Breakfast Served Anytime (3 page)

“Oh! Gloria. My name’s Gloria. Hi.” I did this nonsensical little wave.

Jessica reached out and squeezed my hand. She tilted the phone away from her mouth and stage-whispered, “Gloria, oh my God, we are going to have so much
fun
. Be right back. Oh, grab something from the fridge if you’re thirsty.”

As quickly as she had burst in, Jessica disappeared from the room, her voice back to its normal register but still going turbo-speed on the phone. I was just starting to feel despondent again when I turned to open Jessica’s tiny refrigerator, the front of which was adorned with a sticker just like ones I had seen plastered all over a bunch of parents’ cars in the parking lot:
COAL COALITION
, the sticker said. I had seen other stickers, too, almost identical but with a message clearly intended to appeal to the other team:
SOL COALITION
.

Now. I wish I could tell you that I was the sort of person who, upon being met with bumper-sticker proof of an environmental war being waged in the very state where I was born and raised — in the state where I was currently being expected to act as a freaking role model — might have actually devoted some thought and maybe even some allegiance to a side of said environmental issue, but the awful and embarrassing truth is this: Before I landed at Geek Camp, the business of mountaintop removal wasn’t even on my radar. If Jessica’s sticker registered with me at all in that moment, it was only vaguely. If I had to guess, I’d say I probably thought Coal Coalition was a band — an alt-bluegrass band, maybe,
huge
in outlying parts of the state but not in that grand sparkling diadem of Louisville, where bands of that ilk are clearly passé.
Coal Coalition
. I mean, it’s a good name for a band, right? Featuring a sexily bedraggled lead singer with a come-hither look in his wounded eyes? Yes, I probably thought it was a band, because that’s what you do when you’re clueless: You apply your own narrow little realm of experience to everything you look at and touch.

It mortifies me now to say that I knew nothing then of an issue that was to become central to my thinking in the days and weeks that followed, but it’s the truth: In that moment, I didn’t think or care about the Coal Coalition, band or bandwagon. I was concerned only with Jessica’s refrigerator, which was stocked with perfect rows of bottled Ale-8-One. Longnecks, my absolute favorite. Forget technoparaphernalia — if I’m addicted to anything in this world, it’s Ale-8. Nectar of the gods, people. No lie. I took a long, gingery swig and immediately felt bad about the text I had wanted so desperately to send to Carol. Just when I had decided that Jessica and I had absolutely zero in common, that we would hate each other and there would be drama and the summer would suck and we would all disappear into gaping black holes, blah blah blah, there was a mini-refrigerator full of the freaking nectar of the gods. So maybe a soft drink shouldn’t count as a sign, maybe and probably it wasn’t anything to go hanging an opinion on, but in my mind it was proof of what Atticus Finch says about walking in Boo Radley’s shoes. I forget the line exactly, but it basically comes down to what Walt Whitman said, too, in that poem I had to memorize for English class last year: People, man. People really do contain multitudes.

Incidentally, the weather was ridiculous. All week it had been the sort of mind-numbing hot that you’d expect from Central Kentucky in June, but that first day at Geek Camp was almost eerie in its cool, green gorgeousness. Jessica had left the window open, and the air that breezed into our room smelled like cut grass and warm skin, like possibility itself. Somebody outside was laughing, and the music of it made me impatient to be outdoors, to get my bearings and learn my way around campus, starting with the mail room.

I’d finally finished unpacking my stuff and was in the middle of wrestling sheets onto the mattress when one of those crazy blue butterflies sailed through the window, hovered for a few thrilling beats in midair, and swooped to a rest on the sill. With its wings pressed together behind its body, the thing looked for a second like a folded slip of paper, like a secret note passed in class, dark and thin as a razor blade. Carol was right: The butterflies
were
sort of scary. I was holding my breath as I inched toward the window for a closer look, but in that split second the butterfly lowered its wings and disappeared back into the bright afternoon.

And that’s when I first saw him.

On the ground below, strolling across the courtyard toward Reynolds Hall, was this boy wearing — no lie — a floppy green top hat. He was apparently a stickler for detail, this boy, because tucked into a wide ribbon wrapped around the hat was a square of paper, à la the original Mad Hatter. À la Mr. I’m So Clever, which was obviously this guy’s persona. He hadn’t even walked twenty feet, I hadn’t even really seen his face yet, and already my insides were doing a slow boil. If there’s one thing I cannot abide, it’s people who can’t resist the temptation to call attention to themselves in the freaking noisiest way possible. There I was again, rapid-fire texting Carol in my head:
Remind me to tell you about the Mad Hatter, aka Mr. Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
So maybe I was staring. Okay, so I was staring, whatever, and the Mad Hatter looked up. He looked right up at me, grinned, and, twirling his hat toward the ground, gave a deep and infuriating bow. I spun away from the window and had to actually
sit down
because that’s exactly the extent to which I felt like the air had been stolen from my lungs. Suffice it to say that, officially and irrevocably, I hated the Mad Hatter.

I must have still been in my stupor when somebody knocked on the door, because for one crazy second I thought it was going to be him. The Mad Hatter. I was all ready to ask what the hell that bow was all about, but when I yanked open the door, nobody was there. I could hear girls talking and laughing behind closed doors along the hall, but I didn’t see anyone. I think I stepped on it before I saw it: a small white envelope, my name on the front, sealed in familiar red wax. Inside was an index card with a bunch of weird stuff scribbled on it:

Normally I would have been six shades of thrilled by what looked like a code, a puzzle, something for my brain to wrap itself around, but I wasn’t thinking clearly. The air seemed charged, electric, and I needed to get out into that cool green afternoon. I shoved the card into my pocket and took the stairs two at a time. Was I surprised by what I found on the ground outside? No, of course I wasn’t surprised. The day, after all, had been full of signs and portent from the start. Here’s the weird thing, though: It’s almost like I
knew
that when I stepped outside I would find that piece of paper — the one from the Mad Hatter’s top hat. Like a freaking calling card:
In this Style 10/6.
I shoved it into my pocket along with the message from X and went off to find something to eat. All of a sudden I was starving.

Morlan College’s dining hall is called the McGrathskellar. It’s in McGrath Hall, which is named after this guy Thomas McGrath, who freaked out and put a curse on the whole school a few hundred years ago. I learned this after following a huge herd of people into McGrath: Everyone was apparently going to a first-day-of-Geek-Camp ice-cream social (no lie: an
ice-cream social
) that I had somehow failed to get the memo about. People were walking around with Fudgsicles and Push-Ups and whatnot, and I was falling fast into Deer-in-Headlights mode again when Jessica ran up and linked her arm in mine. Her other arm was already linked with the arm of a girl who looked dead-on Michelle Obama, perfect biceps and all.

“Gloria! There you are. Sit with us! This is Sonya.”

“Hey, Sonya,” I bumbled, and with my free arm gave that same ridiculous wave from earlier. What was wrong with me? Then I made some brilliant observation like, “Seriously, I haven’t had a Fudgsicle since I was like seven. I didn’t know they still even made Fudgsicles!”

If Jessica and Sonya thought I was a moron, they were nice enough not to show it. Jessica marched toward an unoccupied corner table and parked us. I did a quick scan of the room: no Mad Hatter. Good. I relaxed a little bit and accepted Sonya’s offer of half a Fudgsicle. The thing tasted exactly like first grade.

“So,” Jessica said, giving the table an efficient little rap. “I just gave Sonya here a proper grilling — Gloria, you should be aware that Sonya is one of those pageant bitches — and now it’s time for
us
to get to know each other, roommate. So far the only thing I know about you is that you’ve got all this gorgeous hair and you’re just letting it go. As soon as we get back to the room I’m going to introduce you to my flatiron, but for now why don’t you just give us the basic rundown. Where you’re from and why you’re here and all of that. Go!”

Suddenly paranoid about my hair, I gave Jessica and Sonya the basic rundown. I’d rather die than talk about myself out loud, so I sort of gave them the expurgated version. In return I learned that Jessica was also “one of those pageant bitches,” having once been runner-up to Sonya herself, who was indeed the famous girlfriend of the famous Kevin Donnelly. Kevin Donnelly, the name finally clicked: the small-town dynamo who had recently achieved hero status as the country’s number-one high school basketball player and most sought-after recruit of practically every college team in the nation, including his home state University of Kentucky Wildcats. To say that basketball is a religion around here would be to put it mildly. It would also be to put it wrongly, because as far as I can tell, in the annals of history, religion has been responsible for things like war and fallen empires, while the shared devotion to basketball among Kentucky’s faithful has had the power to do near-impossible things like break down social barriers in my high school’s cafeteria. I mean, I’d be hard-pressed right this second to give you a clear definition of a pick-and-roll or to tell you with any accuracy what a bank shot is, but I’ll tell you this: My very own GoGo, who contained more multitudes than anyone else I know, was the most fanatical basketball fan I’ve ever met. I’m just saying. I haven’t fully figured it out yet, but I’m convinced there’s a recipe for magic in this whole basketball thing.

“I’m telling you, girls, this gig is getting real old real fast,” Sonya was saying. “It’s like he’s cheating on me, but with a bunch of greasy white basketball coaches instead of another girl. If the boy’s ego gets any bigger, I just don’t even know what. Seriously, yall, when we go out it’s like,
Oh excuse me baby, there’s no room for me in this car because your big fat ego is all the time riding shotgun
. Whatever.” Sonya shook her head, let out a long sigh, and rolled her eyes heavenward. I liked her immediately.

During Jessica’s own rundown I learned that the two SISTERS from the photograph were twins, and that they would be juniors at Morlan in the fall. Jessica leaned toward us and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper as she revealed everything her sisters had told her about the curse of Thomas McGrath.

“So he was this biology professor, right? A botanist or something, from Europe or someplace. Anyway, he had all these crazy ideas about things, these revolutionary ideas that people weren’t ready for or something, like envelope-pushing biological theories or whatever. Anyway, he got fired. They sent him packing, and that’s when he put this curse on the school.” Jessica paused for effect and to take a dainty bite of sherbet.

Sonya smirked, folding her beautiful arms across her chest in this girl-don’t-you-bullshit-me pose. “What kind of curse?”

“Umm, the kind of curse where people start dying of the plague and the administration building burns down and all kinds of other weird stuff starts happening,” Jessica intoned. “McGrath said he’d only lift the curse if they promised to bring his dead body back from Europe or wherever and bury him on Morlan College grounds.” Her eyes were huge as she gauged our reaction, which was apparently not up to par. Not the type to lose a rapt audience, she changed tactics and went for the nonchalant: “Anyway, whatever, the guy’s buried in some tomb right underneath McGrath Hall. Like maybe right under your
ass
right now this second, Sonya.”

At this, Sonya climbed onto her chair in mock horror and let loose a truly impressive scream that made everyone in the room turn around and stare at us. It was one of those moments when I would have been thrilled if the floor had suddenly opened up and swallowed me whole. Sonya was amazing, though: She just waved, hollered, “How’re yall doin,” and climbed back down like nothing had happened. “Jessica,” she said, “girl, you are more full of shit than my full-of-shit boyfriend. Let’s get out of here, yall. Gloria, are you coming or what?”

I told Jessica and Sonya that I’d see them later and set off to find the student mailboxes. It was funny: I had hung out with my new friends for, what, fifteen minutes? Not a long time, and I liked them, I really did — I was even sort of in awe of their quick and generous affection for each other. Aside from brushing elbows on pageant podiums, they had known each other for exactly one morning and had already formed what appeared to be a fierce attachment. Equally awe-inspiring was their easy acceptance of me, even though I was clearly their polar opposite in a bazillion different ways. Anyway, I’m so weird this way, I really am, but even after fifteen minutes I was already feeling that familiar itch to go off somewhere and be by myself. I wanted to be alone long enough to let my mind settle down around all the new stuff it was suddenly carrying. The curse of Thomas McGrath, for instance, and the strange code on the message from X, which seemed, burning there in my pocket, to be a key to some treasure locked way down deep in the trunk of my imagination.