Breakfast Served Anytime (16 page)

“An arena by any other name would still smell like like armpits and nachos,” I ventured.

“Nice try,” Sonya said, half smiling. “You know what sounds good? The Sonya Henderson Center for Basketball Superiority. I oughta write some kind of petition.”

I grinned and curled myself into a ball. It wouldn’t surprise me if Sonya made it happen. “So what’s Kevin going to do?”

Sonya shrugged. “Says he doesn’t know yet, but I know he knows. He’s gonna do exactly what he’s wanted to do ever since he was old enough to say
Wildcat,
old enough to put a ball through a baby hoop in his granny’s shit-sad backyard.” She stretched and yawned, heading for the door. “It sucks, though, you know? In this state you’ve got these crazy extremes” — Sonya turned and started ticking them off on her fingers — “You’ve got your meth-addict poor people, your rich-as-balls horse people, a whole buncha regular people just trying to find or keep a job —”

“Okayokayokay.” I shook my head, trying to clear it. What happened to our merry little conversations about boys? “Sonya, where’s this going?”

“The point is that black or white, rich or poor, whatever — the one single stupid thing everyone seems to have in common is a maniacal love for basketball. Am I right?”

I thought of GoGo, her crossword puzzles and her basketball. “Yeah. Strange but true.”

“So it sucks to ruin that one good thing with a big fight about coal. It’s like drawing a line and telling everyone to pick a side. Kevin doesn’t want to pick a side; he just wants to play ball. It’s what he was born to do, and it’s what he’s going to do.” Sonya paused to look at Jessica’s photo display on her way out. She had this look of sad fondness on her face, like Jessica was someone she had known a hundred years ago.

“Sonya. Wait. What are you going to do?”

Sonya paused in the doorway, her hip resting against the frame. “What, you mean right now?”

“When you graduate.”

“Girl, why do you think I’m here? I’m gonna take that UK scholarship and run like a bat outta hell before somebody changes their mind. Scholarships don’t exactly grow on trees where I come from.”

“Really,” I said. “Because the trees in Louisville are covered in scholarships. Scholarships, money, chocolate. Take your pick. La-La Land is crawling with stuff you wouldn’t believe.”

Sonya managed a smile. “Touché.” She chewed at a fingernail and looked at me for real. “Seriously, though, Glo. What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I opened GoGo’s book and studied her handwritten signature. Same name as mine. “What do you think of New York City?”

Sonya shrugged. “Never been. But I get sick of everybody acting like there’s California, and then there’s New York, and nothing worthwhile happens in between. There’s a whole huge fascinating country in between, is what there is.”

“True.”

“Well, we can make it true, or we can just be dicks.” Sonya sighed and gave me her sad-fond smile. “G’night, Glo. How about we all start over tomorrow?”

Sonya left so quietly that I didn’t even hear the door click shut behind her. I wasn’t used to a quiet Sonya, and even I, self-proclaimed lover of silence and solitude, felt uneasy in the stillness that settled over the room. Shame, blame: I couldn’t put my finger on the exact feeling welling up in me, but I knew I felt awful. Awful because what had I done throughout my high-school career but perform in silly plays and work at a silly coffee shop so I could blow all my money on music? So I could flail my body around at shows and drive around in my dead grandmother’s car and stare at the river and dream about an impossible boy? I curled myself into an even tighter ball, squeezed my eyes shut, assessing the damage: Jessica was right. In addition to never having thought about the mountains of Eastern Kentucky before that morning, I had also, just an example, never picked a blackberry, never planted a tree or taken the time to help something grow, never wanted for anything for one second of my life, blahblahblah, the list went on and on, the list made me sick, the list smacked of privilege and indulgence and general sanctimonious cluelessness. I felt awful because I loved Jessica and Sonya and was already missing them, because our misunderstandings felt seismic, because it seemed that things were always coming to an end before they even had a chance to begin.

For once in my life, I didn’t want to be alone.

My hands were unsteady as I dug in my bag for the calling card. My father picked up on the first ring.

“Hi, Dad.”

A pause, during which I could practically hear my father bracing himself. This particular brand of call was not exactly new to him.

“Well, hello there, Glo.”

“Dad.”

“Gloria?”

“Yes. Hi. Hello.”

“Is everything all right?”

The tears were traveling my sinuses now, threatening histrionics. “Yes. Everything’s fine. I love it here, but the food is really bad. So hey, do you know anything about mountaintop removal? The Coal Coalition? All that?”

Dad waited. I could hear the TV going in the background.
Antiques Roadshow
. “Well, of course I do,” he said. Then he paused, gauging. “Gloria, what is this about?”

“I just wondered what you thought about it, that’s all.”

Another pause. “Gloria. Why don’t you tell me what you think about it?”

“I think it’s
terrible
,” I wailed, crying full-on.

Dad waited for me to cry a little bit more before he continued. “Gloria, honey, you’re the only one who can decide what you think and how you feel about things. The important thing is to always think things through. Think before you speak.” He paused, tentative. “I’m grasping at straws here, honey — am I on the right track?”

My dad has always been able to do that — to read my mind that way, even when I’m all over the map. It’s a trick he inherited from GoGo, Mind Reader Extraordinaire. “Everything’s fine,” I said, blinking hard, pulling it together. “Dad?”

“Hmm?”

“How come you never took me to pick blackberries?”

Dad sighed. I was wearing him out. “It sounds like you need a good night’s sleep, Gloria. Things will be clearer in the morning, I promise. Call me tomorrow if you need to, but if I know you, you won’t need to. I’ll see you in a few weeks. I guarantee I’ll be the last person on earth you’ll want to see.”

I smiled. My father, the original prophet-seer. “I love you, Dad.”

“Remain calm.”

“I will.”

I must have fallen asleep, because all of a sudden there was the rude gleam of a flashlight in my face.

“Hey!” I screamed.

“Glo, get up,” Jessica whispered. “Flashlight tag!”

I was still half dreaming as Jessica led me by the arm into the startling fluorescence of the hallway, down two dizzying flights of stairs, and into the warm breath of the night. Fireflies were rising up in luminescent drifts from the dark expanse of lawn, and everywhere flashlights blinked on and off, trailing laughter. Jessica’s hair shone in the moonlight and disappeared in a wave behind her as she made for the Kissing Tree, the swing. I was aware of the grass beneath my bare feet as I ran after her — I was aware of the shadows, the moonlight, the night air on my skin, humming magic. The disorientation of a moment before gave way to giddiness; I was laughing and couldn’t stop, I was nine years old again, flying down the hill on my bike. I was vaguely aware of being alone — Jessica and the others had disappeared, but lights were still winking in the trees, so I ran for the swing and set myself sailing.

“I surrender!” I screamed, just to see how far my voice would go. And it did feel like surrendering: to the game, the night, the delicious freedom of it all.

“You’re it,” Mason whispered, appearing from nowhere and catching me in his light. “Boo.”

“Boo who?”

“Boo Radley, at your service.”

Mason switched off the light. I stared at his silhouette until my eyes got used to the dim and his face, suddenly nearer, came into focus.

“Kind of ruins the surprise,” he murmured. “I obviously didn’t think I’d run into you here.”

“Really? I’d have thought only you could arrange a midnight game of flashlight tag.”

Mason shrugged. “I have to admit this is not my work.”

It occurred to me that all conversations with boys should happen this way: in whispers, bathed in moonlight. Everyone looks beautiful in the moon.

“What’s in the tree, though, that is my work,” Mason continued. “In the style of Weegee, just for you.”

I turned to investigate the hole in the tree, but Mason reached out to stop me. His touch wasn’t anything, really, just barely enough pressure to get my attention, but I felt it at the bottom of my stomach: a blue butterfly set free. “Wait’ll I’m gone. Leave some of the surprise as a surprise.”

“I promise that I could not possibly be more surprised,” I admitted, still whispering, just for the thrill of it. Then he turned to go, loping up the hill.

Back in room 317, I took pains not to wake Jessica, who had somehow beaten me home and fallen asleep in a fully clothed heap on her bed. Moonlight slanted through the window and rested on her face and hair, which spilled over the pillow in a fairy-tale whorl. As gently as I could, I slipped the flip-flops from her feet, drew the top sheet over her legs, and picked up the flashlight that she had let fall to the floor. My heart was thrumming as I fumbled for Indigo in the half-dark; I didn’t feel prepared to open Mason’s package without a sound track. Cocooned in the music, I could suspend myself in that moment of discovery — a moment I prolonged as long as I could before giving in completely to an anticipation that I felt as an actual ache in my cheeks, the ache of biting into something so sweet that the thrill of the sugar makes your face hurt.

I climbed under the covers and shone the flashlight on Mason’s gift: a roll of something or somethings, bound in string. I unfurled it to reveal an 8×10 black-and-white photograph. The girl in the picture was me. Me in the Mystery Machine, eyes locked with the eye of Mason’s camera, mouth tilted in an incredulous smirk. It was the girl from the mirror, it was the girl from the wall in McGrath’s tomb, it was the girl from the moon, as far away as that. A familiar girl with a faraway look in her eye. I’d know her anywhere; I didn’t know her at all. Over her eyes Mason had outlined a pair of 3-D movie glasses — a nod to Weegee’s 3-D-movie lovers, no doubt, although this girl — me,
I
— was alone, not locked in some passionate embrace. Underneath her/my face, Mason had taped a fortune cookie message:
One who admires you greatly is hidden before your eyes
. God! He almost had me. So if I was the 3-D girl with hidden eyes, did he think
I
was
his
admirer?
Oh, Mr. Mad Hatter
, I thought.
How fearfully wrong thou art
. I set the photo aside to assess page 2: a purple flyer like the one that had appeared in my campus mailbox several days before. It was an announcement. A call for participants in the end-of-Geek-Camp talent show. Was he serious? On principle, I had never — and would never, especially not with Mason — participate in something as fourth-grade ridiculous as that. Beneath all the flyer-411, Mason had scrawled
Much Ado I.i: Come on. You’d be perfect: “I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me.” — Beatrice/Gloria

I shoved the photograph and the flyer underneath my pillow and decided to sleep on it, literally. I was finished with acting, but the single line of Shakespearean prose was another lit match, quick and hot.

“Glo?”

I turned to see Jessica facing me, her eyes glistening in the arc of moonlight that stretched across her bed and her face. “Yeah?”

“I’m sorry. For before. For those things I said.”

“I’m sorry, too. I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t know —”

“It’s okay. You don’t have to say anything else. Please just don’t say anything else.” Jessica closed her eyes and curled herself into a ball. “I’ve never met anyone like you before, you know.”

I wasn’t sure what to do with that. What was I like?

“I mean you’re different. You’re so weird. Good-weird, though.” Jessica sniffed. She may have been crying, but I wasn’t sure. As far as I was concerned there had been enough crying for one night.

“And I’m not,” Jessica continued, “I’m not going to go changing my mind about you just because we disagree about stuff.”

“Okay,” I said. “So my weird shoes are okay with you?”

“I still think your shoes are hideous.”

“What about your hideous boat shoes? Hello, landlocked state.”

“Hey,” Jessica said, laughing. “Don’t knock the boat shoes. They’re iconic Americana, man.”

“No, man, my Chucks are iconic Americana.”

Jessica was smiling, her hands tucked beneath her head. “That’s us, Glo. Opposite ends of the iconic-Americana spectrum.”

“We should be models,” I said.

“We should,” Jess said dreamily.

I thought of my first moments in room 317, how I’d looked at those pictures of Jessica and made up my mind about her before she’d even had a chance to be her flesh-and-blood real-life self. I thought of how the room looked to me then, and how the days and nights had transformed it into a different place altogether. It had been changed by the living we’d done in it, the secrets we had spilled into it through wee-hour talks in the dark, just like this one.

Jessica propped her head up on one hand, examining the fingers of her other hand in the silver light. “Hey, did you get something from Alex?”

“This? No, this isn’t from Alex. This, if you can believe it, is courtesy of the Mad Hatter.”

Jessica laughed. “I think you secretly love him.”

“Who? Alex? No kidding.”

“Not Alex. The Mad Hatter. I’m not an Alex fan, I have to say.”

I rose up on my elbows, balking. “What’s wrong with Alex? You’ve never even met him.”

“I don’t need to meet him. It just seems like if he were really into you, if he really appreciated you, he wouldn’t keep your romance some big secret.”

“We don’t have a romance —”

“Precisely,” Jessica interrupted. She tucked her hands back beneath her head and gave me an apologetic smile. “Girl, I know you love that CD, but a CD’s not love. Love of the chickenshit variety, maybe, but you deserve to be swept off your feet in the here and now. That’s all I’m saying.”