The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy (27 page)

So that’s why the scholarships weren’t going to be announced after Luke’s performance by Coluber. They would be announced during Luke’s performance. By Luke.

We
hoped
.

It all depended on Luke.

Which meant that it all depended on Jackson, who, at that
very moment, was alone in the deserted kTV editing studio, hacking the scripts and the teleprompter.

“Nothing,” said Elizabeth, checking her phone. She’d last checked about a minute ago, but we’d started to feel panicky.

“He said it would take him forty-five minutes,” I said.

“It’s been almost an hour.”

“I know that.”

“Don’t snap at me.”

“I’m not snapping.”

“You’re snapping.”

Baconnaise was agitated. He shuddered and made the arduous climb from lap to shoulder. “Look, Elizabeth,” I said, trying to sound calm for his sake. “I’m nervous. I’m sorry.”

I could hear her sigh, her slump. “Me too. I wish he’d text us progress reports.”

“He said they would interrupt his creative flow.”

She snorted. “Great, now I have dust up my nose. Yeah, well, I’m freaking out here.”

I almost put my arm around her, and then I wondered whether she’d think it was weird, and I remembered crashing through the ceiling, and I thought about Maura. By then, it was too late. The moment had passed.

No word from Jackson. It’d been another twenty minutes. “Do you think Luke and Maura are really together?” I said.

Elizabeth heaved a sigh heavy with dust and exasperation. “Why are you asking me?”

Oops. Now I wished I hadn’t. I’d just been bored, and Baconnaise had not been forthcoming.

“Because, Ethan, I have no insight into the matter.”

“Oh. Sorry. I thought you might. Because—”

“Because I’m a
girl
?”

I’d forgotten how irritable Elizabeth gets when she’s nervous.

“News flash.
Girls
have no more understanding of
love affairs
than
guys
do,” she said. She hissed it, actually.

“What about, like, those magazines?”

“It’s not something you
learn
from
magazines
.” Still quite hissy.

“How do you learn it then?” I was curious. Maybe she knew something I didn’t.

“Try using basic human sense.”

“I’m not very good at that.”

“Oh my frigging God, haven’t we had this discussion already? Nobody is good at it.”

“So why are you telling me to use it?”

“Because that’s the point. You have to
practice
.”

How do you practice? Can I practice with you? Is this conversation over? I didn’t know what to ask, and I didn’t want to unleash another slew of italics, but she kept talking.

“You’re an art major. You know what people say when you tell them you can draw.”

“Well, I’m not sure ‘can’ is the word I’d use.”

“Stop pretending you suck at everything, Ethan. What do they say?”

“They say, ‘Oh, I can’t draw.’ ”

“Exactly.”

“ ‘I’m terrible at art.’ ”

“Yeah. And I’m always thinking, it’s not like they’d pick up an instrument and expect Mozart to flow forth. But when they can’t draw on the first try, they give up. It’s like they’re expecting too much of their hands. Hands need practice drawing. Eyes need practice seeing.”

“Okay,” I said. “I think I see where you’re going.”

“Shut up. I’m reaching my dramatic conclusion. Ethan: you need to practice love too. It’s hard, it’s really hard, and if you don’t practice, how can you expect to be any good?”

“Selwyn should add it as a major. The art of love.”

She giggled, which I took as a victory.

“Everyone would graduate
so
well adjusted,” I said. I was getting into this idea. I could imagine the intro class: What Is Love? It’d be interdisciplinary, philosophy and literature and biology all working together. (No math. Math has nothing to do with love.) And the final project would be a field study. Once you’d passed, you could move to the intermediate-level classes: Love in Film, or Practical Applications of Love, or Coping with Crushes—

“I don’t think they’re really together.”

Right. Luke and Maura. “You don’t?”

“Nah.” She was quiet for a minute. “But does it matter?”

I looked at her in the gloaming, and she’d never looked so pretty, the lines of her face exaggerated by the harsh faint
light of our cell phones, her eyes fluid, her wild hair melting into the shadows of the curtain, and behind her face the unknowable thoughts, tangy and smart and unexpected, awesomely complicated. I almost—almost, again!—let my hand drift toward her head to touch a dreadlock. I remembered how soft they were.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Does it matter to you, I mean.”

That question was not about Luke and Maura. I may have been an amateur in the study of love, but I knew that much. But I still didn’t know what I wanted: to be with Maura, to be with Elizabeth, to be alone, just me and the Baconnator. This was where my course would help. It would help you figure out what you wanted. Then she shook her heavenly head and her dreadlocks bounced and she said, “It matters, Ethan. To you, it matters.”

“Cat-piss,” cursed Elizabeth as she looked at her phone.

“Porcupines,” I said as I looked at mine.

Jackson had sent us the same text:
Circumstances have conspired and I’m unable to access the scripts. Still working on teleprompter. Mobilize for backup plan on Phase C
.

“I had a dream,” said Elizabeth, “and it was that we wouldn’t need this particular backup plan.”

“Same,” I said grimly.

“Let’s get it over with.”

We staggered our escape. As before, the backstage area was so hectic that nobody noticed a thing. We met in the hallway and scuttled down to the green room.

“Hide here,” said Elizabeth, pulling me into a niche in front of the set-storage room. She checked the time. “We should see them file out in about two minutes.”

They were true to the schedule that Jackson had found on the admin server. The seventeen students who’d already been kicked off
For Art’s Sake
came out and turned to go onstage. Then came Maura and Miki F.R. and Luke. Then Trisha Meier and Damien Hastings and Willis Wolfe. Then a few techies. The door clanged shut.

“Get ’er done,” Elizabeth muttered, and she shot out of the niche and into the green room as soon as the last techie turned the corner. I grabbed Baconnaise and tried to take deep breaths. I didn’t envy her her job, but mine was nerve-racking too.

It was five till nine. The show was about to start. With everyone onstage during the introductory scene, Elizabeth was sweeping the deserted green room for scripts. She’d remove one page from all of them; in Luke’s script alone, she’d replace that page with something else.

It was my task to create a diversion should anyone try to get into the green room. I was equipped with the following:

You know me. I do not handle nervousness well. I had to dissociate, or else I really was going to have a mental breakdown.

So I started thinking about that major. The art of love.

The intro class, I decided, would have a unit on Ezra Pound. They’d analyze those lines I’d read with Maura and in BradLee’s class:

I’d always misread them. I’d looked at Maura, I’d looked at Luke, and I’d had stirring thoughts about how they’d remain. And I’d liked “the rest is dross,” because it gave me permission to stop looking at anything or anyone else. This doesn’t matter, I’d said about Elizabeth, and Jackson, and kTV, and so much else. It’s dross.

But I’d missed the word “well.” You have to love something
well, to keep it. And I had not loved well because I had not known how.

That would be the point of the major, I thought. Everyone knows how to love, but not how to love well. The mistake is too easy. You call her a goddess and you think he’s perfect and suddenly they’re not people anymore. You’ve betrayed them. Instead of being in awe of their complexity, you’ve swept it away.

This class would not be pleasant. I can tell you that it’s painful to have the rosy gauze ripped from your eyes, the halos dashed from their heads. You cling to your idols. But I can also tell you—not from experience but from the glimpses found in daydreams and books and cold hard thought—that once you’ve recognized a person as a person, you can start to love that person
well
. It’s an awful thing to learn, but it’s the best thing in the world to know.

Both Baconnaise and the hammer remained in my pockets. Elizabeth made a fast sweep of the green room. She exited with a stack of the pages she’d torn from the scripts.

“Do you think you got them all?”

“I have no effing idea.” I thought she’d be adrenalized and happy, but she sounded even more irritable than before.

“What do you mean?”

“I got all the ones I could find. And realized in the process how—how tenuous this all is. If I missed one, if somebody took their script onstage, it’s all over.”

I declined to think about that. “Did you get Luke’s?”

“I got his
main
one. In that black notebook he uses onstage. Who knows. He could have another.” She waved the sheaf of pages. “I got a full script too.”

“You didn’t.”

“I wasn’t going to tell you, but—” She shrugged. “Maura was wrong. They’ve chosen already. Look.”

I grabbed the script from her, scanning pages and flipping toward the end.

Flip, flip.

Flip, flip.

No.

“We have to keep walking, Ethan.”

I hadn’t even realized I’d stopped.

“We can’t get caught back here. God, this is why I didn’t want to show you.”

“Miki Frigging Reagler,” I said.

“Put them in here.” She’d taken the lid off a garbage can.

“Ew.”

“Now.” You don’t mess with anyone who says “now” like that. The scripts were duly placed underneath the remains of the kTV dinner and adorned with globs of mustard and shreds of turkey. Elizabeth dumped a half-full Diet Coke over them and I replaced the lid.

“I can’t believe she’s going to lose.”

“This is why EZRA has to work,” said Elizabeth. She grabbed my elbow. “We’ve got to get that scholarship for her.”

“And for the rest of them,” I said, trying to be fair.

“I just care about Maura.” She looked at me, and I couldn’t tell whether she was going to laugh or cry. “Oh, Ethan, what’s happened to us?”

“We have to do everything we can,” I said. We’d reached the fork in the hallway.

“Yes.
Everything
. Sacrifice
everything
.”

“I will.” I didn’t want to split up, but that was the plan, and I was fully committed.

“See you when it’s over.” She dissolved down the other hallway. I went on alone. We’d decided, way back in the era of rational thought, that Elizabeth and I should disband, one going to stage right, the other to stage left. If they discovered only one of us, that person could possibly pass as some kTV obsessive who wanted to get as close to the action as possible. But if they found two, they’d think
plot
.

Why not just go back to the auditorium? That was tempting. But the sound guys probably had it on lockdown. And besides, being in the wings would allow us to troubleshoot. We’d entered uncharted waters, the part of Jackson’s timetable that said, “Resolve problems on an as-needed basis.” Which meant, “Improvise.” And that was terrifying. Terrifying with a trumpet, terrifying now.

*   *   *

Standing behind a side curtain, I mouthed to Baconnaise, “So far, so good.”

Elizabeth and I were hidden much more openly than we had been earlier. I couldn’t see her, but I knew she mirrored my position. It was weird to watch the show from the wings. Trisha and Damien and Willis Wolfe looked orange and plastic, like low-quality action figures. The stage was hung with cameras, and I knew that the entire Selwyn student body was in the audience. But all that betrayed their presence was a rustle, an undulation, like the sea at night.

The performers, presumably, had a direct view of me. For a while I blanched every time somebody looked in my direction. But their eyes always seemed blank and unseeing, like those of slightly manic zombies, and I started to believe what Jackson had kept promising: the lights were so bright that the performers couldn’t see
anything
that wasn’t under the same degree of illumination. In my black clothes, ensconced in curtain, I was darkness to them.