The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy

Just call me Ethan.

You’re reading this first, but I’m writing it last. I’m at a corner table in this low-rent Starbucks a few blocks from my house. I had planned to write this on the living-room couch, but I have triplet sisters, and they are four years old.

“Ethan,” said Olivia, “sit on the floor.”

“Now,” said Lila.

“It is time for Candy Land,” said Tabitha.

“No. I’m writing.” I made my dad’s working-from-home face. “I’m
busy
, girls.”

The face worked about as well for me as it does for him. Lila said, “Please.”

Olivia said, “Please!”

Tabitha said, “Please. Or I will bite you.”

I said, “I call the blue piece.”

Starbucks may have provided a refuge, but I can’t say I’m upset my time here is ending. Farewell, barista with the
mongoose tattoo. Farewell, double-shot mocha Frappuccino with extra whipped cream. Farewell, the daily smirk I got when I asked the former for the latter. Today is Labor Day, and tomorrow we’ll start our senior year at Selwyn Academy, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

We
, by the way, equals me and my friends. Jackson, Elizabeth, Luke. Jackson and I have been friends the longest. Back in middle school, we were quite the pair. I hadn’t had my growth spurt yet (little did I know I never would), and he’d just discovered his passion for computer science. Together we redefined the upper limit of the seventh-grade awkwardness curve. We were best friends by default.

Luke, meanwhile, was the most popular prepubescent on earth. He was impossible to dislike. That’s not hyperbole: I tried. I have a strict policy of holding automatic grudges against people everyone likes. But Luke had a mouthful of braces and said “awesome” all the time, and he was totally genuine. He liked everybody and he assumed that everybody would like him back.

How did he become friends with us? Well, he chose us. He chose us at a Saturday-morning math contest called MinneMATHolis. Jackson and I were on a team with Luke and this kid called Miki Frigging Reagler. (Okay, this kid
I
called Miki Frigging Reagler.) We finished up and went out in the hall.

“Hey, we’re the only ones done,” said Luke. This happened a lot when you were on Jackson’s team. “This is the best part—”

“I KNOW!” said Miki F.R. “We need to catch up, Luke. I’ve got so much to tell you—”

“—since all the adults are occupied elsewhere—”

“—about this hilarious thing at Jenna’s party—”

“—and we are left to our own devices—”

“—which involved suspenders and a case of pop—”

“—alone in a university hallway—”

“—and do you want to go hang out by the water fountain down there?”

“—and when will such an awesome opportunity come again?”

“I can do a flip around the stair railing,” I said, seizing my opening.

“No way,” said Luke.

I could, and did. It was the one perk to being an eighty-pound thirteen-year-old.

“That’s awesome.”

“I can do that,” said Miki F.R. It was apparently not that easy, even if you
were
trained in ballet, jazz, hip-hop, and contemporary. He bumped his head and went to sulk in the corner.

Luke and Jackson and I performed various feats of rail-somersaulting, head-standing, and pencil-throwing. We also told horrible math jokes. “Got one,” said Luke. “What did the zero say to the eight?”

“ ‘You’re gonna get fat,’ ” said Jackson.

“Uh, what?”

“ ‘Because you eight more than me.’ ”

Luke and I were laughing so hard we were crying. Jackson seemed much funnier with Luke around.

“Not what I was thinking,” Luke finally managed to say.

“Which was?”

“ ‘Nice belt.’ ”

I went home wanting just one thing: to be friends with Luke. And then it turned out that I
was
friends with Luke. It was a miracle.

Four years passed, and we hung out all the time. Jackson’s cousin Elizabeth, who lives down the street from him, would come over too. We were a pretty tight foursome. We all went to Selwyn, a highbrow arts school where I belonged to the Untalented caste.

Then junior year happened.

Early this summer, I didn’t know where I should start this thing. Life’s not a TV show, with easy divisions between seasons and episodes. When
did
stuff begin? I couldn’t decide.

Enter tricolon. I’m sort of obsessed with tricolon.

It’s a rhetorical device. It means “the succession of three elements.” I came, I saw, I conquered. Government of the people, by the people, for the people. Get it?

If you are sophomoric, like all the male juniors in BradLee’s English class, let me tell you that yes, “tricolon” and “colon” are related words. We were all sniggering, and then Jake Wall said, “So it’s like,
plop, plop, plop
?” BradLee couldn’t help laughing. And then he sat on his desk, clutching his forehead, after he explained tricolon crescens. That’s when the elements are progressively longer or more intense. Plop. PLOP.
PLOP
.

I’ve dumped several tricolons into this narrative. I could blame it on my indecisiveness. I could give you a Wikipedia-sourced essay on the importance of threes in the literary tradition. Or I could tell you that the memory of those plops, back when BradLee was just our earnest and embarrassable teacher, and Luke sat laughing next to me, and Maura Heldsman
flinched at the sudden sound, her mind spinning off in pirouettes—well, I could tell you that some days, that memory was all I had.

Remember: this is not a novel, not a memoir, not produced by anyone with artistic skill. It’s just about what happened last year. It’s about reality TV, a desperate crush on a ballerina, and a heroic gerbil named Baconnaise. But mostly it’s about my friends. Please remember: not art, just life.

I was in a locker.

Perhaps you have some questions for me.

Where was the locker?

It was in the math hallway. The hallway also contained TV cameras and reality stars and the love of my life.

Was the locker locked?

We’ll get to that.

Oh, and by the way, WHY? Why, in the name of God-slash-Buddha-slash-Zeus, in the name of all things holy, WHY, why why why?
WHY
were you
IN A LOCKER
?

Yeah. That was going through my head too.

It started because I’d been stuck at school all afternoon. Usually I’ll catch a ride home in the Appelvan, the child-molester vehicle (white van, tinted windows) that’s piloted by my friend Jackson Appelman. But Jackson couldn’t drive me because he had to whiz off to the University of Minnesota for an emergency meeting; the chess players were trying to secede
from the Board Game Society, and there was some major civil unrest to be quelled. The bus wasn’t an option since I needed to stay after for bio help night. My mom had been my last resort.

“Would you pick me up at three-thirty?” I’d asked her before I left that morning. The Appelvan was already sitting in our driveway. Either Jackson or Elizabeth was honking to the rhythm of “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah.”

“Ethan, it’s
January
. The school year’s halfway over. And you still can’t remember to tell me these things the night before.”

“You could just get me a car.”

“How could I entrust a car to a kid who can’t remember to ask for a ride?”

Obviously, a car would solve that issue, but it wasn’t a good time to point that out.

“The triplets have dentist appointments this afternoon. I won’t be able to get you till afterward.”

When she’d be battle-scarred and weary. The honking changed to Beethoven’s Fifth, the ominous one. Dun-dun-dun
DUN
. “So what time?”

“Five? Five-thirty? Six?”

“Crap. Fine. Bye.”

Bio help night, which left me unhelped, was over at three-thirty. I had way too much time to kill, so I figured I’d go sit by my locker in the math hallway and get some homework done. That should tell you how bored I was. Quiet had slammed down on the school, and Luke had walked home, and Jackson was at the U defending Fort Sumter from the chess rebs, and there was nothing else to do.

The corridors were deserted, as dusty and dim as if there’d been some apocalyptic zombie invasion that I had missed. That
would
happen. I’d be playing with Baconnaise, my gerbil pal, and only notice that the world as we know it was ending when those rotting undead hands slunk over the windowsills. I’d have already lost my chance to stockpile canned goods, but it wouldn’t matter because I suck at running and the zombies would catch me instantly. But maybe they’d throw me back, like a minnow. Because they eat brains, right? The jury’s still out on how big my brain is. My mom, say, has a higher opinion than my teachers.