The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy (16 page)

I was very glad Jackson had a different lunch period that day.

We were standing right behind Luke. Elizabeth dropped my hand to tap him on the shoulder, and I covertly wiped my sweaty palm on my jeans.

“Yo,” she said.

“Hey!” said Luke, nonplussed. “It’s you!”

“Can we talk to you in private?” I said.

Luke looked pained. “I’d say yes, but”—he gestured to his taco salad—“you know the Divergent Temperature Principle.”

“What’s
that
, Luke?” said Miki F.R. “That sounds
hysterical
!” He started laughing.

“Can’t we just talk here?” His eyes weren’t meeting ours.

“Why are you on the show?” I blurted out.

Miki F.R. started laughing again, but I ignored him. Or tried to. I’ve never heard a screech monkey die a slow and painful death, but I can’t imagine the sound is dissimilar.

“They asked me,” said Luke.

“But we thought you hated it!”

“Yeah,” said Elizabeth. “What about the indigenous society protesting the colonizing overlords of the schlocky lowbrow sell-out consumerist culture?” She was leaning forward, getting into Luke’s space. I’d have been terrified.

He looked nervously at his tablemates. Kyle was talking to Josh and Kirtse, but Miki F.R. was following the conversation with interest. “You were right!” he cried. “You called it! You
know
human nature, Luke. You totally predicted they wouldn’t get it.”

Now Luke looked embarrassed. His skin was pretty brown, but he was blushing. “The publicity … the scholarship … the chance to network—”

The old Luke always thought it was vile to use “network” as a verb.

“It’s a really good opportunity.”

I tried to look straight into his eyes. Surely he’d be telegraphing something like, “I have to say this in front of them, but really, I have an excellent way to explain all of this! I still like you the best! I’ll be back, Ethan! I’ll be back!”

But he looked down and took a bite of taco salad.

“Come on, Ethan,” said Elizabeth. I followed her across the cafeteria.

“I hope his meat and his lettuce are both room temperature,” I said.

Any fool could have hit a solid “lukewarm” joke with that setup, but she didn’t even take a whack. That’s when I knew she was as upset as I was. “Me too,” she said.

“James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, H.D., William Carlos Williams,” said BradLee. “All writers who were strongly influenced by Pound. All modernists. What are the hallmarks of modernism? Fragmentation. Collage. An unreliable narrator.”

An unreliable narrator. That was me! “Everyone has a filter,” Luke had told me in calculus, back in the good old days. And my filter was wrong. I’d been choosing the wrong luminous details, frankenbiting reality, and I hadn’t ended up with anything close to the true story. I didn’t know Luke at all.

That Thursday, there was a new issue of the
Contracantos
.

“What the eff, Herbert,” I whispered during Morning Practice. There were a few other people in Dr. Fern’s studio, but they had on their iPods and were actually concentrating on art. I figured it was safe to have a brief conversation with my manikin.

I had picked up Issue III of the
Contracantos
from a newspaper distribution bin before school. I’d wanted to boycott it, but I’d been too curious to resist. Then I’d had to wait all through first-bell Latin. There was no way I was going to read it under Ms. Pederson, she of the invisible eyebrows and Scandinavian discipline.

Now I put it on my lap, angling Herbert so he could peer down too.

The paper was glossy. The words were typed. There were still drawings, but they’d gotten some real artist to do the sketches. I steeled my nerves and started to read.

“Vintage Luke,” I told Herbert as I flipped to page two.

“Same style, but …,” I told him as I flipped to page three.

“This is disgusting,” I told him as I flipped to page four.

I closed it and stuffed it in my backpack.

I felt sick. It was Luke’s style, Luke all the way through. But now the show was hailed as the school’s savior. A new era had dawned for Selwyn, and it was ushered in by reality TV.

“Damn it, Herb,” I said. He scowled at me and I realized that he wanted me to draw him. I was still working on “The Art of Excretion,” so I moved him into a squat.

“Better?” I asked.

He still looked angry, but at least that fit with his constipation pose.

“Listen up, man.” I started to sketch him, trying to see him as lines, not a person. (My habit of chatting with him admittedly made that more difficult.) “He’s made a philosophical about-face. He’s claiming
For Art’s Sake
is the best thing that’s ever happened to Selwyn.”

Herbert nodded. Maybe it was a draft of air.

“So everyone’s going to notice. They’ll rebel. They’ll call him out on his hypocrisy.”

Dr. Fern came into the room and walked around. I shut up.

“A pose of despair, Ethan?” she asked me.

“Oh, uh, yeah,” I said. Now that I looked at Herbert, crouching with his face in his hands, his shoulders hunched with tension and anxiety, I could see where she was getting it.

“A little disproportionate,” she said, squinting at my sketch. “The torso’s too stumpy for the length of the legs.”

“That’s why he looked weird. Thanks.”

“But Ethan? Your drawing has greatly improved of late.”

Dr. Fern sounded so sincere that I had no choice but to conclude that every word she’d previously spoken to me had been sarcastic.

“Your skills are increasing, but there’s something else. You’ve been inspired, I think. I don’t know if it’s the poses you’re working on”—she raised an eyebrow; Dr. Fern is no dummy—“or something else in your life. But you’re bringing a new focus to art.”

The reception of Issue III was nauseating. Really. I had to go home because I threw up. I spent the rest of the day in bed pretending to my mom and very revolted sisters that I had a stomach virus, when in truth I was sickened by betrayal.

Nobody had commented that the issue was different. They were all like, “Oh em gee, it
was
Luke Weston!” And, “Luke and I have always been close.” And, “Yeah, he’s super cool.”

He didn’t show up to English class, which disappointed a bunch of my classmates who were wondering before the bell whether it’d be weird to ask him for an autograph. BradLee lectured. I was feeling bad by this point. I kept plucking at the
collar of my shirt, imagining that its friction against my neck was the cause of my burgeoning nausea.

“It’s interesting to consider certain elements of Ezra Pound’s life as you read the
Cantos
,” said BradLee. “He was an anti-Semite. He supported the Nazis in World War II. He was shut up in a mental asylum for thirteen years.”

I wiped sweat off my forehead—why did no one else seem warm?—and tried to listen.

“By the time Germany surrendered in 1945, he’d been indicted for treason and imprisoned in an American military compound in Italy. He told a reporter that Mussolini was an ‘imperfect character who lost his head.’ And that Hitler was like Joan of Arc, ‘a saint.’ He thought Hitler was the savior of his people.”

It was easy to tell who was paying attention, because they were all gasping.

Cynthia Soso raised her hand. “So why are we reading him?”

Miles Quince jumped in. “Ezra Pound called Hitler a
saint
?”

“We’ve read the
Cantos
. It’s obvious the guy is crazy,” said Vivian Hill. She got a laugh, which irritated me. “We already
know
that.” She was milking her dumb joke, and it worked. The class sniggered again. “But I didn’t know he was some
fascist
.”

Everyone was nodding. I felt like defending Pound, but I didn’t know why.

“He’s controversial,” said BradLee. “Lots of people would say I shouldn’t be teaching him in a high school English class.”

“But that doesn’t have anything to do with his poetry,” I said. I could hear the tremor in my voice. Dang, I hated when that happened. There was no non-lame explanation: either I was nervous, or I cared too much about what I saying.

But maybe it was the nausea, I thought. Because I didn’t feel nervous. And I didn’t even
know
what I was saying.

“Could be true, Ethan. Class, what’s the big question we’re dealing with here?”

A few people tried, but they were off the mark. They didn’t get big enough. They were like, “Should we read fascist poetry?”

I propped my right elbow on the palm of my left hand and flopped my arm into the air. “How much an artist’s life should affect our interpretation of his work,” I said flatly.

“Perfect. Life versus art.”

While BradLee scribbled that on the board, Elizabeth caught my eye. “Are you okay?” she mouthed. I shook my head.

“Should it matter that Pound was treasonous?” continued BradLee. “Should it matter that he betrayed his country for a cause that was categorically wrong? Is it possible to read his work without our knowledge of his beliefs coloring our reading? Should we even try?”

The room was spinning around me. I put my head down on my desk.

“Mr. Lee?” I heard Jackson say. “You know Ethan?”

“I do,” said BradLee. The words sounded as if they were coming from very far away.

“I’ve deduced he’s sick.”

Then I just had to keep my mouth shut and hold very still.

I was done thinking about Pound. All I could think was
please please please don’t hurl not now not in front of Maura stop stop stop stop
.… Then I sprinted.

I made it to the trash can in the hallway. It was the best thing that happened all day.

I kept barfing, so I skipped school the next day. The most productive thing I did was watch the latest episode of
For Art’s Sake
. Probably not the best remedy for nausea.

“Is that Luke?” said my mom, coming into the living room with a hot-water bottle. “Put this on your stomach, honey. Why, it
is
Luke.” She sat down by my feet. “Jonathan! Girls! Luke’s on kTV!”

“I’d rather finish the crossword,” my dad, a smart man, called from the kitchen. The triplets tumbled in wearing their footie pajamas.

“LUKE!” they screamed when they saw him on the screen. He was wearing dark jeans and a black T-shirt, and he looked
solemn and artsy until he grinned at the applause from the studio audience. Then he looked like my friend.

“Why is Luke on TV?” said Olivia.

“Why
is
he on TV?” my mom asked me.

“Shh,” I said. “She’ll explain.”

The image had returned to Trisha, who was beaming at Luke as if he were the fruit of her loins. “It’s always a great joy to discover a new talent. It’s like finding a violet that has blossomed in a landfill.”

“She’s pretty,” said Lila.

“She’s evil,” I said.

“Like the wild things?” said Tabby. Tabby is a big fan of
Where the Wild Things Are
. She was Max in his wolf suit for Halloween last year, at least until she got sent home from nursery school for starting a wild rumpus.

“I am so pleased to present
For Art’s Sake
’s newest contestant: Luke Weston!”

Luke waved.

“Tell us a little about yourself,” said Damien.

“I’ve always loved writing. I think it’s amazing that mere scratches on a page can signify emotions, characters, ideas. That’s why I decided to write and publish a poem about Selwyn. Just for fun, of course: I had no idea that it would land me on
For Art’s Sake
!”

“And we’ll be hearing new installments of this poem every week,” said Trisha. “We’ve got only a few episodes left before the live finale, when we’ll crown America’s Best Teen Artist.”

The scene moved to other contestants, bitching about how Luke got to jump in two-thirds of the way through the season.

“I wanna see Luke,” whined Lila.

“He’ll be back,” said my mom, mesmerized. “Oh! Goodness! Girls! Close your eyes!”

I closed my eyes too. Maura and Josh were making out. You don’t want kisses to be that up-close and personal unless you’re on the receiving end.

But I had to squint my eyes open when I heard her voice, somewhat muffled. “Hey. We have to talk, Josh.”

“Uh-huh,” said Josh. Was he biting her neck? Holy bejeezus, he was nibbling at her neck as if it were a giant pale hot dog. I couldn’t watch this in the same room as my mother.

“Now,” said Maura.

“Yeah, yeah. Mmm.”

“We’re over, Josh.”

“Over?”
said Josh, pulling away with a squelch. “What are you talking about?”

“I can’t do this anymore.”

“Maura—”

“I’m too stressed for a relationship right now.”

The image suddenly cut away. “Lukie!” cried the girls. Maura was sitting on his desk in a library writing pod. They were smiling at each other.

“She’s pretty too,” Olivia said.

“Is she evil?” asked Tabitha.

Back to Maura and Josh. “I just don’t have the time.”

Now she was sharing Luke’s chair. They were both laughing at something he’d written.

Back to her and Josh. “And I don’t have, like, the mental capacity? I’ve got to focus on dance and the show.
Not
on guys.”

Back to Luke. “Sorry about you and Josh,” he said.

“No big deal. We weren’t right for each other.”