IF ANYONE ASKED him to mention three things about himself, Wyatt would say that:
1. In his seventeen years of living, he had been heartbroken a grand total of twenty times.
2. Of the twenty he'd only dated thirteenâhe defined dating very looselyâso yes; the list included his celebrity crushes.
3. He deserved a Nobel Prize, an invite to the MET Gala, and bestie status with a main pop girlie after all the bullshit he'd had to go through.
There were a ton of other more interesting things he could say, but in Grace's class those three spun around inside his head, teasing each other. It was his last period of the day.
Grace Barker was in her mid-twenties, with fair skin and dreadlocked hair which stretched down to her lower back. She was also one of those people who actually loved the jobs they did and it was evident in how passionate she was when she went about the entire affair of teaching: never arriving late to class, how emotionally invested she got when it came to debates, the list was never ending; once last year they'd had to stop class as she'd gotten teary eyed right in the middle of an analysis of Shakespeare's Othello, when Monique Jones, one of the only African-American's in Wyatt's grade, narrated a fact sheet of statistics about race-based crimes off-heart after some random kid made a comment about how racism was no longer a thing, and how people of color needed to stop playing the victim card.
To date that was probably one of the most awkward experiences he'd had to sit through at Mayfield.
"Alright class," she began, clapping her hands to grab everyone's attention. She wore a plain yellow summer dress that flayed from its waist down and a pair of gold flats. The Cheshire grin on her face was suspicious, and he soon found out why.
"Poem-a-Thon," she said simply.
The room fell silent, and then soft muttering began which, eventually replaced with groans, including Wyatt's.
Preface: Poem-a-Thon (a play on marathon) was an event that all twelfth graders who took AP Lit. at Mayfield Academy had to participate in. Basically it went on for the entire fall term and involved an assignment in which each person memorized a poem, recited it in front of the whole class and then briefly discussed its contents, all within an undetermined amount of time. It made up for about forty percent of their grades, and right around the time where college admissions decisions would be coming out everyone's final results were pasted on the school notice board (in only this subject, thank God).
What with trying to balance school work, his social life, and a failing relationship over the summer Wyatt hadn't had the time to even look at a poem, much less learn one by heart enough to recite it, and everyone in this class knew that unless it was voluntaryâwhich wasn't always a guaranteeâthe order of presentation was picked at random by the teacher.
It was a tradition that the academic committee tolerated because some thesis report published a few years ago showed it trained the brain to remember things.
Grace looked like she was about to break into a dance routine and that meant that nobody was going to be getting off the hook, even if it meant that you had just gotten out of your thirteenth relationship, or contracted Lime Disease (rumor had it that this had actually happened once, and the girl had had to give her presentation from her hospital ward).
At this point Wyatt was ready to hand in his Nobel Prize and MET Gala invite if it meant he got to sit this assignment out.
"Who wants to go first?" she continued; hand on hip as she sat precariously on the edge of the table in front of the class.
It was also a well-known fact that usually, the first to go often had the highest grade in the class.
Marco Valdez's hand shot up so quickly Wyatt barely caught the motion, followed predictably by Monique Jones's.
For as long as anyone at Mayfield could remember, Marco and Monique had had a rivalry between themselves and the only time it paused was if anyone threatened to get in the way of their spots as first and secondâand then they came together to make that person feel their combined wrath. It was a battlefield, which involved wild accusations about said common enemy cheating, cases of accidentally spilled ink on notebooks, and missing assignments, which may not have sounded like much if they happened once in a while, but occurring in succession they became a most effective form of torture.
Nerds at Mayfield were cardigan-wearing gangsters who used their brains like machine guns and were not to be fucked around with.
Wyatt didn't care though, he was too busy swatting away at stray locks of hair blocking his vision as he feverishly flipped through his text book for a poem he could devour and digest in a span of minutes, preferably anything between two to four lines.
Discreetly pulling his phone from the messenger bag that leaned on the wooden desk he sat in as Marco walked to the front of the class, Wyatt used the opportunity to look up short poems. His feed was suddenly filled with suggestions (see also: Rupi Kaur) links to poetry pages, and Google images with one word inscriptions (a poem is, as a poem doesâwhich was probably supposed to mean something brooding, but as a budding expert in dating the Fake Deep/Wannabe Hipster types, Wyatt called bullshit). He stilled, recalling his bathroom stall encounter and all the others that had come before it and suddenly he was returning to Google's home page and typing Poems about Heartbreak into the search bar.
Marco was in the middle of his presentation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 14:
â But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
â Nor lose possession of that fair thou
â ow'st...
At a point he seemed to lose all sense of place and time and went on to recite his poem in an exaggerated British accent as he gesticulated wildly and even before he finished Grace had already began to give her standing ovation.
"Bravo," clap, clap, "Bravo!"
Everyone else unenthusiastically followed her lead as Marco bowed with a flourish and Wyatt turned his head back just in time to watch Monique's hands tighten around the corners of her desk. When he began his discussion on the themes of the poem (the immortality of love, beauty of nature etc.), Wyatt wished that he would add at least add Boring. He looked down his phone screen to see that the search results for Poems about Heartbreak were already displayed and he clicked on the first link: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Elliot.
â S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse...
Wyatt clicked out as fast as he could.
Despite being half-Dominican, he had never been good at even basic Spanish save the handful of phrases he knew. In fact the highest grade he could boast of was a B-minus, and so he wasn't about to start cramming Italian just to pass this class. He clicked on another one, this time a list of the most famous poems about heartbreak.
It felt ridiculous, really, looking up poems and quotes about breakups. At this point Wyatt was sure that everyone at Mayfield placed bets on his numerous relationships and how long they would go before hitting rock bottom. Right before he started dating Rashad, he'd eavesdropped on a conversation between two guys centering on him and his supposed drama.
It had been at the library, and he and his best friend, Tobi, had been in the middle of a biology assignment when the people two table away began to talk about him. Wyatt listened to these two strangers dissect his life with verbal knives, with a firm grip on Tobi, whose first instinct had been to confront them.
The thing about being in and out of so many relationships was that people always assumed that you had more sex than you actually did, and so when it got to a point where one of guys said that he would never touch Wyatt (or that ugly slut, specifically) with a stick no matter how much he was offered, Tobi shook out of Wyatt's vice grip and walked over to their table and delivered a right jab, which led to a full on fight.
The speaker had been Tyler Abernathy, a willowy drama club star more suited to singing along to all forty-two songs on the Hamilton original Broadway cast recording than picking fights with Tobi, who had been lifting weights since he and Wyatt turned fourteen, and so it was kind of slaughter. The once silent library was replaced with the sound of bodies knocking into bookshelves, which attracted a small crowd in no time. There was no getting over it, teenagers were bloodthirsty.
Wyatt had fought through the wall of bodies until he found himself at the front but by the time he got there both parties were already too invested in getting beat up, actually Tobi was on top of him punching away at the other guy, whose entire face was a bloody mess. It took the intervention of Mr. Beckman, the schools fifty-something year old librarian to put an end to the entire ordeal and they'd both been suspended for a month.
Unenthusiastic clapping of his classmates brought him back to the present, and Wyatt came to just in time to watch Marco smugly make his way to his seat, and if looks could kill he would have been in a morgue from all the glaring he received from his best friend/arch nemesis.
It was only after Grace called on Monique that Wyatt let loose a sigh of relief. Marco had made sure to milk out all his twenty minutes, and Monique was not about to allow herself get outshone, which was proven by how confidently she stood after taking a gulp from the Evian bottle on her table.
"Hey everyone," she greeted as she got to the front of the class. "I'll be basing my presentation off Nayirrah Waheed's what the war has done to us from her collection, salt."
Wyatt forced down the urge to stand up and protest. All he wanted to do was go home.
Monique began, speaking of a warm Philadelphia night, groceries, and dreaming of honey.
He stopped listening.