Academic Assassins (30 page)

I peered down the aisles.

Nobody was there.

I stared at the librarian, just to see if she would look up from her work and glance my way—but no dice.

On instinct, I slowly glanced up to the ceiling. No fiberglass tiles were pushed back, no probing eyes peering down.

I was being paranoid. I shook it off and rubbed out the note with my eraser.

Yeah, well, just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to write me.

A few days later, while marauding the pages of
Slaughterhouse-Five
, I discovered on page one hundred fifty-three—

You can't…

I turned to the next page—

Get rid…

On the next—

Of me…

And the next—

That easily, Spencer….

Nobody else checked out the books this mystery annotator did. I flipped to the back of each book, finding the index card holstered inside their back covers. All the names of readers who'd
ever checked out these books were written right there—a winding column of names in different-colored inks, different handwriting. Dates winded backwards, some going so far back in
time—well before I ever set foot into this library, before I was even born. The names didn't even sound real anymore.

But no name for my spectral defacer.

Who was this person? Where were they going to pop up next?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

A Clockwork Orange?

The Catcher in the Rye?

This was totally against library policy. The librarians would've given me the boot if I got caught doing this, but I went ahead and wrote in the margins—

Who are you?

I placed the book back on the shelf and waited.

And waited.

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).