The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy by Kate Hattemer Read Free Book Online Page B

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.

CHAPTER THREE
    In what is still the recent past
,
    We Selwynites made art to last
.
    On fields of beauty we’d purport
    To touch the world: our contact sport
.
    For art is long and life is short
.
    —
THE CONTRACANTOS
    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’vegot 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.