The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy (19 page)

“No, he rides in the other—here they are.” I handed her a pair of latex gloves and put another pair on myself.

“Thanks.” She opened the door. We stepped in. Before she turned on the lights, she closed the door again and locked it.

“At least we’ll have some warning if someone comes.”

The very idea made me shiver. “It’s Friday night,” I said. That had been our nervous mantra all week. Nobody would ever show up at the school on a Friday night.

I watched Elizabeth as she began to open drawers. After a minute she jerked her head at me. “Why are we here again?”

“What?”

“We’re looking for files, Ethan.”

“Right.”

I’d used up all my guts on that dumbwaiter descent. If I’d been alone, I’d probably have curled up and rolled under Coluber’s desk like a frightened pill bug. I opened a file drawer and looked at the stacks of papers. I had no idea what I was doing.

Elizabeth said, “Budget items, kTV items …”

We’d been over this. I had no excuse. I thumbed through the dry, sharp manila folders.

“I got a paper cut! It tore right through the glove! My pinkie is bleeding!”

“Yeah, so’s my heart. Don’t you get DNA on those files.”

“I’m in
pain
.”

“Why don’t I just halt our mission and find you a Band-Aid. You take pictures of these documents.” She spread them over the expanse of Coluber’s desk.

“You found something?”

“I found something that could be something. Here’s my camera. Will your wound prevent you from pushing the button?”

“I’ll manage.”

The documents were too mathy to understand. And the few bits of English were words like “deduction” and “voluntary withholding,” which might as well be math.

“Finished.” I gathered the papers back into the file. “Uh, Elizabeth?”

She was hunched over the file cabinet. I couldn’t see what she was doing. She grunted.

“Did you ever find that Band-Aid?”

“Shit, Ethan, you made me slip. No, I’m not finding you a frigging Band-Aid.
This
is what I’m doing.” She brandished an untwisted paper clip in my face. I thought she was threatening to de-eye me until I realized she was using it to pick the lock of the file cabinet.

“Wow, you know how to pick locks?” Flattery is useful in such moments. Plus, I was actually impressed.

“My babysitter taught me when I was like six. Though I admit file cabinet drawers are the extent of my ability.”

“I’m amazed.”

“Laying it on a bit thick, aren’t you?” But even from behind her, I could tell she was smiling. Her cheekbone was higher than usual, protruding from her mass of hair just enough that I could see its rise.

“Not at all. I’m truly dumbfounded.”

“Dumb, maybe. Ah!” The drawer slid open.

“I thought people used hairpins.”

“Hairpins are ideal, but who carries around hairpins anymore?”

How was I supposed to know the state of the American hairpin? How else did girls keep their hair out of their faces? I looked at the back of Elizabeth’s head as she thumbed through the files. I’d never really looked at dreadlocks before. I’d always considered them one of those things it’s rude to stare at, like a scar or a massive suppurating zit. But she was turned away and so I stared, and I realized that I liked dreadlocks. I’d thought I liked shiny, controlled hair, like Maura’s high bun, smooth enough that if there hadn’t been a color change you might have thought she was bald. (Well, bald with a large knob growing out of her crown.)

But dreadlocks were pretty. They were pretty in the way of things that weren’t supposed to be pretty: not pretty like a sunset, but pretty like undergrowth, like an English muffin, like the mottled surface of an old car’s bumper. And when she had them gathered into a ponytail, as she did now, they had this frightening power. The band was stretched around them
just once, and they looked like they were threatening to burst it, thick and heavy like a roiling pot of cheese. She had a few beads stuck into them at points. And although Elizabeth was half black, her hair wasn’t all dark. There were different shades of brown, and some of gold.

“What are you doing?” she said without turning around.

Falling in love with your dreadlocks, I’d have said if I were honest.

Why did I have this tendency to stare and stare and then to fall in love?

“This is definitely kTV related.”

It wasn’t because I was into art. I spend a lot of time staring at Herbert, but I haven’t started crushing on him. (Not yet, anyway.)

“Hand me my camera, would you?”

It was so hard to rip my eyes from her hair that I expected a Velcro noise when I did. I found her camera. She accepted it over her shoulder, still combing through the file.

That was how the trouble with Maura had started. We’d been in the same Algebra II class freshman year. She’d sat in front of me. I’d stared at her neck, and once I memorized it, I no longer knew what life meant when I didn’t stare at her neck.

Necks are highly underappreciated body parts, I decided, finding Elizabeth’s underneath the mantle of dreadlocks. They were the connection between mind and body, the symbol of this strange combination of physicality and soul that makes us human. Ugh, I thought. Here I go again. Whenever I’m under stress, I have these pseudo-philosophical daydreams. It’s
a huge liability. During the PSAT I got so worried about free will that I skipped half the math section just to prove I wasn’t a robot. (And also because I suck at geometry.) You’d think that natural selection would have eliminated that trait long ago. There was probably only one philosophical Neanderthal who didn’t get crunched by a woolly mammoth, and that guy was my ancestor—

“Ethan! Earth to Ethan!”

“Oh, hi, yeah.” I riffled some papers. “Just engrossed in the files. What’s up?”

“Can you make any sense of—”

We looked at each other.

We looked at the door.

Footsteps.

Not Jackson’s footsteps. Jackson went to Indian camp as a kid and he says he can walk, and I quote, “like a deer through the forest.” These were heavy, hurried footsteps.

“Cat-piss,” Elizabeth mouthed.

I was paralyzed.

Elizabeth wasn’t. She stuffed the folders back in the drawer and eased it shut. I was all set to dive under the desk, but Elizabeth climbed on top of it.

She hissed at me. I followed. She clambered on top of the armoire. I followed.

The footsteps were getting louder. Sure, they might have been going to another office. But were we going to risk that? I was shot through with adrenaline. Elizabeth pushed a ceiling tile aside and scrambled up. From inside, she held the hole open for me. I’m a klutz but fear made me graceful, or at
least quick. I even remembered not to squish Baconnaise in my pocket.

We’d made it out of the office. There wasn’t much vertical space between the ceiling and the next story’s floor, but there was enough to sit up straight.

“Stay on the strut,” she breathed. She’d rotated to face me. Still holding the tile aloft, she motioned down and I saw how the ceiling worked. There were parallel beams every five feet or so. We were both on one now, and it easily held our weight. Bridging these struts were thin metal channels that supported the lightweight fiberboard tiles. You wouldn’t want to put your weight on those.

She looked at me questioningly, and I nodded back. She let the fiberboard fall. It settled almost soundlessly, betraying its flimsiness. For the second time that evening, I was plunged into blackness.

But it wasn’t truly dark this time. We’d left the office light on, and the ceiling was perforated with tiny holes. My eyes adjusted quickly and I could see her moving away from me.

“Come on,” she whispered. We could hear somebody fumbling with the lock. She was scooting backward along the strut, straddling it with her legs straight as if frozen in a gymnastic vault. I followed her. She was right: it would be much better if we weren’t directly above Coluber’s office. Particularly if our visitor, still waggling the key in that blessedly uncooperative lock, was Coluber. I sure hoped Elizabeth had stuffed her camera in her pocket.

The door opened. We froze. We’d moved about eight feet down by then, and I was very close to her, facing her. We
weren’t quite touching, but if I’d leaned forward, I could have put my nose to hers.

She looked into my eyes. We could hear someone breathing underneath. The noise traveled straight up. The sounds were so distinctive that I could imagine exactly what he was doing: picking up folders, flicking through papers, heaving open drawers, ruffling through files.

Unfortunately, if sound traveled so easily up through the ceiling, it’d travel down as well. I knew I couldn’t move, even to bend my cramping legs or dislodge my slight wedgie. What I wanted most in the world was to remain undiscovered, sure. But coming in a close second was the urge to take off those blasted gloves and wipe my hands. They were disgusting. The gloves had been shoved half off, and the dust from the beam had combined with my copious palm sweat to make a sort of paste.

But I tried to hold still, relax, listen. The visitor was looking for something, I thought. Some specific item. He was moving quickly. Every so often he’d let out a hum or sigh of exasperation. Then he paused. He said, “Aha.” He opened the office door—

—when I made the mistake of looking at Elizabeth.

Her eyes were bugged out. Her mouth was full of air, clamped shut. She was grasping the strut with both hands, and she was on the verge of a cataclysmic giggling fit.

I clapped my hand over her mouth, dust be damned. This was no time for delicacies. I mustered the most threatening look in my repertoire. I’d been there, plunging through space and hurtling toward the giggles. It was a free fall. Everything
depended on my face. A look of sympathy and she’d hit bottom. A mugging expression, a lifted eyebrow, and she’d hit bottom sooner. And all would be lost.

Down below, he’d opened the door and flipped off the light, but now he halted. He must have been standing on the threshold. It was the light, I thought. When he turned it off, he’d remembered that he hadn’t turned it on.

My eyes adjusted to the new darkness. I stared into the distance, trying to look angry. This is not funny, I repeated to myself as if I could beam her the thought. This is not funny.

Of course, it
was
funny. In fact, it was knee-slapping, sidesplitting, aisle-rolling, ass-off hilarious. I could feel a tiny muscle in my cheek begin to twitch.

I could not allow that to happen.

And he shut the door.

We heard the tumblers fall into place and we heard his footsteps recede down the hallway, and soon, we heard nothing at all.

I took my hand off her mouth. I expected a deluge, but instead she let out a long, shaky breath. She looked surprised too. The fit had passed like a storm.

“Sky’s clear,”
I said.

“Night’s sea,”
she said, and I looked at her—
shone from the unmasked eyes in half-mask’s space
—and I thought how she’d quoted Pound right back at me, and how her eyes did look like a night’s sea in the half gloom of the crawl space. The darkness was sapping the world of color, and I thought that dark eyes look better than light ones in the night, because they become a deep gray, full of tides and pools and waves. Those eyes met
mine. I was going to kiss her. I cupped my hand to her chin again, and she tilted her face slightly upward, and—

CAT-PISS AND PORCUPINES.

PISS OF WELL-HYDRATED FELINES, PORKIEST PINIEST PORCUPINES.

WHY DOES THIS ALWAYS HAPPEN TO ME.

I’d lost my balance.

And one of my legs had crashed through the fiberboard ceiling.

Thankfully, Baconnaise was in the other pocket. He stuck his head out to investigate the sudden motion.

I had grabbed the strut with both hands and wasn’t falling any farther, but there was no way to take this back. “No backsies,” as Lila would say after she’d swindled me in a trade. And the earlier discomfort was nothing compared to this: one leg desperately pretzeled around a strut, the other dangling down into an office. Not Coluber’s—we’d moved too far. Whatever office was next door. The fiberboard was cutting into my leg and I was clutching the strut with both sweaty hands and my face was very near the dusty beam and Elizabeth—

You know that giggling fit that I’d thought wasn’t going to happen?

It happened.

But I will say that Elizabeth, despite needing frequent breaks to wipe away tears of laughter, eventually helped me out. First she found her flashlight to inspect the scene of the accident.

“Is Baconnaise okay?” she said.

“I’m the one you should be worrying about.”

“Can’t you pull yourself up?”

“Does it”—pant—“look like I can pull myself up?”

“Hold still.”

I held still. I grimaced. I wish I could say I was feeling pain and humiliation in equal measures, but I was definitely more humiliated, even with the rough tile scraping my leg and my muscle-cramping, tendon-stretching position. To distract myself, I reviewed that third thought.

Why does this always happen to me
.

There is no question mark, because that’s not a question. It’s a wail. I don’t want to suggest that I’d already destroyed ceilings in pursuit of kisses, but I do submit two incidents: