Page 38 of Poet & Protector

“Wait.” I frowned at him. “When in September? Is your birthday soon? Did it already happen?”

Nev leaned back and folded his arms across his chest. “Why? Are you throwing me a party?”

“Mine was August 17,” I said, hoping it would prompt him to tell me his.

It didn’t. He continued to stare me down, not even bothering to offer me a belated Happy Birthday. It was obvious he’d rather throw daggers at me with his eyes than tell me his birth date.

“So last September you were contacted.” I dropped the birthday thing altogether. “What did you make of the notes?”

“I didn’t get notes,” he said. “Banes have more of a whisper network. But it’s all necessary. The secrecy.”

“Sure,” I said, remembering how Jackie told me the system worked differently for Banes.

If Nev got an invite at the end of the school year, the Banes were more cautious and waited almost a year before revealing the Bunker’s existence. Unlike me, Nev hadn’t balked before coming here. My invitation came in February and it took me another six months to work up the courage to knock on the Burnout’s side door.

“But did you like the mystery of it all?” I was encouraged he hadn’t shut me down yet. “Or were you scared?”

He gave me a long-suffering look. “Really?’

“Okay, fine, don’t tell me.” I decided to try something else. “What about the password? You’re a writer. Why do you think it’s Jack London? Or do you already know, since you seem to have inside information from Caleb and Tom?”

“I don’t have inside information,” Nev said. “Have you read any of Jack London’s stories?”

“I’ve read Call of the Wild and White Fang.”

They were both good. Guardians tended to enjoy stories about wilderness and survival. Shocker.

“My guess is that it’s about dual natures,” he told me. “How there is something the world expects us to be, but it’s up to us to choose where we belong, in the same way Guardians submit to the laws of the Keepers, but those of us who come here subvert that expectation.”

“I can see that,” I agreed. “Or maybe Tom came up with it because in a reversal of the White Fang story he was a man who helped a wolf in the wilderness and he became part of the wolf’s family, so to speak?”

“That’s…not a bad theory.”

I bit the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t smile, certain Nev hated that I’d come up with a good idea that hadn’t occurred to him.

“We should work on the assignment.” He rummaged through his bag and pulled out a few books, flipping through them to place bookmarks, then handed them over. “These are the poems I brought: Wallace Stevens, ‘The Snow Man,’ Margaret Atwood, ‘Dream I: The Bush Garden,’ Carl Sandburg, ‘Choose.’”

I went through the poems in the reverse order that he’d given them.

‘Choose’ was a quick read.

“This is good,” I said. “And it’s short. I wouldn’t mind if we went for short with our poem.”

“Short is harder to do well,” Nev commented. “People assume the opposite.”

“You’re supposedly the expert, so I won’t argue.”

The poems by Atwood and Stevens focused on nature. While very different in tone, they were equally stirring.

I liked all three of Nev’s selections. I didn’t like that I liked them all. I expected at least one poem to be long and stuffy and tiresome. Something I could complain about. The poems Nev gave me were raw, they breathed. They spoke to the wolf within me.

Worst of all, they made me want to know more about Nev.

“Nature, fighting, blood,” I said. “I can relate. If that’s the kind of theme you want to aim for, I’m on board.”

“I guess that’s good,” Nev replied, frowning.

“You guess?”