Breakfast Served Anytime

by Sarah Combs

  “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 breathle
ssly. 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:

  Dear Muhammad Ali

  Oh, say can you see?

  Come back to River City

  And fix it for me.

  Dear Johnny Depp

  Mr. Ken-tuck-y

  You saved the West Memphis Three

  But what about me?

  Dear George Clooney

  You got what it takes

  How ’bout uppin the stakes

  Lead these You-Knighted States . . .

  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?’”

  And then that old theater magic kicked in and I forgot my lines. When I say I forgot them, I don’t mean the right words didn’t come out of my mouth; they did, all of them, just the way Shakespeare wrote them, just the way I’d rehearsed them in this very spot and just the way I’d spoken them opposite the chalk girl in McGrath’s tomb. When I say I forgot my lines, I mean I reached that wonderful moment of onstage levitation that you sometimes feel as an actor if you’re very, very lucky: The lines are so much a part of you that you can let them go and forget them; while your body is down there strutting and fretting its hour upon the stage, you can hover like a dust mote in the spotlight and catch a glimpse, just for a second, into what it’s all about.

  Call it hyperbole, call it whatever you want, but in my split-second moment of levitation I could have sworn I caught a dust-mote glimpse into what would happen next: I would wake brokenhearted at having to leave Morlan, but by midmorning I’d be dizzy with longing for my own room, for River Road, for my CDs and books and for my dad, who would show up in the Munch (the last parent to arrive but still the first person I’d want to see; the tears that would spring to my eyes would surprise and embarrass us both). On the way out of town we’d pass the Egg Drop, and Xiu Li would be waving and Mason would be hunched in a booth, nursing a black coffee before walking the two miles home, where he would discover in his backpack the note I had hidden there, a line borrowed from Yeats: one (wo!!)man loved the pilgrim soul in you, and loved the sorrows of your changing face . . . First, though, he would catch sight of the Munch at the red light and he’d climb up on the table and behind the glass, behind the red-painted words BREAKFAST SERVED ANYTIME, he’d take a deep bow, like he did beneath my window that first day, like he was doing now, and I was bowing with him, hand in hand, and I could see our friends out there beyond the footlights, clapping and smiling and cheering.

  I could see that Jessica would follow in her sisters’ footsteps to Morlan and she would fall in love with Eric the RA and they would seal their God Match right after graduation; I’d get to be a bridesmaid and the wedding would be gorgeous, something right out of a magazine or a dream, but after that we’d drift the way friends don’t mean to do but do. There would be Christmas cards with babies on them. Twins.

  Sonya’s boyfriend, Kevin Donnelly, would play ball for UK, but in the middle of a game at the newly named arena something strange would happen, his heart would stop; it would turn out to have been enlarged, his heart, or something like that. People would have caught the tragic moment on their phones; a blurry image of Kevin falling to the polished wood floor would make its way to YouTube. It would go viral, and Sonya would go ballistic. She would take her rage and grief to law school and take every bit of law that she could muster into her own hands. She would make huge bank, and she would take her first paycheck to Kevin Donnelly’s granny and would be loyal to her (and to me, to Jessica, to the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, to her family and her beautiful black Western Kentucky ancestors, six generations strong) as long as she would continue to breathe.

  The seats stretching up behind Sonya and Jessica and the others were almost fully plunged in darkness, but in that dust-mote moment I scanned them still, those back-row seats, for the faces that I would seek in windows and in back rows and in mirrors for always: GoGo’s face, smiling at me all the way to graduation and then to NYU and the Tisch School of the Arts, where I would go because the scholarship really would fall out of the sky, just like Carol’s dance scholarship to Juilliard would, as if through all those years of dreaming we had willed our magic futures right into place. Alongside the light of GoGo’s face would be the darkened shade of my mother’s: Eventually I would try to stop imagining her in the windows and back rows of my life, but always she would appear there, because no matter how surely your friends can become your family, no matter how deeply you are cared for by such a lucky windfall of other people’s mothers (Carol’s, Calvin’s, Mason’s, each one a gift), the mother you always deep-down want — and you can ask Scout Finch if you don’t believe me — is nobody else’s but your own.

  As for Chloe and Calvin and Mason: They would be true to their words and our Agreement. We’d meet in the fall and everybody’s hair would be longer and the leaves would be turning and the plans and applications would be falling into place: Calvin would take the scholarship, would study agriculture and be a first-generation college graduate, would do his family proud and keep the farm, keep it dutifully and lovingly, and keep Holyfield, too, who would live to a ripe old age on fresh air and corn and irreplaceable Kentucky bluegrass and Calvin’s singular, honorable brand of love, a love that each one of us would count on (and wonder at, and sometimes take for granted) over the years — and there would be many — to come.

  Chloe would surprise us and take the scholarship, too: She’d go straight to the UK study abroad office, first stop Sorbonne, and later, much later, she’d come back to her alma mater and teach
French, and one year she’d have this bright-eyed freshman named Juliet Goble-Xavier and the girl would look strangely familiar to Chloe, but the semester would be halfway over and Juliet’s French would be perfect before it would click and Chloe would think, Ah, I knew you when you were a bébé; your father had a hand in changing my life.

  Mason would go to Columbia, but it would be his camera that got him there, not the stage. I’d visit him sometimes in his hovel on Riverside Drive, and sometimes he would come downtown to see Carol and me in our tiny Houston Street apartment, strung with a million tiny white lights. We’d eat steaming noodles from the place downstairs and we would pine for Kentucky stars and sometimes Mason and I would stretch our bodies out — shoulders, hips, fingers barely touching — along the length of the beveled floor, which would rumble at night with the mysterious, subterranean passage of the trains and the great big huge heart of the city, beating its marvelous drum.

  A NOTE (& SOME ACKNOWLEDGMENTS) FROM THE AUTHOR:

  There’s no such place as Morlan College. It’s a figment of my imagination, but I feel it’s worth mentioning — for anyone who might be interested in this sort of thing — that I borrowed its name from the art gallery at Transylvania University. Transy also has a Kissing Tree (though it’s not a sycamore, and there’s no swing — the swing can be found on another Kentucky college campus, but I don’t want to go revealing all my secrets, do I?), as well as a tomb, secreted away beneath the storied administration building and belonging to one Constantine Rafinesque, who has been haunting the place for almost two hundred years. If when I was applying to colleges the admissions folks at Transy had mentioned the legend of Rafinesque and the annual Halloween lottery that allows a few brave students to spend the night in his tomb, I think I’d have been won over immediately.