The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy (10 page)

It was a great afternoon, then a great evening, then a great night. We felt like we were the saviors of the school. We were doing something, finally, after weeks of sitting around and moaning and thinking we should do something.

It really was a great time.

Here’s what everyone was doing:

I was hunched over the tiny rolltop desk in the den, sketching cartoons to illustrate lines from the
Contracantos
.
Baconnaise was peering at the drawings. Sometimes he’d get bored and climb around on his personal jungle gym, a.k.a. me. The vet had flat-out refused to operate on someone who only weighed 2.6 ounces—in fact, he wouldn’t even take a biopsy—but the lump wasn’t bringing Baconnaise down. He was his usual sprightly self.

Luke was on the couch, furiously writing.

Elizabeth had commandeered the dining-room table, where she’d laid out four huge sheets of thin vellum paper. She kept making happy comments about how retro this was, how fun it was to do graphic design while not squinting at a computer. She was carefully copying Luke’s poem, incorporating my drawings, and every time I walked over there I’d marvel at her talent. She could make stuff, real stuff that people would want. So many kids at school painted scary stuff with scary messages: bloody wombs with their parents and bin Laden inside, or babies suckling at the teats of machine guns. But Elizabeth created elegant, beautiful things, and the
Contracantos
was going to be elegant and beautiful.

Then we had our jack(son) of all trades. He helped anyone who needed help. He posed for me when I couldn’t figure out how an arm would connect to a shoulder. He composted Baconnaise’s poop pellets. He kept a tab open on a rhyming dictionary and he’d give Luke rhymes when he got stuck. He rolled tape into curlicues and spell-checked the poem before Elizabeth copied it onto the vellum.

We were blasting the Beatles on vinyl, since they comprised the intersection in the Venn diagram of the set of acceptable
music versus the set of music owned by the Appelmen. Jackson spun their albums chronologically. By the time we finished, in a blaze of glory, you could tell that LSD had become a major part of their artistic process. I didn’t dare look at the clock. We collapsed onto the couches and slept like the dead.

The next day, the logistical challenges hit us.

Jackson was the only one who didn’t briefly lose faith. Instead, he opened a document. “I need a name for this file,” he told us. “What’s the name of our plan?”

“What’s a plan without a name?” murmured Luke.

“No philosophizing. Hurry up.”

“Imagism,” Luke said. “That was Ezra Pound’s first plan.”

“Okay,” said Jackson. “But all caps. And I don’t like the ‘ism.’ Too establishment. IMAGE.”

“Stop shouting,” said Elizabeth.

I interrupted the planning to say, “Why can’t we just post it online?”

“That would be far too easy,” said Jackson scathingly.

“Plus,” said Elizabeth, “I think it’s important that we really stick it to the man. As in, the administration.”

“The ad-man-istration,” I said.

“Ha. Ha. Shut up. We want this in their faces. Under their noses.”

Luke was nodding along. “Only cowards post anonymously to the Internet. And then nobody would talk about it at school. We’d never hear reactions.”

“And we want equal, universal access,” said Elizabeth.

“True,” I said. “Maura Heldsman never even gets online.”

Elizabeth snorted. “Glad we’re on the same page.”

“This is what Ezra Pound would have done,” said Luke.

But a little while later, I whispered to Jackson, “We could just take it to a copy shop.”

“Three hundred copies. Four black-and-white pages. Ten cents a page. That’s a hundred and twenty bucks. And that’s just for the first issue.”

Maybe he thought he could hide it with math, but I could see the fervor on his face. He wanted to sneak down to the presses as much as they did.

So this is what we did. Here’s what IMAGE needed, and here’s what IMAGE got.

Jackson wasn’t
Sun-Tzu
-ing in between calls for help. He was getting into the Selwyn administration network. He hacked them right from the Appelden. Don’t ask me how.

I do know he’d only reached the lowest tier of the network. It gave him access to shared documents, so nothing private or password-protected. But he found one ultra-important file: the master schedule. There must have been a kTV intern whose entire job was to maintain this thing, because it was epic. You could tell where every single administrator, security guard, and kTV employee was supposed to be at any moment.

This was essential information.

Jackson thus knew that on Thursday afternoon, they’d be
filming the next
For Art’s Sake
challenge at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. They’d rented the place from noon to midnight, and all the kTV guys plus all the Selwyn administrators would be there to help manage the filming. Which would leave the school basically empty.

We had our opportunity.

From there, we—and by “we” I obviously mean “Jackson, Son of Jack”—just had to figure out how to get down to the printing presses, which were kept locked. They were dangerous, after all, with lots of machinery and gears and metal crap. (Or so I discovered. At first, I was imagining really big laser printers.)

Jackson stole the keys.

He did it during tech theater class. He created a diversion by jamming a color gel into the wrong slot of a seven-thousand-dollar spotlight, and then he snuck back to the key closet and snatched—ack, I’m getting all fluttery and adrenalized just thinking about it. Let’s move on.

We descended Thursday afternoon. The school was deserted. We had to go behind the stage, under the stage, across a furniture-filled pit, down a long hallway, down a staircase, down another. At every locked door, we’d stand as lookouts as Jackson tried one key after another. There were six on the bunch labeled
Presses
, and we ended up needing them all.

Luke had been there many times, of course, and Elizabeth
once for a design project. But we were all creeped out. There were no teachers, no classmates, no gossip or reprimands or dumb jokes to normalize the situation. I was unnerved by the sense that I didn’t know my school at all. I’d spent a lot of time there, and I liked the place, and I’d thought I’d understood it. But I hadn’t. There were these hidden depths, levels and levels of basements and subbasements, staircases I’d never seen, doors I’d never opened. I almost felt betrayed.

Elizabeth took off her backpack and jacket. “It’s warm,” she said.

“That’s because we’re closer to the core of the earth,” I said.

“That’s because we’re closer to the furnace,” said Jackson, rolling his eyes.

The room was maybe the size of an elementary school basketball court. A raised sidewalk hugged the walls, and in the middle loomed the machinery, ominously metallic and complicated, taller than any of us. I quickly discovered that if you touched it, it creaked to life. This freaked the hell out of me.

It was Luke’s third year on the
Selwyn Cantos
staff, and he knew where their green-tinged newsprint was stashed, how to load the ink, what levers to pull, when to pull them. Jackson felt kinship with anything mechanical, so he was paying close attention, and Elizabeth insisted on being the one to lay out the originals on the laminates. All I did was follow instructions. I loaded up newsprint. I cranked some handle. I got out of the way. We were there a few hours. Then, sweaty and greasy, we filled our backpacks with gorgeous
Contracantos
, flipped off the lights, and traveled upward.

Jackson quoted Vergil.
“The descent to hell is easy. Getting out—that’s the work, that’s the task.”
I was against Latin as a matter of principle, but I had to smile. We’d done it. We’d made it out.

Because of the arts academy reputation and all, the
Selwyn Cantos
was a big deal. All over the school were those newspaper distribution baskets, like the ones in coffee shops for free local papers. They wanted the paper’s circulation to be the entire student body, or at least whatever percentage of the student body was literate. I had my doubts about some of those dancers.

Jackson got us to school at the putrid hour of six-thirty-one, which was when they unlocked the doors. He’d divided the building into four sectors—there was a color-coded map involved—and we ran around with our stuffed backpacks, dumping
Contracantos
into the
Selwyn Cantos
bins. Then Elizabeth went down to the band hallway to visit her normal friends. Luke and I were feeling the lack of sleep, so we slumped on the floor by our lockers and watched Jackson do some insane math problem that involved forcing two vast matrices to merge. It was very soothing.

First-bell calculus jarred us awake. (That’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.) I had my head propped in both hands with my pinkies holding my eyelids up, and I was trying to comprehend what Mrs. Garlop was doing on the whiteboard when Luke poked me.

“Shut up,” I said.

“I’m not talking.”

“Now you are. Shut up.”

“Look around.”

Hoping that Mrs. Garlop wouldn’t notice my alertness, which surely would have tipped her off that I wasn’t thinking about math, I lifted my head. What to my wondering eyes did appear but greenish newspapers. The more diligent students had them underneath their calculus stuff, and they’d glance at them between problems. The ones who couldn’t give a shit about conic sections were holding up their textbooks with
Contracantos
stuck inside. Everyone had them, and everyone was reading them.

It was a crazy high. My drawings, everywhere. Elizabeth’s cool graphic-designer handwriting. Luke’s words. The payoff for the hours of work and the scary trip to the presses, for getting to school before dawn, for breaking the rules. Our plan was going to work. We’d reclaim our culture. Our voice had been denied but now we were bellowing to the high heavens who we were and what we wanted. The mytho-whatever was revised. We’d taken control.

It was one of the best calculus classes of my life.

Okay, that’s not saying much.

It was one of the best
days
of my life. There we go.

It was at lunch when the PA system clicked on. I was with Luke and Jackson. We figured it’d be a dead giveaway if we
were the only kids who didn’t have
Contracantos
, so we were perusing it, chuckling despite ourselves, admiring it while pretending we weren’t.

“Mr. Coluber would like to quickly give an announcement,”
said his smug secretary.

The cafeteria fell silent.

Coluber’s voice, sounding testy, crackled out over the intercom.

“It has come to our attention that an unapproved publication has been distributed. According to the Handbook, Section F Point 2, no school-wide publications may be issued without administrator initials. This particular publication is both profane and unauthorized, and is hereby banned. Possession and/or distribution will incur consequences. Destroy your copies immediately. Thank you.”
He clicked off.

There was a moment of silence before everyone began to talk. Everyone but us. Finally, moving as if he’d just woken up, Luke pushed our
Contracantos
deep into his backpack.

“Profane?” he said.

“Cat-piss,” said Jackson.

“Ooh,” I said. “I forgot about that part.”

“It’s not the profanity that’s the problem,” said Luke. “Nor the lack of authorization. It’s that we lambasted him. Coluber’s portrayed as a snake.”

“Cat-piss and porcupines,” I said.

“This is just great,” said Jackson. I thought for a moment he was being sarcastic, but here’s a fact: Jackson Appelman is never sarcastic. His brain does not traffic in irony.

“Huh?” I said because Luke didn’t.

“There was only one thing Coluber could have done to make it
more
popular.”

“Ban it,” said Luke, following along. His eyes were sparkling again. “Boom.”

I got it. Before the announcement, maybe half the lunch tables were browsing the
Contracantos
. Now it was the topic of every conversation. It was illegal and it was alluring.

I thought of Coluber fuming in his office, the
Contracantos
on his desk. He was an idiot, I thought. What ignorance of human nature, to think that a ban would make something less popular. We were contrarians. Now everyone would read the
Contracantos
.

An idiot indeed.

We had English last and BradLee looked at us in a funny way, his mouth tight as if repressing a smile. He was wearing jeans, since it was Friday, and a yellow polo.

“Get out your copies of the
Cantos
,” he told the class.

“
Cantos
or
Contracantos
?” said Paul Jones, a funny guy, one of the school’s best-slash-only athletes. Some people laughed, but everyone was watching to see BradLee’s response.

“Mr. Jones,” he said, his mouth noticeably twitching, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. And I’d recommend that you allow me to remain in blissful ignorance.”

Now everyone was laughing, even Maura Heldsman.

There was a knock. BradLee opened the door to a security guard, the mean one with the Viking beard. His eyes swept our desks.

“Sir?” said BradLee.

“Looking for illicit materials,” said the guard. “Mr. C’s orders.” He walked the rim of our seminar circle, peering into open backpacks with his hands clasped behind his back.

I held perfectly still.

“You let me know if you need a removal.”

“Thanks, sir. Will do.” BradLee held the door. He’s tall, at least six feet, but next to the guard he looked tiny and young. When the door shut, there was silence, a different sort of silence from the one that had hummed in the cafeteria. Still disbelief, but not as much glee.

“
Cantos
, class,” BradLee told us again. “Number eighty-one.”

We got out our
Cantos
and started to analyze.