The Basic Eight
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HarperCollins e-books
The Basic Eight
DANIEL HANDLER
The author wishes to acknowledge the following people: Lisa Brown; Louis and Sandra Handler;
Rebecca Handler;
Kit Reed and Joseph W. Reed; Charlotte Sheedy and Neeti Madan; Ron Bernstein and Angela Cheng; and Melissa Jacobs.
Introduction Begin Reading Epilogue
About the Author
Other Books by Daniel Handler Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
v 1
375
I, Flannery Culp
, am playing solitaire even as I finish this. Gifted children have always been good at doing two things at a time, and where I am I’ve played solitaire so much it’s practically a biorhythm. It helps me think. When I can’t tell which of two sentence arrangements sounds better, I just look over at the top of my neatly made bed where I’ve laid out the game and see something: red seven on the black eight. Why didn’t I see it be- fore?
Don’t think I’m not aware of the metaphor (or of the double negative–in spite of all the hoopla, I did get a diploma). I’m alone here, sitting at this typewriter with my journal propped up to my left and a pile of typewritten papers to my right. I am a woman with a room of her own, just like what’s-her-name, the writer. I am rereading my journal and typing my life here onto stark white paper. If I make a mistake, I just type back a few letters and write over it. It’s one of those typewriters with white erasing tape, so whatever I write wrong, I can erase, except for some faint imprints which will be completely obliterated when I have this copied. Those shreds of misplaced facts and typographical errors will fade and vanish as I ready this to send to publishers. That’s met- aphorical too.
Can I just say something? (A rhetorical question.) Somebody down the hall is listening loudly to the radio and it is just driving me crazy. It’s “the station that plays the hits of the nation,” which are essentially greeting cards with guitar solos. I hate it. It’s so inconsiderate of whoever-it-is, too. When I play music–and I mostly listen to classical music, like Bach–I play it softly, because I’m considerate of other people. I just had to get that off my chest.
Right now I have the suspicion that the ace of diamonds is trapped forever, face down, beneath the king of diamonds, which is sneering at me like Juror Number Five, and my whole life feels like a similar misshuffle. One more flick of the wrist and it could have been my math teacher who had been targeted, or some other teacher: Johnny Hand, or Millie. The Grand Opera Breakfast Club could have become the “important aspect” of the Basic Eight, and Flora Habstat could have ended up on the Winnie Moprah Show saying that we were some club of mad opera lovers rather than babbling about Satanism the way she did, though I guess in a slightly different set of circumstances Flora Habstat could have been one of us and actually known what she was talking about. With a slight shuffle there could have been somebody else sniff- ling into a handkerchief on the talk show, with a cult investigation citizens action group named after her child, and Mrs. State could have just shook her head as she watched the show, instead of participating in it, and then reached over to telephone her son Adam and his new fiancée: me. Things would be a different way. While at a bookstore, Adam would tell me to get lost while he bought me a present. I would wander down the uninteresting aisles: Gardening, Pets, Travel and finally, True Crime. I might glance at some slightly different book, there in this slightly differ- ent world, where my love for Adam worked out instead of ending in tragedy: The Basic Six, The Basic Seven.
But this is not some true-crime tell-all. This is my actual journal, with everything I wrote at the time, edited by me. The revisions are minor; I only changed things when I felt that I wasn’t really thinking something that I wrote at the time, and probably would have thought something else. After all, I was only eighteen
then. I’m almost twenty now. I learned lots about narrative structure in my Honors English classes so I know what I’m doing. Everyone’s names are real, and so are their various nicknames. The radio was just turned up a notch, if you can believe it.
By process of elimination (too small, too big, won’t stay up with regulation Scotch tape) I have only one picture of the Mis- labeled Murderers, by which I mean my friends or, I’ll just say it, the Basic Eight, that is on my wall. It faces me, and in a rare synchronous moment, everybody is looking at the camera, so everyone is looking right at me. Kate, leaning on an armrest rather than sitting on the couch like a normal human being, placing herself (symbolically, in retrospect) above us and looking a little smug, serving out a four-year sentence at Yale. Right next to her is V , fingering her pearls. V must have snuck into the bath- room sometime that evening to redo her makeup, because she looks better than anyone else, better than Natasha even, and that’s saying a lot. Lily and Douglas, snug on the couch. Lily between Douglas and me as always. Douglas looking impatiently at the camera, waiting to continue whatever it was he was saying. Gabriel, his black hands stark against the white apron, squashed into the end of the couch and looking quite uncomfortable. And there’s beautiful Jennifer Rose Milton standing at the couch in a pose that would look awkward for anyone else who wasn’t as beautiful. And stretched out luxuriously beneath us all, Natasha, one long finger between her lips and batting her eyes at me. I mean the me sitting here typing, not the one in the picture, who’s looking right at me, too. That’s also symbolic. Most of those people won’t meet my eyes, now, but I’m not one of them. Every morning I get up,
and while brushing my teeth, look at my showered self, calmly foaming at the mouth. Take out the photograph now. (I hope you can, reader. I want to arrange with the publishers to have a copy of it tucked into each copy of the book, for use as a visual aid and as a bookmark. Isn’t that a good idea?) Look into each of our eyes and try to picture us as people rather than the bloodthirsty mythological figures you’ve seen on those tacky television shows about bloodthirsty events. Come on, you know you watch them. Will anyone read this introduction? When this is published (with all proceeds, by law, going to charity), my own introduction will probably be buried among other prefaces and forewords by noted adolescent psychologists, legal authorities, high school principals and witchcraft experts, all of which will be ignored as readers cut to the chase. There is no getting around it: this is going to be marketed as a trashy book. Most readers will flip through these first pages, half reading as the flight attendants give the safety lecture, and by the time we’re all airborne they will have forgotten them in favor of the actual journal, the real beginning. Perhaps they’ll look at my name under the introduction with disdain, expecting apologies or pleas for pity. I have none here. Perhaps, though, people will read the quote that opens the journal. I chose it from the limited library here, to reveal the dim- wittedness of the pop-psych gurus who look at people like me. Of course I’m neither fish nor fowl. I’m a real person, like you are. This journal is real. It is the reality of the photograph you’re using to mark your place, a photograph that nobody ever got ahold of. It’s more real than all those pictures the magazines used.
Those were our school pictures, pictures
taken of us when we were wearing appropriate outfits, smiling for our out-of-state relatives to whom our parents would mail them. What sort of image is that? This journal is the truth, the real truth. This book is as real as it gets. As real as–let me think–as real as the red queen I just overturned, or the black king I smothered with it.
Vocabulary:
HOOPLA NARRATIVE METAPHORICAL STRUCTURE RHETORICAL ADOLESCENT ATROCITIES DISDAIN
Study Questions:
What do you already know about the Basic Eight? How will it affect what you read here? Discuss.
Most people who keep diaries want to keep them secret. Why do you think this is?
If you were to reveal your diary to the general public, would you edit it first? Why or why not? (Note: If you do not keep a diary, pretend that you do.)
It is often said that high school is the best time of one’s life. If you have already graduated, was high school the best time of your life? Why or why not? If you have yet to go to high school, how do you think you can prepare yourself to make it the best time in your life? Be specific.
One of the reasons the teenage years are so agonizing is that in most societies, particularly ours, the adolescent is emotionally neither fish nor fowl.
-Dr. Herbert Strean and Lucy Freeman,
Our Wish to Kill: The Murder in All Our Hearts
One may as well begin with my letters to one Adam State.
August 25, Verona
Dear Adam,
Well, you were right–the only way to
really
look at Italy is to stop gaping at all the Catholicism and just sit down and have some coffee. For the past couple of hours I’ve just been sitting and sipping. It’s our last day in Verona, and my parents of course want to visit one hundred thousand more art galleries so they can come home with a painting to point at, but I’m content to just sit in a square and watch people in gorgeous shoes walk by. It’s an outdoor cafe, of course.
The sun is just radiant. If it weren’t for my sunglasses I’d be squinting. I tried to write a poem the other day called “Italian Light” but it wasn’t turning out so well and I wrote it on the hotel stationery so the maid threw it out by mistake. I wonder if Dante was ever suppressed by his cleaning lady. So in any case after much argument with my parents over whether I appreciated them and Italy and all my opportunities or not, I was
granted permission–thank you, O Mighty Exalted Ones–to sit in a cafe while they chased down various objets d’art. I was just reading and people-watching for a while, but eventually I figured I’d better catch up on my correspondence. With all the caffeine in me it was either that or jump in the fountain like a Fellini movie I saw with Natasha once. You know Natasha, right, Natasha Hyatt? Long hair, dyed jet-black, sort of vampy- looking?
I stumbled upon an appropriate metaphor as I looked for reading material in the hotel bookstore. Scarcely more than a magazine stand, actually–as always, I brought a generous handful of books with me to Italy thinking it would be more than enough to read, and as always, I finished two of them on the plane and the rest of them within the first week. So there I was looking through the bare assortment of English-language paper- back pulp for anything of value. I was just about to add, if you can believe it, a Stephen Queen horror novel to my meager stack of mysteries, when it hit me: Is this what next year will be like? Do I have enough around me of interest, or will I find myself with nothing to do in a country that doesn’t speak my language? I don’t mean to sound like Salinger’s phony-hating phony or anything, but at times at Roewer it seems that every- body’s phony and brain-dead and that if it weren’t for my friends and the few other interesting people I’d go crazy for nothing to do. To me, you’re one of the “few other interesting people.” I know we don’t know each other very well and that you probably find it strange that I’m writing to you, if you’re even reading this, but I really enjoyed the conversations we had toward the end of the year–you know, about how stupid