The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy (6 page)

It wasn’t prettiness that kept Luke and Elizabeth from
For Art’s Sake
.

“I’m going to deflate the ones who’ve sold out.”

“Please deflate Miki Frigging Reagler,” I said. “Pop him like the hot-air balloon he is. If I have to walk into bio one more time and see him practicing his shuffle-ball-change …”

“This will be the anti-
FAS
.”

“Very cool,” said Elizabeth.

“Hey, speaking of
FAS
.” I motioned to the TV with my head. I couldn’t move my hands because Baconnaise was negotiating a three-foot tightrope.

“Groan,” said Elizabeth. “Friday night. Nine p.m. It’s time for the requisite viewing.”

“Must we?” said Luke, even as he pulled the remote from Honey Mustard’s mouth.

“We’ve bought in,” said Elizabeth. “As has the entire school. You might love it, you might hate it. But you watch it.”

*   *   *

You know the lock scene? The one that made Maura look so sweet, Brandon so romantic? I couldn’t believe what they did to it. I was appalled.

This episode started the same way they all did, with a long zoom onto the three judges, Trisha Meier and Damien Hastings and our principal, Willis Wolfe, sitting at a shiny table on the Selwyn auditorium stage. Trisha made some irritating joke about how cold it was, and Damien jockeyed for airtime with his own dumb joke about moving the school to “Cali.”

They talked up the prizes. They brownnosed their sponsors. “Remember,” said Trisha Meier, “these ten young artistic geniuses are fighting tooth and nail to win an all-expenses-paid trip on Amber Airlines.…”

Insert product placement. Trisha misused “literally” twice. Willis Wolfe kept plugging the importance of arts education. Damien shook his gelled head like a pony.

“Besides a guaranteed signing with an agent, the winner receives a trip to LA and a spread in
La Teen Mode
,” he said. “Also, a scholarship of one hundred thousand dollars, redeemable at any arts institution and provided by Collegiate Assets,
the
way to help
you
save for school.”

A lot of product placement, a lot of commercial breaks.

They explained the format every week, clearly assuming that all viewers were morons. (Granted, we’d chosen to watch
For Art’s Sake
.) They’d started with nineteen contestants. When they were down to three, the show would conclude with a live finale.

Cut to the hallway, where Brandon was talking to Miki Frigging Reagler.

“Sorry, man,” said Miki F.R. “When I see something I want, I take it.”

“What happened to the dude code? Bros before hos?” said Brandon.

Unsurprisingly, Miki F.R. broke into song. “When you got it, flaunt it.…”

This other girl, Kirtse Frumjigger, scuttled over. Analogy: Kirtse is to musical theater as a cockroach is to leftover pizza. She joined in. Brandon stomped off when Kirtse and Miki F.R. started harmonizing.

Luke muted it. I kowtowed in thanks.

“I thought Maura and Brandon locked themselves together,” said Elizabeth. I’d finally told them all what I’d seen and, more reluctantly, how I’d seen it.

“Probably coming up,” I said, shrugging.

Now they were showing Miki F.R. and Kirtse with their heads pitched together in that obnoxious a cappella bffs-in-harmony way, like the vultures in
Jungle Book
.

“Unmute,” said Elizabeth. The hosts were about to announce the challenge.

“This week,” said Trisha, “you must use art to express anger. Rage. Fury. Ire.”

Luke groaned. “Can we please turn this off?”

“Shouldn’t you be taking notes for your poem?” said Elizabeth.

“Good idea,” he said.

Kyle Kimball, the Shakespeare kid I like, was biting his lower lip and nodding thoughtfully. Miki F.R. was doing a little
snap-and-bounce as if he couldn’t wait to begin. Maura Fieldsman looked vacant.

Luke scribbled all throughout the commercials. The shot reopened on my locker.

“Hey!” I said. “It’s me! I’m on TV! Baconnaise! Look!” I crawled up to the screen and held him close.

“Move your big head, Ethan,” said Elizabeth.

I couldn’t see anything through the locker slats anyway, but I knew I was in there. “My debut,” I told Baconnaise.

“Doesn’t look like it,” said Elizabeth. The image had shifted to the dim backstage. There were two people, their figures indistinct. Now Elizabeth was the one peering at the screen. “I think that’s Maura.”

Jackson deigned to turn from his video game. “Certainly bony enough,” he said.

“Slender,”
I said indignantly. “Svelte. Slim.”

“But I can’t cheat on Brandon!” said one of the figures.

“Definitely Maura,” said Jackson.

I dropped Baconnaise.

“He’ll never know,” said the other figure.

Now we were back to the locker.

“I didn’t do
anything
with Miki,” Maura told Brandon.

Return to the figures backstage. They started groping each other. Ew.

Locker. “I trust you,” said Brandon. He held up the padlock. “You and me. We’re locked together.”

Backstage. The faces were sucking at each other. We’re talking vigorous make-outage. The slobbery sort you’d expect from Honey Mustard, not a reasonably inhibited teenager.

Elizabeth wordlessly handed me Baconnaise. I sat, stunned and anguished, on the couch. Maura Heldsman was
not
a two-timer. Or was she? What the hell was happening?

Baconnaise nipped at my chin as we watched the contestants attempt to express rage through art. Andy elicited nails-on-a-chalkboard noises from his cello. Adelpha threw paint onto a canvas while screaming like a peacock. Kyle and Josh ranted via monologues, Kirtse and Miki F.R. ranted via show tunes. Miriam bashed the keyboard. Brandon and Scarlett shrieked out some arias. Maura just danced. Then she told the camera, “I’m not here to make friends.”

“Predictions,” said Elizabeth after they all performed. “Who’s getting cut?”

“Miki F.R.,” I said.

“What’s with you guys and your inability to distinguish between predictions and wishful thinking?” Elizabeth said crossly. “Come on, Ethan.”

“Fine. Andy. That cello piece sounded like a cat in a disposal.”

“No way,” said Luke. “Andy’s the hottest guy on there. They need the eye candy. It’s going to be Josh.”

“Scarlett,” said Jackson. “She’s a really good soprano.”

“Jackson, bud, that means she’ll
stay
on the show.” That was me.

“Let me elucidate,” said Jackson. “She’s good, so her voice is kind of scary and unhuman. And besides, her nose is off-center.”

I’d never noticed before, but that was definitely why I felt my OCD kicking in whenever I looked at her face.

“This is my
least
favorite part,” said Trisha. Yeah, right. They’d narrowed it to two, and she could barely repress her grin. “Josh, that monologue was sickeningly overwrought. But Scarlett, frankly, my dear, your aria hurt my ears.”

Scarlett started to cry. The cameras zoomed in.

“Scarlett, I’m sorry, but—”

Trisha looked at Damien and Willis Wolfe so that they could deliver their catchphrase.

“THAT WASN’T ART!” they chanted in unison.

Trisha bid us farewell. The show cut to commercials. Woe ensued.

We have a rotating schedule at Selwyn: daily Morning Practice, plus five of your seven classes. That next Monday, English dropped, and I didn’t see Luke until math, right after lunch.

I liked calculus. Scratch that. I hated calculus. But I liked calculus
class
. The only other class Luke and I had together was English, where BradLee and Maura Heldsman, in very different ways, made it hard to goof off. But Luke and I both loathed math, and Mrs. Garlop was not only a harpy but also a terrible teacher. We had to get Jackson to reteach us everything before the tests. Jackson had hit calculus before he’d hit puberty. Now he was doing an independent study with a tutor. He didn’t even use numbers anymore.

Mrs. Garlop always had her harpy radar out for Luke and me, so we usually pretended to pay attention. Sometimes we even volunteered to do a homework problem on the board, usually with Jackson’s elegant and clearly un-Garlopian (rhymes with fallopian) strategy. But for me, the calculus was a façade. The real subject of the class was hanging out with Luke.

We were rotating line segments around axes and determining the area of the shape thus formed. Luke was crabby, I was heartbroken.

“I wrote another review Friday night,” he said, meticulously shading his rotated shape.

“For the
Selwyn Cantos
? You know they’re not going to publish it.”

“As one final test. It’s a pure review, no editorializing. Just a summary of what’s been happening on the show.”

“So we take the integral of
this
,” I said loudly. Mrs. Garlop was sniffing around our desks.

“And then raise it to the power of the derivative of
this
,” said Luke. She went to go help Rummica and Missy.

“Um, no, we don’t.” (If you haven’t taken calculus, Luke was spouting nonsense. Also, don’t.)

“I took it to Wyckham this morning. Didn’t even stop at June. And I made it as difficult as I could for him to reject it. I basically said, ‘Hi, I’m your arts editor, I’m number two here, I wrote this, I need it for my page, I just wanted your approval.’ ”

“And?”

“He took one look at the lead and said no. He said, ‘If you’ve
got blank space, here are some ads for advertising. Maybe next issue.’ ”

“So it’ll go in next issue.”

“Andrezejczak. Are you listening to me? Instead of publishing my review, we are advertising
advertising
in this godforsaken newspaper. They aren’t even ads. They’re ads for ads. They’re like those benches that say, ‘See, You Looked! Bench Ads Work!’ ”

“Well, they do. Because I always look.”

“Not even going into the fallacies of that statement. So ten times three is seven, moving from base four to base six, of course, and if you take the natural log of pi—”

“You sound like a moron.”

“She’s buying it.”

Mrs. Garlop had moved away from us again.

“She just doesn’t want to explain it again. She thinks we’re hopeless.”

Though that was probably good for our relationship with Mrs. Garlop. Once she gave Luke a detention for asking a question that betrayed her befuddlement with the finer points of calculus, and for that reason she put “insufferable arrogance.”

“I think the administration has put the kibosh on any meaningful discussion of
For Art’s Sake
,” said Luke.

“Probably Coluber.”

“Definitely Coluber.”

“Or maybe it’s part of their contract with kTV, that the school can’t criticize the show.”

“That’s even worse!” Luke was gesturing with his pencil.
“At least the administration has
some
justification for censorship. They own the presses, provide the paper, pay the advisor. But it violates all our First Amendment rights if we’re being censored by an unethical TV network that’s just throwing sops of entertainment to the American public at the smallest possible cost so that they can keep the biggest chunk of adver—YES, L’HOPITAL, I LOVE YOU AND I LOVE FINDING THE DETERMINATE QUOTIENT OF LIMITS!”

He started scribbling random mathematical symbols. Mrs. Garlop gave us a crocodilian smile and circulated back to poor Rummica and Missy.

“Tising revenues,” he said.

“L’Hopital’s rule is totally irrelevant here.”

“If I’ve learned anything in calculus—which is debatable—it’s that L’Hopital’s rule is always relevant.”

The only thing worse than calculus is discussing calculus with Luke.

“Ethan, I know
you’re
not in favor of the show.”

Because of Maura, he meant.

“They’re really screwing her,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Although, perversely, it might be good for her chances of winning. The more drama she generates, the less they can afford to kick her off. She’s the one who keeps people watching.”

“Yeah.”

“But it’s just gross, what they’re doing to her.”

“And to Miki F.R.”

“I admire your sense of fair play,” said Luke. “And your feminism. Sure, Miki’s being portrayed as promiscuous too.
But come on, Miki
is
promiscuous. And he wants everyone to know it. Your friend is in an entirely different situation.”

“Not my friend.”

“Your lover.”

“Rotating around the x-axis would get us, uh, like, a doughnut. Not my lover.”

“No need for precision between best friends. We both know there’s no action going down.”

“
She
has action going down.”

“Ethan. Ethan Solomon Andrezejczak. You didn’t believe all that, did you?”

“Believe the stuff that
happened
? Of course I did. I
saw
it. It
happened
.”

“You are so naive.”

I hate being called naive. Probably because it’s true. I said, “She did that stuff.”

“They edit crazily well. Reality TV is not reality.”

“Integrate from one to five. We’re going to have to do u-sub.”

“You know how all your experiences are seen through the filter of your own particular vision? How everything you perceive may or may not be true because of this filter applied over your senses?”

“Hey,” I protested.

“Not you in particular, you in general. Everyone has a filter, a different filter. That’s why it’s so hard to figure out what the real story is. Or whether there’s a real story at all.”