Breakfast Served Anytime (19 page)

“Okay.” Mason settled down, mirroring my pose. His left knee touched my right just barely.

I scooted back. “No camera,” I said.

“Fine.” Mason stuck the camera in his bag, from which he drew two copies of the script. “Here.”

I glanced at the pages. The words were swimming. “So do you want to do a quick read-through before we block the scene or what?”

Mason tapped his teeth with his fingernail. An obnoxious habit. “Let’s warm up first.”

I rolled my eyes. Surely he wasn’t going to make me do vocal exercises,
red-leather-yellow-leather
and all that bulsh.

“Seriously, this isn’t going to work unless we get the trust down first. I mean, let’s face it. You can’t stand me, right?”

My eyes flicked up and met Mason’s head-on. “I can stand you just fine. Most of the time.”

“Good. Hold out your hands. Palms up, like this.”

I raised my eyebrows, a bitchy little warning.

“Jesus, Gloria. I’m not going to bite you. Just hold out your hands, okay? Good. Now close your eyes.”

I complied, waiting for Mason to deposit something disgusting in my hands. A used piece of gum, maybe, or a dead roach. I wouldn’t have put it past him.

“Keep your eyes closed. Don’t cheat!”

“Okay.”

With my eyes closed, my other senses ramped up: From somewhere in the building I could hear the rich, mournful lowing of a cello. I could smell the toothpaste on Mason’s breath and the clean scent of his still-damp hair. A moment later I could feel the warmth of his palms, which hovered just above my own — not touching, but almost.

“Now,” Mason said. “What’s your favorite color?”

My eyes flew open and I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. “What? I don’t need my eyes closed for this!”

“Fine. Keep them open, but dude, don’t
laugh
. Come on, this is serious. Get with it. Deep breath.” Mason filled his lungs with air.

“Is this like that game where it’s my job to slap the tops of your hands before you have a chance to move them away? Because I suck at that game, and I’m not into violence.”

Mason dropped his shoulders and took his hands back. “Gloria. Come on. Are you with me here or not? You gotta focus.”

“Okay okay okay.” I sat up straight. “I’m focusing. Starting now.”

We realigned our palms and took a couple of simultaneous breaths. I have this horrible condition where nervousness equals inappropriate laughter, so I had to fight the urge to crack up. I decided to focus my eyes on a tiny scar on Mason’s temple. “What happened there?”

“My scar? Forceps. Doctor had to yank me out. My mom says I’ve been hard to handle ever since.”

I grinned. Involuntarily. The spotlight buzzed faintly as it cast its glow on us.

“My turn,” Mason said. “Do you have any scars?”

“Literal or figurative?”

“Either one. Doesn’t matter.”

My outstretched arms were starting to ache. My eyes were starting to water with the effort of keeping them locked with Mason’s eyes, which seemed to throb in and out of focus. If you say a word out loud enough times, it starts to lose its meaning; it was like that with Mason’s face — as I stared at it, it began to lose its shape. It was all cool blue eyes and toothpaste. I became painfully aware of my contacts.

“I have plenty of scars,” I said finally. “But I’ll live.”

“Your turn,” Mason said. The heat between our palms felt like one of those shimmery black mirages you see on the street when it’s really hot outside.

“Okay,” I said. “Why are you here instead of with your parents?”

“You mean parent?” Mason corrected. “My mom has better things to do. Besides, it kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it? If you send your kid off to camp, you shouldn’t have to deal with him until he comes home at the end. A month is not forever. Mid-month reunion? It’s stupid. I’m not on board.”

I nodded in agreement. “So where’s your dad?”

“It’s not your turn,” Mason whispered.

“Sorry,” I whispered back, stifling a giggle. My palms quivered reflexively and barely — just barely — kissed Mason’s palms;
palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss
— God, my mind was Shakespeare-drunk; my mind was spinning.

Mason kept up with the whispering; his voice this time was barely audible. “Your eyes are grey. Like Grey-Eyed Athena. She’s the goddess of wisdom, you know.”

I rolled my grey eyes and really did laugh this time; I couldn’t help it — it was maybe the loveliest thing anyone had ever said to me, and it was somehow important that I blow it off completely.

“That’s not a question,” I whispered.

“Oh yeah,” Mason whispered. “So where are your parents?”

“You mean parent?” I made my voice as small as I could. Some part of me wished that Mason and I could have this conversation with eyes alone. Another part of me believed that we probably could. There weren’t words for this stuff; whispering them into the dark was the way to go.

“My dad,” I said, “stayed in Louisville because I asked him to.”

Beneath Mason’s hands, my hands were shaking.

“My mom,” I whispered, “left the scene early on.”

Mason’s eyes traveled between mine, right-left, right-left. “Is she dead?”

“Nope,” I whispered. “She is alive, in one piece, and absolutely gone.”

Without a sound, Mason lowered his palms on top of mine. Our hands were sweaty. It was disgusting. It was the sweetest relief I’d ever felt in my life, and I felt it everywhere.

“That sucks,” Mason murmured. “In a way, leaving’s worse than dying. At least when somebody dies, people bring casseroles.”

I laughed and wrapped my fingers around Mason’s wrists. I could feel his quickening pulse beneath my thumbs. “Were there casseroles at your house?”

Mason nodded, a slow sad smile. “There were many, many casseroles.” He paused to swallow. “My dad, he left the scene early on, too. You know, orchestrated his own exit?”

I held Mason’s gaze. Held tight to his hands.

“The worst part is how a lifetime of good things, hard work, happiness — it all gets eclipsed by this one bad day. He had a bad day, you know? One bad day out of thousands of good ones.”

The truth hung between us like an incandescent bubble: Touch it and it shimmers away.

“Mason.”

“Gloria?”

“My favorite color is blue.”

We had an Egg Drop date with Chloe and Calvin at noon. As Mason and I emerged from the theater into the glare of midday, I felt empty-full and dazed, changed somehow, the way I feel when I step from the dark of a movie theater into the sunlit realm of real life. What had happened in there felt like a movie, like a thing Mason and I had watched happen to characters on a screen. Under the leafy canopy of trees lining the streets of campus, it seemed impossible that we had said those things out loud.

What I hadn’t told Mason, though, is that my mother wasn’t all bad. I don’t really feel like going into all the things that were less than wonderful about her, but I’ll tell you this: She had her moments, my mother. They weren’t many, but they’re enough. I’ll take them, is what I’m saying. There was that baseball game, for instance, which I won’t ever forget. There were radio songs sung loud and clear and happy in the car. Sometimes there were pancakes from scratch on Saturday mornings — those were unforgettable, too, and proof, in my mind, of a love that had to have been there. She just wasn’t well, is what GoGo and my dad said. Sometimes people just aren’t well, and it’s nobody’s fault, and there’s no getting around it. One time Carol and I spent an entire afternoon stretched out on the floor with Carol’s dad’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
Fifth Edition, trying to figure out which one could be my mother. Bipolar Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Intermittent Explosive Disorder: Each one was more plausible and entertaining than the last. “That’s her exactly!” Carol and I screamed. We were cracking ourselves up. There was nothing funny about it, nothing even remotely funny at all, but Carol and I could not, could
not,
stop laughing. Merriment in the face of grief: It’s what Carol’s dad might refer to as a Defense Mechanism. Defense Mechanisms! People: They’re my specialty. I’m trying to cut back, but it’s harder than you might think.

Anyway. I’m a true professional when it comes to Mom-Shopping; I can evaluate other people’s mothers in the blink of an eye. Maybe that’s not very nice or generous of me, but there it is. It’s an involuntary talent and I’ve earned it. Mason had told me about his own fantastic mother, and it was clear that she belonged at one end of the spectrum, along with GoGo, Carol’s mom, the mom from
Friday Night Lights,
and the best mom ever: my own dad. The opposite end was populated by the likes of my mother and the mom from
Ordinary People,
who in my opinion gets overlooked as one of
the
most frightening villains in all of American literature. Jessica’s mom — who might as well have come into our room that morning waving a red flag — had earned a spot at the scary end of the spectrum. The more I thought about those doughnuts, the more I wanted to weep.

That’s what I was thinking about as Mason and I walked along the sidewalk, a pair of orphans for the day: Diane’s Krispy Kremes, and that playground singsong
Step on a crack, break your mother’s back
. An innocuous rhyme that never fails to ring in my head every time I walk on a sidewalk — a stupid, small thing that can bring tears to my eyes on a bad day. I thought of Mason and his casseroles, Mason and his own complicated personal geometry; how everybody everywhere has some heartbreaking thing like my sidewalk rhyme. People and their multitudes. It just goes on and on, around and around. One of the things that had appealed to me about Geek Camp — about New York, about college — was the absence of parents, mine and everyone else’s: We each had a chance at a clean slate. But then I arrived at Morlan and everybody was still glued to their parents via their stupid smartphones, and now the parents had broken the spell by descending on the place like a plague, and I had gone and lost my mind and spilled my guts to Mason Atkinson, of all people. My hands were shoved in my pockets, but I could still feel the imprint of his touch on my palms.

“Check it out,” Mason said. He bent down and carefully drew a clover from the ground. “Four-leafer.” He twirled it by the stem. “Here,” he said. “You keep it.”

I slid my bag down my arm and reached for the GBBoE. I held the book open while Mason pressed the clover between the pages.

“First one I’ve found in forever,” Mason said. “I used to find them all the time, but then I started looking for them. You don’t find half as many if you’re looking for them.”

“Nope,” I agreed. The clover was there in my book, a perfect green charm. A tiny sign of wonder, storing up its good luck, awaiting its moment. What if the moment came and I missed it?

“Mason, I —”

“Shhh,” he interrupted. “You don’t have to say anything.”

So I didn’t.

Mason was right: I didn’t have to.

“Closed for the holiday,” Chloe announced from her spot on the ground. “Xiu Li has forsaken us,
mes amis
. Want some corn?”

Next to Chloe sat Calvin, and between them Holyfield was sniffing around in a bushel basket filled with vegetables. “Cal gave me a ride on the tractor,” Chloe gushed. “And look at this. Basil! Doesn’t it smell delicious?”

“The corn tastes good just like this,” Calvin said. He shucked an ear with practiced ease and spun it between his fingers: The kernels were white and yellow together. “It’s the best when it’s fresh, when you don’t do anything to it at all. Try it.”

I accepted the ear from Calvin and took a tentative bite. The corn of my childhood was the frozen kind, boiled to death by my well-meaning dad, slathered in Parkay and balanced between a greasy set of those spiked, corn-shaped cob-holder things. Calvin’s corn smelled like the earth and tasted like sunshine.

“This all came from your farm?”

Calvin nodded. “That variety’s called Ambrosia.”

Ambrosia
. I love a word that casts its own spell, that sounds like what it’s talking about, that tastes like the thing itself. If Ale-8 was the nectar of the gods, this corn was the fruit. The vegetable. Whatever. It made me want to cry.

Mason rubbed the basil between his fingers. “Potent stuff,” he observed. “So Cal, why didn’t Glo and I get invited to the farm?”

“Well, I invited myself at the last minute,” Chloe confided. “We tried to call both of yall but nobody picked up. Right, Cal?”

“Yep,” Calvin nodded. “Also, it didn’t occur to me that everybody would get all revved up to spend a whole morning on a farm.”

Calvin couldn’t have been more wrong. The farm had taken on an enchanted glow in my mind — Narnia, Hogwarts, Calvin’s Farm. I had already started to picture the four of us there in the fall, reuniting over marshmallows and a campfire.

“Your parents didn’t come, either?” Mason asked Chloe.

“They’re in Cozumel, if you can believe that. They were so excited to get rid of me that they had to flee the country in celebration.”

It was good-natured, the way Chloe talked about her parents. There was love in her voice. Appreciation. I thought about X, about his litmus test. Maybe the real test hadn’t been for us, but for our parents, and that by letting us go, they — we, all of us — had won. We had been handed the freedom to be who we wanted to be. It was better than a million chocolate factories. It was rare and wonderful. If I could just figure out who and what I wanted to be, it would be even better. I chewed my ear of sunshine and considered, for a second, my — our — excellent luck.

“So, Cal,” I said. “Don’t you have a brother? Does he work on the farm or what?”

Calvin shook his head. “Luke’s older. About to start his third year at Berea.”

“Calvin’s parents are awesome,” Chloe interrupted. “They’re like the true freaking salt of the earth. You guys should’ve come.”

“I was saying something,” Calvin said, dazed. “Holyfield, what was I saying?”

The dog cocked his head, spun himself in a circle as if to think it over, and curled up next to Calvin’s knee.