The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy (2 page)

At least I think she does.

I got so embroiled in my zombie fantasy that I forgot where I was going. I’d ended up near the English rooms. I thought I’d say hi to BradLee, but his door was locked, his room dark. Homework it was. Gurg. I preferred to do homework in the six minutes between class periods. I’m a junkie for the adrenaline rush.

But I resigned myself to my fate, and plopped down in the math hallway, and transferred my phone from my back pocket to my front pocket lest I butt-dial my grandmother again. I got into the zone with some history IDs. And then I heard footsteps. Not just footsteps, but wheels, gurneys, loud adult voices, shrill teenage voices, a cacophony, an approaching horde.

Was it Thursday? It was Thursday. Crap. Cat-piss. Porcupines. I was a cretin. Zombies, this brain is not up to par.

Thursday was the day, every Selwyn student knew, that
For Art’s Sake
did its filming. That’s the kTV reality show. They’d
chosen a school (our school) and they’d chosen contestants (not me). Every episode, they had some artistic challenge and someone got kicked off. The last person standing would be crowned America’s Best Teen Artist. The kTV security people do a sweep every Thursday at three-thirty to kick out the non-anointed, but I must have missed them with my daydreaming meander through the English hallway.

Why not just leave? Walk past them? Tell them I had to grab something from my locker, that I was just on my way out …?

I present a tricolon of justifications.

Besides, I was avoiding Maura. In the latest episode of
For Art’s Sake
, she’d flirted with the person I hate most in all the world, Miki Frigging Reagler. He’s a musical-theater twerp who tap-dances up the aisle to turn in tests, who thinks he’ll be the best thing to hit Broadway since
Cats
. Which he quotes, frequently. There are many things in this world that nauseate me—sitting in the backseat while my dad drives, watching the triplets eat sardines, doing both of these simultaneously—but Miki F.R. tops the list.

I know what you’re saying: “Who
is
this girl to cheat on the likable and upstanding Ethan Andrezejczak?” You should know that this was all one-sided. It was possible Maura knew my name—she’d never proven she didn’t—but that was it. In fact, she was dating Brandon Allster. I told myself that Brandon was just practice. Maura was destined to end up with me.

The noise was getting ever closer. I panicked. I tried a couple classroom doors. But they were all locked, the teachers long gone, and there was Trisha Meier’s piercing laugh—
henc! henc! henc!
The film crew would only be passing through the math hallway, I figured. I just needed to get out of the way for a minute.

I put my books in one empty locker, and I leapt into the one right next to it. I wrenched my fingers through the slats and I slammed shut the door.

The whole entourage turned the corner. I contorted my neck and squinted through the slats so I could see. They ground to a halt right in front of me.

“I’ve got a great tagline, Trisha,” said an eager voice. I identified
the source: Damien Hastings. Damien, another LA-actor type, was Trisha’s co-host. He had ultra-gelled hair with frosted tips like the Backstreet Boys circa 1999 and he was obviously as terrified of Trisha Meier as I was, although he showed it by kissing her ass.

Trisha didn’t respond.

“Ready? Ready?”

No response.

Damien put on a stagy voice. “ ‘The theater department isn’t the only place you’ll find drama at Selwyn.’ Get it, Trisha? T-Dawg? Get it?”

“Brandon,” said Trisha. “Maura. Come here.” Brandon, who sings opera, jogged into my limited field of vision. Maura separated herself from the crowd with that toes-pointed-out glide of hers. She looked only slightly less spacey than she usually did in English class.

She was very close to me.

“Makeup, check; hair, check. Looks good,” said Trisha. Truer words never spoken. “You two know the basic outline?”

“I’m stringing him on,” said Maura.

“She hooked up with Miki and I know it,” said Brandon.

I was getting interested despite myself. Sure, I was jammed in a half squat, and the coat hook was boring a hole into my spinal cord, and my air supply had the scurvy stench of ancient brown-bag lunches. But it wasn’t all that bad. I couldn’t wait to tell Luke and Jackson and Elizabeth.
Nobody
got to watch the episodes being filmed. I was like a secret agent.

*   *   *

“We’re fixing the lighting, Trisha,” someone said. “It’ll be a minute.”

“Fine.” A burly cameraman moved right in front of my locker. All I could see was half a polo shirt and a hairy biceps. Trisha’s voice suddenly changed. “Well,
hello
, you.” I was pressing my face so hard against the slats that I was going to get corrugated, but I couldn’t make out who she was talking to.

“Hey there.”

“Just
happening
to stroll by?” Trisha trilled a little laugh.

“Exactly.” The voice was a pleasant, gravelly, tenor rumble.

“Would you like to stay and watch a scene or two?” I didn’t need to see Trisha to know that her hand was on one hip, her head saucily canted to the side.

“Oh, just passing through. Have to get home; I’ve got pounds of grading—”

BradLee! It was our English teacher! He hadn’t been in his classroom, but he must have had a meeting or something.

“We’re ready, Trisha,” said the cameraman in front of me. I jumped and hit my head on the shelf. It clanged. I held my breath.

“All right, kiddos,” said Trisha in the fakest voice possible. “Let’s get this done. Maura, Brandon, go where Ken tells you.”

Ken was apparently pointing right at my locker, because that’s where they went. If I’d had goblin fingers, I could have reached through the slats and touched Maura’s hair. This was getting freaky. Nightmare scenarios ran through my head. What if my quads gave out and I toppled through the door? What if the cameraman could see my eyes glinting through
the slats? What if Brandon started kissing Maura and I couldn’t restrain my wild virile jealous rage?

“Take some deep breaths,” said Trisha. I did too. “Remember, there’s only one winner! Only one trip to LA!”

“Only one spread in
La Teen Mode
!” said Damien.

“Only one scholarship,” Maura muttered to Brandon. The winner got a lot of glitzy crap, but also a hundred-thousand-dollar scholarship to any arts college. That’s what most of the kids were gunning for.

“Makes this seem a lot more real, doesn’t it?” said Brandon.

“Chop-chop!” called Trisha. “Stop talking. We’re ready. And, action.”

“Look, Brandon,” said Maura, suddenly enunciating, “can’t we talk later? I’ve got to get to the studio. This week’s challenge—”

“This can’t wait. Listen. I was rehearsing my aria in one of the practice rooms, and I went out to see if Miriam would accompany me on the piano.”

“Miriam? Help someone? Are you crazy?”

“She was all, ‘I need to keep my fingers fresh, I have to perform Bartók’s
Allegro Barbaro
in three hours.’ ”

“Whatever.”

“Yeah, what a prima donna,” said Brandon.

“Good, good,” murmured Trisha Meier. “Keep going. Get to the point, Brandon.”

Brandon took a deep breath. I figured out what was going on. They’d been having the conversation somewhere else, and Trisha was just making them do it over. For the light, probably.
“Then I overheard Miki. He was bragging. He said he’d hooked up with you.”

“He’s lying. Why would I hook up with him? I hate him.”

“Really?”

“Do you trust me?”

“I trust you.”

“Well, I trust you too. And I didn’t do
anything
with Miki.”

Trisha interrupted. “
Bor
-ing.”

“Maybe I should kiss her?” said Brandon. Maura winced. She was in profile to me now, her elegant swan neck and her little chin and her thin, straight nose all flowing upward to the bun that rose from the crown of her head.

“Where’s a scriptwriter when you need one?” said Trisha.

Guess reality TV has some downsides.

“Any ideas?” she said.

Damien jumped up like a puppy. “We need a
visual
. So I was thinking, you know bridges?” He paused as if requiring some assurance that Trisha Meier did, indeed, know bridges. “There’s this thing where couples put padlocks on bridges. To, like, lock their love.”

“Surprisingly,” said Trisha, “that has some potential. Ken, fetch me a padlock.”

“It’s a European custom,” said Damien airily. “When I went to—”

“Spare us the details.” Ken trotted back with a padlock that I bet he’d taken off the locker of some fool who hadn’t closed it. Trisha handed it to Brandon. “We’ll want to finish with a close-up shot of the lock clicking shut.”

“I can
see
it,” said Damien. “We zoom, it clicks, it’s shut, their love’s eternal. The music swells—”

“Shush,” said Trisha. “Maura, Brandon, improvise as best you can. And, action.”

“Maura,” said Brandon. He lifted the padlock. “You and me. We’re locked together.”

“Oh, Brandon,” said Maura.

“Look into his eyes,” hissed Trisha.

“Together forever,” said Maura. She put her hands over Brandon’s, and they looked into each other’s eyes and then down, bashfully, as they threaded the shackle through the hole. She glanced up at him and he gazed down at her, tears glistening in his eyes.

“Us,” he whispered. The lock clicked shut.

“Cut,” said Trisha. “Not bad. Let’s get moving.”

They left.

And that is how I ended up stuck in a locker.

The problem with situations that give you time to think is that you don’t want to think when you’re in them. Like when we train for the zombie invasion by running laps in gym. My dad claims running is meditative, but personally, my running meditations all concern how I’m about to vomit a lung right out of my chest. And it’ll lie there on the track, gelatinous and pulsating, and the gym coach will be like, “Andre—er, Ethan! Pick it up!” And I’ll be like, “The lung? Because I have this
thing
about touching my own internal organs.” And he’ll go—

Anyway. I was in a locker, and I had a lot of time to think. After half a year in BradLee’s English class, I was getting used to asking, “What’s the deeper meaning?” Hmm, let’s see. Boy meets girl. Boy contracts huge crush on girl. Boy gets imprisoned in locker by girl as girl professes eternal love to other, hotter boy. Basically, I was helpless and passive and pathetic. Then there was the part about how “locking away” is a phrase usually applied to lunatics or felons. And about how I’d watched the whole thing and it’d taken me till half an hour later to start fantasizing about leaping out of the locker and telling Maura I was the one who truly loved her. If my life had been a poem, I could have analyzed the shit out of it.

Before these depressing thoughts, however, I’d determined the recipient of my save-me text. I had three options, which I submit in order of how little I wanted to text them.

I could hear him coming down the hallway before I could see him, because he was rattling like an escaped convict.

“Marco!” he yelled.

“Polo,” I said weakly. I could see him now. He slung his backpack to the floor with a jangling thud.

“We got a bolt cutter, we got pliers, we got a pry bar—”

“What’d you do, raid a Home Depot?”

“But the first thing I want to try is a good old-fashioned hammer. Prepare thyself.”

All I could see was his forearm. The ropy muscles tensed. I closed my eyes. The blow reverberated right into my teeth, like biting into ice cream. I opened my eyes to see Luke inspecting the lock.

“Almost,” he said. “Take two.” He hit it again. “One more.” It shattered. The pieces fell to the floor with an anticlimactic tinkle. I stumbled forth into the light.

“Should I ask?” he said.

“I don’t think I’m quite ready to talk about it.”

“The ordeal too recent, huh?”

We walked companionably to the main hall. He didn’t press me for details but instead started going on about his latest idea, which was all about long poems and censorship and protesting
For Art’s Sake
’s intrusion into our school. (More about that later.) I nodded along. There were footsteps and I cringed, but it was the janitor.

“Mr. Miller,” said Luke, saluting him. “How’s it going?”

“Well, hey now, Luke.” He didn’t know
my
name. Granted, I didn’t know his. “You didn’t hear a noise, did you? I thought the TV guys had left, but—”

“Maybe coming from the math hallway?” said Luke.

“That’s what I thought.”

“We were just there. It looked deserted.”

“Hrm.”

“All right, Mr. Miller. Take it easy.”

“You too, Luke.”

My mom’s minivan was just pulling into the circle. She rolled down the passenger window and leaned all the way over. “Luke Weston! How
are
you, honey?”