The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy (17 page)

“That,” said Luke, “was obvious.” They shared a meaningful look.

“He’s pretty too,” said Olivia.

Tabby looked at me. “Don’t ask,” I told her.

The show went to commercials.

“Well!” said my mom with a little shake. “I didn’t realize this was quite so—sensational. Girls! Bedtime!” But she didn’t move to herd them, and they pretended not to hear, and we all stayed in the living room and watched the show.

It was when Luke read a new section of his poem that I curled into the fetal position, where I remained all weekend. I avoided Jackson and Elizabeth. They said they were going to visit, but I made some oblique references to projectile vomiting to scare them off.

Lunch that Monday was the first time I’d seen them since the baneful Thursday of
Contracantos
III. They double-teamed me.

“Here’s what we’ve decided, Ethan,” said Elizabeth. “We have to do something.”

“Yeah, that’s what Luke said,” I said wearily. I shoved my lunch bag farther away from me. I was still in that phase when you wonder why people eat food, anyway. “That’s why we published the
Contracantos
. I don’t want to do something. It’ll probably backfire.”

“Are you still sick?” she said. “This is not the Ethan I know.”

She was just being nice. The Ethan she knew was just as spineless and depressive.

“He’s not eating,” Jackson told her.

“You wouldn’t be eating either, if you knew what I’ve seen food become over the last four days.”

“Anyone who can make vomit jokes is not sick,” said Elizabeth firmly. She dumped my lunch on the table. “Eat. And listen.”

I ate a corner of my PB&J. It wasn’t bad. “Owamlihsin.”

“I didn’t tell you to talk. Or whatever that was.”

I separated my tongue from my palate with some difficulty. “Now I’m listening.”

“Plans, Jackson,” said Elizabeth, all but snapping her fingers.

He got out his phone and started punching buttons.

“You guys have
plans
? What is this, a war mission?”

“Shut up and eat.”

I took another bite.

“We don’t have plans,” said Jackson, holding the screen a few inches from his nose. “We have a list of things we’re going to do.”

“That’s called a plan.”

“Ethan Andrewhatever,” said Elizabeth, “if I have to tell you to be quiet one more time, I’m … um.…”

“Threaten on,” I said.

She grabbed my lunch bag.

“Hey!”

She looked inside. “Jackpot.”

“Huh?” said Jackson.

“
Pot
, not son,” said Elizabeth. “Except not pot. Better. I’ve got cookies.”

“I’ll stick to the sandwich. You can have those,” I told her.

“Wait, really? Ethan, you’re so nice.”

“I know.”

I didn’t mention that the triplets had just discovered baking. I’ve seen the amount of spoon-licking they do. You’d have to list saliva as an ingredient, right up there with the brown sugar.

“I’ve been craving homemade cookies.”

I decided not to inform her that Tabitha cracked eggs by holding them in her fist over the bowl and squeezing.

“Number one,” said Jackson. “Get into Coluber’s office.”

“What?!” I yelped. I looked around nervously, not that anyone would bother eavesdropping on us. “Not this again.”

“We have to. You remember that day I hacked into BradLee’s computer?”

“Of course.” I wasn’t senile.

“Remember how I said he’d set up a VPN-blocking agent?”

“Uh, sure.” Okay, maybe I
was
senile. Technologically.

“Assuming that’s the last barrier of encryption, his office computer may allow me to access his network files. I’m even more excited about the paper files, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s savvy to the threat of hackers and/or subpoenas, and keeps anything incriminating in hard copy so it can be thoroughly destroyed.”

“Why do you want to access his files?”

Elizabeth interrupted. “Ethan, I know you’re touched in the head, but pretend you’re smart. Briefly. It’s all I ask. Jackson
and I, we’re like ninety percent sure he’s getting money under the table from kTV.”

“You have no proof of that.”

“Exactly. That’s why we’re breaking into his office.”

“But—” I ate a grape instead.

“Can we move on?”

“Just to tell you, my silence does not imply agreement. Nor that I’m going to help you with this cockamamie shit.”

“We’ll infer anything we like,” said Elizabeth. “Son of Jack, go on. Number two.”

“We’re going to figure out why BradLee is Coluber’s mole,” said Jackson. “Then we shall either help him or destroy him.”

“This isn’t a video game,” I said.

“Okay, not actually destroy.”

“Why would we help him?”

“We like him.”

“What if he’s dating Trisha Meier?”

“Then he really needs help.”

Maybe it was that I hadn’t eaten anything solid for four days, but I had trouble formulating the questions I knew I should be asking.

Elizabeth came to the rescue. “He’s the one who told Coluber about all of this. He’s a pawn. But why? He’s smart. So he’s either secretly evil—”

“—in which case we destroy him—” inserted Jackson.

“—or Coluber has some hold over him.”

“Blackmail?” I said.

“You’ve caught on. Congratulations.”

“This is crazy. What if Coluber just wanted kTV at Selwyn for free publicity?”

“Right. Because he’s so selfless and devoted.”

“What if dumb old BradLee just thought we all
wanted
Luke on the show?”

“I thought you were obsessed with tricolons. Doesn’t it bother you that we’re stuck in the middle of one right now?”

Damn, she knew me well. I’d had that nagging sense of unease, like when you jump ahead on the page and you have to remember to read the paragraph you skipped.

“Number three,” said Elizabeth. “The third thing we have to do is—”

“Luke,” said Jackson.

“I am not doing Luke.”

“Your juvenility is rank,” said Elizabeth, but Jackson smirked and I felt validated. “We have to do something
about
Luke.”

“Which is?”

They looked at each other. Jackson put his phone down. Elizabeth stuffed her dreadlocks into a gigantic ponytail.

“Which is?” I prompted again. They looked like I felt: uncertain and tired. Sad.

“We’re in disagreement,” said Elizabeth.

“Frankly, I’m angry,” said Jackson. “I want to mess with him. I want to make him look like an idiot on-screen.”

“I just don’t know whether he should be blamed for all of this.” Elizabeth shrugged.

“Of course he should be blamed,” said Jackson.

I sympathized with both of them. Was he the villain or the
victim? I was angry enough to contemplate acts of violence that my skinny ass would never be capable of doing, but I also wanted to believe that it wasn’t his fault. Because that was the only way we’d get him back.

“Problem is,” said Jackson, “kTV’s going to edit out anything that’s not marketable.”

“Right.”

“But there are five episodes left. So we’ve got time. I bet I can get into their editing software if I read up on it. We could make him look like the asshat he is.”

“We haven’t even decided whether we’re going to screw with him,” said Elizabeth.

“Yes we have,” Jackson mouthed at me.

“We. Need. More. Information.”

“We’re agreed on
that
count. We’re learning everything about Snakeman and Avogadro.”

“Jackson,” said Elizabeth impatiently, “we discussed this. We’re
not
doing code names.”

“Avogadro?” I said.

“Because BradLee’s the mole,” Jackson explained, looking pleased with himself. “Ignore her. She’ll come around.”

Elizabeth folded a funnel into my lunch bag and tilted it to her mouth for the last of the cookie crumbs. “I draw the line at such nerdiness,” she said, emerging.

“Hold still,” I said. I brushed the crumbs off her cheeks.

“Did that just happen?” said Jackson. “Ethan? Seriously? That was
Elizabeth
you just voluntarily touched.
Elizabeth
.”

“I
am
a tangible being,” she told him waspishly. The cheeks
that I’d been touching three seconds ago were now the exact shade of her hot pink tank top. So were mine, I’m sure.

“Give me a second to wipe my memory card of that incident,” said Jackson, fingers to his forehead, eyes closed. I glanced over at her. She was wearing overalls. Her shoulders had this endearing knobbly look, but her skin was as creamy as the flesh of a tree, its bark just peeled. She refused to look at me.

“Done,” said Jackson. “Phew. Whatever just happened, I have the vague sense that it was highly disturbing. Anyway. Let’s hatch a plan.”

I leaned toward my friends. This was making me kind of excited. I know what you’re thinking: I was being swept up again, just like when we published the
Contracantos
. I’d renounced “doing something,” but that had lasted about four days.

But what can I say? I’m susceptible to a well-turned tricolon.

“Can I sit here?” said Elizabeth before English, gesturing toward Luke’s abandoned chair. Now he sat across the room next to Maura.

“But what will your normal friends do without you?” I said. “Who will laugh at their normal jokes? Who will pass them normal notes?”

“Your absence will screw up their normal distribution,” said Jackson.

“Ba-dum-
ching
!” I said, even though I only get like one percent of statistics jokes. (Ba-dum-
ching
.) Before she sat down, she gave us both the finger.

Our plan’s name came to us that very class.

“You remember that Pound was an early proponent of Imagism,” said BradLee. In Luke’s face, not a muscle budged. “Pound moved on. His next movement was called Vorticism. He said, explaining the name, ‘The image is a radiant node or cluster; it is a vortex, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.’ ”

VORTEX. I liked it.

“Isn’t ‘vortex’ a Latin word?” I whispered to Jackson.

“Tornado,” he said instantly.

“We shall be the tornado of justice,” murmured Elizabeth. “The vortex of vengeance.”

Across the room, Luke showed his notebook to Maura. She laughed.

Later in that same class, BradLee took us back to the lines I’d analyzed with her.

You know how you’ll get obsessed with a song for a month or so? Then you hear it again, years later, and it’s a nostalgia
machine
.
You immediately remember what it was like back then, except everything’s sodden with the golden goo of memory and looks a lot better than it really was.

Well, that’s what happened when I heard those lines of the
Cantos
. All I wanted was to go back.
What thou lovest well remains
.… It hadn’t remained, I thought.
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
.… That was wrong too. Luke had betrayed us, and it was painful to think of the soaring hope I’d felt when Maura had said, “I don’t say these things to anyone else.”

Ezra Pound had lied. What I’d loved had been reft from me, and I was bereft, and they were in their own world.

We planned VORTEX. “Might as well go tonight,” said Elizabeth Friday morning as we drove to school.

“Tonight?” I howled. “I’m not mentally prepared.”

“T minus fourteen hours,” said Jackson.

Friday night, 9 p.m. The best time to ensure that anyone and everyone involved with Selwyn would be occupied. They picked me up in the Appelvan. It was just as dark as it’d been that morning.

“Welcome to VORTEX,” said Jackson. “A man. A plan. A van.”

“I’m the man,” I said immediately.

“We’re both men,” said Jackson.

Based on the snorts and whoops that accompanied her laughter, it was going to take Elizabeth a while to recover. I asked Jackson, “Did you bring him?”

“Against my better judgment.”

At the next red light, he handed Baconnaise’s travel cage back to me. I took him out and cradled him in my hands. My nervousness instantly receded. Good old Baconnator. “Ready?” I asked him.

“Did your parents notice that you’re wearing all black?” said Jackson.

I just laughed. Inside, the triplets were playing Don’t Touch the Floor. My mom was a lava monster dozing on the carpet. My dad’s back served as the bridge from coffee table to couch. My parents hadn’t noticed anything I did for nearly five years now.

“Don’t be nervous,” I told Baconnaise. “You’ll be in my pocket most of the night.”

“Is that safe?” said Jackson. “Won’t he get squished?”

“Ethan’s pants leave plenty of space,” said Elizabeth. “He’s missing that thing called a thigh.”

“But what about the tumor?” said Jackson. “Is he in pain? If you were in pain, would you want to spend the night in someone’s pocket?”

“Stop calling it a tumor.” I much preferred
benign lump
. “And it doesn’t hurt him.”

It had been getting bigger, but Baconnaise seemed supremely unconcerned. I was trying to imitate his attitude. Besides, we were at school. VORTEX was upon us.

We skirted the edges of the lot as we headed for the rear
of the school. I glanced back at the van. It was eerily alone, gleaming in dingy pedophiliac glory. I looked at Elizabeth and started to laugh.

“Silence,” she said, giggling herself.