The Basic Eight E-Book

Daniel Handler

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 581

Beschreibung

'This is not some true-crime tell-all. This is my actual journal, with everything I wrote at the time, edited by me. The revisions are minor; I only changed things when I felt that I wasn't really thinking something that I wrote at the time, and probably would have thought something else. After all, I was only eighteen then.' Meet Flannery Culp, a world-weary high school senior. She is primed to taken on the few remaining obstacles that stand between her and the rest of her life: the SAT, college applications, the autumn term...Mercifully, there are a couple of distractions: 1) her friends: Kate (the Queen Bee), Natasha (less like a high school student and more like an actress playing a high school student on TV), Gabriel (the kindest boy in the world and in love with Flan), Lily, Douglas, V - (her name has been deleted to protect her prominent family), and Jennifer Rose - The Basic Eight. 2) Adam State, a well-groomed, polite young man and the object of Flan's affections. If only things hadn't gotten out of control. If only Flan had stayed away from the absinthe. Then she wouldn't be a topic on daytime talk shows, or on the cover of tabloids, or incarcerated, or have time to edit her journals...The supremely talented Daniel Handler has perfectly captured the absurdity of school life in this wickedly funny, dark-as-can-be novel.

Leseprobe

THE BASIC EIGHT

Daniel Handler

Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

The Basic Eight

Epilogue

About the Author

By Daniel Handler

Copyright

The author wishes to acknowledge the following people: Lisa Brown; Louis and 324 Handler; Rebecca Handler; Kit Reed and Joseph W. Reed; Charlotte Sheedy and Neeti Madan; Ron Bernstein and Angela Cheng; and Melissa Jacobs.

INTRODUCTION

I, Flannery Culp, am playing solitaire even as I finish this. Gifted children have always been good at doing two things at a time, and where I am I’ve played solitaire so much it’s practically a biorhythm. It helps me think. When I can’t tell which of two sentence arrangements sounds better, I just look over at the top of my neatly made bed where I’ve laid out the game and see something: red seven on the black eight. Why didn’t I see it before?

Don’t think I’m not aware of the metaphor (or of the double negative – in spite of all the hoopla, I did get a diploma). I’m alone here, sitting at this typewriter with my journal propped up to my left and a pile of typewritten papers to my right. I am a woman with a room of her own, just like what’s-her-name, the writer. I am rereading my journal and typing my life here onto stark white paper. If I make a mistake, I just type back a few letters and write over it. It’s one of those typewriters with white erasing tape, so whatever I write wrong, I can erase, except for some faint imprints which will be completely obliterated when I have this copied. Those shreds of misplaced facts and typographical errors will fade and vanish as I ready this to send to publishers. That’s metaphorical too.

Can I just say something? (A rhetorical question.) Somebody down the hall is listening loudly to the radio and it is just driving me crazy. It’s “the station that plays the hits of the nation,” which are essentially greeting cards with guitar solos. I hate it. It’s so inconsiderate of whoever-it-is, too. When I play music – and I mostly listen to classical music, like Bach – I play it softly, because I’m considerate of other people. I just had to get that off my chest.

Right now I have the suspicion that the ace of diamonds is trapped forever, face down, beneath the king of diamonds, which is sneering at me like Juror Number Five, and my whole life feels like a similar misshuffle. One more flick of the wrist and it could have been my math teacher who had been targeted, or some other teacher: Johnny Hand, or Millie. The Grand Opera Breakfast Club could have become the “important aspect” of the Basic Eight, and Flora Habstat could have ended up on the Winnie Moprah Show saying that we were some club of mad opera lovers rather than babbling about Satanism the way she did, though I guess in a slightly different set of circumstances Flora Habstat could have been one of us and actually known what she was talking about. With a slight shuffle there could have been somebody else sniffling into a handkerchief on the talk show, with a cult investigation citizens action group named after her child, and Mrs. State could have just shook her head as she watched the show, instead of participating in it, and then reached over to telephone her son Adam and his new fiancée: me. Things would be a different way. While at a bookstore, Adam would tell me to get lost while he bought me a present. I would wander down the uninteresting aisles: Gardening, Pets, Travel and finally, True Crime. I might glance at some slightly different book, there in this slightly different world, where my love for Adam worked out instead of ending in tragedy: The Basic Six, The Basic Seven.

But this is not some true-crime tell-all. This is my actual journal, with everything I wrote at the time, edited by me. The revisions are minor; I only changed things when I felt that I wasn’t really thinking something that I wrote at the time, and probably would have thought something else. After all, I was only eighteen then. I’m almost twenty now. I learned lots about narrative structure in my Honors English classes so I know what I’m doing. Everyone’s names are real, and so are their various nicknames. The radio was just turned up a notch, if you can believe it.

By process of elimination (too small, too big, won’t stay up with regulation Scotch tape) I have only one picture of the Mislabeled Murderers, by which I mean my friends or, I’ll just say it, the Basic Eight, that is on my wall. It faces me, and in a rare synchronous moment, everybody is looking at the camera, so everyone is looking right at me. Kate, leaning on an armrest rather than sitting on the couch like a normal human being, placing herself (symbolically, in retrospect) above us and looking a little smug, serving out a four-year sentence at Yale. Right next to her is V___, fingering her pearls. V___ must have snuck into the bathroom sometime that evening to redo her makeup, because she looks better than anyone else, better than Natasha even, and that’s saying a lot. Lily and Douglas, snug on the couch. Lily between Douglas and me as always. Douglas looking impatiently at the camera, waiting to continue whatever it was he was saying. Gabriel, his black hands stark against the white apron, squashed into the end of the couch and looking quite uncomfortable. And there’s beautiful Jennifer Rose Milton standing at the couch in a pose that would look awkward for anyone else who wasn’t as beautiful. And stretched out luxuriously beneath us all, Natasha, one long finger between her lips and batting her eyes at me. I mean the me sitting here typing, not the one in the picture, who’s looking right at me, too. That’s also symbolic. Most of those people won’t meet my eyes, now, but I’m not one of them. Every morning I get up, and while brushing my teeth, look at my showered self, calmly foaming at the mouth. Take out the photograph now. (I hope you can, reader. I want to arrange with the publishers to have a copy of it tucked into each copy of the book, for use as a visual aid and as a bookmark. Isn’t that a good idea?) Look into each of our eyes and try to picture us as people rather than the bloodthirsty mythological figures you’ve seen on those tacky television shows about bloodthirsty events. Come on, you know you watch them.

Will anyone read this introduction? When this is published (with all proceeds, by law, going to charity), my own introduction will probably be buried among other prefaces and forewords by noted adolescent psychologists, legal authorities, high school principals and witchcraft experts, all of which will be ignored as readers cut to the chase. There is no getting around it: this is going to be marketed as a trashy book. Most readers will flip through these first pages, half reading as the flight attendants give the safety lecture, and by the time we’re all airborne they will have forgotten them in favor of the actual journal, the real beginning. Perhaps they’ll look at my name under the introduction with disdain, expecting apologies or pleas for pity. I have none here.

Perhaps, though, people will read the quote that opens the journal. I chose it from the limited library here, to reveal the dim-wittedness of the pop-psych gurus who look at people like me. Of course I’m neither fish nor fowl. I’m a real person, like you are. This journal is real. It is the reality of the photograph you’re using to mark your place, a photograph that nobody ever got ahold of. It’s more real than all those pictures the magazines used. Those were our school pictures, pictures taken of us when we were wearing appropriate outfits, smiling for our out-of-state relatives to whom our parents would mail them. What sort of image is that? This journal is the truth, the real truth. This book is as real as it gets. As real as – let me think – as real as the red queen I just overturned, or the black king I smothered with it.

Vocabulary:HOOPLAMETAPHORICALRHETORICALATROCITIESNARRATIVE STRUCTUREADOLESCENTDISDAINStudy Questions:

1. What do you already know about the Basic Eight? How will it affect what you read here? Discuss.

2. Most people who keep diaries want to keep them secret. Why do you think this is?

3. If you were to reveal your diary to the general public, would you edit it first? Why or why not? (Note: If you do not keep a diary, pretend that you do.)

4. It is often said that high school is the best time of one’s life. If you have already graduated, was high school the best time of your life? Why or why not? If you have yet to go to high school, how do you think you can prepare yourself to make it the best time in your life? Be specific.

THE BASIC EIGHT

One of the reasons the teenage years are so agonizing is that in most societies, particularly ours, the adolescent is emotionally neither fish nor fowl.

– Dr. Herbert Strean and Lucy Freeman,Our Wish to Kill: The Murder in All Our Hearts

One may as well begin with my letters to one Adam State.

August 25, Verona

Dear Adam,

Well, you were right – the only way to really look at Italy is to stop gaping at all the Catholicism and just sit down and have some coffee. For the past couple of hours I’ve just been sitting and sipping. It’s our last day in Verona, and my parents of course want to visit one hundred thousand more art galleries so they can come home with a painting to point at, but I’m content to just sit in a square and watch people in gorgeous shoes walk by. It’s an outdoor cafe, of course.

The sun is just radiant. If it weren’t for my sunglasses I’d be squinting. I tried to write a poem the other day called “Italian Light” but it wasn’t turning out so well and I wrote it on the hotel stationery so the maid threw it out by mistake. I wonder if Dante was ever suppressed by his cleaning lady. So in any case after much argument with my parents over whether I appreciated them and Italy and all my opportunities or not, I was granted permission – thank you, O Mighty Exalted Ones – to sit in a cafe while they chased down various objets d’art. I was just reading and people-watching for a while, but eventually I figured I’d better catch up on my correspondence. With all the caffeine in me it was either that or jump in the fountain like a Fellini movie I saw with Natasha once. You know Natasha, right, Natasha Hyatt? Long hair, dyed jet-black, sort of vampy-looking?

I stumbled upon an appropriate metaphor as I looked for reading material in the hotel bookstore. Scarcely more than a magazine stand, actually – as always, I brought a generous handful of books with me to Italy thinking it would be more than enough to read, and as always, I finished two of them on the plane and the rest of them within the first week. So there I was looking through the bare assortment of English-language paperback pulp for anything of value. I was just about to add, if you can believe it, a Stephen Queen horror novel to my meager stack of mysteries, when it hit me: Is this what next year will be like? Do I have enough around me of interest, or will I find myself with nothing to do in a country that doesn’t speak my language? I don’t mean to sound like Salinger’s phony-hating phony or anything, but at times at Roewer it seems that everybody’s phony and brain-dead and that if it weren’t for my friends and the few other interesting people I’d go crazy for nothing to do. To me, you’re one of the “few other interesting people.” I know we don’t know each other very well and that you probably find it strange that I’m writing to you, if you’re even reading this, but I really enjoyed the conversations we had toward the end of the year – you know, about how stupid school was, and about some books, and about your own trip to Italy. You were one of the non-brain-dead non-phonies around that place. I felt – I don’t know – a connection or something. Well, luckily I’m running out of room on this aerogram, which is probably a good thing, but I’ll seal this before I change my mind.

Yours,

Flannery Culp

P.S. Sorry about the espresso stain. All the waiters here are gorgeous, but clumsy and probably gay.

September 1, Florence

Dear Adam,

If writing one letter to you was presumptuous, what is two letters? It’s just that I feel you’d be the only one who’d understand what I’m thinking right now, and besides I’ve already written everybody else too many letters and I have all this caffeinated energy on my hands, as I said last time.

But in any case, the only person who’d really get what I want to say is you, because this relates to the hotel bookstore metaphor I told you about before. Yesterday, when viewing Michelangelo’s David I had the exact opposite metaphorical experience. I mean, I had of course seen the image of David 18 million times, so I wasn’t expecting much – sort of like when I saw the Mona Lisa last summer. I stood in line, took a look, and thought, Yep, that’s the Mona Lisa all right.

It was huge. From head to toe he was simply enormous, and I don’t just mean statuesque (rim shot!) but enormous like a sunset, or like an idea you can at best only half comprehend. It simply took my breath away. I walked around and around it, not because I felt I had to, but because I felt like it deserved that much attention from me. I found myself looking at each individual part closely, rather than the entire thing, because if I looked at the entire thing it would be like staring at the sun. It was such an unblinking portrayal of a person that it rose above any hackneyed hype about it. It flicked away all my cynicism about Seeing Art without flinching and just made me look. I walked out of there thinking, Now I am older.

But it wasn’t until I finished one of my hotel-lobby mysteries that night that I thought of my experience metaphorically. Unlike bringing books to Italy, I went to see David anticipating an empty, manufactured experience; instead I found a real experience, and a new one. I didn’t think I’d have any new experiences left, once sobriety and virginity took flight. Perhaps that is what next year will hold for me. Not sobriety and virginity, but real new experiences. Maybe in writing to you, a new person in my life, I will embark on something new, as well. David has filled me with hope. And another biblical name fills me with hope as well: yours. Out of room again.

Bye,

Flan

And a postcard, written September 3rd, postmarked September 4th.

On the back:

Listen what my letters have been trying to tell you is that I love you and I mean real love that can surpass all the dreariness of high school we both hate, I get back from Italy late on the night of Saturday the 4th call me Sunday. This isn’t just the wine talking.

F.

On the front:

A picture of the statue of David. Cancellation ink from a winking postmarker across the groin.

Vocabulary:VAMPYPRESUMPTUOUSFAUXHACKNEYEDSOBRIETYVIRGINITYPOSTMARKED

Study Questions:

1. A Chinese proverb reads: “Never write a letter when you are angry.” Are there other states of mind in which one should not write letters?

2. Most postal laws state that after one has given one’s letters to the post office to mail one cannot retrieve them. Do you think this is a fair law? Think before answering.

3. Taking jet lag into account, how long would you wait to call someone who had just gotten back from another continent? If you had just gotten back from another continent yourself and were expecting a phone call, what would be the appropriate amount of time to wait before you could assume the phone call wasn’t coming? Assume that you kept the line available as much as possible by keeping all other phone calls short.

Monday September 6th

Jet lag finally wore off today, so it seemed time to start my brand-new-expensive-black-Italian-leather-bound journal. Historians will note that my bargaining skills were not yet sharpened when I made this purchase, which is why I’m trying to write costly sentences to justify my expenditure (i.e., “Historians will note …”). For the past couple of days since I got back I haven’t been doing anything much, anyway; only sitting around my room trying to call my friends. My bedroom became a perfect decompression chamber between the European and American civilizations: I spent all my time talking to machines and was thus soon acclimated back to my motherland.

No one was home. I was sorry to miss them but glad to keep my phone time brief. I’m keeping the line open for Adam. He hasn’t called. I’d like to think that he’s on vacation, but school starts tomorrow so his parents must have brought him home by now to give him time to shop for new khakis.

Just when I was going over each of my letters in my head, Natasha called. “You know Natasha, right, Natasha Hyatt? Long hair, dyed jet-black, sort of vampy-looking?” What stupid things to write! I picked up on the third ring, but before I could speak I heard her breathy voice.

“Flan, are you waiting for some guy to call?” Reader, note here that she pronounces my nickname not as the first syllable in my name is regularly pronounced, but as “a pastry or tart made with a filling of sweet rennet cheese, or, usually, custard.”

I put down TheSalemSlot, the last of my hotel bookstore acquisitions. Once I’ve started something, I have to finish it, no matter how bad it is. “Hi, Natasha. How did you know?”

Natasha sighed, reluctant to explain the obvious. “You just got back from your European jaunt. You’ve left ‘Hi-I’m-home’ messages on everybody’s machines, so you haven’t gone out. You are therefore sitting on your bed reading or writing something. You can reach the phone without moving, but you waited until the third ring. Now, Watson, we need school supplies, ja? Let’s meet for coffee and go buy cute notebooks.”

“Cute notebooks?” I said. “I don’t know. I sort of have to –”

“Yes, cute notebooks. We’re going to be seniors, Flan. We have to play it to the hilt. If we can find pencils with our school colors on them, we’re buying them. But of course we’ll need coffee first. I’ll meet you at Well-Kept Grounds, OK?”

She started to hang up. “Wait! When?”

“Whenever we get there, dearest. While on the Continent, did you forget how we operate? Did you forget us entirely? Nobody got even a postcard.”

“Sorry.”

“Yes, yes, yes. Leave the machine on in case he calls. And I’ll want to hear all about it. The more you talk with machines and the more they talk with you, the more acclimated you’ll get to American civilization, Ciao.” The phone clattered as she hung up.

Only Natasha can make me move as fast as I did. I left the machine on, ran out the door, turned back, got my coat, ran out the door, turned back, got change for the bus and ran out the door. I forgot that San Francisco September can be chilly and that my July bus pass wasn’t going to work two months later. Once on the bus I adopted the Blank Face Public Transportation Dress Code but by the time I got off I couldn’t help beaming. I was happy to see Natasha again. It’s often difficult to keep up with her Bette Davis-meets-Dorothy Parker act but underneath that she’d do anything for me.

Well-Kept Grounds is tucked into a neighborhood full of hippie preteens and bookstores dedicated to the legalization of marijuana, but the surroundings are a small price to pay for the cafe’s collection of fabulous fifties furniture and for not charging extra if you want almond extract in your latte, which I always do. Natasha was there already. I saw her lipstick first, though her forest green rayon dress was a strong second. “Flan!” she called, sounding like she was ordering dessert. Men in their midtwenties looked up from their used paperbacks and alternative newspapers and followed her with their eyes as she cantered across the Grounds. She gave me a hug and for a second I was embraced by a body that makes me want to go home and never eat again. Natasha is one of those high school students who looks less like a high school student and more like an actress playing a high school student on TV.

“Hi,” I said sheepishly, wishing I had worn something more glamorous. Suddenly a summer of not seeing each other seemed like a long time. She stood in front of me and looked me over. She swallowed. We both waited.

“I’ll go get a drink,” I said.

Natasha looked relieved. “Do that.”

The men in their midtwenties slowly returned to their used paperbacks and alternative newspapers. What I would give to have someone in college look me over. I got my drink and went and sat down across from Natasha, who put down her book and looked at me. I looked at the spine of the book.

“Erotica by Anaïs Nin? Does your mother know?”

“Mother lent it to me,” Natasha said, rolling her eyes. She always calls her mom “Mother” as if she’s some society matron when in fact she teaches anthropology at City College. I thumbed through the book as Natasha took a sip of some bright green fizzy drink. I can see you biting and scratching. She learned to tease him, too. The moans were rhythmic, then at times like the cooing of doves. When people thumb through this book, those italics will catch their eyes and they’ll spot a pornographic sentence before the page flaps by. A writer’s got to sell herself.

“Why no latte?” I asked, gesturing to the green potion. “I thought it was mother’s milk to you.”

“After this summer it’s begun to taste like some other bodily fluid,” Natasha said, looking at me significantly. Her eyes were very carefully done; they always are.

“Do tell,” I said, happy to have arrived at a topic that didn’t involve my confession of love, written in a hurried, Chianti-laced scrawl, on a postcard. Just thinking about it made me want to hide under the table, which was painted an unfortunate fiesta-ware pink.

“All right, I’ll talk about my love life, but then we’ll talk about yours. But first, this Italian soda needs a little zip.” Natasha found a flask in some secret pocket and added a clear liquid to the soda, watching me out of the corner of her eye. She’s always taking out that flask and adding it to things. I often suspect that it’s just water but I’m afraid to call her bluff. She went on to describe some guy she met at the Harvard Summer Program in Comparative Religion. Natasha’s always had a fascination with what people worship. Kate says Natasha’s actually fascinated that people aren’t worshiping her instead. In any case, each summer Anthropologist Mom plunks down her hard-earned money for Natasha to fly across the country and make out with gorgeous men, all for the cause of higher learning. According to Natasha, this one was five years older than us and attended a prestigious liberal arts school, the name of which I’m not sure I can mention here lest its reputation become tainted due to its association, however brief, with the notorious Basic Eight.

“He was said to be brilliant,” Natasha said, “but to be honest we didn’t have too many conversations. It was mostly sex. It will be a while before I order any drink with steamed milk again.” She drained the rest of her soda in an extravagant gesture and I watched her throat as she swallowed, taking mental notes.

I sighed. (How perfect my recall of these small details. I sighed, reader; I remember it as if it were yesterday.) “You go to the puritanical city of Boston and hook up with a genius who also happens to be an excellent lover –”

Natasha used a blood-red nail to poke a hole in my sentence. “More accurately, he was an excellent lover who also happened to be a genius.”

“– and I go to Italy, the most romantic country in the world, and the only man who makes my heart beat faster is carved out of marble.” I briefly described my experience with Michelangelo’s David. She broke character for a full minute as she listened to me, shaking her head slightly. Her silver earrings waved and blinked. I was a little proud to have hushed her; even my best poems haven’t done that. When I was done she remembered who she was.

“So this is the guy you’re waiting to hear from?” she asked. “Can I give you a piece of advice? Statues never call. You have to make the effort.”

“You have experience in this realm?” I said. “And here I thought you only slept with anything that moved.” Natasha threw back her head and cackled. U.p. and a.n. went down again; the men all sat and wished they were the ones making her laugh like that. I jumped in while she was laughing.

“It’s Adam State. I’m waiting for Adam State to call.” Once I finally told someone it seemed much smaller, a problem made not of earth-shattering natural forces but of proper nouns: first name Adam, last name State.

Her cackling stopped like somebody pulled the plug. “AdamState?” she screeched. “How can you have a crush on anyone who has a name like a famous economist?”

“It’s not because of his name. It’s because of –”

“That sinequanon,” Natasha finished, batting her eyelashes. She stopped when she saw my face. “Don’t get angry. You know how I am. Underneath all my Bette Davis-meets-Dorothy Parker act I try to be good, really. There’s no accounting for taste. Do you think it will work out?”

I bit my lip. “Honestly?”

Natasha looked at me as if I suggested she keep her hair natural. “Of course not. Honestly. The very idea.”

“In that case, yes. It will definitely work out. I’m just worried about how ‘Flannery State’ will look on my stationery.”

“You could do that hyphenated thing. Culp-State, say.”

“Sounds like a university. Where criminals go after high school.”

I finished my latte and paid careful attention to the taste of the milk. I didn’t notice any real similarity, but my palate isn’t as experienced. “This is a secret, Natasha.”

“Mum’s the word,” she said. Her hair looked gorgeous.

“Don’t say the word to me. My parents have vanished as far as I’m concerned.”

“You have to stop traveling with them,” she said, smiling slightly as her eyes met one of her admirers. “Get them to send you to summer school. You’d learn things.”

“Thanks, but there’s enough steamed milk in my life.”

“Come on, you need to buy notebooks so you can write his name on them in flowery letters.”

I rolled my eyes and followed her across the street to a stationery store. We opened our purses and bought things: notebooks, pencils, paper with narrow, straight lines. Our school colors weren’t available, which is a good thing: Roewer’s colors are red and purple.

She drove me home, which made me worry a little bit about the flask. I leaned back in the passenger seat and everything felt like a transatlantic flight again. I hoped I had enough interesting books, but for now I felt at ease, pampered even. It was almost dusk. I rolled down the window and felt air rush into my mouth. I stole a look at Natasha as she stole a look at me. Friends, we smiled and I closed my eyes again and let the sublime noise surround me.

“The music is great. Who is this?”

Natasha turned it up. “Darling Mud. They’re all the rage in England.”

It sounded great. It was all thundering percussion and snarling guitars, and the chorus told us over and over that one thing led to another. “On and on and on and on,” the singer wailed, on and on and on and on.

As I opened the door to get out, Natasha touched my hand. “Listen, if you want Adam, you’re going to have to move. I talked to Kate just the other day, and she had talked to Adam just the other day. He’s apparently been getting crazy love letters from someone all summer. He wouldn’t tell her who.” Natasha’s voice sounded too careless for these remarks to be well placed. I could have told her then that it was me, but I didn’t. I could have told her I was in love, and didn’t just have a crush, but I didn’t. Maybe I would have saved us all the trouble in the next few months, but I didn’t tell her. School starts tomorrow and with it the chattering network of friends telling friends telling friends secrets. On a postcard; I’m so stupid. I got out of the car and Natasha drove off. All I heard as she left was one thing leading to another.

Tuesday September 7th

So let it be noted that the school year began with the difference between authority and authoritarianism, and I have a feeling that the rest of it will be just as clear. My homeroom teacher is Mr. Dodd. It has always been Mr. Dodd. I cannot remember a time when my homeroom teacher wasn’t Mr. Dodd, and my homeroom teacher will always be Mr. Dodd, forever and ever, world without end. While the rest of us took unknowing summer sips of coffee (and “steamed milk,” in Natasha’s case), Mr. Dodd was apparently at some Assertiveness Training program. He droned on and on about it after stalking into the room and writing “MR. DODD” in all caps on the blackboard, even though homeroom has been the same kids, with the same teacher, year in and year out, world without end. The gist of his speech was that thanks to Assertiveness Training we couldn’t chew gum anymore. He told us of his vision of a new homeroom, “one with authority but not authoritarianism.” I would have let it go, but he insisted we all look it up. He waited while we fumbled with our Websters. We knew he was waiting because he kept calling out, “I’m waiting!” Finally Natasha stood up, brushed her hair from her eyes and read out loud: “Authoritarianism: a doctrine favoring or marked by absolute and unquestioning obedience to authority. Authority: the power to command, determine, or judge.’” Then she looked at Mr. Dodd and sat down. No one ever stands up in class and recites like that, of course, but I suppose if I looked like Natasha I’d stand up too. All the boys, Mr. Dodd included, gaped at Natasha for a minute before the latest graduate of Assertiveness Training for Homeroom and Geography Teachers said, “Does everyone understand what I mean?” Everybody thought, No (except for a sizable handful of homeroom kids who will never think anything, world without end), but only Natasha said it. I looked back and saw her take out an emery board that had a carved claw at either end. She didn’t look at Mr. Dodd as she began to do her nails. Ever since Natasha and I read CyranodeBergerac in Hattie Lewis’s freshman English class she’s done everything with panache. Later this emery board will be very important in our story, so I introduce it now.

Mr. Dodd cleared his throat. Nobody at Assertiveness Training had prepared him for Natasha Hyatt. Nobody ever would be prepared for her. He opened his mouth to say something and the bell rang and we all left. I caught up with Natasha and hugged her.

“I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“I don’t know what I’d do without me, either,” she said, batting her eyelashes. “That’ll teach him to fool around with the dictionary. Tune in tomorrow for the difference between disciple and disciplinarian. Come on, it’s time for Chemistry.”

“I’m not doing Chem,” I said. “I’ve got Biology.”

“With who?”

“Carr.”

“Carr? That dreamboat? ‘NotdoingChem,’ she says.” Natasha looked around the crowded hallway, narrating. Few kids looked up; everyone was used to Natasha going on about something, and we were all zombies this early in the morning, anyway. ‘“NotdoingChem,’ when all the time she gets Biology with Carr. That’s more Chem than I’ll ever have. I’ve got that four-eyed man with the toupee. So when will I see you?”

I started to pull out my schedule to compare, but Natasha was suddenly swept away by a thick-necked rush of football players who apparently let nothing stand in their path on their quest for punctuality. For a minute it felt like a Hollywood prison camp movie where the husband and wife are dragged off to different trains, though I must admit Natasha didn’t look too dismayed at being caught in the stampede. “Easy, boys!” I heard her call, and I looked down at my computerized card to see where to go next:

HOMEROOM: DUD FIRST PERIOD: CALCULATED BAKING SECOND PERIOD: POETIC HATS THIRD PERIOD: ADAM ADAM ADAM ADAM FOURTH PERIOD: FREE LUNCH FIFTH PERIOD: APPLIED CERVIXSIXTH PERIOD: ADVANCE TO RIO BY CAR SEVENTH PERIOD: THE FRENCH SEVERED MILTON

Funny how one’s eyes are bleary in the mornings:

HOMEROOM: LAWRENCE DODD FIRST PERIOD: CALCULUS: MICHAEL BAKER SECOND PERIOD: AMERICAN POETRY: HATTIE LEWIS THIRD PERIOD: CHOIR: JOHN HAND FOURTH PERIOD: LUNCH FIFTH PERIOD: APPLIED CIVICS: GLADYS TALL SIXTH PERIOD: ADVANCED BIO: JAMES CARR SEVENTH PERIOD: FRENCH SEVEN: JOANNE MILTON

Doesn’t look much more believable, does it? Perhaps it has been edited for your amusement and to protect the innocent, if any. This is the first year they’ve included first names on our schedules, and we will never let Lawrence forget it.

It looks like I’m alone in Math. None of my friends. Mr. Baker seems fine. We have to cover our books. Even Hattie Lewis had very little to say about American Poetry except that we have to cover our books which contain it. Hattie Lewis, who opened my eyes to books and the world, to whom I owe the very act of writing in a journal, had little to say except that we have to cover our books. It says something about school that the first thing our mentors tell us is to cover up tomes of knowledge with recycled paper bags. Or maybe it doesn’t. I only had time for half a cup of coffee this morning, and the coffee available here where I am editing this is extremely bitter, like the author/editor herself.

At least in English I have friends – Kate Gordon, the Queen Bee, was in there, and so is Jennifer Rose Milton whose name is so beautiful I must always write it out, completely: Jennifer Rose Milton. Her mother is Joanne Milton, the beautiful French teacher who has written a cookbook of all the recipes contained in Proust. To give you an idea of how beautiful Jennifer Rose Milton is, she can call her mother Maman and no one minds. Gabriel was there, too, although he might have to transfer out to make his schedule work. Gabriel Gallon is the kindest boy in the world, and somehow the San Francisco Unified School District Computer System has figured that out and likes to torture him. Today he will attend three English classes and four gym classes, even though he’s a senior and isn’t supposed to have gym at all. Jennifer Rose Milton came in late and sat far away from me, but Kate sat right next to me and we exchanged heaven-help-us glances about book covering for a full forty minutes. As the bell rang we compared schedules and learned that we have only English together. Jennifer Rose Milton glided toward us and hugged us all, Gabriel first, then Kate, then me. “I wish I could talk,” she said, “but I must run. Maman says the first meeting of the Grand Opera Breakfast Club is tomorrow, so see you then if not before.” She flew out, followed by Gabriel, who was hoping to catch our guidance counselor, an enormous Cuban woman who lives in an office with three electric fans and no overhead lighting. There are always suspicious-looking students glowering around her like bodyguards; going in to have forms signed is a little like discussing détente with a banana republic’s dictator. “Viva la Revolution!” I shouted to him as he left, and half a dozen students looked at me quizzically. Kate threw her head back and laughed, though there’s no way she could have gotten the joke; she has the other senior guidance counselor, a warm, friendly woman sans fans. Kate, though, will never admit to not getting the joke. It’s as if we would depose her. We clasped hands – “Be strong!” she mock-whispered – and she had to go off. I wanted to hear firsthand about her conversation with Adam re those letters he had received from some breathless woman, but there wasn’t time. Perhaps at Grand Opera Breakfast tomorrow.

What you’d like to hear about, of course, is the first face-to-face meeting with Adam. But as with the difference between authority and authoritarianism, it’s hard to talk about something that barely exists. As my bleary-eyed first take at my schedule indicated, I knew I’d see him in choir – he’s the student conductor, which isn’t just something to write down on his college applications. It’s that Johnny Hand is a dim lush who wanders in and out of choir rehearsals and occasionally performs meandering show tunes from his either long-dead or entirely fictitious nightclub act. Adam handles all the music and teaches it to us. So the first meeting of choir consisted of the one hundred or so members (ninety of whom are female) milling around the rehearsal hall while Adam sat in a folding chair, in conference with the other choir officers, trying to figure out what the hell to do. Johnny Hand was nowhere to be seen – he probably needed jump-starting somewhere. Adam saw me as I came in and gave me a half wave and rolled his eyes. I sat down and wondered whether the eye rolling meant he wished he could talk to me instead of talking to the chirpy president, vice president, secretary and treasurer, or that he can’t believe I had the courage to catch his eye.

On the way out of choir, I passed the room where the band and orchestra rehearse. Rolling their eyes, Douglas Wilde, my ex, and his girlfriend Lily Chandly, strolled out carrying their instrument cases. He is a violinist, she a cellist so there’s no bitterness here because she’s much better for Douglas; I’m practically tone-deaf and anyway, I broke up with him. Douglas, as usual, was dressed to the hilt in an off-white linen suit, complete with pressed handkerchief and pocket watch. Dating him was a bit like being in an old movie. I hugged them both, each in turn. Douglas, the dear, didn’t mind – it was, as they say in tabloids, an amicable parting – but Lily emitted such a glare that I was thankful that those were true instrument cases and not Mafioso euphemisms. Had I written to these people during the summer I wouldn’t have to re-establish anything. Douglas had to rush off (after disentangling himself from Lily’s smugly possessive good-bye kiss), but I stayed with her as she went to her locker. She handed over her computerized schedule card and I discovered that we were about to have lunch together.

“I think it’s great that you two are still together,” I said as we sat down at one of the appropriate benches in the courtyard. Like homing pigeons, all the right people were in all the right places after summer break.

“Yes, me too,” Lily said, relaxing a little bit. I could see her remembering that she was my friend and not my rival. I spied Natasha and waved for her to come over; she saw me and walked across the courtyard, accompanied by – I swear I could hear it – the clatter of male jaws dropping to asphalt. She had taken off her black leather jacket as the day got hotter and was wearing a translucent tank top that made the following fashion statement: Herearemynipples. That may sound bitterly envious, but that’s only because I am.

“Same shit, different year,” she said by way of greeting. She grasped Lily’s well-combed head and kissed both cheeks. “Tonight I get to make flash cards of the periodic chart. How’s the scrumptious Jim Carr?”

“I haven’t had him yet.”

“Well, give yourself time,” she said, taking out a blood-red metallic lunch box decorated with lacquered photographs of her idol, Marlene Dietrich. Where does she find these things? “It’s only the first day. Oh, how was choir?”

Lily looked up from her apple. “What’s in choir?”

“Flan’s current flame,” Natasha whispered.

Lily looked relieved and I was thankful that Natasha let her know that I wasn’t after Douglas. “Who? Have you been dating someone this summer?”

“She spent all summer in Europe,” Natasha said, opening her lunch box. Inside it were twelve large shrimp in a bag filled with ice, and a small container of cocktail sauce. “Not that anybody received as much as a postcard.” Natasha and Lily turned to me and tut-tutted in unison. Why hadn’t I sent postcards to them instead?

Lily took another bite of apple. “So if Flannery isn’t seeing someone, how can she have a current flame?” Only Lily would want to get the terminology straight before finding out who the mystery man was. Is.

“The candle,” Natasha said, shrimp between teeth, “is not yet burning at both ends. He doesn’t know yet.”

Lily nodded sagely. She was ready. “Who is he?”

I sighed. This part was always a little embarrassing. “Adam State.”

“Adam State?” she screeched, and the apple dropped out of her hands and rolled into the middle of the courtyard. Everybody was quiet and stared at it. Natasha, of course, broke the silence.

“To the fairest!” she cried, and people laughed and went back to their lunches. Though I’m sure nobody but us understood the Homeric reference, everyone understood Natasha doing something crazy.

“Having a crush on Adam State is like having a crush on Moses,” Lily said matter-of-factly. “He’s too busy doing his own thing to notice you.”

“In The Ten Commandments Moses had a lover,” Natasha said, absently.

“The Ten Commandments is not a documentary, Natasha,” Lily said, and looked me over like a talent scout examining a piece of meat. “Flannery, I wouldn’t bet on his candle getting lit.” She took her napkin from her lunch bag and began to clean her tortoiseshell glasses.

“I heard he just broke up with somebody,” Natasha said, fluttering her hands in a gesture that indicated that she may have heard this from the wind.

I tried to sound worldly and confident. “He is the only appropriate person for me to like,” I said, and Natasha and Lily exchanged a look. Natasha said nothing and finished her shrimp, and Lily put her glasses back on. I watched her hands as they absent-mindedly practiced cello fingerings at her side. Lily will probably attend a conservatory next year. I think she lost some weight over the summer. What was that look about? Did someone have a crush on me? The sun glinted on the apple, but the gods didn’t seem interested today. Maybe they had to cover their books. I’d better stop all this description now, because I’m in Civics and my teacher, Gladys Tall, who lives up to her name, is getting suspicious. I couldn’t possibly be taking this many notes on her lecture, because the notes would have to look like this: cover your book cover your book cover your book

Wednesday, September 8th

Would that everything in life began with the Grand Opera Breakfast Club. For those who have opened the time capsule and found this journal as the sole chosen memento for this wondrous century, let me elucidate: The Grand Opera Breakfast Club is a precious stone that killed two birds that flew around the head of Joanne Milton, Roewer’s best French teacher and mother of Jennifer Rose Milton. One bird was the fact that Jennifer Rose Milton’s friends (that is Kate, Gabriel, Natasha, myself, etc.) always weaseled our way into French with Mrs. Milton (it’s so strange to write that – to us she will always be Millie) and not entirely inadvertently turned it into what we called a salon but what the head of the department told Millie was socializing, even if it was in French. The other bird was in the form of our principal, an ex-football coach named Jean Bodin who is as large as a truck and half as smart. He was giving Millie a bad time for not sponsoring a club. Every faculty member was supposed to sponsor a club.

It was Jennifer Rose Milton, beautiful Jennifer Rose Milton, who had the idea. It was when she was going out with Douglas, and he was trying to woo her away from the wispy-voiced feminist songwriters she liked to put in her tape deck by steering her toward the classics. So, over dinner with Maman, Jennifer Rose Milton conceived of the Grand Opera Breakfast Club, an organization so pretentious that no one but our friends would join it, which would enable us to have a salon after all, except not in French, and would give Millie a club to sponsor. Once a week or so we’d meet before school in a classroom, listen to opera and eat breakfast. In her gratitude, Millie volunteered to buy the pastries.

This morning was LaBoheme, and so was the opera, if you catch my meaning. Millie, Jennifer Rose Milton, Douglas, Kate, Gabriel, Natasha, and V___: I felt for the first time that I was amongst comrades and that we were all facing the new year together. Of course we couldn’t meet two whole hours before classes began, so we only listened to the first act, with the artist/lovers meeting in their garret. We munched and listened. We got powdered sugar all over the libretto. Douglas, in a dark blue three-piece suit, tried to lecture us; we shushed him. Gradually the burnt play, the shirked rent, the pawned key all became background for our own small dramas.

“I can’t believe all my babies are seniors,” Millie said, adding accent marks to someone’s homework with a leaky red pen. A single red drop stained her cheek like a bloody tear; I note this image now for a future poem.

“I can certainly believe it,” Natasha said. She was looking in a small hand mirror and examining her lipstick for flaws – she might as well have been examining it for the crown jewels which were just as likely to be there. “Douglas, what were you saying Marcello had to do?”

“Not Marcello, Schaunard. He’s telling the story right now,” Douglas said, and his eyes lit up. I think one of the reasons it ended was that his eyes never lit up for me the way they did for classical music. I realize that in the long run I may not be as wonderful as a Brahms symphony but I think I’m good for a Haydn quintet. “He was hired to play for a duke, and –”

“Lord,” Kate corrected, looking up from the libretto.

“Well, a royal, anyway. The lord told him he had to play the violin until his parrot died.”

“I’m sorry,” V___ said, fingering her pearls. The pearls were real; she wore real pearls to highschool. “How and why did a starving musician have a pet parrot?”

“The lord’s parrot,” Douglas said. “Honestly, V___.”

“The Lord’s Parrot,” I said, “will be the name of my first play.”

“Your first play for whom?” Natasha asked, raising an eyebrow delicately highlighted with glitter. Maybe the crown jewels were to be found on her face, after all.

“Hush, you savages,” Douglas said. “Anyway, Marcello has to play until the parrot dies.”

“Well, my point, lost somewhere in all this, is that that’s how I’ve been feeling. We’ve been at Roewer all this time, waiting for some goddamn parrot to die.” Natasha took another doughnut. What I would do to be able to take another doughnut and still look as good as she does.

Douglas thought for a second. “Well, Marcello manages to bribe the maid into poisoning the parrot. Who could we bribe?”

“To kill whom?” Lily said, always demanding accuracy. It was still early, so none of her hip-length hair had strayed from her sculptured bun. “Who is the parrot in this situation?”

“Bodin,” Millie said, muttering the name of our beloved principal under her breath, and then, suffering from a rare bout of professionalism, looked up from another scarred homework assignment, saying, “Who said that? I didn’t say that.”

“Killing Bodin would be extremely difficult,” Natasha said. “Digging a grave that large would be six weeks’ work.”

“Is there some creative murder method in LaBoheme?” Kate asked in a tone of voice meant to imply that she once knew the answer, but it had slipped her mind.

“Nobody gets killed, they just get sick,” Douglas said, and drew out his pocket watch. “It’s almost homeroom,” he said.

“Then we’d much rather discuss something of infinitely more importance,” Kate said, “like the first dinner party of the season.”

“That’s more like it,” Gabriel said.

Kate pulled out a spiral notebook. “I was thinking this Saturday, if everyone’s free.” We all nodded; we’d postpone surgery for one of our dinner parties.

“Let’s make a list,” Lily said, licking jelly off her fingers.

“You and your lists,” V___ said fondly, swatting at her. Lily kissed her on the cheek. “I can’t have it at my house, even though I’d love to. My parents are entertaining.”

“Your parents? Entertaining?” Kate asked in mock surprise. Her parents are always entertaining, though in person they are never entertaining, if you follow me. We’ve never had a dinner party at V___’s house, even though each time she says she’d love to.

“We’ll have it at my house,” Kate pronounced. “Now, a guest list.”

“Well, everyone here,” Lily said, counting us off on her fingers. “There’s Flannery, Gabriel –”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Kate said. “We don’t have to list all of us. We’re you know, the basics.” She scribbled down our names on a piece of paper. “The Basic Eight.”

“Are there only eight of us?” Jennifer Rose Milton asked. “We’re such a menagerie it seems like more.”

“Yep, just eight. The Basic Eight are as follows: Kate Gordon, Natasha Hyatt, Jennifer Rose Milton, Flannery Culp, Lily Chandly, V___, Douglas Wilde and Gabriel Gallon.”

“Why are the men last?” V___ asked.

“If you have to ask …” Natasha said, rolling her eyes.

“… you can’t afford it,” I finished, and Natasha smiled at me.

“Who else shall we invite besides, um, the Basic Eight?” Lily asked.

“How about Lara Trent?” Gabriel asked. “I’ve always thought she was nice.”

“Absolutelynot,” Natasha Hyatt said. “Such a drip.”

Jennifer Rose Milton put her hands on her hips. “She can’t be that bad. Let’s invite her. We’ll give her a chance.”

“Absolutelynot,” Natasha said. “She once told me I wasn’t a good Christian.”

We all threw up our hands and said “No!” in unison. One thing we don’t tolerate is organized religion. Right-wing parent activists are going to love that sentence, but loath as I am to give any ammunition to those who are frothing at the mouth about our godless schools, it’s true.

“How about Adam State?” Kate asked. She met my eyes quietly, and I appreciated her tact, which was a little out of character. Not that Kate is the sort to tease about our romantic inclinations, but she might at least raise her eyebrows. Just about everyone must have known about me and Adam, so just about everyone waited for me to answer.

“He seems a little conceited to me,” Gabriel said. Don’t smirk at me, reader; I said justabout everyone, not everyone.

“And we certainly don’t want any egotism,” Natasha said. “Heavenforfend. We don’t want to be friends with anyone who’s at all self-important.” Millie snorted in the corner at that.

“I think he’s nice,” I said, casually. I’m sorry, I didn’t write that in a way that properly conveyed the mood. “I think he’s nice,” I said, CASUALLY.

“I do too,” Lily said, loyally, and Kate wrote him down.

“How about Flora Habstat? She’s my only friend in homeroom.”

Kate narrowed her eyes and sighed. “It’s always difficult to tell if someone’s interesting in homeroom. The setting is so dull, how can anyone really shine?”

“Well, let’s try her,” Jennifer Rose Milton said, and Kate wrote her down.

Natasha pulled out her hand mirror again. “Can I just warn you guys about something? I’ve heard that Flora constantly quotes the Guinness Book of World Records.”

“What?” V___ said. “I know her, and I’ve never heard her do that.”

“That’s just what I’ve heard,” Natasha said, airily. Kate and I exchanged a look. We were both wondering if we were missing some obscure joke.

“Who else?” Kate said. The bell rang.

Idea for a story: A man falls in love with a woman and writes her letter after letter. We never read the letters she writes to him. His love grows and grows through the letters. He can’t stand it anymore. Then something drastic happens … but what?

O my boggled head, around which numbers spun all period. The second day of school and I’m already lost in Calc. I covered my book last night, just like everybody else, but after that I got lost. I looked around me – no friends in that class, none at all – and everyone was taking notes, nodding along with Baker and his spirals of chalk. My mind sputtered and began to sink. I clung to the life jacket of sketching out story outlines. I think when I reread my journal this year I’ll always be able to tell when I was in Calc by the paragraphs of story entries.

For some reason we got out of Baker’s class early. The bell system here is computerized, which means of course that it doesn’t work; the bells ring, ignored, at random, as if a loud, unruly ice-cream man is wandering around Roewer High School. Baker let us out of class and the hallways were nearly deserted. I arrived early for Poetry, which was a gift. Hattie Lewis was there.

Hattie Lewis likes to tell her students stories from when she was young, but I can’t quite believe those stories because it seems that she must have been born a wise old woman. Her classroom is her lair. It’s industrial and ugly like everyone else’s classrooms, but it has an aura of classiness and culture. For one thing, there aren’t any faded travel posters or soft-focus photographs of sunsets with “Reach For Your Dreams” superimposed over them up on the walls, but the aura transcends the cheap Impressionist reproductions that have replaced them. It comes from her. She doesn’t have to tell anybody not to chew gum; they just know it. She dresses more ridiculously than any other Roewer teacher (and the competition is stiff) – all crazy-quilted skirts and vests with embroidered flora – but no one laughs, even when she’s not around. Her first name is Hattie, but no one has a mean nickname for her. Showing up early for her class and thus being alone with her felt like showing up early for Judgment Day and getting to hang out with the angels before the crowds arrive. (It sounds like I mean it felt like death. Calculus must still be crowding my brain.)

Our conversation was about the literary magazine, of which I am editor. She’s the faculty sponsor. Our first meeting is tomorrow after school. I can’t forget about it.

LIT MEETING TOMORROW!!!

I asked her what poets we’d be studying this year, and was embarrassed when she listed all these names I had never heard of. I mean, I recognize Robert Frost, and of course e. e. cummings, but I consider myself a poet and had never heard of these people. She must have seen my face as I struggled to hide my ignorance.

“Relax,” she said. “You will be wise. You’re young. You can’t have everything right away.” When something simple and true takes you by surprise, it hits you in the stomach. Before I could say anything people starting piling in. Hattie Lewis didn’t skip a beat. She had us all sit down and she spent the rest of the period talking about Anne Bradstreet. I took notes; I had never heard of Anne Bradstreet.

Now I’m in choir, and even with Adam still gathered in a corner with the other officers, the calm of Hattie Lewis’s words comforts me. I can’t have everything right away. Plus, sometimes it’s enough to watch him. Still no sign of Mr. Hand, the real choir teacher.

From a spiral-bound notebook passed between two desks in Gladys Tall’s fifth-period Applied Civics class, taped into these typed pages:

Kate, what is Mrs. T talking about? I’ve been staring out the window.

Tell me about it. You were far, far away. I’ve had to roll my eyes at myself all period.

Sorry. I didn’t get much sleep last night.

Flan, what did I tell you about whoring on school nights? You’re always tired and grumpy the next day. I’m going to call your pimp and give him a piece of my mind. If he doesn’t reschedule your hours you’ll never get into a good college.

You must stop writing things like that to me. I don’t think Mrs. Tall bought the fact that I found the concept of supply and demand humorous.

On a much more important note, I saw Adam today but I didn’t invite him to the dinner party. I thought you might want to.

You know him better.

You want to know him better.

Still, I’m waiting for him to call me.

You need an excuse before you can call somebody. He doesn’t have an excuse to call you. Anyway, somebody else is afterhim, so you better get moving. He said that somebody had written him love letters all summer.

The notebook wasn’t passed anymore, despite there being a full fifteen minutes left of class.

Jim Carr has eyes like a hawk, so I can’t write much in here, but I would like to note that for the seventh semester in a row – every semester I’ve been here – Mr. Carr has managed to find a curvaceous female education grad student to serve as his teaching assistant. Most teachers here don’t have any teaching assistants at all, except for the occasional French friend of Millie’s who needs work, but Carr manages to find a bevy of them. There are a lot of stupid biology jokes to be made here, but my beautiful expensive Italian leather-bound black journal is too nice for such cracks.

Home again, home again. I’m bored of my routine already, and it’s the second day of school. Natasha picked me up from Bio – “Is that this year’s model?” she asked, glaring at the assistant – and walked me to French, trying all the way to convince me that I should invite Adam to the party. Finally she said I could think it over tonight and that otherwise Kate’d do it tomorrow. My plan is that he’ll call me tonight, and I, quasi-spontaneously, will invite him to the party. After I hang up the phone, I will go out to the garden and frolic with my pet unicorn, which just as surely exists as the rest of my scenario. Sigh. Gotta go read some Bradstreet. She’s an early American poet; what do you mean you’ve never heard of her?

Thursday, September 9th

This morning when I went outside I found that the newsprint from the ChronicIll (as it is called by a rather fuddy-duddy columnist) had spread from my fingertips to the whole wide sky. I got off the bus and stared at the traffic, trying to think of a very good reason to cross it and walk up the three-block San Francisco hill to school, when V___ pulled up in her car and opened her door in one swift swoop. She said nothing, just beckoned, and I got in. Inside it was warm and V___ was playing the Brandenberg Concertos.

“Bless you!” I shouted. “Bless you!”

V___ merged. “I didn’t sneeze,” she said. “Although you are going to get a cold if you continue to insist on taking the bus each morning.” Like many people of noble descent, V___ often assumed that everyone’s habits were born of personal choice and not necessity; why people chose to live in war-ravaged countries was always beyond her.

“Hey, this is the faculty parking lot.”