Breakfast Served Anytime (5 page)

Calvin handed me an envelope identical to the one that had been deposited beneath my dorm room door. “I found it stuck on page 205. It’s addressed to Chloe Farris, Gloria Bishop, Mason Atkinson, and me. So I guess there are only four of us, and I guess you’re Gloria?”

“You’re smarter than you look, Calvin.” As soon as the words escaped my mouth, I wished I could take them back. Calvin Little, I could tell almost immediately, was not the kind of person who should be greeted with sarcasm — which, I realized with a burn, is too often my customary Default Mode. I made up my mind then and there to henceforth handle Calvin with care. Words, man. They matter.

I tried again: “So what’s it say? Let me see.”

Calvin handed the envelope over. “I haven’t opened it yet. I thought I ought to wait until we’re all here. Right now I’m just trying to figure out what we’re supposed to get from the Allegory of the Cave.”

I studied the names on the envelope and hoped that Chloe and Mason would hurry up. “Any sign of X?” I asked.

Calvin shook his head. “Nope.”

“The Allegory of the Cave. Isn’t that the story with the fire and the shadows and whatnot?” It was all coming back to me from ninth-grade humanities class. Calvin looked at me and beamed. He was one of those really polite guys — the kind of guy who goes around beaming all the time and knocking the socks off of everybody’s moms with his good manners. I mean, he had his shirt tucked in and everything. He was wearing an actual belt. GoGo would’ve traded me for him in about three seconds flat.

“Yeah, that’s it. Socrates tells this story about how these guys chained to the wall had only this one tiny slice of what they thought was reality. Like, they didn’t know anything else, so they thought the shadows were, I don’t know, the end-all.” Calvin flushed again, like maybe he thought he had already done too much talking. Like maybe that was the most talking he’d done in a really long time. He seemed so embarrassed that
I
started to feel embarrassed. Man, bashful people really stress me out sometimes. I do better with people like Carol and Jessica and Sonya — people whose personalities take up so much space that I can just be free to listen, to sit back and take it all in and ruminate about it later. It’s always a little alarming to be in the presence of a fellow observer.

Calvin got to his feet — he was way tall all of a sudden — and stretched. “I don’t know,” he said. “What do you think we’re supposed to think?”

I thought about how Carol had started calling me a Luddite, and how now X was apparently comparing us — who could it be but us? Calvin and me and Chloe and Mason, whoever and wherever they were? — to a bunch of cave dwellers with a skewed view of reality. It occurred to me that Tweed Philosophy Guy could have been X in disguise. I mean, come on: Plato? Anyway. That’s when Chloe showed up.

Chloe Farris was tiny. Microscopic. She had one of those severe Louise Brooks–esque bobs, and her hair was so black it gleamed a spooky blue beneath the library’s anemic lights. She was hauling a bag that was approximately three times as big as she was, and she dropped it to the floor with an emphatic thud when she saw me and Calvin in the 800s. When she opened her mouth, I expected a diminutive voice to go with her diminutive self, but her voice was remarkable: low and rich and scratchy, like maybe she’d had a few packs of cigarettes for breakfast. As if reading my mind, she extracted a pack of American Spirits from her ginormous bag and stuck a cigarette between her lips.

“I’m not going to light up, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said, blowing an impressive imaginary plume of smoke into the air. And then, squinting on the imaginary inhale: “I’m trying to quit, and I figure that half the reason I smoke is because I need a prop. I need something to do with my hands, you know?” Chloe tapped some imaginary ash onto the floor. “So what the hell, yall? It’s like,
bonjour
and welcome to the wild-goose chase, right?”

Calvin and I introduced ourselves, and the three of us waited around for the elusive Mason Atkinson, who was either very late or very dim or both. Chloe smoked a couple of unlit cigarettes, and Calvin fretted some more over the Allegory, and about X, who we were all starting to believe was, at best, an allegory himself. We were considering taking our research outside when the sound of whistling came ringing up the stairs. If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s whistling. The sound of whistling grates on my last available nerve. I mean, seriously: Who
whistles
? What kind of zip-a-dee-doo-dah crap is that?

The Mad Hatter. I couldn’t freaking believe it. He came strolling across the library to where we had parked ourselves on some ratty leather couches. With one final, low whistle, he poured himself into an unoccupied ratty leather chair. “So,” he said, “am I late?”

“Let me guess,” I said. And then, because I couldn’t help it, because I think maybe I had been rehearsing this line in my head ever since the episode with the window and the bow: “You’re late because you were too busy believing six impossible things before breakfast?”

The Mad Hatter, aka Mason Atkinson, aka Jackass Extraordinaire, winked at me and nodded. “I believe the White Queen is responsible for that line,” he said. “But I appreciate the sentiment all the same, my dear.”

My dear
? Who talks like that? Who goes around winking? I wanted to die. I wanted to fly right out of the room and knock the Mad Hatter on his egotistical ass on my way out.

“I’m Chloe,” Chloe announced from her supine position on the couch. “This is Calvin and that’s Gloria. Your hat is stupid. Would you care to open this letter from le Professeur?” Chloe frisbeed the envelope in Mason’s direction and he raised an indolent hand to catch it in midair. A graceful maneuver, I had to admit.

Mason took his time opening our mail. “Breakfast served anytime,” he read aloud. He looked up at us and grinned, waiting, I guess, for us to break into wild applause.

“What? Let me see,” Calvin said. He was getting flustered.

“Breakfast served anytime,” Mason repeated, tossing the card to Calvin. “That means we need to meet him at the Egg Drop. X marks the spot, right?”

“Wait. The what?” Calvin asked.

“The Egg Drop Café. It’s this twenty-four-hour greasy spoon around the corner. Best milk shakes on the planet. Breakfast served anytime.”

“And you know this
how,
exactly?” Chloe asked, squinting beneath her glossy bangs.

“I’m from here,” Mason replied. “Born and raised.” He got up from the chair and started sauntering back toward the stairs. Whistling. Again. When the rest of us just sat there looking at one another Mason stopped and turned around. “Are you coming?”

Well. Did we have a choice? We gathered up our stuff and followed the Mad Hatter down the rabbit hole.

THE STORY gets better from here. It actually gets pretty good. First, though, another story, because this one is permanently lodged in the back of my mind. Nobody has heard this story, not even Carol, and that’s because the story is about Carol’s brother Alex. He’s the oldest of the four of them; it goes Alex (headed back to Alaska for college this fall), then Carol, then Hank (two years behind us in school), and then Paul (who, at fourteen, just recently became a real person). For as long as I care to remember, Carol’s brothers have been a fact of my life. I’m around them all the time, and sometimes they get on my nerves, but I never really
think
about them, the way you never really think, say, about the bathroom wallpaper you’ve been staring at since you were born.

Last summer, that changed, and even though the change could fit into the space of three minutes, it’s still the scene I see behind my closed eyes every night when I’m drifting off to sleep. It’s still the image I conjure most often when I dive into underwater dreamworld to the accompaniment of my underused Make-out Playlist. It happened like this: Alex was giving me a ride home, which he had done at least a zillion times before. I was so at ease with him, he was so much like bathroom wallpaper, that we weren’t even talking, which is how the six-minute ride from Carol’s house to mine would usually go. I’m not sure what, exactly, made this ride different from any other, but in my mind it had something to do with the song Alex had going — this jangly sad song about a lighthouse. (The song is actually called “The Lighthouse”; I know this because it’s on a CD, made especially for me by Alex, that appeared in my mailbox about twelve hours after the moment that became my go-to underwater dreamworld scene, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.) So cue the jangly song about the lighthouse. Then cue Alex, who, instead of screeching to the curb and letting the car idle while I skipped up to the door, cut the engine this time. Then he keyed the ignition enough to let the lighthouse song keep going, and then he shifted around to face me. “Gloria,” he said. “Gloria, Gloria, Gloria.”

It occurred to me that I rarely, if ever, heard Alex say my name out loud. Hearing it four times sent my stomach right off the high dive,
whoosh
. My heart was thrumming in my ears.

“What?” I said. (Because what do you say?)

Slow down and let the waves have their way now,
went the song. God, that song!

“I have a secret to tell you,” Alex whispered. Some shift had happened in his eyes — huge drenched brown eyes — like he might cry or laugh at any second, like his eyes were pools to go deep-end diving in, down, down, down. “Come here.”

I came here. And Alex kissed me. He kissed me the way I imagined I’d always wanted to be kissed: both hands on my face. Without really noticing them, I had noticed his hands before — long and clean, like hands should be. He wore this wide leather cuff on his left wrist, and I could smell the leather, and his soapy skin, and I could smell the car engine as it ticked and cooled.

“There,” Alex said. “Glad I got that out of my system.” He smiled at me with this smile that was equal parts appreciative and mournful, embarrassed and proud. Because that was it — that was our three minutes. He was, after all, Carol’s brother, and it couldn’t be any other way. The next day the CD arrived in the mailbox, and the day after that I was back at Carol’s, eating Doritos and marathoning
Friday Night Lights
and alternately fearing and hoping to God that when Alex drove me home he might give me a replay of that kiss, a kiss that put to shame all the other meager kisses I’d known in my life, all the inconsequential fumblings that those meager kisses led up to. But when Alex drove me home it was just like nothing had happened. We were friendly and silent and normal. Absolute wallpaper material. Which was fine. Which, really, was sort of a relief. That one kiss, though? It’s mine to keep. The best secret anyone ever gave me.

That moment with Alex is worth telling not because it was the beginning or end of the world, but because it’s always with me. I’ll be in the Munch, say, stopped at a red light, and that jangly song will drift into my head and with it the image of Alex’s lashes lowered against my cheek. The next thing I know, the driver of the car behind me will be honking at me to go. I’ll be impulse-checking the Vortex and eye-rolling about everything everybody had for lunch, and from that unpredictable realm of daydream, Alex will appear unannounced. Alex, that Vortexless enigma, elusive and lovely in the most private corner of my mind.

Sometimes, when I go to Carol’s and Alex isn’t home, I’ll take a detour on my way to the bathroom and sneak inside his room. I like to glimpse him when he isn’t there: in the globe on his desk, the bass guitar tilted like a curvy girl against the wall, the books and CDs stacked in precise alphabetical rows on the shelves. The Strokes poster taped to the wall above the bed, and the bed itself, a tangle of sheets still twisted around the invisible shape of Alex’s dreaming body. The globe, though. The globe is what kills me — the wishful, wistful boyishness of it. I’ve thought of that stupid globe an inordinate number of times, if you want to know the truth, and always it puts this awful ache at the back of my throat. It’s weird, how
thinking
about Alex is the thing, the treasure. I think if I spent half the time actually being with him that I spend thinking about him, it might somehow break the spell.

So I was thinking of Alex while Chloe was railing against cell phones at the Egg Drop Café, this anomalous little hole-in-the-wall where you could get burgers and Tater Tots but where also — totally random — you could order moo goo gai pan or hot and sour soup. This tiny Asian woman banged a plate of fries on our table as the Black Eyed Peas thudded out of the jukebox in the corner. By way of random decoration, the jukebox had a paper fan taped to it. The four of us — Chloe and me and Calvin and Mason — were crammed into this greasy booth in a configuration that would become the norm for us: me on the inside across from Chloe, Calvin on my right across from Mason. It was good having the Mad Hatter on the diagonal, where I could avoid eye contact if necessary. Despite his having successfully led us the three blocks from campus to the Egg Drop, where X’s next directive was indeed waiting for us behind the counter, I was still wary of him.

“Look at that guy over there,” Chloe said, nodding in the direction of this completely harmless-looking boy, circa our age, who appeared to be enjoying a milk shake with his girlfriend.