguna Beach to our own quirky Minnesotan school.

Last period that day was BradLee’s junior-senior English Lit class. I’d been there for a few minutes, deep-breathing to recover from the trauma that is AP Biology, when Luke stalked in from his journalism class.

“Another piece rejected,” he said. He slammed down next
to me without taking off his backpack. We technically didn’t have assigned desks, but you know how it goes. Day one, the territory gets peed on. Days two through forever, the seats stay the same.

“Another?”

“That’s three in two months.” His long legs were splayed out and his arms crossed. Jackson came in from his math tutorial and sat down behind me. I canted around so we could face each other. There was still some time before the bell, though BradLee had an annoying habit of starting class as soon as everyone arrived. He could occasionally be deterred, but you had to demonstrate through body language that you’d flip your shit if he dared disrespect your six minutes of freedom.

Jackson was updated. “You’re arts editor,” he pointed out. “You’re honcho number two. Who’s doing the rejecting? June?” She was the editor in chief.

“Supposedly,” said Luke. “She claims there’s no space. But I kept pushing and she told me that Mr. Wyckham is the one making the call.”

“The call on space?”

“The call on me.”

“Ah,” said Jackson. He set his briefcase on his desk, dialed the Fibonacci sequence to unlock the clasp, and removed the stapled stack of paper he used for English notes. As a matter of principle, Jackson doesn’t buy notebooks. He hates the corporate idea of repackaging cheap commodities for extreme profit. Drink bottled water around him and live to regret it.

“The call on you? What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.

“There isn’t supposed to be ‘controversial material’ ”—Luke
did the bunny-ears thing—“in the
Selwyn Cantos
this year.”

“This year?”

“That’s preposterous,” said Jackson. “It’s a
newspaper
. Controversy is news.”

Elizabeth rushed in at the bell. I waved, but she’d long held that English was her chance to hang out with other people. “With my normal friends,” she said. I didn’t think to ask Luke what was so controversial about his story until BradLee had started us on a warm-up. We had to identify rhetorical devices in phrases he’d projected onto the whiteboard.

For God, for country, and for Yale
. “Tricolon,” I wrote. I barely resisted drawing a little heart by the word. I loved tricolon. “What was the article about?” I wrote on a piece of scrap paper. As soon as BradLee was hawkishly strolling the other half of the classroom, I flipped the note to Luke.

And murmuring of innumerable bees
. “Onomatopoeia,” I wrote. Actually, I tried to write it. I knew it started with an
O
.

Luke passed me the note. “It was on
FAS
.” Abbreviation of
For Art’s Sake
.

“A review?” I wrote back.

When I next glanced over, Luke had abandoned the warm-up and was scribbling a long screed. Luke’s rangy and tall. He has brown hair that looks like it chose to be brown; it’s that rich, nutty brown girls have, not the boys’ brown that’s just there in the absence of any other color. His eyebrows are straight and his eyes are a complementary chocolate, and in a totally heterosexual way I’ll say that he’s pretty cute.

Not that I was thinking about Luke’s attractiveness in English class. Nope, I was working on the warm-up.
He took his hat and his leave
. Zeugma.

He finally gave me back the note, and then looked up at the board with feigned concentration just as BradLee circled back to us. It is a truth universally acknowledged that English teachers excuse all sorts of malfeasance in anyone who can write like Luke Weston. BradLee for sure knew something was up—he’s not dumb—but he didn’t call us out on it.

“It’s a review, but it’s mostly editorial,” Luke had written. “I tried to suppress my snideness. I may not have been totally successful. I questioned why the school’s allowing the show when it’s just a big moneymaker for kTV. Whatever percentage the school’s getting has to be piddling. Pocket money. Blood money, more like.”

BradLee glared at me. I casually draped my arm over the note and stared at the board with a face that exuded intellectual curiosity. It must have worked because he started pestering Rummica Fitzgerald.

I kept reading. “I didn’t even write about how I feel disenfranchised, marginalized, shut out. This school used to be about the arts. It used to be the best place to go if you were serious about both arts and academics. And now it’s about venerating the
FAS
kids and congratulating ourselves because we’re getting national exposure. It’s changed everything.”

I threw the note over my shoulder to Jackson. I knew he’d been craning to see it. Either BradLee was eyeing me or I was paranoid.
Her home was a prison
. Duh, metaphor.

Jackson passed it back. He’d drawn a graph. The x-axis was labeled
craptasticness of FAS
. The y-axis was labeled
$$$
. The line pointed due northeast: perfect, positive correlation.

“I believe the word is
craptasticity
,” I wrote. Luke heaved a sigh. I tried to fake some more outrage, but he saw right through me.

Because sure, I agreed with him. But I didn’t really care that much. Not in English class, at least. The desks were arranged in a two-tiered circle, and across the room from me was this girl. This girl named Maura Heldsman. You might have heard of her. Usually, I would care more about how much
For Art’s Sake
sucked for Selwyn. And usually, I’d care a
lot
more about Luke’s disappointment.

It was just hard to concentrate. Given the surroundings.

BradLee gave us the answers for the warm-up. “New unit starts today, guys,” he said. “We’ll begin with a brief lecture on our main topic.” Yay, I thought, a lecture. Selwyn is too cutting-edge to have many lectures, and that means I spend my life listening to people who don’t know anything—i.e., my classmates. In a lecture, the one who knows his shit is the one who’s doing the talking. Very logical.

I admit, however, that lectures make it easier to zone out. Especially when Maura Heldsman is within five yards.

“Ezra Pound called it a ‘tale of the tribe,’ ” said BradLee, gesturing with vim, “which can encompass an entire culture’s values and history.”

Oops. Speaking of zone-out, I’d missed the entire topic. I wrote down “tale of tribe” anyway.

“Langston Hughes called its author the ‘bearer of the light.’ ”

Damn, I’d missed the
it
again. “Bearer of light” went into my notebook. Then Maura Heldsman yawned. Her yawn was as delicate as a cat’s, as delicate as every other motion of that dancer’s body of hers, sinewy and light, poised in the seat, toes out.

“And in fact, it’s a pseudo-epic. The epic is the vision; this is the re-vision—revision and
re
-vision, a true ‘sighting again’ …”

I wasn’t in the same room as Maura Heldsman often. I felt like I had to soak her in, to make the most of my scant time. Maura was a secondary satellite that lessened my gravitational pull to everything else clamoring for attention in my world: Luke, Jackson, BradLee’s lecture. She didn’t know who I was. But if I was an Etch A Sketch, she operated the stylus. When she was nearby, the magnetic fuzzies of my consciousness all rushed to her.

She also inspired the creation of really bad metaphors.

“And so in a postcolonial …”

I gave up on BradLee. I couldn’t follow his thread and I let it trail away. He led the class through the labyrinth without me. I was lost down a dead end, entranced by a girl.

Luke suddenly sat up straight and started writing, fast. It startled me out of my trance. He was supremely focused on BradLee, writing every word that came from his mouth. I refocused my attention, but it was too late.

“And that, class, is why we will be spending the rest of this quarter on the long poem.”

I titled my half-assed page of notes “Long Poems,” and then added a parenthetical note: “(wah).” How long, I wondered,
is long? A page? More than a page? I tried to find someone to exchange commiserative glances with, but Luke was still writing intently, and Jackson was staring down at his crotch, surreptitiously playing (let’s hope) one of the math games he’d written for his graphing calculator.

“Now that you all understand the term ‘revisionary mythopoesis,’ ” said BradLee, “we’ll go ahead and get started on our main author, Mr. Ezra Pound.” He clicked around on his computer until an old photo came onto the projection screen: a man from a side angle, with an artistically tormented expression, a fabulous mustache, and big hair.
“Ecce homo,”
said BradLee. I’d studied Latin for five years now, which meant that I could, on rare occasions, actually translate something.
Behold the man
.

“The true
auteur
of revisionary mythopoesis,” said BradLee. The index of words I understood was steadily dropping. I subtly inclined my head toward Luke’s notes, but he’d flipped the page and was writing busily. I would have tried Jackson’s notes, but they didn’t exist. “Here’s a representative story. In 1919, Pound published ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ in
Poetry
magazine.”

Jake Wall guffawed.

“Sex
tus
Propertius, Mr. Wall.”

Hey, I had heard of Propertius. Maybe. All those Latin names sounded the same.

“Who’s Propertius, by the way?”

“A Roman poet,” I said, hoping that BradLee would think I’d been paying attention all along, also hoping that he would not ask me for more details.

“Good. So then”—phew—“a classics professor wrote to the magazine, calling Pound ‘incredibly ignorant’ of the Latin language.”

Jackson poked my back with his pen. That morning we’d had a wretched test on Ovid. Incredible ignorance of the Latin language was near and dear to our hearts.

“He said there were scores of errors in ‘Homage.’ Can anyone guess Pound’s response?”

Luke’s hand shot up. “I bet he said it wasn’t supposed to be a translation.”

“Exactly,” said BradLee happily.

“And that he wasn’t pleased with the editor publishing the letter of a persnickety, picayune Latin professor.”

“You must be the modern-day incarnation of Pound,” said BradLee. “Nailed it. Pound wrote a response to that effect, which was
not
published. Possibly because it began with the imprecation, ‘Cat-piss and porcupines!’ ”

I wrote that down. My notes already blew serious chunks. The addition of cat-piss and porcupines would not make them much worse.

“Even in 1919, Pound was rejecting the artistic mores of the time.”

BradLee kept talking. His full name is Bradley Lee; I always wondered how such a smart guy could have been spawned by such half-witted parents. He turned thirty earlier this year, though he looked more like twenty, and he could have passed for fourteen if he’d gotten rid of his red-blond “beard.” (Peach fuzz.) His favorite shoes were Keds, but in an ironic way. He was the type of guy to have a favorite punctuation mark. It’s
the interrobang, which combines the exclamation point and the question mark:
As in: could anything possibly be dorkier than having a favorite punctuation mark