“See this?”

A bearded man thrust a finger past the face of Wendy Smith. The legendary Aldus Kerouac was the thruster. His scarf: Long. His beard: Prominent. In the eyes of Wendy Smith, this dangerous man embodied everything she longed to be. (The danger part. Not the man part.) The object being fingered was a poster for a fraternity dance event. It hung pitifully on the wall of the library entrance. Any idiot who read the Elements of Style would see this poster was completely rife with grammatical errors. Wendy’s own well trained eyes caught it right away. A simple mistake that if left alone, would announce that everyone’s your was invited, not that you all were invited. There was a black hole there where an apostrophe and the little e could have found a home. But these bastards who made this poster didn’t care like she and Aldus did. The picture of their careless fingers slapping away at their keyboards like they were kneading dough burned at her. It torched her soul like a thousand fiery hands that all looked like her ex-boyfriend’s. Wendy wrote this one down.

“This is the product of a world that tells us we will never get a job,” said Aldus ”This is the world is what caused me to form this gang of English majors.” He tossed his scarf into the air to let it flop over his opposite shoulder. “This abomination is the ugly child of our foe and what do we do to our foes?”

“Kill!” Wendy declared.

“Actually, uh, no. We copyedit,” he said and handed her a sharpie marker, “But I like your pastiche.”

“The word you are thinking of is panache,” said Noam Joyce. He was Aldus’ second in command. The step down in rank was noticeable, as his beard was thin and didn’t connect from his chin to his lip. An embarrassingly narrow red and green scarf only reached around him once, a sign to Wendy that he was barely hanging onto Aldus Kerouac’s coat tails. She tried to contain her disgust while she set to work on correcting the poster.

“And you only know that word because I used it in Scrabble last night.”

“You know, words are just tools we use to dig ourselves out of our own graves,” said the fourth and final member of this gang, Frost. His beard was just a flimsy triangle goatee hanging onto a tiny chin above a neck warmer. That’s all that needs to be said about him.

The four of these combined made up the Fragments, the coolest gang on campus. With every action they defied the world that told them they had no place in it. They were a living embodiment of what Wendy felt: rage. The futility of an English degree came to her suddenly while working her summer job at the lasertorium, right around the twenty second time she sat through the Goo Goo Dolls laser show. A friend in a creative writing course had mentioned the gang in passing on their first class together. The Fragments had only started that year and already had a big reputation. The English professors publicly shunned but secretly admired the gang, their copyedit graffiti, and their intense hatred of the Oxford comma.

“I, too, hate two commas in a list of three items,” she thought, “This is what I’ve been looking for.”

Getting to them was easy. Two never-to-be-spoken-of coffee dates with her creative writing professor and she was finally talking to Aldus Kerouac directly.

“Normally we don’t let anyone even talk to us,” said Aldus “But we needed the fresh feminist perspective you can bring to our bohemian post academic lifestyle.”

“You also have the best penmanship out of all of us,” said Noam. Aldus shushed him so fiercely that Noam had to turn away and bit his knuckle in shame. Wendy felt her insides glow with that compliment. The professor she totally didn’t have coffee dates with must have given them her paper on Chaucer.

“Now, correct this sign and we’ll move on to roughing up some illiterates,” said Aldus. The other gang members cast fearful glances to each other.

”Can we hurry up? If they catch us they’ll pound us into dog meat,” said Frost. He took out a leather bound moleskin book to jot this down.

“Frost is right. We’re in the Kant’s territory, man,” Said Noam. “They pretty much own the drinking fountains at the library.”

“Do none of you have any courage? I say we took it back,” announced Aldus. “After all, who spends more time at the library than the English majors?”

“The amount of time is negligible,” said a semi-confident voice. “It’s whoever applied the initial labor to it first. And that was us, the Dirty Kants!”

The Dirty Kants were the only competition that the Fragments had on campus. Plagiarizing Aldus’ magnificent vision of rebellion, the philosophy majors banded together in defiance of a system that would not employ them. They were ruthless. It was rumored that they beat up a guy until he could prove that he didn’t deserve it, a task that took the poor man thirty five days. But from here they didn’t look so tough to Wendy, even though they were blocking the only entrance to the library. Their leader had but one remarkable thing about him: the size of his sideburns. She spotted a pale skeleton behind him with less girthy sideburns and a threadless t-shirt. It must be his second in command.

“Don’t believe me? It’s Locke. Look it up,” said their leader. “Oh yeah, you can’t, because we own the place!”

A tiny girl with frazzled hair popped out from behind the two of them to speak. “I mean, as far as one can theoretically own something that will exist beyond their existence.”

“Perfectly stated,” Trevor said, “This is a place to which coming back would be ill-advised.” Wendy didn’t know if this was his name or not, but their leader certainly looked like a Trevor.

Everyone’s eyes moved to Aldus Kerouac, whose gigantic scarf was hanging off him like a plant. (Another good one) He didn’t do anything but pull out a clove cigarette. He was about to light it but he noticed the sprinkler system.

“I know that our ability to communicate is debatable, but did you hear me? Get out of here!” Trevor repeated.

“Sorry, punk. We don’t respond to passive voice,” said Noam with arms folded.

Wendy could feel her hands shaking. She had stopped crossing off exclamation points from the frat boy’s sentence “Come get booty worked because we’re saying so!” Frozen, she watched the insults continue.

“That’s it! I’m going to choose to. To,” Trevor sputtered. He couldn’t finish the statement he was so distraught. Aldus brought his scarf around him another time, a sign of his obvious triumph over his enemy.

"That's the way things go when you elevate sub-par people to positions of authority,” he said in a stage aside to Noam, ”That’s Chapter 29, pg. 330 of Catch 22, by the way.”

“Actually, it’s ‘that's the way things go when you elevate mediocre people to positions of authority." It’s Chapter 29, pg. 335.” Trevor said, “I took AP English in high school.”

A gasp rose from all of them. What had just happened was the deepest insult you could toss at an English major: you corrected his quote. It was only through Wendy’s steel will did she resist the urge to wail in terror. Everyone’s eyes turned to the usually Teflon-coated Aldus, who was busy trembling the clove out of his hand.

“Name a time and place,” he said.

“F-for what?” Trevor responded.

“We’re going to fight.” Aldus craned his neck upwards to reveal more of his powerful beard to emphasize his point.

“Alright then. T-tomorrow at dawn,” Trevor said. “It’s Sunday so the library will be closed and no teachers will be looking.”

“Make sure to bring body bags.” Aldus sneered and walked away, signaling for the others to follow. Wendy put away her pens and followed behind them diligently.

“Aldus, we don’t know how to fight. We’ll be scraps of paper in the hands of the Devil,” said Frost.

“I think you’re misinterpreting the meaning of what I said,” stated Aldus, “I said fight, which was more of a figurative statement that we should challenge each other. You know, with words.”

“I disagree,” said Noam, “I believe when you said ‘we’re going to fight’ you were illustrating the inevitable battle between our postmodern intellectualism and their baseless ideologies. “

“What does the new kid think?” said Aldus. He halted and they all turned to Wendy, who was busy jotting everything they said. Damn, she wished she owned a nice Moleskin like Frost.

“Oh, I, uh. I assumed we were talking about hurting them,” she said. They all just stared at each other for a moment. “Well, uh, as our post-telefeminist reconstruction of the global idea hive mind makes their isolationist ramblings even more obsolete then they were before.”

“Exactly,” said Aldus. “Let’s go reinvent some clichés. Denny’s?”

The nodded, “Denny’s.”

The next morning the usual throngs of wayward students moved across campus. Dreary eyed boys and girls finally realizing there was no porn or lifetime movies that could prepare you for the awkward after sex conversation following an 80s Hair Band theme-party. Pushing through the throng of dazed, crimp-haired kids, the members of the philosophy gang emerged. They truly were giants moving amongst the minnows with ripped jeans.

The English gang was already waiting. They sized each other up like warriors; wearing suit coats in every color of the Tanbow. Volleys of insults immediately started flying.

“After a five hour discussion and an all-nighter watching the Matrix trilogy, we have decided that your asses do exist and it is categorically imperative that we kick them,” said Trevor.

“As you had agreed last night, this is going to be a fight using words. So first you’ll listen to us speak, then we’ll wait through what you say to speak again,” said Aldus.

Confused protests erupted from their side but Aldus raised a hand to silence them. In the momentary hush that followed, Aldus produced a folded paper tablemat from last night’s Denny’s brainstorming session. Unfortunately it didn’t have much on it that wasn’t scribbled out. Aldus had spent the entire previous night trying to hit on Wendy but had to take turns with the other members of the gang. It was a dismal failure. This meant that the placemat only contained the words “those guys suck” and the word “gazebo” as well as its associated scrabble points (18). Wendy knew Aldus would have to trust in himself and his superior knowledge of what lay inside his heart. He drew in a great breath, an action that seemed to suck in everyone’s attention to what he was about to say.

“We should have the library because we’re cooler,” he said. There was a silence like the moments before a bomb drops. Wendy covered her eyes, peeking out through them.

“No, we are!” Trevor shouted, and they ran at each other with their hands slapping in front of them. Wendy shut her hands tight, covering her eyes. The sound of men being ripped apart by each other’s fury echoed within her ears. It must have been two minutes before the symphony of violence stopped. She almost cried when she dared to look. Wendy had read about gang wars, but this was on another level of horror. It was then that she truly knew what it was like to be a Vietnam vet. Her comrades lay on the ground, rolling from side to side moaning. Frost was rocking back and forth with his head in his hands screaming, “You tore off my beard! Oh god what am I now?”

She walked among them like a pregnant ghost in a minefield. (She wrote this one down, too.) She alone had survived. The Fragments were fragmented, all bruised, broken men and a single (as well as individual) woman. The Dirty Kants were equally wounded. Wendy could not help but wonder who really was the winner.

“I think I hurt my ankle, can you help me up?” asked Noam.

“I will remember you,” she said, “I will carve your name in the rock of the new gang’s foundation.”

“What?” he said. He could give her no more epitaphs though, and his head fell gently back to the concrete below for his usual afternoon nap.

“I will call them the Red Pens,” Wendy said, “red for that is the color of the blood that flowed so freely today. We will rise on this campus like a phoenix. A phoenix of wit and semicolons. And who will lead them?” she asked no one, “It will have to be me, Salinger Syntax. Hardened by the sights I have seen. Ennobled by the wisdom I now hold from my fallen teachers.”

She paused. “Comrades.”
She paused again “Underlings.”

As she walked away she held her head up high. At the beginning of this Saturday afternoon she was a pupil, and now she walked to the Subway on the corner as the master.