Breakfast Served Anytime (23 page)

I was getting that scowly, panicky feeling of having missed something. I knew exactly what Carol’s Something Big was, and I couldn’t believe she would allow it to happen in another
state,
when I wasn’t even around! Not that she needed my permission, not that I wanted to be in the same room with her or anything, but still. I felt bereft. Left behind. Stranded in kindergarten with the virgins and the finger-painters. And Chloe! Where had she found the time and space to fall in love? I’d been at Geek Camp all that time but had only just met Jimena. How many other fascinating people had I missed? Why hadn’t I made half an effort? Where had I been? What, exactly, had I been doing? GoGo would have kicked my ass:
Don’t be so
insular,
sweetheart,
she used to tell me.
Don’t be so bitter and standoffish! People are one of life’s greatest joys; make an effort to know them and get along with as many different kinds of people as you can.
In general I tried to live up to GoGo’s advice, I really did, but it was hard. Inevitably, people would get on my nerves.
Maybe,
I thought with horror,
maybe
you
get on people’s nerves, Gloria Aaron Bishop
.

Even Calvin was acting weird: At breakfast I’d seen him eating with this girl — an unabashedly gorgeous girl, one of the Modern Dancers. She was wearing actual leg warmers and was throwing back her head and laughing like Calvin was just the funniest person ever to land on the planet. I was crossing the room to join them, my tray wobbly with milk and juice and Lucky Charms, when Calvin shot me this embarrassed, apologetic, positively whiplashed-by-love look:
Not now,
the look said.
I’ll explain later
. I could tell Calvin had it bad because he was rubbing his left leg with his right foot in that way he does when he’s nervous. Unbelievable. Calvin Little was wooing a Modern Dancer! The Calvinisms just went on and on.

I parked my tray at an empty corner table and was fixing to drown myself in Lucky Charms and my sorrows when Mason appeared out of (as usual!) nowhere. I was so happy to see him that I decided to cut the bullshit for just one second and actually tell him I was happy to see him.

“Really?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Don’t ruin it.”

We smiled at each other for a second. It was a delicious second, I have to say.

“We need one more rehearsal,” Mason said, suddenly all business. “Check it out.”

He held out his palm, on which rested a slender silver key.

“What’s that?”

“The key to McGrath’s tomb.”

My mind did some quick, suspicious arithmetic. “So have you and Meghan rekindled your romance?”

“No. Which is why I have zero qualms about stealing stuff from her desk. Are you done eating or what?”

McGrath’s tomb looked completely different this time around. Smaller, somehow. Darker. More mysterious.

“What if there’s a tour?”

Mason shrugged. “We’ll cross that bridge if we get there.”

“What if we get caught?”

“Caught doing what? We’re rehearsing for a freaking talent show.”

“Caught trespassing. Caught stealing keys. You know, property of Morlan College?”

Mason looked exasperated. “Are you seriously this big of a groundbird? I’m shocked, Gloria Bishop.”

“Groundbird? What?”

Mason hoisted himself up onto McGrath’s stone slab. “Gloria. I will pay you to stop sabotaging everything. Will you just get up here, please?”

Mason was not the first to accuse me of blowing fantastic moments when they had the good grace to come around. Carol says I’m famous for it: I go around wishing for things to happen and then as soon as they start happening I go into Sabotage Mode.

“Fine.” I climbed up.

“Let’s just do a quick read-through.”

“Okay.”

“Here,” Mason said. “Turn around.”

I turned and Mason twisted his body so that we were sitting back to back. He linked elbows with mine.

“What are you doing?”

“Shhh,” Mason said. “Start when you’re ready.”

I took a deep breath and stared at the wall in front of me. There was the drawing of the chalk girl, staring right back at me.
Go on,
she seemed to say.

I leaned my head back against Mason’s shoulder. He smelled like his soapy self. God. I had to take another breath so I could get it together.

“‘I wonder that you will still be talking, Signor Benedick. Nobody marks you.’”

Mason sat up straighter, dislodging my head.

“‘What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?’”

I could feel each bone of Mason’s spine against my own. I was totally discombobulated. The next line seemed to hover in the air before me, then I lost it. I closed my eyes and looked for it, like I was doing the Jumble. Nothing was behind my eyes but Mason’s face, his detestable, irresistible grin. When I opened my eyes, the chalk girl seemed to be whispering to me; the line came flying back to my tongue.

“‘Is it possible disdain should die while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signor Benedick? Courtesy itself must convert to disdain if you come in her presence.’”

We bounced the lines back and forth, our voices answering each other like the sharp-edged, trained instruments they were. Neither one of us faltered. We had it down, this business of highbrow witty banter. We were pros!

“It seems really short,” Mason said when we’d run through the whole thing. “Should we get Kyle to read Don Pedro and Leonato?”

We were still back to back, and we leaned these questions into each other’s ears.

“Who’s Kyle?”

“My roommate. Kyle, aka Edward Softly. Although last week he had a change of heart and is now calling himself d’Artagnan.”

“Can d’Artagnan be trusted to handle this?”

Mason thought about it for a second. “No.”

“Okay then,” I said. “We’re on our own. It’ll be short but sweet.”

A silence settled over us, during which I became aware that our breathing was taking on the same rhythm.

“You know all that stuff I told you?” Mason asked. “That stuff about my dad?”

I nodded against his head.

“Well it’s not like I just go around telling everybody that stuff. Just so you know.”

I nodded again. Our hair was tangled together in this staticky mat.

“It’s not your fault, you know,” I whispered.

“Say it again.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Louder.”

“It’s not your fault!” I yelled. The tomb seemed to trap my voice in the cool of its walls; I had a feeling that we could scream our heads off all day long and our voices would never leave the room.

“That was loud,” Mason laughed. “It’s also something — the
one
thing — I’ve wanted to hear for years. It sounds good.”

“My turn,” I said. I shifted, tightened my elbow grip, and held on. “I want to hear what it sounds like, too.”

Mason turned his head so that I could feel his breath curl into my ear. His eyes were closed. “It’s not your fault,” he whispered.

He said it again. And again. And I said it with him, over and over, louder and louder until we were hoarse, until we were screaming with laughter, tears of joy and rage filling our eyes. My arms ached from holding on so tight; my throat burned. I felt a thousand pounds lighter; I could have easily wisped into the air and floated through the keyhole.

“Man,” I said, lolling my head against Mason’s. “Beatrice and Benedick. They are so full of shit.”

Mason’s body seemed to slacken. I thought he might be falling asleep until he gave my left elbow a gentle tug.

“So what do you think of my artwork?” he asked.

The chalk girl grinned at me. She might have even winked.
I’ve got your number, girl.

“Wait a minute.”

“A pretty good rendering, if I do say so myself.”

“I thought you were claustrophobic.”

“Well, I couldn’t have you thinking I’d been down here before, now, could I? Anyway, I am claustrophobic. It was not fun to be in this place by myself.”

The weird thing about the chalk girl was that it wasn’t so much the shape of her features that looked like me; it was her expression. It was some nameless thing happening in her face — something that seemed to change each time I looked at her.

“Huh,” I said, not getting anywhere near what I wanted to say.

“That’s you in the window,” Mason said, whispering again. “On that first day. Remember? You were up there all bright-angel Juliet-like, and I was just minding my own business, and you looked at me like you hated my guts. It was hate at first sight. How could I resist?”

I studied the chalk girl again. She didn’t look like she hated anybody. She looked the way I felt: knocked right out of her senses by a feeling so huge and foreign and disorienting and straight-out-of-nowhere that it had to be something like love.

“THE GREAT AMERICAN Novel hasn’t been written yet,” Mason declared. Rain streaked along the windows of the classroom building, and the overhead lights buzzed and flickered ominously. Holyfield curled himself beneath Calvin’s desk and whimpered. It was our last class, and the mood was one of impending gloom-doom.

“Either that,” Mason continued, “or it’s hidden beneath the floorboards somewhere in J. D. Salinger’s house.”

The rain graduated to hail. A yellow puddle appeared beneath Holyfield’s shaking haunches.

“Just one sec,” Calvin said, quietly excusing himself from the room.

Chloe took a long drag on her pencil. “Or maybe,” she said, “maybe it’s been written but you just haven’t
read
it yet.”

Mason shook his head. “Impossible.”

God. Every time I was tempted to fall for Mason Atkinson, he had to go and remind me of why I hated his guts in the first place.

Then he looked right at me and winked. “Just kidding.”

I tried not to smile, but it was useless. Even the roots of my hair were smiling.

X sighed. “Thank you, Mason. That was certainly illuminating.”

Calvin returned with a clutch of paper towels. “What’d I miss?”

“Nothing,” Chloe said. She gathered Holyfield into her arms. “Gloria, you’re on.”

Here it was: the moment I’d been dreading. I clutched GoGo’s book in my hand and crossed to the front of the room. As I stood there, looking at X and my friends and Holyfield, it occurred to me that I wasn’t cut out for this at all. Getting up on a stage and spouting Shakespeare was one thing, but standing up in front of people and being me, Gloria Aaron Bishop, and talking about something that’s so dear to me I just don’t even know what? That was quite another.

“So,” I said, trying to be casual. I waved the book around. “
To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Already the lump was rising in my throat. Already the tears were gathering behind my eyes. This was what I had feared: that I wouldn’t be able do it. I looked at Chloe and she nodded, her eyes huge and warm. It occurred to me then that I loved her, that she was a truly good person and an excellent friend, that I was lucky, lucky to know her. There was Calvin, next to her: Calvin Little, Lepidopterist and Mad-Farmer-in-Training. He smiled at me in a way I hoped I deserved, because that’s how it is with Calvin — when you’re around him you want to have
earned
his trademark respect and integrity. You want to rise to the occasion. There was X, waiting. I had been hard on him; I had suspected him of the same disease that plagued so many of my teachers at school — general burnout, or a general self-indulgent unwillingness to grow up long enough to be a role model for somebody else. The truth was that he had trusted us, he had been
earnest
with us, and that I wouldn’t forget him anytime soon. And Mason? I couldn’t look at him. If I looked at him I knew I wouldn’t be able to speak at all.

I looked right at Holyfield and said, “I love this book because of the father in it. There aren’t many books with really memorable fathers, and this one, at least I think, is the best.”

My dad rose up in my mind, a scene from years ago: He was wearing this goggle-magnifying-glass thing on his head and he was ordering me to
sit still
while he patiently combed again and again through every strand of my splendid waist-length hair while I cried, full-on snot-cried, like my life was coming to end. My life wasn’t coming to an end, of course, but I did have a raging case of head lice, and any other single father of an eight-year-old girl would have just hacked off all that hair, would have just gotten rid of it instead of spending hours making sure that every nit and egg was gone from what his daughter was convinced was her one single beauty — her hair was her glory and her security blanket, and to lose it would have broken her heart. My father. My very own modern-day Atticus Finch. He has eradicated head lice in the middle of the night. He has collected pads and tampons from the twenty-four-hour drugstore, has spent hundreds of dollars replacing retainers and other orthodontic paraphernalia lost forever to the depths of school cafeteria trash cans, has seen me heartbroken, really heartbroken, and has held me tight as I cried. He has done these and a million other things that people mistakenly believe to be the responsibility of mothers, when in truth sometimes fathers are the very best people for the job.