The sound of Ms. Reese’s finger cymbals jarred me back to the present moment. I was saved from having to respond to Tyler for now.

Ms. Reese always began class this way. She had super-long blonde hair and these kooky purple glasses, and she tended to wear flowing scarves and skirts.

“How was everyone’s weekend?” she asked all of us. The fact that it was first period on a Monday meant that basically no one answered. There were about twenty of us in Honors Lit and there were about twelve of us who hadn’t quite woken up yet. Kate Shankar’s eyes were actually closed. Julian Frey sat cross-legged on his ottoman, but his head kept nodding back and jerking forward every time he realized that he was falling asleep.

Ms. Reese smiled at the silence and went on. She was the most tolerant teacher that I had come across yet. There was a mutual sort of allowing and acceptance in her class—most of us liked Ms. Reese and the literature that we studied. Plus, we were all nerdy kids, at least about English—the Honors bunch of Junior Year. It was kind of a shame that our class met during first period, when we weren’t even warmed up into the day yet. But Henley High’s scheduling office wasn’t exactly a flexible operation.

“Glad to hear you all had such great week-ends . . . mine went way too fast, of course. How did the essays go?”

An assortment of mumbled replies arose from all of us in response.

“Glad to hear that too . . . think I’ll start serving coffee here in the morning so that we can all speak in complete sentences. Pass your papers up to me, please, and then we have some announcements.”

We all passed our essays forward to the Turn-it-in Table at the front of the room and Ms. Reese went on.

“Now before we get into our discussion of Hester Prynne and Dimmesdale and the whole Scarlet Letter gang, I have some exciting news about a new extracurricular club here at Henley. Well, we do. Wren?”

Wren stood up and went to the front of the room. I sat forward in my patchwork armchair to listen. This was going to be good.

A lilting breeze came in through the opened window. Ms. Reese’s nearby chimes rung softly in response. Wren began.

“So, since moving here to Berkeley, I’ve gotten super into poetry and especially Beat poetry and spoken word. You know, writing that sounds even better when spoken out loud? Stuff that sounds like music. And the North Beach area, right over the Golden Gate Bridge there, is chock full of history, the history of Beat poetry. So much happened, right there. What better way to celebrate this history than to do it again now, to bring it back?”

I stole a glance at Carmelita; her gaze was narrowed in skepticism. Myself—well, I couldn’t help but be excited by Wren’s speech.

“I spoke to Ms. Reese about starting a club here at Henley High—a poetry club for juniors,” she went on. “We’ll meet after school once a week at Caffe Trieste on Vallejo and have readings there. To be in the club, you have to write a new poem every week. The first meeting will be this Thursday and it’ll be more of an intro meeting, an audition. Ms. Reese always talks about peer support during our editing process, and I think to have that same support system in the club, we’ll all have to approve of all of the members’ creative work. So . . . it’s gonna be really fantastic. Hope to see everybody Thursday!”

Wren sat back down in her seat, beaming from ear to ear.

“Thank you, Wren,” said Ms. Reese. “I think that this is a wonderful opportunity for all of you to experience the support of your fellow writers, and to appreciate the artistic legacy of where you happen to live!”

“Will you be there, Ms. Reese?” Carmelita asked.

“No—no, I teach a photography course at the Art Exchange on Thursday afternoons. I will be reading your turned-in work, surely, and I will be there with you in spirit of course. I look forward to hearing all about your progress.”

Carmelita nudged me and whispered, “I don’t know about this.”

I shrugged in response and focused back on Wren. Three days until Thursday. Three days wasn’t that much time to write the best poem in the entire world but I would do my best.

I looked around the room and caught Wren’s eye. She mouthed, “See?” and gave me a big smile. My face felt like it went up in flames.

During lunch period Tyler, Carmelita, and I staked our usual piece of lawn outside. We discussed the poetry club news as we grazed on home-brought items. Tyler was all psyched up about it. Carmelita wasn’t.

“She’s trying to do an open hippie poetry collective, right, but what kind of peace-and-love world uses auditions? And who’s going to decide who gets to stay in? Her, right?”

Carmelita took an angry bite of her pita bread. I was getting angry myself. Car didn’t even know Wren. Who was she to suggest that Wren was an ego-based judgmental creep? She finished the pita and began crunching away at her apple. I noticed Tyler frowning slightly as he watched Carmelita in action; he didn’t say anything though. Car went on.

“And I’m sure she’s already in, right? No audition for her because it was her stupid idea. I mean—she just moved here! What does she know about North Beach, the Beat poets, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady? We grew up here! We were born right here in Berkeley!”

Now I felt my face turning red again but not because I was embarrassed.

Tyler spoke. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were jealous of Wren’s idea. That you’re jealous of her, even.”

This is what I had suspected too and wanted to say but couldn’t. I hadn’t wanted to get into a dialogue about it. I had just wanted Carmelita to stop. I’d known her for what seemed like forever and I’d seen her like this before. Not often, because she was, as a rule, pretty cool, as I tried to be. My guess was that she had issues with Wren of a grand order, issues that I didn’t want to involve myself in unless I had to.

Tyler waited for Carmelita to respond but she seemed to be giving us the silent treatment. I forked up the rest of Mom’s tofu rice leftovers and went to throw out my trash in the can at the bottom of the hill. I needed to breathe for a moment, on my own, away from the Carmelita rant that was in progress. From my stance on the hill I could see Wren and a couple of her friends, mostly guys in the afterschool music program, having lunch on the other side of the field.

I wanted something new. I wanted to take the next step, to make a leap, to become the artist, the writer that I really wanted to be, that I was meant to be. I felt so sure that this new poetry club was a step in the right direction. I felt so sure that Wren was.

I returned to my place with Carmelita and Tyler. Both were silent now. I suddenly felt sad and frustrated. Didn’t Carmelita understand what a big deal this was—working on creative material, being part of a writers’ collective, doing readings at Caffe Trieste? It would make Jack Kerouac’s ghost proud!

“Tyler,” I said, “what do you think?”

He was lying on his back, tearing a blade of grass in two.

“About what?” he responded, looking at me upside-down, squinting in the sharp sunlight.

“The new poetry club that . . . that Ms. Reese mentioned. Are you gonna do it? Are you gonna go on Thursday to the meeting?”

“If I can get out of my shift at Napoleon’s, man. He’s been running me ragged as of late. That’s because Anita—”

“—oh yeah, the crazy chick—”

“—she’s on vacation this week. I’m taking over all of her shifts, plus my own. This weekend I am working two doubles—Saturday and Sunday. May Earth and Sky help me.”

Tyler was a self-dubbed naturalist. He considered his religion to be of the earth, so instead of using God’s name in vain, he would go the other route.

Carmelita had opened her Physics textbook and was now reading with her nose buried in the pages. I was surprised that she could even see the words that close up. I asked her anyway.

“Car. Are you gonna go?”

She waited a few seconds too long to respond. “Go where?”

“To the poetry club meeting at Caffe Trieste. On Thursday.”

Carmelita put the book down and looked at me over her shades. I felt a chill go through my body.

“Yeah, I guess I have to. Can’t let you two bozos go unsupervised, all the way to the city and back.”

The bell rang loudly and we hurried to grab our books and junk from off the lawn. Carmelita had Physics next; Tyler and I had Trigonometry. We walked to the main building in silence as the afternoon sun burned high above us. Although the weather in the main city across the bay was all over the place and varied from neighborhood to neighborhood, Berkeley weather was more or less decidedly sunny and bright for most of the time.

We approached the main inner stairwell and paused; Tyler and I had to go up to the second floor and Carmelita’s class was in the basement.

“See you later, Car? After school to walk home?” I asked.

She looked at me with a deadpan expression on her face. “No, that’s okay, thanks. I’d prefer to do my own thing today.”

I felt my face grow red and hot but hoped that it would quickly subside. I wasn’t sure what was going on with Carmelita and me. Nothing, I guessed.

She was gone down the stairs just like that. I looked at Tyler.

“You know where I have to be after school, Ziv. Napoleon’s. Tonight I’ve got to totally reorganize the Blues section of the store. Do you know how long that’s going to take me?”

We climbed the stairs to the second floor and walked down the hall toward the Trig room.

“Uber-long, Ziv. I might be there past midnight.”

We plunked ourselves down in last-row desks as Mr. Kim, our teacher, began writing the daily prompt on the board. I momentarily regretted spending so much time on Ms. Reese’s essay last night, when I should have been studying Trig. I had done the homework hastily during breakfast yesterday morning while Mom and Dad tried to book plane tickets to conferences that they had to attend next month in Philadelphia and Baltimore, respectively.

I took a deep breath, reminding myself that my career as a literary artist trumped any other sort of assignment that could ever arise for me. I chose to calm down. I would get by in Trig; I studied enough and had received As and a few Bs thus far.

As Mr. Kim finished writing out the prompt I considered potential subjects for my audition poem, the one that I would write later, after school.

It was six fifteen that night when I threw another balled-up piece of paper over my shoulder. It was the fourth piece of trash—and the fourth aborted writing attempt of mine thus far—and I had been working for over an hour in the common area of our apartment building. The area was on the roof and offered pretty cool views of San Francisco Bay, the main city, and Berkeley. I sipped the cup of chamomile tea that I had brought up with me. The label on the box in my kitchen assured the user that it would “relax and soothe,” both of which I would accept for my audition poem-writing process.

I wanted to keep the tone of my poem as true to myself as possible. I wanted it to be tough and gruff and wise and humorous. I knew that it wouldn’t rhyme; I didn’t want it to.

Settling on a subject to write about was difficult. I went back and forth between stuff about the beauty and harmony of Muir Woods, and my escapade with Mara in freshman year. And Wren. I wanted to write about her most of all, but I also knew that she would be reading it and hesitated to try to articulate how I truly felt about her.

I finished the tea and stood up from the wooden bench to stretch my legs. The lights on the Golden Gate glimmered. I felt inspired, as I always did from living here. But inspired to do what, exactly? What would I write?

Just then I heard the roof door open and turned to see who had come in. Ramon and Amelia appeared with books in hand.

“Hey, Hunter,” Ramon said. “How’s it going?”

“Okay, I guess. Trying to write. How about you guys?”

“Trying to study,” Amelia answered. They sat across from me and opened up their textbooks.

“What are you writing?” Ramon asked.

“A poem—but not the usual poem. Not flowery or anything. Like a Beat poem, a prose-ish sort of thing.”

Amelia smiled. “Nice. For a girl?”

I looked away into the distance. “I don’t know, maybe. It’s for a club at school. There’re auditions for it on Thursday and I have to bring in a poem of mine.”

“Well, I’m not big into poetry or anything,” Ramon said as he put his arm around Amelia, “but when I have to write, I try to think of a phrase or line that I like first and go from there, instead of thinking about the content too much. I like to go with what I’m feeling, you know?”

Suddenly I knew what I would write. I needed to get to a place of solitude, and fast. I grabbed my scattered pages and tea and went for the stairs.

“Hey, where are you—” Ramon started to ask.

“Thanks so much for all the help, Ramon. I’ve got to go.”

“Good night,” Amelia called as I hurried down the steps.

I didn’t stop to respond.

On the first day of the poetry club, Caffe Trieste’s interior was dimly lit, even for an afternoon when the sun was still up. Tawny and cherry-colored wooden walls were covered with rows of black-and- white photos much like Ms. Reese’s. The smell of espresso beans radiated throughout the room.

Fewer students had turned up for this first meeting than I had imagined would. About seven or eight of us were scattered throughout the place, listening to Wren speak in the center of the room. Will was by her side, nodding at everything that she said. Will was one of the music students with whom Wren always hung out.

I couldn’t imagine that he was much of a writer. I remembered him from sophomore year when he had tried to organize a student protest against price increases on Henley High’s vending machines. For two weeks he’d spent every morning outside the front entrance screaming from atop a milk crate and handing out flyers on student rights to passersby. Will was a bit over the top for my taste.

Some 1950s jazz played softly over the stereo system. There seemed to be a couple of non-Henley High folks at the countertop area—vaguely disgruntled-looking old men sipping cappuccinos and reading newspapers intensely. I thought of the Beats hanging out here years ago, all of their innovative ideas coming together, soon to change the philosophy of literature, of the world. I wanted to do that myself, with Wren, here, now. The possibilities seemed endless.

Carmelita and Tyler took seats with Kate Shankar and her boyfriend. Car had been silent during the entire BART ride while Tyler riffed on Beatles records. Apparently he had gotten into an argument with Napoleon about which album of theirs was the best one. Knowing Tyler as I did, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the whole thing went on and on as a philosophical conundrum for weeks.