Breakfast Served Anytime Read online

  “Calvin’s in thinking mode,” Chloe said, smiling. “Let’s leave him alone.” She glanced over at my work. “Do you seriously carry a glue stick around with you everywhere you go?” she asked.

  “Yep,” I nodded. “What about you? I’m guessing there’s something in that bag besides your placebo-smokes.”

  “Everything and nothing,” Chloe answered. “Do you need any Pez?” She dug into her bag and came up with a Hello Kitty Pez dispenser. “Three-D movie glasses? Dr Pepper Lip Smacker?”

  I smiled at her. Definitely a kindred spirit. “No, thanks. I’m good.”

  “I like those shades,” Chloe said. “Are they vintage?”

  And so I sat there on that lawn and told Chloe about GoGo. I was surprised at how easily the words tumbled out, like I had been waiting forever for someone to ask me about my grandmother. And Chloe, she listened. She didn’t interrupt me or break in to tell me about her grandmother or try to lay claim to my sadness by co-opting it with some sad story of her own.

  “Your GoGo sounds awesome,” Chloe said. “I was totally born into the wrong generation.”

  Chloe went on to tell me about her obsession with France, her adoration of Louise Brooks and Charlie Chaplin, her love of silent movies, her collection of vintage flapper dresses and costume jewelry. “If I could time-travel, I totally would,” she sighed.

  How long had it been since I’d talked with someone this way? Not just say words out loud to enjoy the sound of my own voice, not just pick the most convenient witty thing to say, but really talk, and listen back? It seemed like such a small thing, but I seriously couldn’t remember the last time it had happened. The stretch of time we found ourselves in, the swath of sunshine warming our hair and the backs of our necks, seemed almost criminal. It was hard to shake the itchy feeling that we were supposed to be somewhere, that we were under the watchful eye of some in-charge person who could admonish us or give us a test or arrest us or send us packing back to our parents at any moment. Our freedom felt foreign and exhilarating. There was Mason, dozing as the grass breezed against his face. There was Calvin, leaping off the swing and crouching to examine something on the ground. I glanced around at other Geek Campers crisscrossing the lawn: laughing, hurrying, phones pressed to their ears. They seemed remote from the four of us. Part of me envied them — they looked full of purpose, engaged in something we were missing, something I didn’t want to miss — but a greater part of me felt glad to be apart from them, and protective of this mission I found myself on with Chloe and Calvin and Mason. It was ours now, and it felt somehow too secret or sacred a thing to share.

  Calvin approached us so gently that I didn’t hear him. He knelt next to Chloe and me and opened his cupped hands. There, on his palm, was a blue butterfly. It seemed completely at home in his hands, in no hurry to fly away.

  “Look at that,” Chloe breathed. “Beautiful.”

  I asked Calvin what kind he thought it was, and he shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, “but it’s pretty incredible.”

  Yes, we agreed. It was.

  “HE DIDN’T give a reason, Mom,” Jessica gasped into the phone. She was pacing the floor of room 317 and her face was bloated with tears. When she picked up the TRUE LOVE picture frame and hurled it against the wall, I took my cue to leave and started backing out the door I’d just opened.

  “No, don’t go,” Jessica pleaded, enveloping me in a hug and pressing her teary face against my cheek. “Stay!”

  God. Talk about being held hostage. I surrendered to the bed and tried to absorb myself in one of Jessica’s magazines. For fifteen excruciating minutes, I was privy not only to the gory details of Jessica’s apparent breakup (“He sent me a text, Mom!”), but also to way more information than I’d ever want or need about the now-defunct romance (“I can’t ever get my virginity back, not ever!”). I guess it shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it completely blew my mind that (a) Jessica ostensibly had a bona fide active sex life; and (b) she would discuss it in detail — with this air of total nonchalance and collusion, no less! — with her mom. I silently thanked God that my father rarely dared to trespass in my room, much less the private recesses of my heart. I made a mental note to thank him.

  “Come and get me,” Jessica begged her mother. “Please just come and get me. I can’t stay here!”

  At this, I opened my eyes wide and, shaking my head, mouthed the word no. “Hang up, Jess!” I hissed. She trained her red-rimmed eyes on me and gave a flustered nod.

  “Okay,” she said into the phone. “Okay, call me when you get close.” She hung up and folded herself into a fetal position on the bed. The sobbing that ensued was awful. Jessica’s whole body was heaving, and she was having trouble catching her breath. I didn’t know what to do — I had never felt that way about a person, and I was weirdly, selfishly jealous at having never been there before. I didn’t know anything about the short guy in the demolished picture frame and I didn’t care to know, but whoever he was, Jessica loved him. Not just TRUE LOVE, either, but the real-deal kind of love that knocks your heart inside out. That much was obvious. I let Jessica downshift from full-on sobs to intermittent sniffles before I sat down next to her. I put a tentative hand on her shoulder.

  “Jess?”

  “Yeah?” Jessica gulped, wiping away snot with the back of her hand.

  “You need to call your mom back, right now, and tell her to turn around. You’re not going anywhere, okay?”

  “I can’t stay here.” Jessica cried, turning away from me and burying her head beneath a pillow. “I can’t!”

  I didn’t know what else to do, so I picked up our antiquated dorm-issue phone and punched in some numbers. “We’re having an emergency,” I announced. Thirty seconds later, Sonya appeared at the door.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Breakup. It’s bad.”

  “Oh, shit.” Sonya sighed. She crossed the room and stretched herself alongside Jessica’s crumpled form on the bed. “Girl, start talking.”

  With great effort, Jessica unfolded herself and told Sonya everything. All through the story, Sonya listened carefully and nodded. She rubbed Jessica’s back and was all support and comfort until Jessica came to the part about how her mom was currently en route to Morlan to pick her up. At that point, Sonya got up and started looking around the room.

  “Jessica, where’s your phone?”

  “What?” Jessica asked, totally out of it.

  “Gimme your phone a second. Is this it?” Sonya raised her eyebrows in inquiry, holding aloft a pink iPhone. Without waiting for an answer, she started scrolling around on the screen until she found what she was looking for. She looked over at me and mouthed the words It’s ringing.

  “Sonya, wait —” Jessica tried, failing.

  “Hello, Mrs. Dixon?” Sonya cooed brightly. Immediately I could see why this girl rocked the pageant circuit. She was a natural. “This is Sonya Henderson, Jessica’s friend?”

  At this point we could hear the frantic, high-pitched warble of Jessica’s mom’s voice through the line. You could just imagine her at the helm of some SUV, barreling down the Mountain Parkway in hot pursuit of her fragile daughter, totally jacked up on the adrenaline that comes with Being Needed. Jessica was buried once again beneath her fortress of throw pillows — I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying, but her shoulders were shaking — and I myself was doubled on the opposite bed with a hand clamped over my mouth, trying not to laugh my ass completely off.

  Sonya held the phone away from her ear and, rolling her eyes, made a quack-quack motion with her hand to let me know that Jessica’s mom wasn’t going to shut up anytime soon. “Jess,” she whisper-demanded, “what’s your mom’s name?”

  “Diane,” came the muffled response. Jessica was definitely laughing.

  “Diane,” Sonya said sweetly. “May I call you Diane? May I interrupt for just a second, Diane? Can I have your attention for just a minute?”

  It was too hilarious. My
eyes were watering from the effort of not laughing out loud. By the time Sonya switched from trying to prohibit Diane’s imminent arrival to lecturing on the ills of Helicopter Parenting (“There’ve been studies, Diane — I promise that you are not doing your daughter any favors!”), I had to leave the room and stumble to the bathroom so I wouldn’t pee in my pants. By the time I returned, Sonya was off the phone and the crisis appeared to have been averted. My friends were locked in a hug and Jessica managed a weak smile. “Thanks, girls,” she said.

  “That’s what we’re here for,” Sonya replied. “Next time, call me before you call your crazy-ass mama.”

  “So.” Jessica sniffed. “Gloria, how was your day?”

  As much as I wanted to, I was unable to tell Jessica and Sonya about my day. I mean, I didn’t lie; I just told them it was fine and changed the subject. First of all, it all felt too strange, like the students assigned to Secrets of the Written Word had fallen through the cracks or slipped through some loophole. The four of us had spent the entire three hours of the afternoon session trying to glean the whereabouts of X’s next clue, but we never found it. We hung out in the college’s official art museum (reasonably, Chloe had reasoned that there might be an urn in there) and scoured the library again, but we never got close, each of us sensing that we were way off the path. Were we failures? No, I don’t think so. We hadn’t found X, but we suddenly knew a lot about Plato, even more about John Keats (“Born on Halloween,” Mason informed us, grinning. “My kind of ghoul”), and we were starting to know a lot about one another.

  I felt weirdly protective of Chloe and Calvin, and even of the Mad Hatter himself. Carol says I do this all the time: I compartmentalize my friends, she says. An obnoxious habit, I know, but I can’t help it. I was already overthinking my new friendships, the part of myself that each of them hinged on. What if Sonya and Jessica thought Chloe was weird? (“That must mean you think Chloe is weird,” Carol would tell me, but of course I don’t think Chloe’s weird!) What if Chloe thought Sonya and Jessica were bitches? (“That must mean you think they’re bitches” — but I don’t!) And so on and so on in this ridiculous psycho loop. I swear, sometimes I wish my brain had an off switch. Already I was worrying about how my Geek Camp friends would or wouldn’t get along with my Real Life friends once I got home. Sonya and Carol? They would kill each other! It’s part of what freaks me out about the Vortex: Your school friends get all mixed up with your neighborhood friends or your friends from the swim team or your friends from last summer’s trip to the beach. It’s like I’m a little kid who gets all uptight if her macaroni touches her broccoli on the plate. Same thing exactly: I get uneasy when my friend-groups touch on the plate. Carol would tell me to stop worrying so much about everybody else and worry about my own bizarre self instead, but I can’t help it. It’s like all these people are just too . . . dear to me, or something. It’s ridiculous, how people become dear to me in, like, five minutes. But they do. They did.

  That night, after our room had gone dark and still, Jessica’s voice stirred me from sleep. “Glo?” she asked. “Are you awake?”

  “I am now.”

  “Oh, sorry,” she whispered. “Go back to sleep.”

  “No,” I said. “What is it?”

  Her face was turned toward the wall. “You know what’s weird?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I always thought it was stupid, that word heartbreak. I mean, it’s not like our hearts are made of pink construction paper and you can just rip them in half, right?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “But my heart,” Jessica continued, “it really, physically hurts me. It aches, just like heartache, just like that word I’ve always thought was dumb and didn’t make any sense.”

  “I believe you,” I said. And then, because it occurred to me I didn’t know, hadn’t even bothered to ask: “What’s his name?”

  “Brandon,” she answered, and the name made something in her voice fall apart.

  “Brandon,” I repeated. I thought about GoGo, how when she died I felt like my heart had hollowed out and abandoned me, and the hole it left behind was full of ache. I didn’t say that to Jessica, because this was her ache, not mine. This was a totally different thing. “Think of it this way,” I said, scanning the dark ceiling for wisdom. “The way you’re feeling right now really sucks. It’s going to suck for a while, so you should just go ahead and let it suck.”

  Jessica sniffed. “Yeah,” she said quietly.

  “But dude, you can’t let it suck for too long. Sooner or later, you’ve got to get up and be like, ‘Hey, man, you know what? I’ve loved somebody. I’ve been loved by somebody. Nobody can ever take it away from me, and it’s part of who I am now.’ You’ve just got to chalk it up to hard-earned experience and own it and keep going and hopefully love somebody else one day.”

  Jessica was quiet for a long time. “I don’t want to love anybody else,” she finally whispered.

  “I guess that’s fair,” I said. “For now, that’s fair.”

  My mind was still locked on to GoGo, how I had known her death was coming, how it had made me feel sick because I couldn’t stop it. I had dreaded it for so long, had worried for so long that I would just break away into pieces and die with her when she went, that when she did finally go, the feeling that came over me was this weird relief — a relief so huge and palpable that it shamed me. Wasn’t I supposed to be sad? Relief seemed the opposite of what I should be feeling, but I wasn’t relieved that she had died. I was relieved that the dreading was over, and — God, weird as it seems — I was relieved that I hadn’t died with her. The sun came up the next morning, and I was still alive, more alive than I had been before.

  “Jess?” I asked, tentative.

  “Yeah?”

  “Is part of you relieved?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “Stupid thing to say.”

  Jessica gave a long sigh. “I don’t know,” she answered. “I mean, I guess in a way I knew this was coming. He’s going to Wake Forest in the fall.”

  “So maybe better now than later?”

  “Who knows,” Jessica answered. “I’m exhausted. I’m exhausted and I cannot believe he has already changed his Facebook status to Single.”

  I rolled my eyes at the ceiling. “You don’t need his Single ass, Jess,” I said.

  “Thank you.” Jessica giggled. “That’s more like it. Goodnight, Glo.”

  “Goodnight.”

  Then, two seconds later, just as dreamworld started swirling in: “Glo?”

  “Mmm?”

  “How come you haven’t mentioned your mom?”

  Shit. Where did that come from? I mean, really. I don’t know what it is with people. A kid gets lost in a department store, and it’s all, Honey, where is your mother? Some celebrity is naked and covered with obscene tattoos and shooting up heroin and eating livestock onstage, and it’s Doesn’t that guy have a mother? So Jessica, out of clear blue nowhere, wanted to know about my mother. Unbelievable.

  “Well,” I said, “there’s not really anything to talk about. She left a long time ago.”

  “Oh,” Jessica said. She said it like she was apologizing. She shifted around, facing me now. “Do you miss her?”

  I thought about it for a second. There’s only one right answer to that question, after all, or at least there’s only one answer that people want to hear, but the truth is that sometimes the truth gets fuzzy. Loving my mother and missing her, I realized, were maybe two different things.

  “Have you ever seen one of those lightning ball things?” I asked. “You know, those balls where the lightning’s inside, and you can move your hands around on them and your hair gets all staticky and stands on end?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah. Well, okay. Close your eyes and imagine being inside one of those balls.”

  Jessica giggled. “Okay.”

  I squinched my eyes shut, too, because this was a hard thing to expl
ain, and I wanted to get it right the first time so I could get a lock on the subject from here on out. “Being inside a lightning ball is sort of what it feels like to be in a room with my mother. I mean, it’s gorgeous in there, right? Really exciting and colorful? Sure it is. But man, more than anything else it’s just really freaking dangerous.”

  When Jessica opened her eyes they were shining in the dark.

  “So yeah,” I said, trying to keep things upbeat. I didn’t want Jessica getting all upset on top of her own heartbreak. Isn’t that always the way, though? The facts of a person’s circumstances are usually way more upsetting to other people than they are to the person in question. When it’s your own life, you just keep going, you just do what you have to do, it’s just how things are, the way you have to roll. No matter what, there’s always somebody who has it about ten million times worse than you do. “Yeah, sometimes I miss her, but I don’t really miss life in the lightning ball, if that makes sense.”

  “That makes sense,” Jessica said.

  “Now, my grandmother? My grandmother GoGo?”

  “Yeah?” Jessica’s voice was drifty, sleep-tinged.

  “I miss GoGo all the time. Most minutes of the day, more or less.”

  Jessica was fast asleep. I stared at the ceiling until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer.

  I woke early the next morning to find Jessica’s bed unoccupied. A note was taped to the alarm clock: Gone for a run. C U at breakfast. J.

  Stirred by that familiar longing for magic, I felt compelled to check my campus mailbox before getting dressed or eating or doing anything else. I stuck Jessica’s note into the GBBoE, put on my glasses, yanked a hoodie over my pajamas, and took off barefoot across the courtyard. Everything was quiet: grass still silvered with dew, birds making break-of-dawn racket in the trees. For that moment, the morning was all mine, hushed and lush and sparkling. It wasn’t lost on me, is what I’m saying. That crazy John Keats had gotten all up in my head, and suddenly the world looked different.