Breakfast Served Anytime (11 page)

I smiled. It felt like the truest thing I’d ever heard. “Sonya Henderson, you’re my hero.”

“You’re my hero, too,” came Jessica’s voice from the seat in front of us, where she had stretched herself out for a nap. “Hey, do you have any gum?”

The bus rumbled on and I pressed my head to the window, watching the farms lilt past, one green swoop and then another, a ribbon of white fences tying them together. Horses grazed and idled, and there were foals too: these tiny baby horses, all wobbly and adorable on their spindly legs, hovering close to their moms and swishing their tails in mom-baby unison. Good God, Brayden had asked a ton of questions. She was a lot like Scout Finch that way. Let me tell you some things I’ve learned about the Scout Finches of this world. First of all, they show up when you least expect them to. Then, when you least expect it, they go and break your heart into about a million pieces. The other thing — and this is seriously, truly true — is that I’ve got some kind of built-in
radar
for the Scout Finches. I can spot them from a mile away.

“OKAY, SO. So what we’re going to do is this. We’re going to write our own paragraphs in the style of Fitzgerald. The idea is to ask yourselves, what makes a sentence Fitzgerald-esque? And then write a paragraph or two on your own. Got it?” X regarded the four of us through his wire rims and grinned.

I blinked. Like my friends, I was still trying to reconcile my preconceived notion of X with the actual person now standing before us. In our minds each one of us had conjured a different image of X, but they were all pretty much variations on a theme. The theme, it turned out, was the exact opposite of the reality. I had imagined X as a dark, dangerous envelope-pusher — maybe even a masked vigilante in a cape — not some earnest, mild-mannered new dad who was allergic to ragweed and had spit-up all over the shoulder of a T-shirt bearing the words
I WENT TO THE MOUNTAINS BUT THEY WEREN
’
T THERE
.

I got the sense that X could sort of sense our disappointment.

“Why aren’t your pencils moving? Time’s a-wasting, people.”

This new enthusiastic X was quite a departure from the Stoner X of yon; if he was high on anything today, it was sheer
Gatsby
. I was having trouble tuning in, though. The air conditioner in the classroom building was broken, and my thighs were sticking to my seat. The seat was the kind that’s actually built into the desk, the better to make you feel like a prisoner stuck in some kind of elaborate torture device.

Calvin raised his hand. “Sir, could you give us an example?”

X deflated visibly. “Calvin, please call me Wesley. And yes, uh, let me see. Okay, here’s an example of what I mean by a truly Fitzgerald-esque sentence.” He paged through his book and rose from his perch on the desk when he found what he was looking for. “
‘A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his head while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor.’
Now. Isn’t that something?” X grinned at us again, urging us to love it with abandon. I wanted to rise to the occasion, I did, but man, it was so unbelievably hot.

“What the hell is a wash-stand?” Chloe wanted to know.

“So do you want us to just use three syllables when one is plenty or what?” Mason asked. “Because that’s what it sounds like.”

“Excuse me, sir?” Calvin said, raising his hand again as he spoke.

I raised my hand, too. “Can I go to the water fountain?”

“Me too,” Chloe added. “I feel major dehydration coming on.”

X regarded us in silence with an expression that could have been disappointment but might have been remorse. Remorse tinged with anger, laced with exasperation and weariness? The morning was not off to a good start. X took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes in slow, deliberate circles. “Let’s start over,” he said, taking a breath. “Let’s try this again.
The Great Gatsby,
also known as one of the all-time Great American Novels. A piece of immortal literature written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Raise your hand if” — and here he paused to loop his spectacles back around his ears, but his voice remained steady and calm — “raise your hand if you give one single solitary shit about
The Great Gatsby
.”

The word hung there in the air:
shit
. The silence that followed buzzed around in my ears. I looked over at Calvin, whose hand shot ramrod straight into the air, and at Mason, who, by way of reply, crossed his legs on top of his desk. Chloe leaned back in her chair, narrowed her eyes to green slits, and smoked her pencil.

“Calvin, get your hand out of the air,” X said. “One of the advantages of being seventeen years old and almost eligible to vote is that you don’t have to wave your hand around every time you wish to speak.”

“Sir, I thought you asked us to —”

“I know what I asked, and I got my answer,” X said. “From here on out, there’s not going to be anymore hand raising in here, and that’s not because I’m trying to
ingratiate
myself with you, but because there are exactly five of us in this room, and it seems reasonable that we should be able to carry on a thoughtful dialogue in a halfway-natural sort of fashion.”

Chloe raised her hand. X closed his eyes for a second, and I thought he might get mad, but his voice stayed soft, patient. “Yes, Chloe?”

“So if you don’t want to ingratiate yourself with us, why’d you say shit? Wasn’t the idea there to, you know, bring yourself down to our level? So we can all be best pals?”

“Excuse me, sir, I just want to say that I —” Calvin broke in.

“Calvin. Dude. I’m talking, okay?” Chloe slid her gaze from Calvin to X. “Because I know all about teachers who want to be your best pal, and I was kind of hoping you’d be more interesting than that, X. Scuse me: X, Wesley, Weston, Dr. Xavier, whatever. How about you just pick a name and go with it?” Chloe paused to extract some bits of pencil eraser from her tongue. “I do, by the way.”

X looked around, apparently unsure as to whether or not this last part was directed at him. “You do what?”

“I do give a shit about
The Great Gatsby,
” Chloe answered. “I give a very big shit, as a matter of fact. I just don’t want you or anyone else to ruin it for me, that’s all.”

X scratched his elbow and examined the floor. He cleared his throat. “Calvin, did you have a question?”

Calvin looked up in alarm. “I’m sorry, sir. I forgot what I was going to say.”

X nodded morosely. “That happens, that happens. What about you, Mason? Gloria? Does either of you have anything to add to Chloe’s commentary?”

I didn’t like the direction this was going, but I felt compelled to say something. I started to raise my hand but then remembered and stuck it back down in my lap. “Well, X — I’m just going to call you X, if that’s okay — I just want to say that we had a really great time finding you. You know, the clues and the hunt and all that.” I looked at Chloe for confirmation, and she allowed an almost imperceptible nod. Mason lowered his legs and leaned forward on his elbows, listening. “And I’d say that all that stuff you made us read — the Plato and Keats and whatnot — was really good stuff, that we all really, you know, learned something from it.” As my voice left my mouth I realized how ineffectual and stupid it sounded. The words were coming out the wrong way. I wasn’t saying what I wanted to say at all.

“Well, Gloria always prefers the chase to the catch, so you’ll have to take what she’s saying with a grain of salt,” Mason added, winking at me in his infuriating way, “but what I think she’s trying to say, what I think all of us are trying to say, is that this” — Mason indicated the stifling classroom with a flap of his hand — “really sucks in comparison to chasing down Keats by way of a nice greasy meal at the Egg Drop Café. In other words, bro, you had us, and now you’re losing us.”

X took this in and gave another solemn nod. Then he broke into a low, private laugh and he bowed his head, shaking it slowly back and forth. “Look,” he said. “Look. We have four weeks together, and one of them is almost gone. Let’s be honest: I’m not going to change your lives in four weeks. I mean, what can I teach you that you don’t already know, right? You know everything worth knowing, right?”

We stared at him and waited. Outside, the cicadas were keening their anxious maraca-rattle in the trees. Somewhere a sprinkler spun its noisy, choppy circle across the lawn. Summer sounds. Ordinary sounds you’re tempted not to notice until they’re gone in the fall and all of a sudden you not only miss them but long for them.

“The truth is, though . . .” X carried on, rubbing at his beard, “the truth is that I think there’re all kinds of things you need to learn, stuff that I can teach you if you’ll let me. There’s a million things I want to say, a million teachable things, but for now I’ll give you just one and then we’ll get out of here. We’ll take this class outside and start over. Does that sound workable? Does that sound like a plan?”

“Yes,” Calvin answered for all of us. “Good plan.”

“Okay,” X nodded. “Here’s today’s one teachable thing. The thing is this. It’s no secret that the purpose of the Commonwealth Summer Program is to lure all of you people into staying in your home state. Not just for college, but for what comes after. Families, jobs, lives. Whatever comes next.” X took a breath and eyed each of us in turn. “It’s also no secret — I can tell just by looking at each of you, and I can tell because it’s a thing I
recognize
— that you can’t wait to get out of here. Am I right?”

I looked around. “You mean out of this room?”

“I mean out of this state. This great commonwealth of ours. You can’t wait to get out. Right?”

Nobody said anything, so X railed on. “Listen. It might have been half my life ago, but it wasn’t that long ago that I was sitting where you are, counting the minutes until I could pack up my van, haul ass out of Kentucky, move to Oregon, and never look back.”

The second hand on the big classroom clock lurched forward, a mighty effort. Who hasn’t been driven to insanity by the mocking face of an industrial classroom clock? Every single one I’ve ever gazed upon has operated at the infuriating speed of molten lava.
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,
says J. Alfred Prufrock. Yeah, well. I’ve measured out my life through the molten-lava ticks of classroom clocks.

“So did you go?” Chloe asked. “To Oregon?”

“I did go,” X answered. “Four unparalleled years of collegiate bliss for which I am still in considerable debt.”

Mason shifted in his seat. “And?”

“And eventually I came back,” X answered. “Here I am.”

“Why’d you come back?” I asked.

“Graduate school,” X replied. “Because that was the plan, right? Go to school as long as humanly possible. Go to school forever and ever and never grow up. Peter effing Pan, people.”

I swear, the second hand got louder.
Thwack. Thwack.
X was on a roll. The color was high in his cheeks, and he was clearly hitting his stride. “The other thing is this, so listen closely. Listen up. There was a time when I thought I was so brilliant that I couldn’t stand the idiotic, waste-of-time conversation of anybody who was less than absolutely brilliant. My friends and I, we sat around writing our brilliant dissertations, and when we weren’t holed up somewhere being brilliant, we were enthralling each other with the sound of our own brilliant voices.”

X’s brilliant voice was getting boring. I cleared my throat a little to give him a hint.

“Anyway. Anyway, do you know where my dissertation is now?”

We waited. Chloe tapped her pencil on the desk in a tattoo of ennui.

“It’s stashed up in some dusty fifth-floor archive room in the library of the University of Nowheresville, Kentucky, never to be given a shit about again by me or anyone else, just sitting up there rotting and maybe having brilliant conversations with the other hundreds of brilliant dissertations.”

“So what’s the moral of this story?” Mason asked, impatient. “I don’t think I follow.”

“The moral of the story? The moral of the
story
is that once upon a time I wanted the whole world from everyone I met — sun moon stars, give me the whole thing, I want it now, I want it in perfect MLA style. And now?
Now
I know that the best you can ask of people is that they just — I don’t know — that they just show
up,
do their part, treat people nicely, pay their taxes. Contribute something halfway decent to society. I’m not necessarily talking about contributing a dissertation, either. I’m talking about pulling your own weight and figuring out what it is you love and then doing it. Not just talking about it or waiting for someone else to do it for you, but actually honest-to-God doing the thing you’re meant to do.”

I had a feeling that what X was saying had nothing to do with us, or the Secrets of the Written Word, or Geek Camp in general, or anything in that horrible, volcanically hot classroom. I chewed the inside of my cheek, thinking it over. I wished Carol were there to filter through all the soul-searching and help me decipher X’s point.

“So what’s your point?” I asked, before I could stop myself.