Breakfast Served Anytime (2 page)

“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:

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 around 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.

By the time we reached the door I was in full-on Deer-in-Headlights mode, which my dad was smart enough to recognize as his cue to please let me take it from here. He gave me a sideways hug and planted a prepaid calling card in my palm. “Use the landline in your room,” he told me. “And Gloria, honey”— and this next part I said along with him, because dude, it is his
refrain
;
I can count on it at least once if not six times a day —“remember to use your head.” He kissed my forehead as a reminder, like,
This is your head, Gloria, so use it,
and headed back down the stairs.

There are lots of advantages to being raised by a single father, and one of them is this: Fathers don’t fool around when it comes to saying goodbye. They might look at you all swimmy-eyed and give you a sideways hug that promises they’ll be back, but man, they have the good sense to know when it’s time to
go
.

In addition to some pretty horrific fluorescent lighting, room 317 featured two beds, one of which had already been made up to within an inch of its life with an immaculate white comforter and a small mountain of throw pillows that appeared to have been arranged by a thirty-something design professional. I backed out of the room and checked the number on the door to make sure I hadn’t accidentally barged into the headquarters of the dreaded resident adviser Jenny, a way-too-eager Geek Camp alumna and current Morlan student who for the past month had been cluttering my in-box with completely useless “useful tips and reminders.” Nope: 317. Home sweet home. I plugged in GoGo’s lamp, tossed my bag on the unoccupied mattress, and took advantage of the chance to gawk at my roommate’s stuff while she was out of the room.

On a shelf above her desk there were all these picture frames of the inane variety that I’ve been known to ridicule on principle, but which now actually helped me figure out what was what. The biggest one featured a photo of my roommate (JESSICA, I presumed, from the letters written in puffy ink across the bottom of the frame) shaking hands with — no lie — Sarah Palin. JESSICA had on a tidy little suit and possessed the most dazzling set of white teeth I’d ever seen. A carbon copy of the same killer smile lit up other frames that provided me with photographic evidence of SISTERS (Jessica was apparently one of three), TRUE LOVE (Jessica was taller than her boyfriend), and BEST FRIENDS (Jessica and her cronies all wore the exact same ginormous sunglasses). My fingers actually twitched with the frantic desire to text Carol:
I am living with Barbie! Get me out of here!

I was just starting to get self-conscious, to wish I had brought along something decent to wear or at least more of my personal library so I’d have something on my shelf to convey to the world who I was, when the actual flesh-and-blood JESSICA flounced into the room. She was on the phone, talking so fast I could hardly catch what she was saying.

“I know, right? She is literally right down the hall from me and I am not kidding he just dropped her off and he kissed her on the mouth in front of like fifty people oh my
God
. Wait hold on a sec.”

My new roommate beamed and enveloped me in a hug that would suggest we had known each other for years. I’m usually not a fan of spontaneous and extraneous physical contact, but I was sort of moved by how the hug came so naturally to this girl, like affection itself was a language and she spoke it with easy, graceful fluency.

“Hi!” Jessica gushed. She was doing this intense stage whisper, presumably out of deference to the person on the phone. “I’m Jessica. Poli-sci. Kevin Donnelly is literally right down the hall this very second and I seriously come up to like
here
on him. It’s insane! That’s his girlfriend down the hall and she is so super sweet and they’ve basically been dating since birth and you are going to love her. Wait, hold on.”

Then, back into the phone: “What? No. I was talking to my roommate. Wait. I’m sorry, what’s your name again?”

I had looked away, trying to remember who Kevin Donnelly was, to concentrate on the bell his name was ringing. It took me a second to realize that the shift back to the stage whisper meant that Jessica was once again addressing me.