Breakfast Served Anytime Page 4

  The Mad Hatter, aka Mason Atkinson, aka Jackass Extraordinaire, winked at me and nodded. “I believe the White Queen is responsible for that line,” he said. “But I appreciate the sentiment all the same, my dear.”

  My dear? Who talks like that? Who goes around winking? I wanted to die. I wanted to fly right out of the room and knock the Mad Hatter on his egotistical ass on my way out.

  “I’m Chloe,” Chloe announced from her supine position on the couch. “This is Calvin and that’s Gloria. Your hat is stupid. Would you care to open this letter from le Professeur?” Chloe frisbeed the envelope in Mason’s direction and he raised an indolent hand to catch it in midair. A graceful maneuver, I had to admit.

  Mason took his time opening our mail. “Breakfast served anytime,” he read aloud. He looked up at us and grinned, waiting, I guess, for us to break into wild applause.

  “What? Let me see,” Calvin said. He was getting flustered.

  “Breakfast served anytime,” Mason repeated, tossing the card to Calvin. “That means we need to meet him at the Egg Drop. X marks the spot, right?”

  “Wait. The what?” Calvin asked.

  “The Egg Drop Café. It’s this twenty-four-hour greasy spoon around the corner. Best milk shakes on the planet. Breakfast served anytime.”

  “And you know this how, exactly?” Chloe asked, squinting beneath her glossy bangs.

  “I’m from here,” Mason replied. “Born and raised.” He got up from the chair and started sauntering back toward the stairs. Whistling. Again. When the rest of us just sat there looking at one another Mason stopped and turned around. “Are you coming?”

  Well. Did we have a choice? We gathered up our stuff and followed the Mad Hatter down the rabbit hole.

  THE STORY gets better from here. It actually gets pretty good. First, though, another story, because this one is permanently lodged in the back of my mind. Nobody has heard this story, not even Carol, and that’s because the story is about Carol’s brother Alex. He’s the oldest of the four of them; it goes Alex (headed back to Alaska for college this fall), then Carol, then Hank (two years behind us in school), and then Paul (who, at fourteen, just recently became a real person). For as long as I care to remember, Carol’s brothers have been a fact of my life. I’m around them all the time, and sometimes they get on my nerves, but I never really think about them, the way you never really think, say, about the bathroom wallpaper you’ve been staring at since you were born.

  Last summer, that changed, and even though the change could fit into the space of three minutes, it’s still the scene I see behind my closed eyes every night when I’m drifting off to sleep. It’s still the image I conjure most often when I dive into underwater dreamworld to the accompaniment of my underused Make-out Playlist. It happened like this: Alex was giving me a ride home, which he had done at least a zillion times before. I was so at ease with him, he was so much like bathroom wallpaper, that we weren’t even talking, which is how the six-minute ride from Carol’s house to mine would usually go. I’m not sure what, exactly, made this ride different from any other, but in my mind it had something to do with the song Alex had going — this jangly sad song about a lighthouse. (The song is actually called “The Lighthouse”; I know this because it’s on a CD, made especially for me by Alex, that appeared in my mailbox about twelve hours after the moment that became my go-to underwater dreamworld scene, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.) So cue the jangly song about the lighthouse. Then cue Alex, who, instead of screeching to the curb and letting the car idle while I skipped up to the door, cut the engine this time. Then he keyed the ignition enough to let the lighthouse song keep going, and then he shifted around to face me. “Gloria,” he said. “Gloria, Gloria, Gloria.”

  It occurred to me that I rarely, if ever, heard Alex say my name out loud. Hearing it four times sent my stomach right off the high dive, whoosh. My heart was thrumming in my ears.

  “What?” I said. (Because what do you say?)

  Slow down and let the waves have their way now, went the song. God, that song!

  “I have a secret to tell you,” Alex whispered. Some shift had happened in his eyes — huge drenched brown eyes — like he might cry or laugh at any second, like his eyes were pools to go deep-end diving in, down, down, down. “Come here.”

  I came here. And Alex kissed me. He kissed me the way I imagined I’d always wanted to be kissed: both hands on my face. Without really noticing them, I had noticed his hands before — long and clean, like hands should be. He wore this wide leather cuff on his left wrist, and I could smell the leather, and his soapy skin, and I could smell the car engine as it ticked and cooled.

  “There,” Alex said. “Glad I got that out of my system.” He smiled at me with this smile that was equal parts appreciative and mournful, embarrassed and proud. Because that was it — that was our three minutes. He was, after all, Carol’s brother, and it couldn’t be any other way. The next day the CD arrived in the mailbox, and the day after that I was back at Carol’s, eating Doritos and marathoning Friday Night Lights and alternately fearing and hoping to God that when Alex drove me home he might give me a replay of that kiss, a kiss that put to shame all the other meager kisses I’d known in my life, all the inconsequential fumblings that those meager kisses led up to. But when Alex drove me home it was just like nothing had happened. We were friendly and silent and normal. Absolute wallpaper material. Which was fine. Which, really, was sort of a relief. That one kiss, though? It’s mine to keep. The best secret anyone ever gave me.

  That moment with Alex is worth telling not because it was the beginning or end of the world, but because it’s always with me. I’ll be in the Munch, say, stopped at a red light, and that jangly song will drift into my head and with it the image of Alex’s lashes lowered against my cheek. The next thing I know, the driver of the car behind me will be honking at me to go. I’ll be impulse-checking the Vortex and eye-rolling about everything everybody had for lunch, and from that unpredictable realm of daydream, Alex will appear unannounced. Alex, that Vortexless enigma, elusive and lovely in the most private corner of my mind.

  Sometimes, when I go to Carol’s and Alex isn’t home, I’ll take a detour on my way to the bathroom and sneak inside his room. I like to glimpse him when he isn’t there: in the globe on his desk, the bass guitar tilted like a curvy girl against the wall, the books and CDs stacked in precise alphabetical rows on the shelves. The Strokes poster taped to the wall above the bed, and the bed itself, a tangle of sheets still twisted around the invisible shape of Alex’s dreaming body. The globe, though. The globe is what kills me — the wishful, wistful boyishness of it. I’ve thought of that stupid globe an inordinate number of times, if you want to know the truth, and always it puts this awful ache at the back of my throat. It’s weird, how thinking about Alex is the thing, the treasure. I think if I spent half the time actually being with him that I spend thinking about him, it might somehow break the spell.

  So I was thinking of Alex while Chloe was railing against cell phones at the Egg Drop Café, this anomalous little hole-in-the-wall where you could get burgers and Tater Tots but where also — totally random — you could order moo goo gai pan or hot and sour soup. This tiny Asian woman banged a plate of fries on our table as the Black Eyed Peas thudded out of the jukebox in the corner. By way of random decoration, the jukebox had a paper fan taped to it. The four of us — Chloe and me and Calvin and Mason — were crammed into this greasy booth in a configuration that would become the norm for us: me on the inside across from Chloe, Calvin on my right across from Mason. It was good having the Mad Hatter on the diagonal, where I could avoid eye contact if necessary. Despite his having successfully led us the three blocks from campus to the Egg Drop, where X’s next directive was indeed waiting for us behind the counter, I was still wary of him.

  “Look at that guy over there,” Chloe said, nodding in the direction of this completely harmless-looking boy, circa our age, who appeared to be enjoying a milk shake
with his girlfriend.

  “What about him?” Calvin asked. He gave a furtive little glance and shifted in the booth. You could tell he didn’t have it in him to go staring at other people, much less talking about them.

  “He’s been over there with his face in his phone since we got here,” Chloe said. She was smoking her straw and waving it around. “That poor girl just keeps yammering on and on, and he’s not listening to a word she’s saying. He’s probably over there playing a video game or some shit.”

  Mason craned around to look. “So? Can you hear that girl’s voice? Fingernails on a chalkboard, man. I’d rather text her than talk to her, too.”

  Chloe elbowed Mason in the ribs. “So, it just proves what I’m trying to say, which is that phones are this generation’s cigarettes. It’s an addiction, dude, but it’s not about communication, just like it’s not about nicotine. It’s about holding something in your hand that makes you feel important. It’s about props. Drama. I’m just saying.”

  Calvin cleared his throat. “Actually, it’s about dopamine.”

  “Dopamine,” Mason repeated. “Like the band?”

  Dopamine: The word drifted in my head and I tried to seize onto it, but I kept coming up with Dramamine, à la GoGo’s old motion sickness remedy.

  “Not the band, the neurotransmitter,” Calvin went on. “Chloe, when you take that first drag on a cigarette, you get a little shot of happy, right?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Chloe said. “But Calvin, sweetheart, don’t be all yanking my chain. I’m trying to quit, remember?”

  Calvin nodded and blushed. “So that little shot of happy, that’s dopamine, telling your brain to be content. And every time you get a text message, or new Facebook updates, or an e-mail in your in-box, or whatever, that’s another little dopamine shot, bam, right to your brain. The more texts you get, the more your brain craves them. It’s what addiction’s all about.” Calvin paused to gulp from his milk. He glanced up at us and seemed surprised that we were listening, waiting for him to go on.

  “So, Calvin,” I asked. “What are you addicted to?”

  “I’m addicted to these fries,” Mason interrupted. “Pass the ketchup?”

  I extracted the ketchup from its sticky chrome harness and banged it in front of the Mad Hatter. I shot him a midlevel death glare.

  “I don’t know,” Calvin answered. “I mean, I don’t think I have any addictions. I don’t have a cell phone or a Facebook account, so it wasn’t hard for me to give those things up when X asked.”

  Chloe gave Calvin a wide-eyed stare. “Calvin. Oh, my God. Are you a Bible-beater?”

  Calvin laughed and picked at his fries. “Actually, I’m embarrassed to say I’ve only been to church like twice in my life. I’m just interested in what makes our minds want what they want, that’s all.”

  My heart gave a sudden lurch of worry and affection for Calvin. “I’m addicted to Ale-8,” I blurted. To illustrate, I downed the rest of my bottle. “I also think I’m addicted to the night-before-the-museum feeling.”

  Everyone stared and waited for me to go on, so I grabbed a fry from our shared pile and leaned back in the booth, all blithe nonchalance.

  “Um, care to elaborate?” Chloe said.

  “Yeah,” Mason chimed in. “Do tell.” His eyes locked with mine for a dizzying fraction of a second.

  So I tried to explain to them the night-before-the-museum feeling, but of course that’s not the kind of thing you can really explain. God, there’s nothing worse than trying to stick words onto something really important and knowing that what’s coming out of your mouth sounds like total nonsense. The whole time I was talking, I was aware that the Mad Hatter had cast his eyes downward toward his plate, that he wasn’t really listening to me, that he was chewing his straw and getting bored. Then he surprised me. He was always doing that — surprising me.

  “Well, Gloria,” Mason said (what is it with the sound of my name spoken aloud?), “It seems like maybe you’ve got a Grecian Urn complex.” He flicked his eyes back in my direction and parked them on my face.

  “Excuse me?” I snapped. I stared back, daring him to look away first.

  “Wait,” Calvin said, leaning forward in his brow-furrowed, get-to-the-bottom-of-this pose. “Is that like an Oedipus complex or something?”

  I shot Calvin a look. “Wait a minute, dude — who says I want to bang my mom and kill my dad?”

  Chloe snorted. “Oh, my God, yall. Don’t make me laugh when I’m drinking. That totally went up my nose.”

  I folded my arms across my chest and waited for the Mad Hatter to go on. After a prolonged performance of polishing off the rest of the fries and wiping his hands on the remains of a shredded napkin, he lifted a finger and started nodding at us, like, Oh, hold on a second, I will enthrall you with my infinite wisdom as soon as I’m done masticating. Seriously: My hatred of him was starting to become epic.

  “Grecian Urn, as in John Keats,” Mason finally declared. “X’s clue. Didn’t you guys look at it?”

  After Mason had collected it from the to-go counter, X’s latest clue had gotten lost in our hurry to fuel ourselves. It lay there in the middle of the table, getting soggy around the edges.

  “Wait a minute, did you read it without us?” Calvin wanted to know. “Okay, new rule: Nobody opens the letters until we’re all together.”

  “We were all together, bro,” Mason said. “You all just weren’t paying attention. This one’s not exactly mind-blowing, anyway. Like I said: John Keats. ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’ I had to read it for AP English last year.”

  Chloe picked up the letter and started reading out loud. When she got to the part about heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter, Mason interrupted her.

  “See, Gloria? Right there. There’s your museum feeling. It’s like, for you, anticipating the museum is better than actually going to the museum.” He stared at me, waiting. “Am I right?”

  “No, you’re not right,” I said. But of course he was right. I was seized by the irrational worry that he could see straight into my brain, could maybe even steal a glimpse there of Alex, my own secret personal private Alex, turning to face me in the car. “You’re wrong. I loved that museum.”

  “Oh-kay,” Chloe broke in. “How about you two discuss that amongst yourselves later. Right now I’m going to finish reading this hideous poem, and then maybe Calvin can tell us where to go from here. Sound like a plan?”

  “Keep reading,” Calvin said. “I’m listening.”

  Chloe read the rest of the poem, which even Calvin couldn’t wrap his brain around, and then our server showed up with a bill and a plate of fortune cookies.

  “Who’s got money?” Mason said. “Chloe?”

  “Shit, I forgot my wallet,” Chloe replied, rummaging in her bag.

  “Dude. You’ve got a whole arsenal of crap in there, but you don’t have any money?”

  “Shut up, Mason. Gloria, what about you?”

  I shook my head and looked at Calvin, who was already quietly plucking bills from his wallet. “Bank of Calvin, open for business,” he muttered. “Since when does it cost fifteen dollars for four people to share some french fries?”

  I reached across Calvin to grab a fortune cookie. Fortune cookies are possibly the grossest things on earth, but I love them.

  Never miss a chance to keep your mouth shut.

  “Hey Mason,” I said. “I think I got yours.” I handed over the message and beamed. Mason flashed me a smirk, cracked open his own cookie, and read aloud, “Too many people volunteer to carry the stool when it’s time to move the piano.”

  “Okay, that one’s obviously mine,” Calvin said. “Chloe, what’d you get?”

  Chloe bit into her cookie and frowned. “Are these things ever not stale?” She chewed as she regarded her fortune. “Suck! I got the piano one, too.”

  Mason reached for the last cookie. “This one must be yours, then, Gloria. Why don’t I read it for you?” He made a great show of
breaking the cookie and extracting the message within. A slow smile spread across his face.

  “What’s it say?” I asked. “Give it here.”

  “This one is definitely yours,” Mason answered. He passed it across the table and, like your average seven-year-old, yanked it away when I made a move to grab it. When he finally relinquished it, here’s what I read:

  Those grapes you cannot taste are always sour.

  Before I could give him a proper glare, the kind of glare that would say, I am not at all interested in your grapes, jackass, Mason rose from the booth, stretching luxuriously.

  “Shall we?” He yawned.

  “Yes,” I said, “We shall.”

  We trudged back to campus in silence. The Grecian Urn had landed us at a dead end, so we decided to stop on a stretch of velvety green lawn in front of the administration building and think things over. In the middle of the lawn stood this huge sycamore tree, the biggest I’ve ever seen, and from an impossibly high branch hung a rope swing, anchored at the bottom by a single slab of wood. The Mad Hatter broke into a sprint and did a flying leap onto the swing. His top hat sailed from his head as the swing swept him in a wide, graceful curve across the lawn. Soon he was spinning himself dizzy and barking the kind of genuine laughter I hadn’t heard or experienced myself in way too long. You couldn’t not smile at that kind of unadulterated joy.

  Chloe hooted a congratulatory whistle and clapped her hands as we made our way toward the tree. “Very nice,” she laughed.

  Mason took a bow and collapsed on his back in the grass. Without the hat, he looked almost normal: sweaty strands of unruly dark hair stuck to his temples, cheeks flushed with laughter and punctuated by dimples I hadn’t noticed before. His eyes, those alert blue accusers, seemed . . . I don’t know. Kinder somehow.

  “Who’s next?” Mason asked, breathless.

  Chloe settled herself down with an unlit cigarette and X’s Grecian Urn clue. I joined her on the grass and started to paste our cookie fortunes into the GBBoE, and Calvin dove for the swing, where he stayed, swaying in great arcs with his eyes closed, for an impressively long time.