Academic Assassins

by Clay McLeod Chapman

  Three days, later, Slaughterhouse-Five was waiting for me in the bin to be re-shelved. Flipping it open, I found directly underneath my note—

  Who do you think?

  After I attended to my requisite scribble rinsing, I’d locate the notes in the margins—and respond.

  Our correspondence was tucked off in the pages where no one could find us.

  I had a pen pal.

  A chain of exchanges started to stretch down the margins, each link in different ink. It took us a month to fill up a single page—but we were talking.

  Sorta talking.

  My pen pal could pop up in any book at any time. I never saw him or her coming, but once we were in a book together, we’d fill up the margins for chapters.

  When we exhausted the blank boundaries of a book, we’d hop to another—

  See you in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, page eighty-six…

  Catch you in The Plague, chapter three…

  Find me in The Dharma Bums, page twenty-three…

  We would run out of books at the rate we were writing now, burning through the whole library before long—

  Where do we go from here?

  How about a bigger book? Like Dostoevsky or something? That way we’ll have some space.…

  Okay. Check out Crime and Punishment. See you on page forty-two.

  I tried staking out the library, waiting for my enigmatic vandal to come in and check out his or her next book—but they never showed. I never spotted them once.

  Completely incognito.

  One time, I thought I’d nailed them. Some scruffy-looking kid waltzed into the library and started flipping through random books. I tailed him through the aisles, holding off on pouncing until he picked up one of our flagged fictions. As soon as the dude grabbed a copy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I leapt out—“Got you!”

  He dropped the book, hands held up at his shoulders. “I was going to return it, I swear! I just need a book for English class….”

  Wrong guy.

  I picked up One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, about to re-shelve it. I opened the book on a whim, only to find on page eighty-six, in the margins—

  So—what’d you think of the book?

  I checked it out and read it in one sitting, cover to cover. I wrote back—

  A little too close to the bone. Feel like I lived it.

  The next day—

  You and me both.

  So I wrote back—

  Sully? I know this is you…Or, well, I hope it’s you. I know you’re not ready to come back to the land of the living. Who knows? Maybe you really are a ghost haunting my library…But I need to get something off my chest…(Flip the page.)

  I’d run out of space, so I picked up within the margins of the next page—

  I love you.

  I walked home after wrapping up a particularly grueling shift at the library. Lots of books to re-shelve.

  Somebody was sitting on the steps of my front porch.

  “Stare much?” Sully asked. Her hair had started to grow back again, spiky hints of auburn poking up from her scalp.

  “You forgot this.” She reached into her knapsack and pulled out a ratty paperback. She held it out to me to take, and I immediately recognized it.

  My copy of Peter Pan. Its cover was nearly torn off, its yellowed pages curling.

  “You never got to finish it,” she said.

  I sat down next to her on the steps. “We can now….”

  Together, we read the last chapter aloud. We passed the book back and forth between us, her reading Wendy and me reading Peter.

  And when we finally reached The End, it felt like everything was beginning.

  “So…” She closed the book and looked to me. “What happens now?”

  Closing my eyes, I leaned over and kissed her.

  Finally.

  “School, I guess,” I eventually said. “I’m supposed to be a freshman next year.”

  “Fresh meat’s more like it,” Sully said with a grin. “High school’s a war zone.”

  “Good thing I’m not going in alone.”

  I had my Tribe.

  You.

  You are not alone.

  For those who don’t belong, who don’t fit in—a square peg that keeps getting hammered into a circular hole—you never have to feel like you’re on your own again.

  Why?

  Because we are here.

  Who are we?

  The Academic Assassins.

  If you are reading this, that means you’ve found us.

  Maybe we found you.

  No matter who you are or where you live, no matter how alone you feel, you are now a part of a family that isn’t bound by blood—but by our beliefs.

  And we believe in books.

  Our word is bond.

  We are always here.

  Above your head.

  In the shadows.

  We are in the corners where adults never care to look, never think to peek.

  We are everywhere.

  We are nowhere.

  We are your home.

  Welcome to the Tribe.

  Now go out there and rock the boat.

  (Exact number still to be determined)

  The Academic Assassins

  The She-Wolves

  The Screaming Mimis

  The Orphans

  The Napoleons

  The Peer Facilitators

  The Piranhas

  The Spanish Inquisition

  The Vandals

  The Juvenile Jihadists

  The Young Republicans

  The Looney Tunes

  The Banshees

  The Fantasy Sports Leaguers

  The Firebugs

  The Tattletales

  The Hall Monitors

  The Baseball Furies

  The Teacher’s Pets

  The Party Poopers

  The Choir Boys

  The Rough and Tumbles

  The Outsiders

  The Ozark Orcs

  The Midnight Marauders

  The Hissy Fits

  The GingerDead Men

  The Nine-to-Lifers

  The Hex Pistols

  The YOLOs

  The Whip-Its

  The Wanderers

  The Thin Lizzies

  The Book Marks

  The Tin Men

  The Scarecrows

  The Door-to-Door Salesmen

  The Old Yellers

  The Catchers in the Rye

  The Red Ferns

  The Moral Compasses

  Thanks to my first-read guinea pigs Kyle Jarrow, Chris Steib, and Liz Deibel, as well as Tim Harper’s copyediting meat cleavers. Indrani and Jasper always and forever.

  Thanks to Literacy for Incarcerated Teens (LIT) and the staff and residents at the Brentwood and Highland Residential Centers for opening their doors to me.

  Thanks to Eddie Gamarra and the Gotham Group for fighting that good fight. Thanks to Kevin Lewis, Ricardo Mejias, and the folks at Disney · Hyperion.

  Thanks to the books and newspaper articles that inspired this one—Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George, Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and the Splendid Kids by Stanley Kiesel, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison by Pete Earley, and Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover, along with Jennifer Gonnerman’s articles “School of Shock” (Mother Jones, August 19, 2007) and “31 Shocks Later” (New York Magazine, September 2, 2012), and Paul Kix’s story “The Shocking Truth” (Boston Magazine, July 2008).

 

 

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