The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy (25 page)

“I’m leaving,” I said. “You—you—”

I wanted to call her a bitch. I almost did. But I couldn’t get the word out. I started wondering whether that’d be sexist, and then I started thinking about how many thoughts could squeeze into the tiniest pause between words, and
then
I started thinking that now I was thinking about my thoughts, and also thinking about the fact that I was thinking about my thoughts, and how that could go on forever, as if my first thought had been placed between two mirrors and now there was an infinite, recursive series of thoughts. And then I thought about how everyone else probably thought about thoughts too, and how there were so many
thoughts
out there,
an oppressive consciousness ladled over the globe like a thick, congealing sauce.

I felt
mise en abyme
. Tossed into the abyss.

“Cat-piss and porcupines,” I finally said. “I’m leaving.”

But I didn’t stand up. It sounds superbly lame, but I didn’t want to leave Baconnaise. Maybe Elizabeth was right, I thought. Not about all of it. But about him. Him and Herbert. I spent a lot of time having conversations with Baconnaise and Herbert. I knew they didn’t have real personalities, but it was exhausting to be around real personalities.

“It’s too complicated,” I said. I put Baconnaise down again. He immediately went back to sleep. I looked at Elizabeth. She had flushed a bright, beautiful red. “Real people are too complicated. I’m not equipped to handle it.”

“
Nobody’s
equipped to handle it,” said Elizabeth. “But you have to.”

“No.” How to explain? “I’m singularly unequipped. I can’t deal. That’s why I’ve been crushing on Maura for years. That’s why I hang out with Baconnaise and Herbert and a bunch of four-year-olds.”

“Who’s Herbert?” said Jackson.

“Andrezejczak,” Elizabeth said, “you’re doing it again. ‘I’m singularly unequipped.’ You think you’re the only real person. You think you’re the only one who’s amazed and scared and freaked by how complicated everyone is.”

“You are?”

“Of course I am.”

“You are?” I said to Jackson.

He shrugged. “This is between you two.”

Typical Jackson, I thought. Then: but Jackson is complicated.

“Everybody else has unattainable crushes too,” she said. “And imaginary friends. Some part of their mind that they talk to when they can’t deal with talking to real people. You just happen to name yours.”

“Is the therapy session over?” said Jackson. “Because we’ve got plans to plan.”

“Ethan,” said Elizabeth, “Luke was wrong. He wanted an awesome, complicated life, and he thought he had to go on kTV to get it. He didn’t know that sometimes, the most awesome and complicated thing you can do is just stick around.”

For the rest of that evening, we discussed what we wanted and how to get it.

“We need to take control of the discourse,” said Jackson.

The word “discourse” always makes me feel dumb.

“We need to be the ones speaking. So we need to do something
on
the show. We can’t let them report it. They’re experts at spin.”

“But that’s impossible,” I said. “They’ll twist anything we do. They’ll frankenbite it until it supports their message.”

“Not something they can’t edit,” said Jackson. “Not the live finale.”

He was a genius. Or I was a dimwit. There was a gulf between us, that’s all I knew.

“But before we proceed,” he said, “we’ve got a problem.
The name. We had IMAGE and VORTEX. But Pound went from Imagism to Vorticism to fascism. To anti-Semitism. Do we call our plan NAZI? ADOLF?”

I cut him off before he said something politically incorrect. “How about EZRA?”

“This is for you, Ezra,” said Elizabeth.

“We’re doing what you should have done.”

There were notes on BradLee’s whiteboard, notes about long poems. Our test was coming up. The unit was almost over.

“Curses,” said Jackson. “The schema’s gone.”

“Do you think BradLee told him?”

“Nah. You know when I rewrote the file with the Merovingian protocol? And did the Bonaparte programming scan?”

(I have made the executive decision to replace all computer terminology with French monarchical dynasties.)

“Well, I think the Capet bot left traces. They must have run a Carolingian-Bourbon test.”

“We can’t read the script anymore?” said Elizabeth.

“Nope.”

“I don’t really mind watching the episode,” I said, turning on kTV.

I saw Elizabeth’s mouth open in the exact shape required for a snarky comment about how I meant to say that I didn’t mind watching Maura Heldsman. Then I saw it close.

“We don’t have a choice,” I said, smirking at her.

It took a second, but she finally smirked back. “You win. Give me the remote.”

“She
is
the remote-meister this month,” Jackson reminded me.

I tossed it over to her. “Don’t mute anything but commercials,” I said. “Or Miki Frigging Reagler. You can always mute him.”

“I think that’s Maura,” said Elizabeth, pointing at the screen.

Maura was not usually hard to recognize, particularly for such an expert as the honorable Ethan Andrezejczak. But the thing on the floor of the dance studio looked more like a small earthen mound.

“That is an
intense
fetal position,” said Jackson. “That’s the kind of fetal position that saves your life in an earthquake.”

“Maura?” said Luke, entering the studio. “Let me help, okay?”

“No,” said the lump.

“We can talk through your ideas. Like last time.”

“No.”

“What’s wrong? You’re not upset about us, are you?”

“Close your eyes!” I shrieked as triceratops make-out footage aired. Violins swanned.

“It’s over, Ethan,” said Elizabeth. I cracked an eye. They were back to the studio.

“I know what’s wrong,” said Luke. “You’re thinking about the future, aren’t you?”

Maura gave a violent nod.

“As our season draws to a close,” said a voice-over, “so does senior year. Are our contestants pumped, or panicked? Fired up, or freaked out? Find out—right after this.”

The show reopened on the Selwyn stage. Trisha and Damien and Willis Wolfe joked about the cold. They hyped up the prize. Then they announced the challenge.

“Tell us, through art, what’s next for you,” said Trisha. “What does your future hold? You have five days to prepare your piece, but take care: only three contestants will advance to the finale!”

Elizabeth muted the commercials. “I hate to say it,” said Jackson, “but it’ll be very difficult for us to take action if Luke gets kicked off.”

“It’s going to be Kyle,” said Elizabeth as she turned the sound back on.

As if on cue, Miki F.R. said, “Hey, Kyle? Buddy? I hope you’re choosing your monologue carefully, because you, my friend, are the underdog.”

“Uh, thanks, Miki,” said Kyle. “What are you singing?”

“Oh, I’ve got some ideas,” Miki F.R. said airily. In the next shot, he was surfing the Internet. “Just checking what’s out there,” he told the camera. The shot zoomed to his Google search bar, which displayed
song musical theater hot guy college turning point awesome
. Jackson sunk to his knees, clutching his forehead and whimpering. I thought he had a migraine, but he started shouting, “Keywords! Keywords! Woe is the state of Googlage in America!” Elizabeth threw slobbery dog toys at him until he shut up.

“It’ll be Kyle,” she repeated. “Unless someone else totally hashes up the performance.”

“Which could happen,” said Jackson, pointing at the screen. Maura was standing at the barre, absentmindedly doing calf raises and staring into the mirror.

“Maura!” said Luke, entering the studio. “I thought I’d find you here.”

“Doesn’t he have a long poem to write?” I muttered.

“Point in favor of the argument that he’s not writing it,” said Jackson.

Maura tiptoe-ran to Luke and gave him a kiss. “Close your eyes!” I shouted, but it was already over.

“How’s the writing?” she said.

“Let’s just say my theme is uncertainty.”

“Mine too.” She sat down with an audible plop. It was the most ungraceful Maura move yet. “I haven’t even started. That’s how uncertain I am.” Her voice was trembling.

“You want me to leave you to it?”

“Soon,” said Maura. “But—” She grabbed Luke’s hands and pulled him down too.

“Close your eyes!” said Elizabeth.

“Gross,” I said. I could hear the slurps.

“There’s one thing I
am
certain I want in my future,” murmured Luke.

“You,”
all three of us said with him.

“BradLee, BradLee,” said Elizabeth. “You’re letting us down.”

“Dialogue doesn’t get much more predictable,” said Jackson.

“Can I open my eyes yet?” I said.

After the commercials, there were interviews with Kyle and Miki F.R. Kyle was deciding between Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams. He sounded far too intelligent to be featured for long, so we had to suffer through a lot of Miki F.R.

“You know how some people need less sleep than others? Well, I need less rehearsal! But this is different. Not because I need the practice, but because it’s just so much
fun
.”

“This can’t be scripted,” I said. “He’s this douchey in real life too.”

“The song is a lovely lagoon,” he said, “and I just want to dive in.”

Fetal Maura came back. Now she was sobbing.

“I don’t
know
what my future is. And we’ve only got two days left and if I don’t figure out something I’ll be kicked off—”

“Can you use that urgency?” said Luke. “The uncertainty? How you’re pulled between two different lives?”

“Luke, just go away.”

“Yes!” I shouted.

“Wait,” she said. “I didn’t mean that.”

“No!”

“Well, actually, you should go away.”

“Yes!”

“But I still love you!”

“No!”

“She puts you through the wringer, doesn’t she?” commented Elizabeth.

I sunk back into the couch, exhausted. “Baconnaise,” I moaned, like a guy crying for water in the desert. Elizabeth
scooped him from his cage and handed him over. “Hey, little man. Want to do some tightrope walking?”

Elizabeth rolled her eyes, but she didn’t say anything.

“Welcome back to
For Art’s Sake
!” said Trisha. “These five days have been jam-packed with preparations, and personally I am
thrilled
to see these performances.”

“We’ll start with Luke Weston!” said Willis Wolfe.

“Unlike my co-contestants, I’m just a junior,” said Luke, “and my ‘future’ is filled with uncertainty. That’s a theme you’ll hear in this week’s installment of the
Contracantos
.”

“The
Contracantos
is Luke’s epic poem,” Trisha reminded us.

“Not technically an epic,” said Luke.

“I’d call it epic!” said Damien.

“I’ll just go ahead and start,” said Luke.

Baconnaise was looking up at me expectantly, but I knew I had to listen.

Luke read his verses.

“He didn’t write that,” said Elizabeth.

“He could have,” said Jackson.

“He’s not who we thought he was,” I said. “But—”

“No,” said Jackson. “I don’t think he could have written that.”

“Me neither,” said Elizabeth.

They looked at me.

Had he written the new
Contracantos
? It was crappy and clichéd. It was un-Luke. Then again, he seemed pretty un-Luke too. He looked more kTV every episode, with longer hair and cooler clothes. I didn’t know whether I’d ever seen beyond his surface. But I needed to. The success of EZRA,
the chance of vengeance, of justice for Maura and for all the casualties of kTV’s corruption: it all hung on our ability to tell whether Luke still wrote the
Contracantos
.

“I’m unspeakably impressed that you can do such things with words,” Trisha was saying.

“He didn’t write it,” I said slowly.

“Are you sure?” said Elizabeth.

“No,” I said. “But sure enough.”

We looked at each other and nodded. Our plan was clear. We’d chosen. We were betting that Luke didn’t write the
Contracantos
. We were betting that we knew him well enough to know.

Kyle went with a monologue from
Macbeth
. “It’s about uncertainty and doubt,” he explained, “ambition and indecision—all emotions that are very familiar to me, and to most Selwyn seniors.”

“Hmm,” said Trisha. “Go right ahead.”

“If it were done when ’tis done,”
said Kyle,
“then ‘twere well it were done quickly.…”

“We’ll be back after this break,” Trisha said when he was finished. Elizabeth muted it.

“I’m nervous, guys,” she said.

“What, is your future full of uncertainty and doubt?” said Jackson. “Ambition and indecision?”

When Elizabeth unmuted the show, Trisha cried, “Miki Reagler, come on down!”

“This last semester at Selwyn is a bittersweet time,” said Miki F.R. “I adore this school.”

The camera panned to a smug Willis Wolfe.

“My time here has gone by so fast,” said Miki F.R. “Time flies.”

“Oh, barf,” I said. Baconnaise looked revolted too. “Where’s your dad’s knitting basket, Jackson?”

“He moved it because you kept stealing his yarn. But he left the tightrope.” Jackson threw me a hank of Baconnaise’s favorite green yarn.

“Bacon-Bacon-Baconnaise!” I said, dangling the yarn near his head. He perked up. Even with the tumor, his steps were as light as a ballerina’s. He was a joy to watch. Plus, he helped me keep my eyes off Miki F.R.