Breakfast Served Anytime (14 page)

“That’s not what I’m saying!” But it was, I realized. It was exactly what I was saying. It was awful. Already I was wishing I could erase the words and start over. That I could fling myself out of the Mystery Machine and hitchhike back to Morlan ASAP.

“Don’t you want to know what
I
like about acting?” Mason asked. He was looking at me through the eye of the camera, adjusting the frame.

“I can’t wait to hear.” This time I stared at the camera head-on.

“I like how you get to get up inside a character’s head. You know, learn how people think and operate.”
Click
. “It makes you see people in a different way.”
Click
. “Makes you see the world in a different way.”

I rolled my eyes, more out of habit than anything else. I was starting to realize that I had almost as many obnoxious habits as Mason. He was my evil doppelgänger: that’s exactly what he was. “That’s a gorgeous sentiment, really, but it’s not going to change my mind. I’ve officially, as of this moment, broken up with the stage.”

“Ah. The better to spend time with your boyfriend, right?”
Click
.

“Who said anything about a boyfr —” I started, but at that moment I felt something warm seeping through my shorts. “Holyfield!” I screamed. “Oh my God, X, your dog just
peed
on me!”

Holyfield woke up, Calvin woke up, Chloe woke up, X veered the bus onto the shoulder. There was general chaos and racket, and Mason Atkinson, as you might have guessed, was laughing like it was just the funniest thing that had ever happened, ever in the world. Despite all of this horror, or perhaps because of it, there was a split second as we disembarked the Mystery Machine when it struck me that this was it: the exact kind of kooky family tableau I had always longed to find myself in. Finally, finally, I knew what it felt like to be surrounded by siblings on that madcap adventure that is the Proverbial Family Road Trip. If I hadn’t been soaked with dog pee, I might’ve actually cried.

“He hardly ever has accidents anymore, I swear!” X protested. “Gloria, I am so sorry. What can I do?”

“Everybody back up,” Chloe ordered, and she drew a wad of Egg Drop napkins out of her bag. “See how important it is to be prepared?” She climbed into the bus and mopped up the pee. Then she dug back into her bag and produced some hand sanitizer, which she applied to a fresh napkin and swiped across the seat. On her third and final rummage into her seemingly bottomless bag, she came up with a tiny black skirt, the kind of thing I’d never wear in this or any other lifetime. “Here, put this on.” She tossed the skirt to me and hopped out of the bus. I just stood there, looking around like an idiot. Holyfield cowered at my feet, cocking his head in apology. It was impossible to be mad at him.

“It’s okay, buddy,” I said, kneeling to scratch behind his ears. “Just don’t do it again.”

“Get in there and get dressed,” Chloe bossed. “We’ll wait out here. Just hurry
up,
dude. I’m sweltering.”

I had no choice but to climb back inside the Mystery Machine and change into Chloe’s skirt. Just to make triple-quadruple sure nobody could see me, I kind of crouched down onto the floor. Their voices were bouncing around out there: Calvin couldn’t believe he had fallen asleep, Mason was playing with Holyfield, Chloe and X were discussing the navigational details of the next leg of our trip eastward. Although clearly it was the end of the world, they appeared to have already forgotten about my pee-stained self. I tried to calm myself down, to put it into perspective. I could hear my dad’s voice in my head:
Relax, Gloria. Use your head. Try not to make a huge deal out of everything
.
Resist the urge to make a scene
.
Resolve to enjoy your life
.
Don’t get into a swivet
. It was the same string of mantras he’d been preaching at me since birth. I’ve got them recorded in my head for easy access when I can feel myself getting histrionic, when I can feel myself edging into a swivet.
Swivet
: I spent most of my childhood thinking my dad had made that word up. When in ninth grade I encountered it in a book somewhere, I felt all bereft to discover it belonged not just to me but to the world in general. What a buzzkill! Story of my life.

Anyway Chloe’s skirt, made for someone Chloe’s size, looked ridiculous on me. But it was better than wearing pee, so I tried to shift into Positive Mode as I banged my way out of the bus. “Hey X, did you bring any snacks or anything?”

“What are you, five?” Mason asked. “A snack. Come
on
.”

“I have snacks!” Chloe beamed. As we shifted back onto the bus she divvied out the fortune cookies.

“Are we ready?” X asked. “Do we have everybody?” He had this exhausted look on his face, like maybe he was regretting the whole field trip idea.

“Ready,” Calvin answered. “I am officially ready to board a helicopter. Let’s go.”

My fortune was awesome:
You find beauty in ordinary things
.

“I got yours, butterfly man,” I told Calvin. “Let’s trade.”

A friend is a present you give yourself.
Also not bad.

“What’d you get?” I asked Mason over my shoulder.

“That’s for me to know and you not to know,” came the response. “Worry about your own fortune, Gloria Bishop, and I’ll worry about mine.”

I turned around to shoot Mason a look, and he got me:
Click
. Girl with Fortune, Rolling Eyes.

Perry County, Kentucky, is made of nothing but hills. It’s a gorgeous place, the stuff of myth and legend, I’m not kidding. We stopped at a single-pump gas station, and the voice of the guy at the counter was almost hard to decipher, it came out sounding so much more like music than words. We rounded up some Ale-8s, and Link — that was the gas station guy’s name — pointed the way, “up yonder a piece, just follow the roadblocks.”

And that’s what it was like, when you saw it from the ground: a huge, elaborate construction site, only after a while your eyes get used to what they’re seeing and you start to piece together that this isn’t just the beginning of a coming-soon new strip mall. It’s a big cavernous mess where something
millions of years old
used to be, is what it is. Not something you can really put into perspective.

A helicopter and waving pilot stood waiting for us. Walking across the packed dirt and rock felt like walking across graves in a cemetery, or walking on the surface of the moon; that’s how weird it is to trudge across a mountain when there’s no freaking mountain where the mountain should be. We would have to take turns in the helicopter, so I grabbed Calvin’s hand and climbed in before he could change his mind. With his free hand, Calvin waved to X and Mason and Chloe, who, holding Holyfield in her arms, lifted his little paw in a return wave. It was much louder in the helicopter than I imagined it would be, so instead of trying to talk to Calvin, I just squeezed his hand and smiled. He squeezed back, smiled back, and then we were off: tilting and floating away from the ground, that wonderful thrill of flight filling up my lungs.

I closed my eyes and imagined myself held in one of those dreams I have sometimes — my very favorite dreams, where I spread my arms out like wings and fly above the rooftops and bridges of my starlit town. As we hovered above the site, the pilot started talking — he was pointing and telling us something we should’ve been listening to — but Calvin and I, our palms pressed together in a sweaty grip, our heads craned to see out opposite windows, our ears too full of noise to hear the pilot anyway, were already gone, spellbound. Together we looked down, and I don’t know how to describe it, I don’t know how to say what I saw, only that it looked
wrong.
It was the definition of wrong, is what it was. For some reason my mind spun back to being six years old, losing a tooth, pressing my tongue to the salty absence in my mouth and marveling that a piece of my body that once-upon-a-time had been there — a fact of me — was suddenly and wholly gone.

The long ride back to Morlan was quiet. Mason took up the role of navigator and Chloe dozed in the way-back. The sun was sinking low in a great wistful swirl of impossible colors, brilliant colors you just can’t make up or buy, when Calvin nudged my arm and whispered, “Did you see that farm back there? The one we just passed?”

“Where?” I asked, looking back. “I missed it. Horses?”

“Nope,” Calvin said, shaking his head slowly. “A
farm
-farm. Cows. Vegetables. Tobacco, too, used to be.” Calvin lowered his eyes and then closed them for a second. When he opened them again I caught something there — a peaceful sort of sorrow that made what X had said seem true: Calvin did seem older and wiser than his newly acquired seventeen years. An Old Soul: That’s what GoGo would’ve called Calvin Little. She had this special radar for Old Souls.

“That’s my family’s farm,” Calvin said. “I guess you could also say it’s my future.”

Carol’s letter made me feel sort of ill. All along I’d been counting the days until we could move away and start our adventurous artistic lives together, but my shifting attitude toward acting was new — I wasn’t used to it and didn’t know what to do with it. I hadn’t yet revealed to Carol that I was growing nauseated by the whole theater business, and somehow the not-telling her, even though I hadn’t fully figured it out, felt like a betrayal.

I tried to pinpoint in my mind the exact moment when I decided to bail on the one thing I’ve ever been halfway good at. Was it when the Mad Hatter appeared beneath my dorm window in all his theatrical glory? Maybe. Maybe it was that moment in the Mystery Machine when Mason and I had a little chat about
All’s Well That Ends Well
. Or maybe the moment happened months before that, when GoGo died. She was the one who had taken me to plays, even from the time I was little. We’d go to Actors Theatre and afterward have grown-up espressos in the brick-walled basement bar, and the whole thing would be magic from beginning to end. GoGo volunteered at the theater and was close personal friends with the actors — she’d sometimes even have them over for Sunday or holiday dinners, the ones who were broke (they were all broke; it was part of their mysterious, tragic allure, as far as I was concerned) and far away from their families. So if it was anybody’s fault that I had fallen headlong in love with the stage, it was GoGo’s. She was the one who encouraged me, said I was a natural, said I should “honor my gift.”

Gift. That’s hilarious! I’m not gifted at all. I’m just an ordinary girl who once-upon-a-time loved to go to plays with her gifted grandmother. A girl who loved to take the stage and bow before her gifted, proud grandmother when the curtain came down. After the gifted, proud grandmother was gone, none of it was the same. It wasn’t the same at all.

Anyway! God. Who knows when the moment happened? All I know is that I had officially instituted an all-new, no-drama policy that I swore would extend to every area of my life. It lasted about four minutes.

“I am done talking about this! Good night!” Jessica stormed through the door and slammed it behind her. “Hi, Glo.”

Sonya breezed in a couple of seconds later, and folded her arms across her chest. “Jessica, we are going to get this shit out of our systems right now.”

I was stretched on the bed with GoGo’s book. If there’s anything I cannot abide, it’s conflict. I mean, I concocted plenty of conflict in my head all the time, and I sort of took a perverse delight in all that stupid harmless conflict with the Mad Hatter, but this was different. This was my friends in some kind of actual standoff. “Should I go?” I asked, rising to make a hasty exit.

“No!” They both shouted.

“Stay,” Jessica said. “We’re done talking.”

“We are so not done,” Sonya said, but she settled herself on my bed with a magazine as if everything were normal. She even helped herself to an Ale-8.

“Bitch, I did
not
give you permission to drink one of those! Put it back.”

A lame little knock at the door. Eager-Beaver Jenny. “Girls, is everything all right in here?”

Jessica and Sonya turned to give Jenny an in-tandem icy stare.

“Everything’s fine,” I blurted. “They’re working on their debate for class. Right, Jess?”

“Right,” Jessica answered. “Our
debate
.”

“Lights out in fifteen minutes. Sonya, I’ll be checking your room to make sure you made it back. In the meantime, keep it down. All righty, ladies?”