Breakfast Served Anytime (21 page)

Calvin looked up, as if the words could be found in the sky. “If more than used for brushing is accidentally swallowed, get medical help or contact a Poison Control Center right away.”

Mason’s eyes widened. “What the hell is that?”

Calvin shrugged. “Warning on the back of the toothpaste tube.”

Chloe helped herself to a marshmallow. “I mean it, yall. What am I going to do without you?”

I had wondered the same thing myself, and hearing Chloe speak the words out loud brought a lump to my throat. In typical fashion I opted for funny. “Whatever! Aren’t you sick of us yet?”

Chloe shook her head slowly back and forth. “Nope.” She smiled at us, eyes glistening in the firelight. “I wish I could take all of you to school with me in the fall. Carry you in my pocket so I can remember what this feels like.”

“What what feels like?” Mason asked.

“What it feels like to be myself,” Chloe said.

Calvin reached for Chloe’s bag and started rummaging around. “Any pen and paper in here?”

“Cal, I love you, but that’s trespassing.”

“Here we go.” By the light of the fire Calvin started writing furiously with Chloe’s oversized, fuzzy Hello Kitty pen.

“Should I even ask?” Mason said.

“I’m drawing up our contractual agreement,” Calvin explained. “Gimme a second.”

We watched, rapt, as Cal went into Thinking Mode. It was always fascinating to watch Calvin concentrate, but even better when his natural gravitas was juxtaposed against the goofy bobbing-along of a Hello Kitty pen.

“What kind of contract?” Mason asked.

“A friendship agreement,” Calvin said. “To keep us in touch. Everybody has to abide by the terms.”

Just the mention of it made me nervous. I knew I’d be bad at abiding by any terms, even if we made them up ourselves. As soon as I felt bound by something, it was my instinct to bail. Mason, in keeping with what had become an alarming pattern, yanked the words right from my head.

“No way, dude. I’m pleading Groucho Marx on this one. Yall’re great and all, but I refuse to be a part of any club that would have me as a member. Don’t let’s get all clubby and sentimental.”

Chloe pelted Mason with a marshmallow. “Whatever, Mr. Photography Club.”

“That’s different!”

“Different how?”

“That’s
school
. What I do outside of school shouldn’t involve contracts. Friendship, in general, shouldn’t involve contracts.”

I nodded in agreement.

Calvin frowned at the paper. “But man, this is good stuff.”

“Here’s what,” Chloe said, rising to her feet. “I think a promise is a fabulous idea, but I respect that things like this make you, Mason, claustrophobic, and make you, oh worshipper of the Grecian Urn” — Chloe spun around and pointed at me — “uncomfortable as hell.”

Mason and I exchanged a sheepish glance.

“But yall,” Chloe went on, “I
need
you. I don’t want to go back to Boone County in a few days and forget that any of this” — she swept her arms about, indicating the farm, the dark sky, the sparks rising like fairy dust from the fire — “ever happened.
Ça va
?”

Mason and I traded another glance. He nodded, just barely.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. First rule of the agreement: No social media?”

Chloe looked around at everyone. “Do we agree? Can everybody handle that?”

Three heads nodded. Holyfield snapped at a firefly.

“Do we want to say no e-mail or texts?” Calvin asked.

“I like it,” Mason said. “Letters’re what got us here in the first place.”

“And we’ll meet up at least, what, once every three months?” Chloe asked. “Quarterly?”

I cringed. “I think I feel a Grecian Urn moment coming on. Let’s not push it.”

“Okay okay,” Chloe said. “Let’s just plan our first rendezvous, sometime between, say, August and Christmas. Just something to look forward to so I won’t die.”

“We can meet at the Egg Drop and come back here,” Calvin suggested. “In the fall, when the leaves change. Hayride, apples, harvest moon —”

“Somebody’s birthday,” Mason added airily.

I liked the leaves-and-apples scenario because it was in perfect alignment with my daydream. “That’s good,” I said. “Write that down, Cal.”

“First day of fall?” Chloe suggested, face alight. “The equinox?”

“But my birthday’s not until October!” Mason whined.

“Mason, God. Could you be a bigger baby? I’ll bring cupcakes and we’ll celebrate early. The equinox it is. Calvin, are you getting all this?”

Hello Kitty zoomed across the page.

Chloe was on a roll. “Make room for birthdays and addresses so that everybody gets plenty of love. If Mason gets cupcakes, we all get cupcakes.”

“Who’s gonna make your cupcakes?” Mason asked. “Because that’s not really how I roll.”

“I always accept fortune cookies and cards.”

“But I don’t send cards or —”

“Mason!” I screamed. “We get it. Chloe, I’ll bake you some cupcakes.”

We hovered over Cal’s shoulder as he scrawled the final terms. “Okay,” he said, wielding Hello Kitty like a wand. “Time to sign.”

Calvin’s contract was serious business, full of stuff like WHEREAS and WITNESSETH and
Now, therefore, in consideration of the above premises and the mutual promises, covenants, and terms contained herein.

“What’s with the jargon, Cal? Where’d you learn to write like this?”

“Eighth-grade mock trial. Back when everybody wanted to grow up to be president and save the world.”

I entered my address and birthday and signed on the line. “Do we really need a notary?”

Calvin looked around. “Holyfield, come here. Chloe, can I borrow your lipstick?”

Chloe seemed to know what was coming next. “Dude, use a marker. Here.”

Holyfield didn’t object at all; he just lolled in Calvin’s arms as Cal applied purple marker to the pads of his right front paw.

“Holyfield,” he said, “you’re as good a notary as any.”

I was hanging out in the laundry room, writing letters and listening to Alex’s CD and enjoying the gentle hypnosis provided by the spin of the dryer. The songs still worked their magic on me, but Alex seemed far away, much farther than Alaska.

It was the shortest, boringest, most unimaginative letter I’d ever written, but also the hardest and the most true. I was trying to work on saying what I meant and leaving it at that. Before I could change my mind — i.e., before I could embellish the letter with some of my trademark hyperbole — I sealed the envelope, addressed it, and affixed it with a stamp (Gregory Peck, of course. Atticus himself!).

Letter writing, I had discovered, was exhausting. Not just because of the effort of putting pen to paper, either. What I had written to Carol and Alex was one thing, but the mood of weird nostalgia that the act of writing put me in — well. That was quite another. There I was in the basement of Reynolds Hall, but my mind was back in sixth grade, Sunday mornings after sleepovers at Carol’s house. Carol’s mom always dragged everybody, including me, to church. I enjoyed the inevitable chaos of those mornings: everybody bitching over the whine of the hair dryer, shoes and coats searched for and eventually found, Eggo waffles crammed into our mouths en route to the minivan. Carol and her brothers hated churchgoing on principle — the theft of their sleep, the uncomfortable clothes and forced niceties — but because I myself didn’t go to church outside of these excursions (just another thing my parents couldn’t agree on from the start), I came to the whole experience with a charged-up feeling that was half abject terror and half reverent curiosity.

First there was Sunday school. It made me uneasy because there I was, this weird girl wearing her best friend’s clothes, an interloper among kids who had been going to church together since birth. It was sort of like being at the pool in the summer: There I’d be, all pale and freckled and clueless, flailing around in a pathetic attempt at a doggy paddle while all these other kids — born beneath the sea, apparently; born with gills and fins! — cut smooth, lithe paths through the pool and climbed out at the deep end, water gleaming on the sort of shoulder blades — tanned, angular — that could easily slice through melons.

So I was uneasy because of
that
whole load, but I was also uneasy because the Sunday school room smelled exactly like another basement room in another place in the back closet of my memory: Miss Lolly’s preschool room, where my mother would drop off four-year-old me every day before going to work. I got a ridiculous amount of joy out of those drives from my house to preschool, if you want to know the truth. I would have my mother to myself for fifteen whole minutes, during which she would sing along with the radio — Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, horrible songs that nonetheless make me sob when I hear them in Muzak versions at the dentist’s office — and I would listen to her voice and breathe in the familiar spicy scent of her perfume. Then we’d get to Miss Lolly’s room and she would leave me. She’d leave me, and GoGo would pick me up. That’s how it always went, right up until the day my mother left for good. GoGo picked me up that day, too, and kept picking me up — one school day, one piano lesson, one rehearsal, one orthodontist’s appointment, one heartbreak or another at a time.

So. Apropos of what I was trying to get at: the Sunday school room in Carol’s church smelled like Miss Lolly’s preschool room, which is to say that it smelled like Leaving. I liked it better when we went upstairs to the Big Church, where it smelled like Incense and Mystery. For Carol and her brothers, this part was torture of the utmost (Carol would zone out during the sermon and write me notes on the program —
That guy is picking his nose!
, etc., etc.). As for me, I was so ashamed of and bewildered by my own church ineptitude — not to mention agonized by Carol’s too-small-for-me, itchy clothes — that most of what transpired was completely lost on me. People would keep standing up and sitting back down and kneeling and saying stuff in eerie unison, and I would just feel like disappearing. There was this one part of the liturgy, though, that I truly loved and looked forward to every time. It happened just before the Communion, when the choir would sing this song with a bunch of hallelujahs in it. That part, man — that was something special. I could cry just thinking about it, and I did, out of nowhere as I was writing that über-boring letter to Alex. Those voices, rising up to greet the ceiling? They were
it
. Bound up in those voices was the same magic, the same mystery, that I felt under the stars at Calvin’s farm. The same wonder I felt when Mason was standing before me, wearing a sleeve of butterflies. I felt it again in the Mystery Machine as I held baby Juliet’s tiny foot in my hand. That behold-the-ocean feeling. That kiss-a-boy feeling, times ten.

Anyway. Carol’s mom quit forcing her kids to go to church once they got to high school. I never went back, either, but those voices of the choir have stayed with me. I was tempted to share that with Carol and Alex in my letters, but instead I stuck with what I was trying to say. The beginning of it, anyway. What was the rest of what I was trying to say? That I love you? That being a small part of your family has been the best gift of my life, that it has provided me with more joy and proof of God than any rocker-slash-evangelist in a pair of jeans could ever in a million years give me? Dear Alex: That kiss was awesome and the CD rocks and I love to fall asleep thinking about your eyelashes, but your mom’s the one I’m really in love with and can I please have her, please and thank you, please?