LIT MEETING TOMORROW!!!
I asked her what poets we’d be studying this year, and was em- barrassed when she listed all these names I had never heard of. I mean, I recognize Robert Frost, and of course e. e. cummings, but I consider myself a poet and had never heard of these people. She must have seen my face as I struggled to hide my ignorance. “Relax,” she said. “You
will
be wise. You’re young. You can’t have everything right away.” When something simple and true takes you by surprise, it hits you in the stomach. Before I could say anything people starting piling in. Hattie Lewis didn’t skip a beat. She had us all sit down and she spent the rest of the period talking about Anne Bradstreet. I took notes; I had never heard of
Anne Bradstreet.
Now I’m in choir, and even with Adam still gathered in a corner with the other officers, the calm of Hattie Lewis’s words comforts me. I can’t have everything right away. Plus, sometimes it’s enough to watch him. Still no sign of Mr. Hand, the real choir teacher.
From a spiral-bound notebook passed between two desks in Gladys Tall’s fifth-period Applied Civics class, taped into these typed pages:
Kate, what is Mrs. T talking about? I’ve been staring out the window.
Tell me about it. You were far, far away. I’ve had to roll my eyes at myself all period
.
Sorry. I didn’t get much sleep last night.
Flan, what did I tell you about whoring on school nights? You’re always tired and grumpy the next day. I’m going to call your pimp and give him a piece of my mind. If he doesn’t reschedule your hours you’ll never get into a good college
.
You
must
stop writing things like that to me. I don’t think Mrs. Tall bought the fact that I found the concept of supply and de- mand humorous.
On a much more important note, I saw Adam today but I didn’t invite him to the dinner party. I thought you might want to
.
You know him better.
You
want
to know him better
.
Still, I’m waiting for him to call
me
.
You need an excuse before you can call somebody. He doesn’t have an excuse to call you. Anyway, somebody else is after him, so you better get moving. He said that somebody had written him love letters all summer
.
The notebook wasn’t passed anymore, despite there being a full fifteen minutes left of class.
Jim Carr has eyes like a hawk, so I can’t write much in here, but I would like to note that for the seventh semester in a row–every semester I’ve been here–Mr. Carr has managed to find a curva- ceous female education grad student to serve as his teaching as- sistant. Most teachers here don’t have any teaching assistants at all, except for the occasional French friend of Millie’s who needs work, but Carr manages to find a bevy of them. There are a lot of stupid biology jokes to be made here, but my beautiful expens- ive Italian leather-bound black journal is too nice for such cracks.
Home again, home again. I’m bored of my routine already, and it’s the second day of school. Natasha picked me up from Bio–“Is that this year’s model?” she asked, glaring at the assistant–and walked me to French, trying all the way to convince me that
I
should invite Adam to the party. Finally she said I could think it over tonight and that otherwise Kate’d do it tomorrow. My plan is that he’ll call
me
tonight, and I, quasi-spontaneously, will invite him to the party. After I hang up the phone, I will go out to the garden and frolic with my pet unicorn, which just as surely exists as the rest of my scenario. Sigh. Gotta go read some Bradstreet. She’s an early American poet; what do you mean you’ve never heard of her?
Thursday, September 9th
This morning when I went outside I found that the newsprint from the
Chronic Ill
(as it is called by a rather fuddy-duddy columnist) had spread from my fingertips
to the whole wide sky. I got off the bus and stared at the traffic, trying to think of a very good reason to cross it and walk up the three-block San Francisco hill to school, when V pulled up in her car and opened her door in one swift swoop. She said nothing, just beckoned, and I got in. Inside it was warm and V was playing the Brandenberg Concertos.
“Bless you!” I shouted. “Bless you!”
V merged. “I didn’t sneeze,” she said. “Although you are going to get a cold if you continue to insist on taking the bus each morning.” Like many people of noble descent, V often assumed that everyone’s habits were born of personal choice and not ne- cessity; why people
chose
to live in war-ravaged countries was always beyond her.
“Hey, this is the faculty parking lot.”
“I always park here. The student lot is simply too shabby.” “What about the parking guards?”
“Flannery, look at me. They’re never sure if I’m a teacher or not.” She was right. The tailored suit, along with the stockings and omnipresent pearls, brought her to that nebulous area between eighteen and twenty-eight. It was very handy when we went to nightclubs. We walked right past the parking guards, who were two huge black men. She even nodded to them, profes- sionally.
When we reached the front doors we had to go our separate ways. “Lily and I are having coffee after school,” V said, “and I’d be delighted if you would join us.”
“Sorry,” I said. “The
Myriad
meets today. Got to do the literary editor thing. Thanks for the ride.”
“Anything,” she said, reaching up and fixing my collar, “for one of the Basic Eight.”
“Don’t tell me that term has been canonized,” I said. “I’m not sure I like it. It sounds too much like some mystical society, or like something concerned with a master race.”
V thought for a second. “I–,” she said, and the bell rang. She dashed off, and that was the last of any discussion about the propriety of the term. But I’ve typed it into the record: it was never a concept with which I was comfortable. So all this talk that the Basic Eight was some unholy alliance, some secret society, should stop with this conversation. Whatever we were, we were bound together unofficially, casually; and I objected to it loudly from the start. Or would have, anyway; the truth of the matter is that I walked all the way to school, but that conversation happened
sometime
, surely; plus, I needed to fully introduce V
and voice my objections to my reading public, to all wary parents and curious teenagers.
Idea for a story: A woman loves a man, but through some slip of the tongue everyone thinks it is the wrong man, including the wrong man himself, who begins to pursue her. When she finally makes the truth clear, all of society shuns her as a woman who leads men on. She dies alone. The story could be called “A Slip of the Tongue.”
I didn’t go to choir today. I just couldn’t take it. Luckily, some people have lunch third period (yes,
lunch, third period
, at a time that’s even a little early for
brunch
. It’s sickening that all over America the promising young generation is made to eat at ten- thirty in the morning), so it didn’t look like I was cutting class. Of course, I ran into Gabriel, who has the worst schedule on earth, world
without end. He was sitting in the courtyard, staring at a sand- wich so intently it looked like he was making some sort of polit- ical statement: black man, white bread.
“Hi,” I said. “You’re not seriously thinking of eating lunch at ten-thirty in the morning, are you?”
“Seriously is the only way I can think at ten-thirty in the morning,” he said glumly. “The worst thing is that they
still
haven’t worked out my schedule. I
still
have to go to gym four times a day. There I sit, a
senior
surrounded by trotting sopho- mores, baffling gym teachers.”
“Quit bragging,” I said. “It’s not difficult to baffle gym teachers. Listen, will you take a walk with me? I can’t face going to choir.” “Why?” he said. “Calculus I could understand, but
choir
? I
thought nothing ever happened in choir.”
“It doesn’t,” I said. “I’ll tell you about it as we walk.” “To the lake?” he asked, rewrapping his sandwich.
“To the lake,” I agreed. By the time this diary is found, the plates of the earth will probably have moved and covered up Lake Merced, a small body of bile across the street from Roewer surrounded by fairly pretty groves of trees amidst which you can find the occasionally intertwined pair.
I didn’t even wait until we got there, though, to tell Gabriel everything. I told him I had an unrequited crush as soon as we reached the tennis courts at the edge of campus, which lay damp and empty and clogged with dull brown leaves. I told him that it wasn’t just a crush but love as we jaywalked across the cracked asphalt that separated Roewer from Lake Merced. I told him it was Adam State when we reached the jogging path, littered with dogshit and somebody’s dingy discarded sweatband.
“Adam State?” he said, doubtfully, as if I had misspoken. “Why does everybody say it like that?” I said, stepping off the
path, toward the trees.
“Because they’re surprised,” he said. “Douglas we expected. He’s as pretentious as the rest of us. But
Adam State
? How did you even end up talking to him?”
“He was in
Arsenic and Old Lace
last year, remember? Adam and I both had small parts, so we ended up talking a lot. That’s when I knew.”
“I can’t believe you’re calling it
love
when you don’t even have a relationship with him.”
I can remember my speech word for word, even though I’m writing it after school as I wait for lit magazine people to show up, and yes, even one year later as I’m rewriting it. “Gabriel, there are two kinds of love. One kind is gradual, like what I had with Douglas. We were acquaintances, we were friends, we were more than friends, we were in love. It was steady, like warming soup. It’s part of a process that people go through with everybody–like with me and you, for instance. We warmed through acquaintance to friend, and we won’t warm any further. But the other kind is more like Cajun cooking. Like pan-blackening something.” I knew this metaphor would connect with Gabriel because he cooks for all our dinner parties. “It just strikes you. It’s just as delicious. It’s just as real. In fact it’s probably more real; it’s an entrée rather than a soup. That’s how I feel about Adam. It’s a connection, a connection bigger and stronger, in many ways, than I ever had with Douglas. It’s not all about the façades of shared interests or attitudes. It’s something deeper.”
“Then there’s no need to despair,” Gabriel said, looking else- where. It was almost as if he were talking to himself. “If it’s something that goes beyond all façades,
then it’s out of your control. If it’s meant to be, he’ll respond. If not, then it wasn’t meant to be. I know when
I’m
feeling something that strong, I just get paralyzed and don’t know what to do. Maybe he’s feeling the same way and doesn’t know how to re- spond.”
“Do you really think so?” I said, hugging him. I watched his hands flutter around for a minute before hugging me back.
“We’re going to be late,” Gabriel said, but when I told him it was my lunch period he agreed to stay by the lake. “I suppose I can cut my third English class of the day.” We rounded a corner and there was Jennifer Rose Milton, sitting on the grass in the middle of a clearing. She jumped up.
“Hi guys,” she said, looking behind us. “What are you doing here?”
“Having a conversation, Jenn,” I said. I don’t call her “Jennifer Rose Milton” out loud, of course. “What are
you
doing here? Alone?”
“Oh, you know,” she said vaguely, gesturing toward the lake. “I’m just–”
Gabriel turned and gave me a
look
. “We’d better go,” he said. “We’ll be late.”
“Right, OK,” I said, and Jennifer Rose Milton smiled. We walked away and back toward school. “She must be meeting somebody,” I said. “And it must be somebody special. She doesn’t have lunch with me. She’s cutting a class. Jenn
never
cuts class. Her grades are
perfect
. Let’s go get coffee.”
“You’ll have to miss more than lunch,” he warned.
I shrugged. “Civics, Bio. I’ll be back in time for Millie. We can walk to the Mocha Monkey.”
We walked to the Mocha Monkey. The Mocha Monkey is an embarrassing cafe, but it’s the only one within walking
distance of Roewer. We usually end up there after school dances; it’s also one of the few cafes open late. It’s embarrassing not only for its name but also for the monkey faces
embroidered
on each of the chairs. You can try to have a meaningful conversation, but all the while in the back of your head you know you’re sitting on a monkey’s face. I ordered a latte and Gabriel had tea, which was served in its own individual pot with a monkey’s face painted on it. The two of us sat there for most of the afternoon, talking and laughing there in the monkey house.
Lit meeting went fine. Jennifer Rose Milton came, of course, and so did Natasha. And so did…drumroll please…none other than Rachel State, freshman sister of Adam, a waif of a girl swathed in black clothes and white makeup. Natasha nicknamed her The Frosh Goth on the way home, as we sat in her car listening to Darling Mud and trying to think of ways I can abuse my power as editor in chief to get to Adam through his gloomy sister. She invited me to spend the night (there was a Dietrich movie on TV she wanted me to watch with her), but I declined, not that I atten- ded enough classes today to have much homework. But I wanted to read Bradstreet, and write some poetry of my own, and think about wise Gabriel’s words about what was meant to be.
Friday September 10
While I sat around last night waiting for Adam to call, somebody must have sacrificed a lamb or something, because all of yester- day’s gray was all burned off, and by the time I was riding the bus to school the sun was searing through the tinted windows like something that killed all the dinosaurs. I reached into my bag and immediately found my sunglasses in a rare case of
morning luck. I put them on and didn’t talk to anyone. I looked for V when I got off the bus, hoping that V ’s gorgeous car could become a permanent morning motif, but as yesterday’s ride was added, as you remember, one year later in rewrites, V of course was nowhere to be seen.