The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy (30 page)

BradLee, I thought, was sort of a shitty person. He was also a person I liked. He was also the best teacher I’d ever had.

“Critics have said a lot of things about Pound. We’re going to look at a few, and decide whether they’re right. With that, we’ll conclude our unit on the long poem.”

I bet Jackson would have been happy to hear that. “The best thing about poetry is that it’s short,” he’d said way back. Jackson, however, had not been in school this week. He was over at the U, undergoing a battery of psychological testing. That’s what happens when you get caught in the kTV lab and claim that you were hacking the closed-captioning because it was so riddled with typos. And that you had been commanded to do so. By an angel.

“We don’t even
believe
in angels,” Mr. Appelman had said in horror.

Right in the middle of the finale, they’d had to drag him away from the lab as he kicked and screamed about the “loose”/“lose” mix-up. “God hates typos!” he’d chanted for the next six hours.

A disturbed, disturbed child. Either that or a hero.

“Here’s our first critic,” said BradLee.

You’ve sat through a bunch of English classes, so I’ll spare you the details. I won’t tell you what we thought of Hugh Kenner, who thought that no contemporary poet appealed more, through “sheer beauty of language,” to those who would rather talk about poets than read them.

I won’t tell you about my crazed hand-waving, seat-bouncing rebuttal to Philip Larkin. Thus saith Larkin: “Nobody criticizes E. P. for being literary, which to me is the foundation of his feebleness, thinking that poetry is made out of poetry and not out of being alive.”

There’s a lot of literary, difficult, meaningful crap in Pound’s work. But thus saith Ethan: if you’re looking, there’s a lot of literary, difficult, meaningful crap in being alive.

I’ve got to tell you about my favorite, though. It’s by Macha Rosenthal, and she wrote that it was “as if all the beautiful vitality and all the brilliant rottenness of our heritage in its luxuriant variety were both at once made manifest” in Ezra Pound.

Not to degrade Pound, but doesn’t this also describe
For Art’s Sake
? This horrible, compelling show? It
was
full of beautiful
vitality. It was full of the kind of stories that could make a few million Americans solder their butts to their couches at 9 p.m. every Friday. Those stories were about people with purposes, people who wanted to get somewhere, and if that’s not beautiful and vital I don’t know what is.

But it was also rotten, brilliantly rotten at its very core. The show wasn’t for art’s sake. It was art forsaken. It was for money’s sake, for greed’s sake, and it was commercialized and fake. So there you go: the remarkable convergence of Ezra Pound and reality TV.

Beautiful vitality, brilliant rottenness, a luxuriant variety of both: that had been the whole school year. There had been perfect times, like when I was sitting with Maura Heldsman in the dance hallway and the printer cartridge of life had just been replaced so all the colors were bedazzlingly bright and I’d figured out how to live and how to love and nothing, ever, could possibly be more beautiful than the green of her eyes, the line of her back. But there were times when I’d been blinded by the rottenness of the world. When Baconnaise’s hairs rose and I knew that I’d sent this conscious being to his death. When Luke waved to us in the cafeteria, and went to sit somewhere else.

But perfect? Rotten? Can I even categorize them? For underneath my memory of Maura’s beauty is the knowledge that I never loved her well. And underpinning Baconnaise’s death will always be his sacrifice. He didn’t know what he was doing, he didn’t believe in a resurrection, he didn’t
not
believe in a resurrection; he just did what he had to do. He didn’t think about things. He didn’t write and write and write and
imagine that there’d be answers at the end of it. He didn’t know how confusing it would be to write so much and think so hard and still know nothing for sure.

I thought there’d be some resolution, I guess is what I’m saying. I thought I’d have some answers. Maybe the important thing is that there are no answers. There are only questions. And asking the questions is important, not answering them.

But that’s an answer!

So in conclusion? This is what I’ve concluded. Not nothing, but only this, which is not at all the same as nothing:

I don’t know.

It was the last weekend before school ended.

“Ethan,” said my mom, sitting at the kitchen table, “I just got a phone call from Mrs. Weston.”

I’d just woken up. It was nine-thirty, barbarically early for a Saturday, but I had to go to this figure-drawing master class for extra credit. (“The Art of Excretion” made for a craptastic quarter grade.)

I was groggy, and it took me weirdly long to remember that Mrs. Weston was the mother of Luke Weston. “Okay,” I said, shuffling over to the cereal cupboard.

“She told me something very strange about
For Art’s Sake
.”

“Yeah, I could tell you strange—AHH! DON’T DO THAT TO ME!”

“SURPRISE!”

I had bent down to open the cereal cupboard and found not Cheerios but two small girls, now raucously cackling.

“We knew you’d fall for it!”

“Because you’re D-U-M-B dumb!”

“Who taught you about silent
B
’s?” I muttered. My heart rate slowly subsided. “All I did was open the cereal cupboard. That doesn’t count as ‘falling for it.’ ”

“It’s not the cereal cupboard. It’s the Secret Club cupboard.”

“So where’s the cereal?”

“In the pantry.”

“I was congratulating her about Luke’s performance on
For Art’s Sake
.”

“Congratulating?”

“That’s what she said! She said—she said
darkly
—that it wasn’t a matter for congratulation. That they’d exploited him.”

“Did he tell her that?” I opened the pantry. “Because that’s a little ironic—AHH! OLIVIA, I HATE YOU!”

“That
does
count as falling for it,” pointed out Lila.

“Give me the Cheerios, or I spoon out your eyeballs,” I said.

“D-U-M-B dumb!” chanted the girls. But they did give me the Cheerios.

“Now shoo,” said my mother. “Ethan and I are trying to have a conversation.”

“You could have said that like three minutes ago,” I told her.

“You looked like you needed a shock.”

“It’s true that I am now fully awake.”

“Mrs. Weston is up in arms. And I feel behind the times. So Luke didn’t win?”

“Nope.”

“And I lost her in the details, but they’re apparently giving scholarships to all the contestants.”

“Yeah.”

“Well. After hemming and hawing for six weeks, they’re saying Luke’s not eligible. Because he wasn’t on the show from the beginning.”

“Ah.”

That Coluber. That slimy Coluber.
To the finalists, who have devoted their school year to these eighteen episodes
.…

Take away the comma, and take away Luke’s eligibility.

“And she’s been calling the other parents to gather details. You know what Mrs. Weston is like when she’s after something.”

“A hungry bulldog?” I said helpfully.

“I wouldn’t go that far. But—well, I see your point. She’s learning some peculiar things about this show. You should have
heard
what she told me from Mrs. Heldsman.”

Lurch. (That was my heart.)

“That sweet girl—what’s her name, honey?”

“Laura? Maura? Something like that.”

“I think you’re right. Maura. She was portrayed as an absolute—
harlot
. It’s unconscionable, what they’ve done to her reputation. And the whole thing is making Mrs. Weston wonder: why did the parents allow this in the first place?”

“Interesting,” I said.

The principal and vice principal may think they’re in charge of a school, but only until they have to face down an angry and mobilized group of parents. Because schools need kids. Arts schools need talented kids. And the people who spawn the talent and feed the talent and drive the talent around? Parents.

It was as if they had a list of everything we’d hoped to accomplish
via IMAGE, VORTEX, and EZRA. Led by Mrs. Michelle Weston, the Parent Board achieved the following:

Shoot back a few weeks, to mid-May. We were in the Appelden. We’d spent the past two weeks taking APs, and even though I was convinced they were going to start issuing negative scores to quantify just how badly I’d done on bio, the exams were blessedly over. The Parent Board’s wild rampage was yet to come, but kTV had packed up and headed southwest for the summer. Nobody talked about
For Art’s Sake
anymore. It was back to the old debates:
Wicked
versus
The Producers
. Monet versus Manet. PBR versus Natty Light.

“Jackson,” said Mrs. Appelman, “Honey Mustard needs to be taken out.”

The windows were open, and the Minnesota spring was blowing in.

“We’ll come,” said Elizabeth.

But once we’d made it to the dark backyard we realized that the spring air was still wintry, and Elizabeth and I elected
to shudder on the back porch instead of following Jackson and Honey Mustard to the rear of the big lot.

“What’s up with Maura?” she said.

“No clue.” I hadn’t seen her since the day of the English exam, during which we’d been given two hours to write three essays. Maura wrote for thirty-eight minutes. Then she shut her test booklet, skewered her bun with her number-two pencil, and took a nap. I guess Juilliard didn’t care about AP scores.

“Meaning that you’re over her?”

“Well.”

“Didn’t think so.” She skipped down the steps into the backyard and held out her arms. “Spring! Spring! You’re not going to get over her, are you?”

“I don’t know if I want to.”

She chortled. “Too true.”

“I’ll get over her when she goes to college.”

“You’ll find someone else to idealize.”

“Probably,” I said vaguely. I was looking at the stars, which I hear are better in Minnesota than in, say, New York.

Sky’s clear / night’s sea
.

“And once you’ve made New Girl unattainable, you’ll fall in fake-love all over again.”

“Yep. You’ve fathomed the depths of my psyche.”

“Ethan the cretin,” she said, but in a nice way. She did a few cartwheels on the grass. I started watching her instead of the stars. Then I hit rewind.

“Wait.
Made
her unattainable? These girls—they
are
unattainable.”

“Not as unattainable as you think.” She sat down on the top step, so I sat next to her. We could faintly hear Jackson exhorting Honey Mustard to poop. It was highly romantic. The dark of night, the gleam of stars, “come on boy push it out I’m freezing my ass off.”

“What do you mean?”

“Good question. I’m being imprecise. I should have said: they’re
not
unattainable. They are, in fact, attainable.”

“Unattainable is my
type
.”

“Maura Heldsman wasn’t unattainable.”

“If you Google Image ‘unattainable,’ you see Maura Heldsman.”

“Come on, Honey Mustard, I know it’s cold but you just gotta go, okay?”

“I think she had a bit of a crush on you.”

“WHAT?”

“Just a theory.” Elizabeth smiled. “I’m freezing. I’m going inside.”

Ready for anticlimax? Guess who never talked to Maura Heldsman again?

Yeah, me.

If this were a show on kTV, we would have admitted our mutual affection. Although we tragically would have no future, we’d have had the bittersweet knowledge of what might have been.

Just kidding. If this were a show on kTV, we would have made out. Minimum.

But this is where real life will let you down. There was no
grand live finale. Instead, I went to graduation and saw her in a weird hat.

And although I was tempted to write it differently, that is the true denouement of the Maura Heldsman chapter of my life.

It was Saturday. The day after EZRA, the day after the
For Art’s Sake
finale.

Early that evening, I went over to Jackson’s. I had a chilly parcel in my pocket. It was Baconnaise.

Well, it was Baconnaise’s
body
. It wasn’t really him. You’d think that since I knew that, I could have brought myself to play a majorly satisfying trick on the triplets. “Would you like a Popsicle, girls?” “YES!” “Open carefully!”

But I couldn’t. Baconnaise had done too much for me.

He had spent the night in a Ziploc body bag next to the fish sticks. I smoothed his fur, closed his eyes, and laid him in a stationery box atop a soft bed of wood chips and raisins. His arms weren’t long enough to cross over his chest, but I tried.

Then I biked over to Jackson’s. It was one of the first truly springlike days. Elizabeth was doing homework on her porch. After recovering from a fit of laughter—apparently I looked funny on a bicycle?—she walked after me to the Appelden.