DEC STEEPLE waited for Ezra, his lunch before him on the cafeteria table looking even more miserable than Dec himself. It was uneaten but not untouched. He had constructed an edifice of limp carrot sticks and celery stalks, a bagel and three olives. A monument to waiting.
He wore Roy Orbison dark glasses. They were almost ugly enough to be cool, but not if you were wearing a Green Eggs and Hamlet T-shirt that said:
I would not, could not kill the king,
I could not murder anything.
Dec was tired. He’d been up half the night again, staring from his window towards the big house, drawn to it and afraid of it at the same time. He had to talk to someone about what was happening to him. Where was Cling Wrap when you needed him?
He sat at the only table in the cafeteria with its own blackboard. Melody Fong and Martin McNair were using it to argue over an equation that proved the universe was a giant Twinkie. Arianna Osmanli was doing the New York Times crossword behind a veil of blue-black hair. Langston Parchment was silently destroying Richard Pergolesi at chess. And directly across the table from Dec, Vivien Ulman was busily writing in her journal. Dec became absorbed with the crown of her blonde head. Hair, pale as a whisper.
“What are you writing?” he asked.
She looked up. “An ode. Well, a mock ode. Want to read a mock ode?”
“No, thanks,” said Dec, staring at her jade eyebrow ring.
It was the same colour as her eyes. “Maybe some other time.”
Vivien flashed a quick smile and returned to her writing. She looked particularly poetic today, in an Indian silk scarf and a faux-leather jacket over a smocked dress that she might have worn when she was six. Underneath it she wore a black leotard and baggy gold corduroy pants. She glanced up and noticed Dec staring at her. “We call the ode Valley of the Dweebs.”
“We?” he said. “I didn’t know poetry was a team sport.”
Vivien tapped herself on the chest with the end of her pencil. “Just me,” she said. “But there’s one letter of the alphabet we do not care to use today. So we are forced to say we.”
Right, thought Dec. With Vivien there was always something interesting going on. “You’re not using the letter I?”
She nodded.
“You’re going I-less?” he said, just to be perfectly sure.
“Exactly,” she said.
“You’re going blind?” asked Richard.
“Not the organ, the letter,” said Vivien. “A poet must learn to expand her vocabulary.”
Martin McNair cleaned his glasses on his sweater. “To expand your vocabulary by reducing the number of letters you can utilize is a contradiction in terms.”
“No, she has a point,” said Melody, who never agreed with Martin on anything. “A handicap makes you find new ways of doing things, right? So Viv is going to have to find new ways of expressing herself — words that don’t have an I in them. That’s got to be good for a poet.”
Meanwhile, Vivien had dug an old book out of her backpack — a novel with a torn cover. “We found a remarkable book at a second-hand store,” she said. She opened it to the first page and handed the book to Dec. “Please,” she said. The crowd drew in close. He read the name on the cover, Gadsby, by Ernest Wright. He opened it to the first page and cleared his throat.
“Upon this basis I am going to show you how a bunch of bright young folks did find a champion; a man with boys and girls of his own; a man of so dominating and happy individuality —”
“That’s full of I’s,” interrupted Richard.
“But no E’s,” said Arianna, without looking up from her crossword.
“Exactly,” said Vivien triumphantly. She took the book from Dec, turned to the front cover flap and pointed at the part she wanted him to read. “It’s called a lipogram,” he announced. “A composition which contains no instances of a particular letter of the alphabet.”
The others looked interested. “That whole novel has no E’s in it?”
“Not a one,” said Vivien.
“Lipogram,” said Arianna, writing it down on the margin of her newspaper. “Kind of like liposuction, except that you’re sucking out a letter instead of subcutaneous fat.”
Only Richard Pergolesi was still eating. He stopped.
“How long are you going to keep this up?” asked Melody.
“I mean, you can’t even say your own name!”
“Just today,” said Vivien. “Tomorrow shall be an O-less day, the next day we shall go A-less, as we work our way up to the greatest challenge of all, E-lessness.”
Nobody spoke for a moment. Everyone seemed to be trying to imagine an E-less day. No “the,” no “he,” no “she.” But then, as if by unspoken agreement, everyone returned to what he or she was doing. Melody wrote something on the blackboard that Martin immediately erased. Arianna filled in a long word Down. And Langston with a chortle took Richard’s queen.
Dec rested his chin on the table. “How about U?” he said.
“What about me?”
“I mean the letter U. And how about ‘sometimes Y’?”
“Been there, done that,” said Vivien. “Yesterday and the day before.”
Dec looked impressed. “I didn’t even notice,” he said.
Vivien leaned towards him, smiling sadly. “You don’t observe a lot these days, Declan Steeple.”
Dec didn’t know what to say. Suddenly he felt as if all the vowels had been sucked right out of him.
Luckily, at that moment, Ezra breezed through the door. The mighty doctor himself, all in black, as usual, with hair like a deserted crow’s nest and tiny round spectacles that gave his narrow face a distinctly crowish look. The lenses were no larger than dimes and the frames were made of real tortoise-shell.
“Where were you?”
“Ah,” said Ezra. “A good question but in need of some refinement. I assume my state of being is not in question and therefore what you really want to know is, what place have I most recently occupied and why for such an extended period.”
With that Ezra sat down. Vivien moved along to give him some room.
“That was totally heavy,” she said and returned to her journal writing with great vigour.
“So?” said Dec.
“Urgent meeting with Marlborough.” Marlborough was the head of guidance.
“What about?” asked Dec.
Ezra opened a bottle of water and glugged down halt of it. When he had finished, his eyes shone. “Dec, dear friends, one and all, an announcement. It’s official. I’m out of here.”
Vivien looked up excitedly. “You’re expelled?”
“Great,” said Martin. “I’ll be tops in physics.”
“In your dreams,” said Melody.
“Is it because of that time you proved Mr. Merkley didn’t exist?” asked Langston.
“Whoa!” said Ezra, holding up his hands. “I have not been expelled. I’ve simply been Plarred.”
Everyone turned to Arianna. She shook her head. “No such word,” she said.
Ezra smiled like a cat on a sunny windowsill. “You know, I’m not going to miss old L.C.I. but I am truly, truly going to miss you guys.”
“Hey. Help is out here,” said Dec. “What happened?”
“Right,” said Ezra. “The details.”
“Thank you,” said Dec.
“P.L.A.R. Prior Learning Assessment Recognition. It’s where an institution takes into account the work you do beyond just your class credits. For instance, a summer job at the Chalk River Nuclear Power Station, making it to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, and yes, proving that Mr. Merkley doesn’t exist — that kind of thing.”
“And?” said Dec.
“There’s this scholarship to McGill that Marlborough figured I could try for, if I wanted. Now. He went to bat for me. Anyway, the long and short of it is, I don’t have to do my senior year.”
“You’re kidding.”
Ezra shook his head, “Montreal, here I come.”
Vivien sighed and rested her hand on her heart. “Alors,” she said. “Montréal, c’est très beau.”
“That’s not all,” said Ezra. “They’ve given me a job in the physics lab for the summer. I start July first.”
Everyone cheered. Everyone except Dec.
“You’re leaving in three months?” It sounded like an accusation.
Ezra threw up his arms. “You can come and visit,” he said. “You can be Igor, my trusty assistant. And when we’ve finished a hard day in the lab, we’ll paint the town red.”
Dec pounded the tabletop with his fist, just hard enough to collapse his edible monument. He looked up. Everyone was staring at him, Ezra the hardest of all.
“What?” Ezra asked. “I should have got your permission?
Dec frowned, shoved a half-empty juice bottle into his lunch bag so hard the paper split. “It’s just the red part,” he said. “I mean, painting the town red. Where’s that at? It’s so trite.”
Ezra pointed a finger at Dec and nodded. “You are so right,” he said. “How about alizarin crimson?”
Dec managed a tight little smile. Red warning lights were flashing in his head.
Ezra was leaving him. Why did people keep doing that?