The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy (9 page)

I put Herbert back on the shelf where he lived. I gave him a nod of farewell and hoped that I hadn’t caused him too much embarrassment among his ilk. Dr. Fern patted me on my back. “Nice job concentrating on your drawing, Ethan.”

Now it was time for English. That meant I’d see her for the
first time since this morning. Would it be weird? Would she say hi? Should I say hi? I hated major life decisions.

I walked in. From across the room, Elizabeth yelled hello. I gave her a distracted wave and sat down by Luke.

“Well?” he said.

“Done.”

“And?”

“Later.”

Only after I sat down did I allow myself to find Maura. She was sitting at her desk, straight-backed as usual. I got out my English notebook. I looked at her again. And this was when things were just a little different from usual, just different enough. She gave me a smile. Not a big smile. She didn’t even open her lips. Really, it was less a smile and more a brief tension in her cheeks. But it was for me, and nobody else, and it let me know that our conversation had happened, that things had changed. Just when I thought I couldn’t fall any further for her, I found a new level. It was like an amusement-park ride, when there’s been a bunch of drops that you were expecting and then there’s suddenly another one, unanticipated and fresh and sweet. You feel your insides questioning you: what are you doing, and why have you left us behind? That was how fast I fell. That was how deep this went.

“A long poem,” said BradLee, “is so long, so all-encompassing and comprehensive, that it can embrace an entire culture’s
values, history, traditions. It can hold multitudes. And the poet must view himself—or herself, of course—as the one who leads the way through this cultural labyrinth. He can see the things nobody else can see. He can change things, and he can change.”

While we suffer through a week of school, you get to hear about the Selwyn property.

Fifty years ago, the
Minneapolis Sun-Gazette
folded, leaving behind a building that had housed the entire process of creating the paper. Selwyn’s founders got it dirt-cheap and did their best to transform it into a school. Despite renovation, some quirks remain. For example, the math hallway, where the papers got folded and packed up, still looks industrial. The metal ceilings are thirty feet high, and there’s a lot of exposed pipe.

Also, the printing presses remain in the basement. Why waste good machinery? They use them to print the
Selwyn
Cantos
and the lit mag. They’re antiquated by now, but they work.

The following Monday, a bunch of us were hanging out in BradLee’s classroom before school, since lately the hallways had been staked out by some territorial janitors. I was on the floor, playing Spit with Luke, Jackson, and Elizabeth. People were stepping over us, some groggily, some making a game out of it, doing jetés or whatever. BradLee was rushing in and out, making last-minute copies and looking flurried. Valerie Menchen had her violin out and was playing klezmer music, and because it’s Selwyn there were some improvised dances going on. It was seven-fifteen on a Monday morning but it felt like a party.

Does that make me sound lame?

It was the best I’d felt since Friday night, for sure. The episode had been more of the same. Now that Brandon was out of the picture, Josh Slimeball DuBois and Miki Frigging Reagler had intensified their pursuit of Maura. She’d told me it wasn’t real. I trusted her, I swear. And I could see how the frankenbiting worked, how they took different scenes and cut them into a collage of flirtation and intrigue and drama. But the thing was, while I was watching it, I believed it. It was that good. It sucked you in.

When we were chilling in the Appelden before the episode, I’d taught Baconnaise his colors. Or at least, with the help of some treats, I trained him to always go for the green yarn. He was so smart. I didn’t even think nocturnal animals could see colors. (Maybe most of them couldn’t. I’d always suspected that Baconnaise was a highly evolved genius mutant gerbil.)

Once I’d firmly established the link between “green” and “raisin,” I called over my friends.

“Watch,” I told them. I lined up the three colors of yarn. “Baconnaise, you ready?” I released him. “Choose green, Baconnaise, you stud!” I snapped my fingers. “Green!”

He ran to the green and looked back at me expectantly. I gave him the raisin.

“Let me try,” said Luke. “Choose red, Baconnaise!”

“He only responds to my voice,” I said. “We have a special connection.”

“Is the snap important?” He snapped. “Red, Baconnaise!”

“I told you,” I said grouchily. “My voice and mine alone.”

“How’s the lump?” Elizabeth asked.

I had done my best to forget it. And I had done my best not to touch Baconnaise anywhere near his midsection. But you could see it now, a gentle swelling on the pale fur of his underbelly.

Elizabeth picked him up. He liked her, which always made me jealous. “It’s
huge
!”

“That’s what she said. And you’re exaggerating.”

“Last time Ethan said it was little,” said Luke to Elizabeth. “Also what she said. Is it growing?”

She handed me Baconnaise. Reluctantly, I massaged his belly until I found it. “It’s about the same size,” I said. It was tiny, but he was a tiny guy. “Maybe a little bigger.”

“I’ll tell my mom,” said Jackson.

“Take him to the vet,” I said. Jackson nodded. My excitement about his new trick had evaporated. “Choose green,
Baconnaise,” I whispered. He paused, uncertain. I snapped. He ran right to the green yarn.

“Benign little lumps happen all the time,” said Elizabeth.

During that FAS episode, Jackson deigned to stop playing
Sun Tzu
so that he could WiTSOOTT frankenbiting. He read us information during the commercial breaks, at least until Elizabeth told him to shut up because she wanted to pay attention. The ads were from bigger brands every week, she said. Which meant kTV was making more money. Which meant
For Art’s Sake
would stay on the air. Thank you, Maura Heldsman’s reputation.

Would you like to know more about this frankenbiting thing?

The weekend continued to suck. There was a terrible convergence: I had a shit-ton of bio homework, and the triplets got a new Raffi CD. Would
you
like to label cell diagrams while living in a continuous loop of liking to eat, eat, eat, eeples and baneenees?

Plus, I was depressed about the whole Maura Heldsman situation. And I felt silly for getting so worked up about
For Art’s Sake
. We were all angry, but we weren’t doing anything. Luke was scribbling away at his long poem, but what was the point of that?

BradLee leaned over our Spit game in a break between rounds. We were all breathing heavily from laughter and exertion (look, we go to an arts academy). “You want to stop in and see me after school?” he said, looking at Luke.

Luke froze. “About what we discussed?”

“Ooh, are you going to tell us the interrobang story?” I asked.

Luke shot me an annoyed look. I’d thought that was sort of funny. “Definitely, Mr. Lee,” he said. “I’ll be there.”

Elizabeth was watching them sharply. Jackson was shuffling the cards, but I could tell by the set of his neck that he was listening too.

“All of us, right?” added Luke.

BradLee hesitated.

“We’re all involved. We’re all having similar thoughts. And we’ve discussed it at
length
.”

I mentally congratulated Luke: what a nice tricolon! BradLee clearly didn’t want to deal with the rest of us. Maybe he would have been okay with me, since I was ubiquitously known as the hench to Luke’s man. But Luke refused to compromise. Luke wouldn’t exclude us.

“Fine,” said BradLee.

And another school day passed, another day of long classes that seemed short in retrospect because I couldn’t remember what happened in them.

At last the final bell rang and we met in BradLee’s room.

“I didn’t mean to convene a summit,” said BradLee. “I’ve just been thinking.”

“We’ve been thinking a lot too,” said Luke earnestly. “The show just keeps getting worse.”

“It does.”

I liked how BradLee didn’t pretend not to watch it, like some of the other teachers.

“And I read your poem, Luke.”

“Oh?” He was pretending nonchalance, but I could hear the tension in that “Oh?”

“It’s a call to arms, isn’t it? A call to raise consciousness about what’s going on here?”

“That’s the idea, yeah.”

“We don’t want the show to be canceled,” I stuck in. The
other three had agreed. It’d be too mean. All those kids had given up a lot of normal existence for a shot at that prize. Or at least that’s what Elizabeth said. Personally, I couldn’t care less about anyone but Maura.

“No,” said BradLee. “But it’s disturbing, what the show’s turning into.”

“Exactly,” said Luke. “It’s not what it purports to be. And it’s doing long-term damage to reputations. To the reputations of students too young to control their images, or even to know that those images need to be controlled.”

“I am certainly not giving you any ideas,” said BradLee. He glanced at the door, which he’d closed when we came in. “But this poem needs to be distributed.”

“But it’s not finished,” said Luke.

“And they won’t publish it in the
Selwyn Cantos
,” said Elizabeth. “And the lit mag doesn’t come out till May.”

“And it’s not finished,” repeated Luke.

“Installments,” said BradLee. Again with the look to the door. “Think Scheherazade. Think Dickens.”

“But
where
?” said Elizabeth impatiently. “Everything is censored.”

“Think alternative publication,” said BradLee.

“Like a vanity press?” said Luke, looking disappointed.

“They print the
Selwyn Cantos
right in the basement,” said Jackson casually.

“Duh, of course,” said Luke, brushing him off. “It saves Selwyn a crapload of money. They’d never let us publish every two weeks if we couldn’t print in-house.”

“So you know how the presses work?” said Jackson.

“Naturally.” Then the light dawned. I think Elizabeth, Luke, and I got it all at once.

“I’m not hearing any of this,” said BradLee.

“But—” I said. I had to voice my doubts. “Is a poem really going to change anything?”

Luke and BradLee looked at me. Two true believers. They were glowing. “Art matters, Ethan,” said BradLee. “This is art.”

BradLee shooed us out. He said he didn’t want to know the technicalities. He said that it had already put him in a weird position.

“Problem,” said Jackson in the hallway. “Luke, you’re the only person in the school who doesn’t start groaning at the words ‘long poem.’ Even the creative writing majors don’t read poetry. They just write it.”

“Which is why their poems suck,” I inserted.

“This is different,” said Luke. “This pertains to them.”

“It’s still a long poem. Nobody’s going to see a long poem and go, Oh, hey, it’s a tale of my tribe! Look at those carefully selected luminous details! Luke is the bearer of the light!”

“You were paying attention in English?”

“I always pay attention in English.”

I broke into a coughing fit and Jackson swiped his leg backward to trip me. I leapt aside just in time.

“We need to present it differently,” said Elizabeth. She was so reasonable. We’d never have gotten anything done without her. “We can’t just type it and print it and scatter it around school.”

“You have another suggestion?” Based on Luke’s tone, type-print-scatter was exactly his plan.

“Three things,” she said. I looked at her sharply. She had her dreadlocks pulled into a high, massive blob, which was sort of cute even if it did make her look like she had two heads. “Art, layout, branding. Ethan will add illustrations, and I’ll do the layout. I want to handwrite the thing. We need to make it seem underground and subversive.”

“It
is
underground and subversive,” pointed out Jackson. “You call Coluber the Serpent Vice. That would never make it into that crap school newspaper.”

Luke didn’t even take offense. He was looking agape.

“We could even call it the
Anticantos
,” she said.

“The
Contracantos
,” said Jackson.

“Perfect,” said Elizabeth. “Luke, that okay with you?”

“That’s okay,” said Luke, still surprised. “I mean, yeah. That’s perfect.”

Elizabeth bared her teeth. I wasn’t sure whether she was smiling or getting ready for battle. Maybe both. We were walking quickly now. We had shit to
do
.

We went to the Appelden, of course. It was our lair, our production center, although Elizabeth made me promise first that I wouldn’t get too distracted by Baconnaise. Distraction, Baconnaise? Baconnaise was a muse.