Breakfast Served Anytime (24 page)

“Also,” I managed to say, “also I love this book because it was my grandmother’s favorite, and she read it to me out loud when I was younger” — here I thought for sure the tears were going to give up and spill; I wanted so badly to just finish what I had to say, to get it right just this once — “and to me it’s
her,
it’s her voice. I guess what I’m trying to say is that sometimes you can love a book not so much because of what it’s about or what happens in it, but because it belongs to a certain time or person in your life — like you’ll always remember where you were when you read it for the first time, or who gave it to you, or what season it was, or who you were before you read it and how you were different when it was over.”

I swallowed. So far the tears had stayed put.

“I don’t know if that makes any sense, but that’s it. That’s why I love this book.”

“That, and Boo Radley.”

At the sound of Mason’s voice my eyes flicked up and met his for the first and only time since I’d been standing there, shaking in my boots.

“Yeah,” I said. “And Boo Radley.”

The lights were still doing their weird disco-flicker.

X started to clap. He rose from his seat, still clapping, and stood before us.

“Bravo, yall. Give yourselves a round of applause. This has been a great class.”

We looked at each other nervously. It felt too ridiculous to clap along with X, and it was our duty to sort of look at one another and then at him like,
Yeah, how lame is that, how big of a dork is he,
but the truth is that we knew, each of us, that our summer together could have been a lot worse, and that maybe it had even been wonderful, and that we weren’t in any huge hurry for it to come to an end.

I sat in the very last seat on the bus. Jessica and Sonya sat in front of me, practicing their heartbreaking song for the talent show that night. It was even more heartbreaking in the rain, which was still pouring down by the bucketful. In the gloom the lush lawns of the horse farms really did look sort of blue.
Oh, my gorgeous Bluegrass State
, I thought.
Where have you been all my life?
Bluegrass State: We had learned the nickname in elementary school, along with Cardinal, Coffee Tree, and “My Old Kentucky Home.” We had learned to find our state on the map, and ever since then — even now — any time I look at any map of the United States, my eyes go straight to our little race-car–shaped state, right at the place where the country’s heart would be if it placed its hand across its chest to say the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s weird, the bizarre thoughts that go through your head when you’re riding in the back of a school bus in the rain. I was getting carried away. No doubt the eyes of people from Colorado go straight to that clean rectangle, to that perfect right-angle crossroads with its postage-stamp neighbors; Oklahomans’ eyes go straight to their tipped-over foam finger (Go, Sooners!), pointing thataway. You learn to see things a certain way and it’s hard to change your perspective, is what I’m saying.

“Glo, are you awake?” Jessica hung over the back of her seat. “How’d we sound?”

I tried to pull myself out of my daze. “Yall sound awesome.”

Jessica hovered there for a second, assessing my mood. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m good.”

She reached out and picked up a strand of my hair. “Are you going to let us fix you up tonight?”

I smiled. I’d never have admitted it, but I was going to miss our Makeover Nights. “Okay. But I don’t want all that black stuff on my eyes.”

Jessica twirled my hair around her finger and grinned. “Your Mad Hatter won’t know what hit him.”

Brayden was the first kid to meet us at the door of the three-year-old room. She had on a fire helmet and was carrying a makeshift hose.

“Miss Gloria!”

I’d been hoping she would remember me, and when she did I couldn’t help it: I opened my arms and gave her a hug, the biggest I could manage.

“Are you going to read to us today?”

I exchanged a glance with Sonya, who tipped a book into my hand.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s my turn to read.”

I didn’t expect them to listen, but they did. As I read from this book about a fireman and his dog, the kids all just looked up at me, hanging on my words, like,
Man, it just doesn’t get any better than this
. There were maybe seven or eight of them, and I tried hard to look at all of their faces, to match their faces with their names so that I’d remember them. Somebody had dropped each one of them off that morning — they’d come into this room straight out of the facts of their own lives — and somebody would pick them up at the end of the day. Sometimes they played with clay and sometimes they got to swing on the swings and on some days, days like this one, new people — foreign ambassadors from the Big World Out There! — would show up out of the blue and read books about firefighters or police dogs or caterpillars or princesses or whatever. They wouldn’t remember a lot of it, but some of it,
some of it
— the way the room smelled, say, or the fire drill they would have in an hour — would stay with them all their lives.

After the End-of-Geek-Camp banquet (we all got dressed up; there was frighteningly overdone roast beef and a sheet cake the size of a car), everybody filed into the auditorium for the talent show. I hadn’t seen Mason anywhere and I was starting to worry that he had changed his mind.

“You look really pretty,” Chloe said. “I like the hair!”

I put a hand to my head, which Jessica and Sonya had worked on for an hour. They had ironed my hair into a long ponytail with braids wrapped around the top. I felt very Greek Goddess-y, very Grey-Eyed-Athena-y, in my talent show getup.

“Thanks,” I said. “So do you.”

Chloe and Jimena both had flowers in their hair; Jimena reached up and took one from her own loose bun. “Here,” she said, fitting it into the side of my ponytail. “Now you’re perfect.”

“Wait,” Chloe said. “One more thing.” She reached into her bag and came up with a jack-o’-lantern Pez dispenser. “Everybody needs Pez for luck.”

Jimena and Chloe and I chewed our candy and hugged one another. Just as the house lights were dimming (there is nothing like the hush and thrill of a darkening theater, nothing in this world) and Tweed was approaching his old friend the Podium, Calvin and his dancer friend — her name was Hayley, Chloe whispered to me with no small amount of glee — came in, closely followed by X and then Xiu Li, who waved wildly when she caught sight of Chloe and me. Together, we all slid into a row near the front. I kept the seat to my left — the one on the aisle — empty and prayed that Mason would show up. Chloe was on my right; she squeezed my hand as Tweed tapped on the microphone.

“Can yall hear me in the back?”

A paper airplane came sailing across everybody’s heads and landed gently at Tweed’s feet. I craned around and there was Mason, draped across two seats in the back row. I tried to shoot him a death-glare, but all I had for him was a huge, relieved, involuntary smile. I mouthed
Get down here!
and beckoned furiously.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Tweed continued. He cleared his throat, straightened his back, and launched into what was apparently some sort of prepared speech.

“Abraham Lincoln,” he said.

Dramatic pause.

“Muhammad Ali.”

Another weighty pause.

“Henry Clay. Simon Kenton. George Clooney. Diane Sawyer. Johnny Depp and his inimitable muse, Mr. Hunter S. Thompson.”

Chloe and I slid a glance at each other. We’d heard this roll call before. Yes, it was nice that all these cool people were from Kentucky, but the things they have in common —

“What do all these folks have in common?” Tweed asked, all puffed up with civic and academic pride.

— the things they have in
common
are (a) they’re famous, which is fantastic and all, as long as you’re willing to buy into the notion that to be a worthwhile person you must also be a
famous
person; and (b) hello, they no longer live in Kentucky and probably couldn’t wait to bail in the first place; and (c) there are interesting people from everywhere. Every state has its own freaking impressive-native roll call. Come on, people.

“They’re all native Kentuckians,” Tweed concluded, in case he thought we’d been lobotomized. “They’re all ambassadors of our own Bluegrass State. They’ve all done our state proud and have paved the way for each of
you
” — Tweed indicated all 120 of us with a grand sweep of his arm — “to do great things yourselves. As graduating members of the Commonwealth Summer Program for Gifted and Talented Students, each of you has earned not only the promise of success, but also a full scholarship to Kentucky’s own flagship university — in our eyes, that’s testament to our investment in your bright future. We hope you’ll stick around to keep making your state great. It’s up to you whether or not you choose to become the next Robert Penn Warren.”

Dramatic pause.

“The next Gus Van Sant.”

Mason slid into the seat next to me and squeezed my knee.

Tweed was just settling into his next Dramatic Pause when Mason cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted up at him, “Don’t forget Richard Hell!”

“Right
on,
” Chloe said. She reached across me and gave Mason a high-five.

“Tom Cruise went to high school with my uncle!” someone shouted from the back.

“Ashley Judd!” somebody else screamed.

“That hot chick from
Dexter
!” came another voice, and somebody whistled in agreement.

“Michael Shannon!”

“My papaw!”

“Calvin’s mom!” I hollered, and Calvin touched his forehead at me in salute.

The room had turned into a chorus of people calling out names and laughing. Apparently half of all Geek Campers had at one point gone to school with, ridden in a car alongside, or encountered at the gas station the one and only Jennifer Lawrence. Tweed held up his hands in an effort to corral the chaos.

“All right, all right, proud Kentuckians. Thank you for a great summer. Now, without further ado, I’m pleased to introduce our first talented talent show participants, Sonya Henderson and Jessica Dixon.”

To the accompaniment of wild applause, Sonya and Jess took the stage. It was the first time I had ever seen Sonya look nervous, and her nervousness made her look even more beautiful than usual. Jessica spotted me in the audience and waved. I waved back and clapped as hard as I could, and I couldn’t stop smiling, so much smiling that my face ached and my eyes got all swimmy. God, Geek Camp had turned me into such a
crier
. My friends sang their beautiful, sad song and didn’t miss a note. When they clasped hands and took a shared bow, everybody roared. I was so proud of them I thought my heart would burst from my chest. Never, not ever in a million years, would I have guessed myself to be the sort of person who would get all emotionally turned upside down by a high-school talent show, but there it was.

“How’d we do?” Jess asked breathlessly. She and Sonya fell into two seats in the row in front of us. I reached over and hugged Jess — she had taught me the art of hugging, after all — and told her that she was wonderful, that I was going to miss her, that so many people had said my hair looked pretty. She slid her eyes in Mason’s direction and raised her eyebrows in approval. I shushed her and sank back into my seat as the lights dimmed for the next act.

The boy who made his quiet way to center stage was someone I recognized from my own school — a small kid, nimble, part of the math and science magnet program, which is basically no-man’s-land if you’re part of the Performing Arts School. His name was Darren something. I didn’t really know him from school and had hardly seen him at all around Geek Camp. All over again I felt that grasping sense of loss, like I had spent four precious weeks with my head in the sand. I felt a sudden fierce devotion to every single Geek Camper in the room; I wanted to start over at the beginning and have at least one meaningful conversation with each of them.

Darren something, it turns out, knew how to robot like you wouldn’t believe. Before our eyes, his body morphed into something mesmerizing and impossible. Everybody went wild, rising to their feet and screaming with appreciation. Then Darren swung his arms together, clapping a strong and steady beat. When he had the whole audience in his thrall, clapping along with him, he started rapping. This tiny little math-and-science white kid, killing the shit out of this rap he had obviously made up right there on the spot:

After that I couldn’t even hear what Darren was riffing, the applause was so uproarious. I had visions of George Clooney actually running for president and taking Darren Something along on the campaign trail. Darren was going to be a tough act to follow, and Mason and I were next.

“Nervous?” Mason asked.

I nodded.

“Good,” he said, and took my hand. “I’d be nervous if you weren’t nervous.”

I closed my eyes for just a second to enjoy the feeling of having my hand in Mason’s hand. It occurred to me that I was way past pretending that it wasn’t my new favorite feeling in the world.

Chloe nudged me with her elbow.

“Finally,”
she whispered.

Finally.

The lights dimmed as Darren disappeared into the wings.

Mason rose from his seat and, heart pounding, I followed him. In the half-dark, as the chatter of our friends settled down around us, we walked together until we reached the stage. Mason pushed himself up and pulled me up after him.

There we were, in our pool of light.

“‘What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?’”