Breakfast Served Anytime Read online

  The rest of my first day at Geek Camp passed in a flurry of obligatory and obnoxious get-to-know-you routines. After a dinner of Lucky Charms in the McGrathskellar (“Avoid the rectangular pizza and go for the cereal,” Jessica warned me and Sonya, on the sage advice of her sisters), all 120 Geek Campers got corralled into the auditorium for orientation. God save me from orientations of any kind. Are they ever not a ginormous waste of everybody’s time? So blah blah blah, all the resident advisers got introduced (Jenny was every bit as overly eager as I had imagined; Sonya mimed a gag), and then all the instructors got up to make their own introductions and let their students know where to find them at nine o’clock the next morning, when classes were set to begin. X was notably absent. In his place, the camp-director-slash-philosophy-instructor (who was actually wearing tweed in the middle of June!) stepped up to the mike and gave it a few experimental taps. A peal of eardrum-splitting feedback screeched through the room.

  “Is this thing on?” Tweed Man inquired. Was he deaf? Deaf but stalwart, apparently: “Can you hear me in the back?”

  In response, a paper airplane — yes, an actual paper airplane, that quaint relic of days of yore — came sailing across a hundred rows of itchy red crushed-velvet seats and came to a silent rest at Tweed’s feet. One hundred nineteen heads craned around to see who the expert pilot was. Well. Do I even need to say it? There was the Mad Hatter, of course, holding court in the back row. He grinned at his audience, reclined with his hands clasped behind his head, and propped his gangly-ass legs on the seat in front of him. People started laughing, of course. Somebody applauded. Everybody thought it was hilarious. I flailed back around in my seat, my cheeks on fire.

  Poor Tweed. After clearing his throat and offering a valiant ha ha, he went on: “Those of you, um. Those of you who are signed up for Secrets of the Written Word will have already received direct instructions from Dr. Xavier as to where to meet for class tomorrow. Dr. Xavier regrets that an emergency called him away this evening, but he looks forward to meeting you in the morning. If you have questions, just, um. Just see me or talk to your resident adviser and we’ll make sure to get everything squared away.”

  Jessica elbowed my arm and whispered, “Don’t you think he’s kind of cute, in a loser-ish sort of way?”

  This, of course, was shocking and unacceptable. “What? Are you kidding? He’s wearing a freaking top hat!”

  Impulse control. I needed to work on it. Jessica looked at me like I’d just screamed at the top of my lungs. “Not Paper Airplane Guy, silly. Philosophy Guy.”

  I took another look at Tweed, who, although orientation was over and people were starting to disappear in clusters out the door, was still standing there at the mike, looking sort of bewildered, like maybe he had something else to say but had forgotten what it was. “Jessica. Dude. No way. He’s at least twice your age.”

  Back in room 317, Jessica and Sonya sat down to Vortex all the people who would be in their shared political science class. How was it that they had managed to acquire a freaking class roster, when all I had to guide me toward Secrets of the Written Word was a bunch of cryptic numbers? Anyway, they were getting kind of shrill, and I was getting tired, and X and his clever little caper were starting to get on my last available nerve. I had no choice but to bust out the one piece of contraband I had allowed myself: Indigo, my trusty iPod. Although X hadn’t expressly banned iPods, I assumed they fell into the “gadget” category he had mentioned in his letter. Still, whatever, I can’t live without Indigo and the underwater dreamworld I fall into each time I go into what Carol calls my “audiospells.” (I’ve got this whole soundtrack planned out for my life, see. It’s very serious business. My Make-out Playlist is stellar but unfortunately doesn’t get ample play; my Driving Playlist is perfect for River Road top-down-in-the-Munch cruises; and of course my famous Thinking Playlist — smart-girl music: Regina Spektor, the Magnetic Fields, the Decemberists — is indispensable when it comes to things like packing, doing Latin homework, and deciphering X’s obscure little code.)

  0900

  8884P697r

  205

  I stared at the numbers and letters until my eyeballs throbbed. I turned them around in my head every which-way, trying to ferret out some meaning: Were they dates? Did the numbers correspond to letters of the alphabet? Was 205 a room number? What was the story with that infuriating lowercase r? Underwater dreamworld swimming wasn’t helping. Regina Spektor wasn’t helping, either. I was starting to get a little panicky, so I closed my eyes and tried to see the numbers in my head, the way I used to be able to picture words in my head during middle school spelling bees. The way I would see the letters when GoGo and I would race to unscramble the Jumble words in the newspaper: I could just close my eyes and the jumbled letters would appear there, like my mind had snapped a photograph of them, and then the letters would arrange themselves into words that made sense. GoGo was always faster at solving the Jumble, but still. She was the one who taught me how to take pictures of things with my mind that way. That’s just how GoGo was.

  So X’s freaky numbers were starting to float there, to jigsaw themselves together behind my closed eyelids, when somebody yanked an earbud out of my ear and snatched the card from my hand.

  “Hey!” I yelped. “What’re you doing?”

  “No, what’re you doing?” Sonya flung herself onto my bed and started studying X’s card. “What’s this?”

  I gave Sonya and Jessica the expurgated version. I expected them to laugh, but they didn’t. Instead, Sonya regarded the card with renewed interest while Jessica plugged in her famous flatiron. “This calls for an Ale and a makeover, girl,” she said, opening the fridge with her foot. “Help yourself.”

  It took Sonya all of maybe three seconds to come up with a solution to the first set of numbers. “Well,” she said. “Oh-nine-hundred hours. That much is obvious, right?”

  “What, now?” Jessica asked as she clamped my hair in the jaws of her iron, no doubt frying it and ruining it forever.

  “Oh-nine-hundred hours. That’s military time. Nine in the morning. Wherever you’re supposed to be, you need to be there at nine, which, hello, is when we all have to be in class, so no big mystery there.” Sonya yawned, flopped onto her stomach, and started paging through a magazine back-to-front. “Now, I don’t know what-all the rest of this nonsense is, so yall can try to figure out the next part. Gimme one of those Ales.”

  I just sat there gawking.

  “What?” Sonya asked.

  “How’d you do that?”

  “Glo, girl, I’m not clairvoyant. I just come from a military family. It’s the way we roll.” Sonya went back to her magazine.

  Glo. Sonya called me Glo, just like that. Nobody had ever called me Glo except Carol, and the nickname made me feel . . . what? It made me feel at home, I guess, although nothing was normal about this situation, nothing was home, especially not the business of having my hair fried to death and ruined forever by an actual straightening iron, a device I despise on principle. I love nicknames because you can’t give them to yourself. They are these completely spontaneous, organic things, and you have to sort of earn them from other people.

  “Let me see that,” Jessica snapped. She picked up the card and sat down at her desk. “Yall be quiet for a second so I can think.”

  “Shhhh!” Sonya mocked. “Jessica’s over there thinking!”

  Jessica’s thinking was interrupted by a knock on the door. Jenny, the dreaded resident adviser, poked her head in and grinned at us. “Hey, girls! I hate to interrupt, but it’s past visiting hours. Sonya, time to head back to your room, okay?”

  Sonya rolled her eyes and took her time rising from the bed. “Oh-kay,” she mock-pouted, a stagy little dig for the benefit of Jenny, who didn’t catch it. “Good night, Einsteins,” she said over her shoulder as she made for the door, and then, as she squeezed past Jenny, she couldn’t resist: “Are you going to tuck me in or what?”

  Jessica missed the
whole performance because she was still examining X’s card. “Glo,” she said (two Glos in one night!). “I think this is a library call number. I mean, I’m pretty sure that’s what this is.” Jessica pointed to the second row of numbers and letters.

  I eyed the figures myself and felt completely stupid for not having made the connection on my own. I mean, I spend a whole freaking childhood in libraries and I can’t recognize a Library of Congress identifier? Mortifying.

  “Jessica” — I wasn’t ready to call her Jess yet; these things take time — “I think you’re right. Totally a call number.” My heartbeat revved into high gear with the recognition of it. I had a huge urge to bust past Jenny and run straight to the library, wherever it was.

  “Let’s look it up,” Jessica said, reaching for her iPad.

  “No!” I said. “I mean, no thanks. I mean, I think we’re supposed to figure all of this out in a different way.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I nodded, still fizzy from the Ale and the solve. “I’m sure.”

  “Okay. Then I’m going to take a shower.” She cocked her head and smiled at me. “Your hair looks good like that, you know.”

  After folding me in another of her easy-fluent hugs, Jessica gathered up a small mountain of shower gear and made for the bathroom down the hall. When the door clicked behind her, I stole a look in the mirror, and I was almost unrecognizable to myself. I’m not a huge fan of mirrors, and I’ve always regretted that my best features (my imagination, of course, and my memory — I live in constant and irrational fear of premature Alzheimer’s) can’t be seen from across a room, but the girl looking back at me was almost, almost pretty. I mean, I wasn’t going to run right out and buy a flatiron or anything, but just for a second, just long enough for that one brief glance, I could sort of appreciate the appeal.

  When I was in elementary school, I could never sleep the night before field trips. The sense of imminent adventure — the possibility of all the fantastic things that could happen the minute we got on the bus and the scenery changed — was almost too much for me to bear. The best field trip of all, the one that left me sleepless with anticipation every time, was the trip we took each year to the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis. I loved everything about that museum and everything about the two-hour bus journey from Louisville. We always returned home after dark, and it seemed a strange and impossible thing, to emerge from a yellow school bus, dopey with sleep, and find your classmates and teachers standing there in the twilight. The out-of-context dark made everyone seem more human, somehow, like we were all in it together, whatever “it” was. I used to daydream about letting the bus leave the museum without me: I would hide in the Egyptian mummy exhibit until the museum closed, and then spend the night beneath the dinosaur bones. For as long as I can remember, I’ve just — God — I’ve just wanted so badly for something to happen.

  When I woke from half-sleep to the jangle of Jessica’s alarm clock, I recognized it right away: the night-before-the-museum feeling. I hadn’t had it in years, and I was buzzy with it, could feel it tickling the back of my tongue. Shower, contacts, teeth brushing: Every necessary ritual seemed like a frustrating barricade between me and all the life I wanted to get busy living. I pulled on my standard first-day-of-anything uniform (indispensable blue sundress, jean jacket, indispensable yellow low-top Chucks and GoGo’s shades), wound my wet hair into a lopsided knot on my head, and stuck a pencil through it to keep it out of my face. Breakfast and the obligatory Morning Meeting were excruciating, but finally, finally, the day was mine, and the library appeared in all its glory before me at the top of this impressive hill, right in the middle of campus. I don’t know what I expected to happen when I walked in (trombones? a trapeze act?), but I was a little stunned by the quiet. A bored-looking student sat sentinel at the reference desk, and the pop of her gum echoed through the building as if we two were the only ones in it. She didn’t even glance up from her magazine.

  The note from X was now pasted into the GBBoE alongside the tag from the Mad Hatter’s hat. I checked the numbers, just to be sure, and climbed the stairs to the second floor. Then I started in with the panicking. What if Jessica and I had gotten it all wrong? What if it wasn’t a call number at all, and somewhere in some fabulous, arcane corner of the campus, class was carrying on without me? A sickening thought. When I reached the 800s, though, I found a boy sitting cross-legged on the floor, a book opened across his lap. He had the reddest hair I’ve ever seen, before or since. Like hard-core vivid red.

  “Hi,” I said.

  The boy looked at me and flushed. “Oh, hey.” He held up the book so I could see it. “Plato’s Republic. Page 205: Allegory of the Cave.”

  I fought the urge to jump up and down and instead sat opposite the boy, who told me his name was Calvin. Calvin Little. “So, are you Chloe?” he asked.

  “Who’s Chloe?”

  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?”