The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy (21 page)

“Sadly, he’s right,” Jackson told her. “Would a guy like Coluber carry a checkbook?”

“Can you get into any of his other files?”

“Not at the moment. Take a look. There’s his main folder. I sent out a worm to get his password, but it hashed up most of the files.”

“Try that one,” I said. It was named “Schema.”

“I already have.”

“So you can’t?” said Elizabeth.

She knows Jackson. The word “can’t” vexes him. His shoulders shot up to his ears and he said, “Let me just try a rewrite.”

I’d been up since six-forty-eight. It was almost two in the morning. I closed my eyes on the couch. Baconnaise had had a long day too, and he cuddled up in my neck-knoll.

“Shit!”
said Jackson excitedly.

I breaststroked through the thick waters of unconsciousness.

“Shit what?” murmured Elizabeth, curled into a ball on the floor.

I finally surfaced. My limbs felt heavy and used.

“Shit this file.”

“Shit what file?”

“Shit this ‘Schema’ thing.”

“Shit it’s like 4 a.m.”

“Shit,” I muttered drowsily. I closed my eyes again.

“No,” said Jackson. “No, no, no.” I could feel myself sinking down into the sweet—“Ethan and Elizabeth, come the shit over here.”

“Don’t wanna,” said Elizabeth, but she unfurled herself and crawled over to the monitors. I was watching through half-closed eyes. “Ethan. I moved. You move too.”

She’d looked ridiculous crawling, but I soon realized there was nothing I wanted less than to stand fully upright. At the level of Jackson’s knees, we looked up at the screen.

“It’s a schema for
FAS
,” said Jackson.

“What’s a schema?” That was me. I swear I know what a schema is in ordinary life.

“A plan, an outline, a model,” he said impatiently. I was stuck on trying to remember what a “plan” was—the word sounded so familiar—but I nodded docilely. Then I started reading the words on the screen, the ones between the brackets, weirdly spaced in that typewriter font but with a meaning that was all too clear.

It was the future of
For Art’s Sake
. It was a plan of Episode 15, which had aired during VORTEX. It was a plan of Episode 16, for next week, and 17, and—

“Stop scrolling so fast!” I said. I was trying to figure out what would happen between Maura and Luke.

“The details are unimportant,” said Jackson.

“Uh-huh,” agreed Elizabeth, but she was fixated on the document too. It was like finding a novel about your life. Not your life up to this point. Your
life
.

Jackson stopped scrolling. “There’s dialogue in here.”

“ ‘M
AURA:
I told Miki I’d meet him after school!’ ” read Elizabeth. “Wow. Coluber knows how to make her sound as brainless as she really is.”

“She has a brain!” I said hotly.

“ ‘M
AURA:
And Miki’s going to be so mad when he finds out about—about us—’ ”

“You’re just reading it in a Valley-girl voice. She does not sound like that.”

Jackson gave an irritated huff and scrolled all the way to the end of the document. Episode 17 broke off, unfinished, after only a few lines. “No Episode 18,” said Jackson. “That could mean they don’t script the finale—”

“It
is
live,” said Elizabeth.

“Or they haven’t written it yet.”

“Go back to the part where Maura’s talking to Luke,” I said.

Jackson held down the brightness button. Twilight and then night fell onto the monitor. I was annoyed.

“
Jackson
. I have to see how bad it is.”

“No. It’s time to discuss the implications.”

I collapsed from my knees onto my stomach. There was no use arguing with that tone.

“He’s scripting it,” said Jackson.

“He’s a screenwriter.”

“It’s not a reality show at all.” That was me.

We sat there in silence for a few minutes. Jackson had been right to turn off the screen. Now we could see the obvious.

“Cat-piss, we
knew
this already,” I said heavily. “I
saw
this.”

“I guess I just didn’t believe it,” said Elizabeth.

“I saw it, when I was in that locker. And that’s the way these shows work. Everybody knows that. We didn’t need to do all this investigation.”

“I really believed it stopped with the frankenbiting,” admitted Jackson. “I thought the contestants lived their lives like normal, and then the genius editors took over.”

“You know what?” I said. I’d relived my conversations with Maura in the dance hallway so many times that they’d become like chewed gum; the substance was still there, but I wasn’t getting any new flavor. But now I remembered something new. That shot of detail was enough to put me back there, back in that empty hallway, looking into those green eyes—

“Speak, Andrezejczak,” said Jackson.

“Right. Well. Maura? You know how I talked to her?”

“Might have heard about it once or twice,” said Elizabeth.

“She said, ‘We’re like marionettes.’ ”

“You told us that.”

“And she was like, ‘I say what I’m supposed to say, I do what I’m supposed to do.…’ But I thought she meant she showed up on time to the challenges, or whatever. I didn’t get it.”

Elizabeth was looking at me with a strange expression. “Luke got it.”

“He did,” said Jackson, staring at the ceiling. Here comes
Señor Total Recall. “He said that maybe they got direction beforehand. Then he started talking about Coluber’s personal incentive.”

“Now quantified at five thousand dollars per episode,” said Elizabeth.

“Not to mention the hypothesized percentage of
FAS
revenues.”

“Rat dung,” I said angrily. “We
knew
. Maura told us. Luke told us.”

“VORTEX failed,” said Elizabeth.

“Just a lot of self-indulgence,” said Jackson. He killed the other monitor as well. The ceiling light blared down upon us.

Elizabeth fell dramatically onto the floor as if she’d been stabbed in the gut. “We were just searching for what we already knew. Knew, but didn’t want to admit.” Her dreadlocks were splayed out on the carpet like a halo, surrounding her head with dark gold, but I couldn’t even stare.

I knew Luke was avoiding us. He always came into English orbited by groupies, like a sun with a bunch of ditzy planets, and when he deigned attend calculus, he’d sit way in the back so he could zoom out as soon as the bell rang. Fine by me. I was avoiding him too.

But neither one of us could hide Monday morning, when I entered what I thought would be a pleasantly deserted bathroom and saw him.

He gave me a nod. If I’d been the unzipped one, I wouldn’t have said a thing, but you know how urinal power plays go. I clearly had the upper hand.

“I saw the latest episode,” I told him.

“Oh, really?”

This annoyed me. “Yes, really.” Then I started quoting him. “ ‘I’ve always loved how words can inspire imagination.’ That was you, Luke. ‘How they can capture emotion.’ ” Luke had spewed the sappiest garbage you could imagine, all about how
special
language is, how
close
he feels to words. He’d sounded like Miki F.R.

He stuffed his stuff back into his pants. “Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

He sighed.

“I mean, what
was
that?”

“I know.”

“You’re following a script.”

He shrugged. Under the fluorescence, he looked tired and pale: basically how a Minnesotan teenager ought to look at 7 a.m. in February. This bucked me up.

“What do you want from this?” I asked him. “That’s all I want to know.”

“The national exposure, the chance at the scholarship—”

“Come on. Be honest.”

He ran a hand through his hair. “It’s a really good opportunity for my writing career—”

“Luke.”

There was a lot I could have said. There was a lot I wanted to say. We used to be best friends, Luke. We could sit on opposite sides of a classroom and have a whole conversation just by twitching our eyebrows. When you wondered whether it was possible to drive the entire Minneapolis–Saint Paul beltway in the space of one skipped lunch period, I came along. When I
was obsessed with the badminton world championships, you barely made fun of me at all. You taught my sisters how to use a can opener. Then you helped me deep-clean the living-room rug. We drank your parents’
Kirschwasser
together, and I lied to your mom when she asked me why you were sick. We know each other’s secrets. Last summer, you told me that in middle school you thought you might be gay because you liked our social studies teacher so much, and I told you I could be a repressed sexual deviant because I had that dream about—well, never mind.

We had each other’s backs, Luke. I know how much you hate it when Jackson says “negatory” instead of “no.” You know that I’ve always thought Elizabeth is sort of hot. Ever since seventh grade, we’ve scooted along on parallel tracks. We’ve had all the same references. We’ve lived the same life.

But instead, I just said, “Why?”

“I know. I betrayed all my convictions. Believe you me, I know. But I’ve been thinking, Ethan, and I don’t think they were really my convictions. I don’t think I believed in them.”

“You didn’t believe in the
Contracantos
?”

“I thought I did. But I’m not sure I wrote the
Contracantos
for the reason I said. I think I just wanted to be different. To do something cool.”

“You didn’t believe in—” I almost said “us,” but that sounded like a bad rom-com. “You didn’t believe in the Appelden?”

“I wanted something exciting. And the
Contracantos
was exciting, sure. But then kTV asked me to be on the show. And I
knew you guys would be mad, but, Ethan, I couldn’t look away. It was like, Finally! Something
awesome
!”

Then I knew nothing I said would matter. He’d always loved that word. And if he thought that kTV was more awesome than we were, we’d lost him. He’d always wanted to be awesome and to do awesome things, and we, apparently, had never been awesome enough.

English class did nothing to lift my spirits. Every time I looked at BradLee I could see his ten-year-old self, one baby face laid over another as if someone were fooling around with overhead transparencies. Luke was quiet. Maura spaced out. Elizabeth slept. Jackson let out the occasional chirp of victory when he estimated a square root within 0.001.

I tried to take notes on the end of Ezra Pound’s life. You already know he was a fascist. But at the very end, BradLee told us, he took it all back. This is what he told Allen Ginsberg:

How can you not feel sorry for him? I know, I know. He was a bigot. He supported people who did terrible things.

But.
Not a lunatic but a moron
, he said of himself. Can you imagine looking back at your entire volcanic life, always committed to one cause or another, spewing out energy and ideas like a vortex, only to think
that
?

He’d tried so hard his whole life.
I should have been able to do better
.

I listened as hard as I could to BradLee’s lecture.

“Does anyone feel relief that he recanted his anti-Semitism?” There was a smattering of hands. “I’m sure we all do. But we need to be cautious about being relieved. Why?”

Nobody answered.

“Because, class, we argued that an artist’s life doesn’t matter when it comes to an evaluation of his work. And if Pound’s fascism doesn’t matter, his disavowal of that fascism doesn’t matter either. Not in terms of our critical appraisal of the
Cantos
.”

I’ve experienced my share of depressing winter Mondays but that day was something else. I’d already been shattered, but the Pound quotation took my porcelain shards and pulverized them, drove a heel into them and ground them to dust. I kept thinking of that old man. He realized that he’d been wrong and—here’s the kicker—he shouldn’t have been wrong. Like every one of us, he had the burden of existing as a moral being, and he’d worn it wrongly. But he didn’t stop caring. He didn’t excuse himself. He looked back on his life—which he could not do over, which could not be edited or frankenbited, which was simply, tragically,
almost over
—and he said, “I should have been able to do better.”

*   *   *

On Tuesday, I waded out of the slough of depression and straight into the fires of anger. It was all BradLee’s fault, I decided in Latin class. If the
Contracantos
had stayed secret, Luke would still be our friend. I had a delectable daydream about confronting BradLee, and I’d convinced myself I was going to do it. But by the time Ms. Pederson released her prisoners, Elizabeth was waiting outside the classroom.

“Ugh, I can’t today,” I said.

“You promised. And I got my dad to let me have the car.” She dangled the keys. That weekend, I’d made the foolhardy vow that I’d accompany Elizabeth to the Science Museum of Minnesota to do our Advanced Figure Drawing assignment. “Get down to the bones,” Dr. Fern had said. “Literally.” I’d planned to draw the squirrel skeleton that the triplets had found in the backyard, but Elizabeth said dinosaurs would be better.

“But I wanted—”

“To go home and play Candy Land and sink into a morass of depression and calc homework on your bed?”

I did not deign to respond.

We got out our sketchbooks in front of the colossal triceratops. I’d loved this place as a kid. “Did you see the posters out front?” said Elizabeth.