Tales From Heller

"Forget it, Alan. It's Heller."

Patrolling the streets of Heller, I've learned never to take anything for granted. There's a dagger in every smile, and every huddle of friends talking in a hallway might be partisans planning rebellion against our government. That's where I come in, you see: I'm a detective. Alan Graham, detective. Imagine that. Well, nobody officially made me a detective—I'm actually the treasurer—but since I saw nobody else stepping up to the plate I gave myself a promotion. Alan Graham, treasurer, by day; Alan Graham, detective, by night. Ain't that cool?

I was at my desk in Ms. Denham's AP Chemistry class when on my smartwatch, I received a text from one of my street informants: "Poster across from Liu was removed. Skulduggery is afoot." My heartbeat slowed, and my foot stilled. After that last black mark on my career, I could not let this go—I could not let the people lose faith in me. I gathered my bags and ran out the classroom—Ms. Denham yelled at me something about our chemistry lab, but there was something more important than science afoot: treason. I should have shouted that line back to her—it would have been so clever—but I was silent. Gosh, I can be so witty at times.

January was a harsh mistress, and her air was biting as I raced from her classroom to the scene of the crime. Campus was empty, almost hauntingly so, and the shady characters who were ditching class looked at me warily. Little did they know that a tactical genius was in their midst. Then again, some of their paranoia (it could not have been a sign of intelligence) has to have been that ability to appraise a person at first glance and detect precocious ability. Even though I looked just like them in my suit and fedora, they could tell. I could feel it in my bones, just as I could feel that I was already stumbling across something portentous.

I surveyed the scene of the crime: the blank concrete wall between the restrooms. There was nothing at all. It was a blank canvas that once had a Caravaggio on it, an empty chalkboard that Einstein had once written on. But now, it was erased, and all our work was for naught. I felt a dull pain in my chest.

Their target had been a poster reminding students they were being watched, in a literary fashion to pay homage to the teacher whose classroom rested opposite: the eyes of TJ Eckleburg loomed over the central courtyard, where students walked in silhouette. "GOD SEES EVERYTHING," the text read. It was a lovely poster, perhaps one of the best we had, and all the English teachers tutted approvingly when one morning it appeared; they clustered around it like pigeons for a few minutes to drink their morning coffee before they disappeared to their usual haunts. But now it was gone, probably a pile of ashes like last time. God was dead, and the Epsilons had killed him.

It was Ms. Liu's free period, and I invited myself in. Ms. Liu was not someone I would say was my closest ally, but she too wanted the streets clean and thus begrudgingly humored my rare inquiries. I would like to think that after what happened last year, she respected my courage in the face of adversity—my quick thinking, especially. Some have questioned if my running inside her classroom instead of confronting the bullies head-on was truly the mark of a hero, but I view it as a necessary evil to prove the validity of our movement. Like the burning of the Reichstag before World War II.

"What brings you here, Alan? Shouldn't you be in class?" Ms. Liu asked, stirring her tea.

Ms. Liu was one of the more popular teachers at Heller, and her room was a hub for gossip. Students loitering before class outside her door let their loose lips run amok, and just like TJ Eckleburg, Ms. Liu saw everything. Not that she'd just volunteer that information without being convinced with rhetorical argument.

"Crime, that's what," I retorted, shaking my fist. "A pox on our morality. Have you seen the poster outside?"

"The TJ Eckleburg poster? I love it—sometimes I've even thought about taking it for my classroom. As much as I speculate about Ms. Caulfield's motivation for adding propaganda poster creation to the art curriculum, you can't deny it's produced effective results—all in coordination with your lovely leadership team, of course. So what's the issue?"