Breakfast Served Anytime
Table of Contents
1 - Into the Abyss
2 - The Mad Hatter
3 - The Allegory of the Cave
4 - The Egg Drop Café
5 - Lepidopterology
6 - The View from Underground
7 - Officer Buckle and the Gloria Record
8 - The Assignment
9 - The View from Above
10 - The View from Below
11 - Reply Hazy, Try Again
12 - Krispy Kreme and the Goddess of Wisdom
13 - Fireworks
14 - Stuff You Can’t Put in a Letter
15 - Borboleta
16 - Magically Delicious
17 - Curtain Call
A Note (& Some Acknowledgments) from the Author
THE BUTTERFLIES started showing up the night before I left for Geek Camp. The first one came as a surprise: an otherworldly blue messenger, lifting and settling its wings on the windshield of the wheezy Chrysler LeBaron I had inherited from my grandmother just months before. Carol was riding shotgun, and when I whacked her knee and pointed, she just slid her sunglasses down her nose, peered at the butterfly like it might be contagious, and said, “They’re everywhere, Glo. A plague of them.” After that, just like when you learn a new word and suddenly it’s all over the place, I started seeing the blue butterflies everywhere I looked.
But then, I can’t remember a time when I haven’t looked for signs. It was not unusual for me, at age twelve, to tiptoe outside to our moonlit mailbox and fully expect to find within it (at midnight, on a random Tuesday!) a love note composed in Egyptian hieroglyphics or a grocery list scrawled in the shaky hand of the ghost of Boo Radley. Give me a fortune cookie, a Magic 8 Ball, a plague of blue butterflies, and I’ll be sure to find in them some urgent message from the universe. Ask Carol: According to her, I’m a master of the Art of Arcane Communication but a complete idiot when it comes to the Writing on the Wall. What happened at Geek Camp? It was like that. I never saw it coming, not even for half a second.
That first magic blue butterfly stayed on the windshield of the Munch all the way to Dairy Queen. Carol’s the one who came up with that: the Munch, as in LeBaron von Münchhausen. Carol’s dad is a psychologist, so she’s always talking about stuff like Münchausen syndrome. Carol has diagnosed half our class, and Münchausen syndrome is apparently what Sophie Allen has, because she’s always feigning illness to get out of gym class. Carol says I’m pretty normal, but that I’m prone to hyperbole and should work on impulse control. Impulse control? Seriously? We’d been in the car for ten minutes and Carol had already texted her boyfriend, Oscar (pronounced “OH-scar” because he is, in Carol’s words — and inarguably — a Cuban Demigod) at least four thousand times.
That’s half the reason I couldn’t wait to go to Geek Camp: I was under obligation to check my technoparaphernalia at the door. According to the glossy brochure, the idea behind Geek Camp is to provide Kentucky’s “best and brightest” rising high-school seniors with an early taste of collegiate life. So you have to pick a major and everything. I flirted with the idea of Forensic Science (too gross) and briefly considered Theater Arts (too obvious), but in the end I listed as my first choice the cryptically named Secrets of the Written Word. The teacher — some guy who called himself Dr. Weston A. Xavier — didn’t even provide a blurb for his class in the glossy brochure. Just a title and a name, check the box here. The mysterious blurb-lessness is what eventually won me over; I checked the box, sent off my application, and hoped for something wonderful. Dr. Weston A. Xavier didn’t disappoint: Several weeks later I received a beautifully handwritten letter, sealed with actual wax:
Dear Students,
I look forward to meeting each of you in June. Before we begin, I must ask that each of you please leave behind any personal computers, cellular telephones, or any other means by which you might find yourselves plugged in and tuned out. It’s a challenge, and I’m asking you to rise to it. We’ll operate on the honor system and I trust it will work. By signing below, you enter into contract to abstain from your gadgets for the duration of our four weeks together. Bring a notebook and a writing implement and you’ll have all the tools you need.
Sincerely,
X.
“That is a freaking conspiracy right there,” Carol had said when I showed her the letter. “X? He calls himself X?”
“Not even Doctor X. Just X.”
“What a jackass,” Carol murmured, fingers skating elegantly across her phone.
“There’s nothing anywhere online about a Weston A. Xavier,” I informed her. “It’s a pseudonym, Carol, hello.” I had to admit it: I was intrigued.
“Oh, well, excuse me,” Carol said. “Mr. Pseudonymous X, of course. Mr. Pretentious Monogram. Sounds like some secret psychological experiment where somebody — some guy who’s probably a perv, Glo — is trying to see if you all can function without the Vortex.” The Vortex: that’s Carolspeak for: TumblTwitFaceGram, which is basically where she lives, if you don’t count brief forays to school, the ballet studio, and Dairy Queen.
“Who says the guy’s a perv? He’s probably just a lonely J. Alfred Prufrock type who wishes he were teaching at Yale instead of some bush-league high-school academic camp.”
“I’m just saying,” Carol said, dangling the letter in my face. “Maybe this is your golden ticket and — oh, wait, oh, my God — if you can keep clear of your phone for a month, you’ll win a chocolate factory in the end!”
I rolled my eyes. Conspiracy or not, I was looking forward to a break from the constant racket of modern technology. First of all, on the Vortex I’m more of a silent lurker than an active participant. Don’t even get me started on the whole Pandora’s box element — it poses a constant threat to my emotional well-being. Second, I have a bad habit of losing or breaking small, expensive items (my retainer, my contacts), so when I finally caved under my paranoid father’s insistence that I go cellular in the name of Unforeseen Emergencies, I was forced to accept what is the mobile phone equivalent of a Jurassic-era dinosaur. The Unforeseen Emergencies? So far they haven’t happened. So far the dinosaur has proven to be not a life preserver but a glorified umbilical cord connecting me to more sound and fury than I know what to do with. Third: It is physically impossible for me not to compose text messages in complete sentences in words that contain all their natural-born letters. By the time I have pecked out a response to, say, an urgent text from Carol (“omg did u hear?????????”) in my own laborious, long-winded, correctly capitalized, and carefully punctuated way (“No. Did I miss something? Tell me!”), Carol will have already sent like three more urgent messages in the interim. I can handle Latin, I can amo amas amat all day long, but I suck at text-ese and I’m constantly behind.
Anyway. I still had a few precious hours to go before surrendering to X and the Luddite life for four weeks. Carol and I ate our Blizzards in the Munch. The convertible top was rolled down, and the sunlight slanting through the trees was getting soft and syrupy in that way that makes you miss things that aren’t even gone yet. This was our goodbye trip to DQ, because Carol was about to leave for her own summer adventure, a crazy-elite ballet school in New York City.
“You know,” Carol said in her thoughtful voice, “in New York you can get a hoagie or a Rolex or whatever on the street at like four in the morning, but I don’t think they have a DQ.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. No Blizzards.”
“Yikes. I might have to change my mind.”
Carol shoved her sunglasses on top of her head, shot me a look. “Girl. You’re not changing your mind. If you even let yourself get roped into that scholarship, I just — I just don’t even know what. I might die.”
Carol narrowed her eyes, searching my expression for signs of half-assedness. “Do you promise?”
“I promise.”
“Good. Because dude, the Plan abides. The Plan trumps the Scholarship. I will tattoo it on your face if I have to.”
The Scholarship, the Scholarship. It’s all anybody wanted to talk about, and I was so sick of talking about it I could’ve screamed. It’s like this: If you get accepted to state government-funded Geek Camp, you also score an automatic free ride to the University of Kentucky, aka UK, aka the state’s “flagship university.” The idea, presumably, is that Kentucky needs to hang on to its geeks, the better to shake that whole shoeless, clueless, Kentucky-fried stigma. Which, you know what? Don’t even talk to me about. I don’t have a whole lot of patience with that bulsh.
Flagship. The word conjures pirates, skulls and crossbones, damsels in distress being forced to walk the plank. A romantic word that has nothing to do with the singular un-romance of going to college within a sixty-mile radius of the place where you grew up. The Plan? Now, the Plan was romantic: Carol and I were going to move to New York as soon as we graduated. She would be a dancer and I would be an actress and we would be broke, but our lives would be awesome and filled with mystery and intrigue. The details of the Plan were still fuzzy, but we knew it would involve a shared apartment strung with tiny white lights.
“Absolutely,” I said. “The Plan abides.”
Carol looked relieved. She poked at a chunk of cookie dough with her spoon. “So we’re going to have to kick it old-school? Real letters, stamps and all?”
“Yep,” I said. I was getting excited just thinking about it. Especially the stamps. Especially the part where Carol’s letters and postcards would show up in an actual mailbox. Geek Camp was starting to become real, and a rush of nervous anticipation fizzed through my body.
“Okay,” Carol said. “Just don’t expect me to be all prolific. I’m going to hold you personally responsible when my ass gets carpal tunnel.”
“I’m pretty sure your carpals are in your wrists, not your ass.”
“Well. Then kiss my carpals, byotch.”
We were cracking ourselves up, but what we were really doing was trying hard not to think about a whole summer without each other. The excitement I had felt a second before took a sudden slide into the realm of panic. It seemed impossible, unthinkable, that Carol and I would be separated (by eight hundred miles!) for the first time in the history of a friendship that began the day skinny little Carol from Alaska walked into sixth-grade language-arts class. Instead of behaving with customary New Girl humility, she acted like she owned the place. As with so many of the things I love best in life, I hated Carol at first. A ballet dancer? From Alaska? She may as well have been a unicorn from the dark side of the moon. Later, I found out that not only did we share a portentous birthday (the Ides of March), but we were also both named for our grandmothers. Gloria and Carol: two totally geriatric names in a class that included no fewer than three girls called Kayla, all of them ridonculously magazine-beautiful. I took it as a sign, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Our friend the butterfly stowaway was still there on the windshield, folding and unfolding its marvelous blue wings. Call it hyperbole, call it whatever you want, but I’m telling you that it looked like it was waving, like it was going goodbye goodbye goodbye. Another sign from the universe, of course. It’s important to pay attention to these things. We finished our Blizzards and cranked the seats back so we could stare up at the darkening sky for a while. We sat in silence as Carol’s phone buzzed with the incoming messages of Oscar the Cuban Demigod. “I’m not even going to pick that up,” Carol said, looking over at me and grinning. “That’s how much I’m going to miss your Luddite ass.”
I’m not a chronic crier or anything, but when I dropped Carol off in front of her house, it was all I could do not to bawl. We hugged each other like crazy and promised to write.
I hadn’t been in the door for three seconds when my dad gave me that look he’d been giving me for days. The look said: Have you packed yet? Why aren’t you packing?
If there’s one thing I don’t get, it’s the business of packing in advance. I mean, if half the stuff you’re going to need is the stuff you’re wearing right now, or the stuff you’re going to sleep in, or the stuff you’ll need in the morning when you go to wash your hair and brush your teeth, then what’s the point of packing it all away and getting it back out again? Ridiculous. But to appease my father, I shut myself in my room to commence “packing.”
First I tuned my iPod to my Thinking Playlist so I could think. Next, in a move that I realized had become automatic, a bodily response to an actual physical urge not unlike the urge to yawn or pee, I checked the Vortex. After thinking for way too long about what might constitute a clever farewell, I finally settled on “Gloria Aaron Bishop is hereby headed into the Abyss. Parting is such sweet sorrow! Enjoy your summer, my lovelies.” It was dizzying to think of everything I would miss — had already missed in the thirteen seconds that followed the shutting down of my laptop — but it was thrilling, too, and I couldn’t wait for life at Geek Camp to begin.
In the end I decided to travel light and bring with me only two books: my prized copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and the Gloria Bishop Book of Ephemera. The first belonged originally to my grandmother Gloria, better known as GoGo. After she died and I inherited the Munch, I found the book stashed in the glove compartment beneath a bunch of lipstick-kissed tissues, an unpaid parking ticket, and a completely badass pair of cat-eye sunglasses. I recognized it as the same ancient copy that GoGo used to read to me from when I was little. When I was assigned to read the book for freshman English, I could actually hear GoGo’s voice in my mind as I turned the pages. It’s my favorite book of all time, ever, and finding GoGo’s very own copy was like discovering the Holy Grail.
I guess now would be a good time to tell you more about GoGo, about how great she was, how unlike anyone else in this world, but it makes me too sad. That will have to wait. Instead, let me tell you about the book: It was filled with underlines and margin notes in GoGo’s handwriting, plus — and this is the best part — a postcard from Munich, Germany, addressed to GoGo and signed by some mysterious person named Robert. Robert didn’t have anything earth-shattering to say (Hello from Weltstadt mit Herz! On to Hamburg Thursday. Back the first of June. Robert.), but the handwriting is wicked cool and the stamp is even cooler.
Not only did GoGo’s postcard from Munich provide a sign from the universe that “the Munch” was indeed the perfect name for my new ride, but it also became the first item in the Gloria Bishop Book of Ephemera. In the months that followed and especially since the arrival of the letter from X, the GBBoE has grown into a pretty epic collection of random stuff I’ve found, all of it featuring, in some way or another, the handwritten word. It was just like the butterflies: Once I started looking for it, the ephemera was everywhere. That very night, at the DQ drive-thru, Carol had handed me a rumpled dollar bill on which someone had printed in purple marker the words TOO MUCH OR NOT ENOUGH? Ha. The age-old question.
Before stashing the GBBoE in my duffel bag, I pasted Carol’s dollar onto a page that already contained a list I had found stuck to the bottom of my cart at Target the week before:
Wipes
Diapers
Batteries
Q-tips
TP
Socks for P
And then my work was finished for the night. I fell asleep on top of the covers with the light still on, so maybe I dreamed this next part or maybe I made it up. Who knows?
My father, who makes a point of not entering my room except under extreme duress, came in around midnight. For the first time in years or maybe ever, he actually tucked me into bed. Before he turned off the light he leaned down, smoothed his palm across my forehead, and whispered in my ear, I’m going to miss you aro
und here.
If I learned anything at Geek Camp, it’s this: Missing people, and being missed, has an underrated charm all its own.
GEEK CAMP isn’t really called Geek Camp. It’s called (very lofty) the Commonwealth Summer Program for Gifted and Talented Students. Which is hilarious, because I don’t really consider myself Gifted or Talented. And much as it might be cool to attend GoGo’s beloved alma mater (I can hear her now: “College is a privilege, honey. Not a right! Scholarships don’t grow on trees! Count your blessings or count yourself a fool!”), I obviously did not apply to Geek Camp in hopes of securing a scholarship to the Flagship University of the State I Could Not Wait to Flee. I just wanted to spend the summer on a college campus — any college campus — if you want to know why I really applied. I wanted to live in a dorm. As I imagined it, dorm life promised what every only child wants: some approximation of the fascinating chaos that goes on in, say, Carol’s house, which she shares with her parents and three brothers, and where there is never not mysterious boy-music blaring from somebody’s room and where there is always, always tons of delicious food in the refrigerator. A dorm! I was totally enchanted.
My enchantment evaporated about three seconds after my dad and I arrived on the campus of Morlan College and pulled into the parking lot behind Reynolds Hall, where the female contingent of Geek Campers had been assigned to live for the summer. The lot was crammed with double-parked cars and parents and boyfriends and a nightmarish array of enough stuff to suggest that every single one of these girls had packed for an extended stay on Mars. In typical Gloria fashion, I had packed at the last minute and managed to cram everything I thought I’d need into one enormous duffel bag, which my dad was heroic enough to haul up the stairs to room 317. I followed with my favorite and indispensable pillow and my favorite and indispensable lamp (it’s a cool lamp; it used to be GoGo’s and it’s made of an old Chianti bottle), because if there’s one thing I cannot abide it’s overhead fluorescent lighting of the sort I imagined to be indigenous to dorm rooms.