The Basic Eight Read online

  She looked at me over the pile of tests. Behind her, the bus driver, fat as hell, shot me an impatient look. “No,” I said. I stood up and took a step into a large puddle of someone’s discarded cola. Evil corporate chemical sweeteners seeped in and began to soak my sock. The bus doors closed and the infant pulled away, whining and coughing. I had just realized I needed to be waiting at the other bus stop.

  Thursday September 16th

  Carr didn’t read it. He didn’t fucking read it! I’m in Biology right now, and we all got our tests back, mine corrected by the teacher himself (how he must of strained himself, he who is used to his love slaves/assistants performing that task) because of, as I learned yesterday, a conflict of interest, aka Flan, caught him with his pants almost literally down, and he didn’t even read it. I just about fainted when I saw the A on top–no way did I get a smidgen of credit on that essay question, and that was one-fifth the grade–but he didn’t read it. I mean he literally didn’t read it. I turned to the page with the essay question on it and saw that I had actually written: “Biologically, these functions are important for the sustenance of a living system” and no one called me on it. What is it–an apology? A bribe? I’m flunking Math and applying to college and my love life is a roller coaster and that isn’t enough–I need this bonus Moral Dilemma.

  “Take the A,” Natasha told me, taking a swig of her is-it-really-alcohol-or-just-water flask as she spun the steering wheel. Outside, pedestrians watched the car warily, like it might kill them. Sometimes accepting a ride home from Natasha is more stress than it’s worth, although so is Advanced Biology and I show up every day. Darling Mud blared; I ought to contact them about being compensated for endorsement when this is published.

  “You know, there is a strong possibility that you actually earned it,” she said. “I’m going to run over this woman in the ugly hat.”

  “That hat is not worth prison,” I said. (These parenthetical asides distract from the dialogue, I know, but can I just say: denim, plaid brim, bright yellow feathers.) “There’s no way I earned it, Natasha. I calculated it right afterward. It was a B and then only if neatness didn’t count for the sketches.”

  “I’ve seen your sketches,” Natasha said. “With you it’s not an issue of neatness but semblance. You can’t seriously tell me that anyone would have pressed charges if I had destroyed that denim canary.”

  “It looked like it was in a kilt, no less. Probably a canary of Scottish royalty.”

  “And, as I recall,” Natasha said airily, stopping in front of my house, “we learned last year in Shakespeare that when you kill Scottish royalty the whole thing becomes a mess.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said. I got out of the car, sourly. Natasha hadn’t made me feel much better. “When shall we two meet again?”

  “Tomorrow, of course,” she said, spitting gum out the open window. “Are you going to the dance tomorrow night?”

  I hadn’t thought much about it. “I hadn’t thought much about it,” I said, cleverly.

  Natasha rolled her eyes. “Oh, well,” she said, “I know that you want to give the matter your full attention before you decide. It’s a high school dance, Flan. You know, most people aren’t so spacey when they get an unexpected A during their most important semester for college.”

  “Natasha, he’s a shit!” I said. “He makes me feel yucky. I feel like I can’t touch anything because Carr slime is all over it.” I thought about the teaching assistant not wanting to touch her kid.

  “Look at me,” Natasha said. I looked her right in the eyeliner. “Forget about Carr. You can’t do a thing about it, and in the meantime he’s giving you better grades than you deserve. If you had half a brain you’d play it up and you’d never have to study in that class again. Look at me, Flan. Now go inside and write in your journal and thicken up your skin a little bit. And don’t forget, ‘your life, your woe, your death: all embraced in dreams.’”

  That did it. We cracked up, loud and loose. “That really was a dreadful poem,” I admitted. “Of course, as editor I’m supposed to remain objective–”

  “And confidential,” Natasha said. “So you don’t have to confirm what I already know: it was a Frosh Goth creation, was it not?”

  “How did you know?”

  “The little State girl blushed and blushed as we all ripped into it. Very satisfying, I must say. Usually you start off the first meeting with one of your own poems so it’s actually pretty good.”

  “All right, enough flattery, I’m cheered up already,” I said, and I was. I looked around, and in the foggy afternoon light my dull neighborhood looked cheerful–the lawns, the throwaway coupon books on everyone’s porch, Natasha’s gum on the street, moist as a kiss. It must have been pathetic fallacy again.

  “That wasn’t flattery,” she said imperatively. “Flan, you’re extremely talented.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, poking at the gum with my shoe. I realized it was probably water in the flask–nobody drank liquor while chewing peppermint gum at the same time.

  “You are,” she said, putting the car back in drive. In the back of my mind I said a silent prayer for those pedestrians who would be in Natasha’s way. Especially the ones in ugly hats. “I just know that you’re going to do something that will make the whole world sit up and take notice.”

  Friday September 17

  Is this funny or am I just suffused with end-of-the-week giddiness? V__’s mother won’t let her go to the dance because of some stupid (rich old family name) family commitment. Lily, Douglas, Natasha and I were sitting around at lunchtime making up catty nicknames for her. I can’t repeat any of the suggestions of nicknames, because they all play off the Queen Mother’s first and last names, both of which are of course secrets. But it makes no difference; suffice to say that the one that stuck we found hilariously funny. Satan. We laughed and laughed, there in the courtyard, Natasha with her bright red lipstick, Douglas in another one of his linen suits, this one a sort of off-white, Lily with her tortoiseshell glasses and me looking surprisingly slim, I think, in these gray pants I used to have back then. We elaborated and laughed some more, imagining cute polished mother-of-pearl horns sticking out of her carefully shellacked bun, a pitchfork kept in the elephant-foot umbrella stand in V__’s hall. Satan. Of course later this nickname would get us into heaps of trouble, but that morning it was hilarious.

  OH MY IT’S LATER

  Tonight tonight tonight. Those were the words to that song and how true they are. Tonight tonight tonight. I had honestly forgotten over the summer the surreal, stupid but irresistible deadly charming intensity that is a Roewer dance. Was that a sentence? I’m checking…yes it was. Subject and verb both, and that’s how I feel, too. Tonight, tonight, tonight I am both subject and verb. I can’t seem to stop moving, and you’d think a bottle of cheap champagne is a depressant, right? But as you know, you gorgeous black leather notebook, I know shit about biology. Flan, begin at the beginning, it’s a very good place to start, all those lessons about narrative structure are melting away under all this fizzy wine.

  Two New Year’s Eves ago (how’s that for beginning at the beginning at the beginning) my parents had a party and it was no problem at all sneaking one of the five boxes of champagne up to my room during the hubbub, they were having me act as waitress all night anyway so I felt it was my due. It lives under the bed, where my parents never check (plus, the fact that my parents have disappeared this year means they never check anything). On special occasions I take out a bottle. I took one when I got home from boring boring school and called folks to see who wanted to meet early at the lake for cocktails before actually proceeding to the dance. I couldn’t get ahold of Natasha, Jennifer Rose Milton said coyly that she already had plans but would see me at the dance (of course, I would find out exactly what sort of “plans”–narrative structure, Flan, narrative structure), and Gabriel was weird about it. He said he didn’t want to get drunk with me. He said it just like that–at least I think he did
. “I’ll just see you there,” he said glumly. What is up with that? Anyway, Kate was game, but by then there were too few people for me to call Lily and Douglas because I didn’t want it to be one kissy couple and the two single girls, drinking out at the lake. I’ve seen that movie; they all end up revealing deadly secrets and killing one another. Anyway Lily and Douglas didn’t even show up.

  Well I showered and changed my clothes and took the bus down to the lake, clutching the champagne neck inside my backpack, feeling the delicious paranoia that only a minor clutching alcohol on public transportation can feel. Spun off the bus and sat on a log, watching the sun setting and a bunch of grimy freshman girls drinking something they’d snuck out of the house in a food storage container. They shrieked with laughter as they spilled whatever-it-was on their shirts; I remember thinking that Carr would smell the liquor on them and lead them, shaken but still tipsy-giggly, to the office to wait for their parents to pick them up. All right, I couldn’t have been thinking about Carr before I found out he was chaperoning, but you probably didn’t catch that, anyway.

  “Happy New Year!” Kate cried out as I popped the cork. Kate was wearing an outfit consisting entirely of the color dark blue. She always wears outfits consisting entirely of the color dark blue, and always will wear outfits consisting entirely of the color dark blue, world without end. We gulped and giggled and talked about nothing, enjoying the Indian summer night but not the mosquitoes that flew in it. Just when the bottle was drained, what I thought was a large black backpack of one of the freshgirls looked up and it was no backpack but Rachel State, the Frosh Goth, Sister Of The Groom. She stared at me from eyes circled in what looked like coal. In fact, between her black lipstick and her black clothes and dyed black hair I would have to say her overall impression was distinctly mesquitelike. If you were bad all year and of the Christian faith, you could expect Rachel State in your stocking.

  “Rachel!” I cried out, hoping I was impressing the hell out of her, “Come meet my friend Kate!”

  She scowl-staggered over while her friends gaped. The bubbly must have mellowed Queen Bee Kate Gordon (did I just use the phrase the bubbly?!?), because she didn’t cringe or mock or anything; she just said hello. How ’bout that.

  “Rachel is Adam State’s sister,” I told Kate brightly.

  “And you–,” Rachel slurred, pointing a black nailpolished hand vaguely in my direction. “You’re the one who wrote Adam love letters all summer.”

  If this were a movie–and don’t tell me it’s not melodramatic enough to be one–some great disaster would have struck right then, and we would have glossed over the mortifying moment by running to shelter, bailing out the boat, comforting the bereaved, calming the horses, anything, anything but standing there–with Kate, Queen Bee Kate Gordon no less, while the worst poet I’ve ever seen went and blabbed my only secret. But as it turned out, no tidal wave was needed; not that Lake Merced could have produced much of one.

  “No, she’s not,” Kate said, without blinking. She wasn’t covering up for me; she was genuinely, drunkenly, stupid, just for a moment. Tomorrow morning, I have to drag my hungover ass out of bed and spend all my money on novena candles. If ever the proof of a Benevolent Deity, this.

  “Oh,” said the Frosh Goth, closing her eyes to regain her balance. Her black lipstick was smeared like she had just eaten fudge. “Then you must be the one he really likes.” She turned to her surprisingly nonblackened friends and explained, gesturing limply. “There are two girls, one who is chasing him, one who he wants to chase.”

  Fuck the novena candles, I’m sleeping late. “Come on,” I said to Kate, trying to sound bored. “Enough hanging around Merced with the Frosh Faction.”

  We stumbled into the building that challenges us academically, athletically and socially, only to find that Carr was one of the evening’s chaperones. Now that’s a challenge. Carr took our tickets and glared at me. We entered our high school for the second time that day, now festooned with streamers. I could hear the bass lines of the music coming from the gym like an approaching army. Gabriel and Natasha bounded up, already dance-sweaty, and grabbed us. “It’s on!” Natasha shouted, and I looked at her in her tight black jeans and sequined bustier with a big fake rhinestone X in the center of it and just didn’t care anymore. We went into the gym and danced and shouted and danced. They were playing that song that goes “Tonight tonight tonight,” it’s still in my head. I love that song. Everything was great, all champagne blurry and the boys weren’t looking at the bustier but at me (dream on, little Culp girl) when I stepped out into the hallway to get a drink of water and all of a sudden I was in The Chamber Of Horrors. I can only describe them by exhibits:

  EXHIBIT ONE: JENNIFER ROSE MILTON LEANING AGAINST THE WALL AND MAKING OUT WITH FRANK WHITELAW! I don’t know if I’ve recorded here in this journal the only conversation I’ve ever really had with Frank Whitelaw–he ran into me once maybe last week, when it was raining–but he is a slow man. I mean stupid slow, not like he moves slowly. In fact, given the location of his hands on Jennifer Rose Milton’s gorgeous thin body, I would say that slow is most certainly not how Mr. Whitelaw moves. So this is who Jenn has been seeing.

  EXHIBIT TWO: JIM CARR, BIOLOGY TEACHER, FLIRTING WITH SOPHOMORE CHEERLEADING CHICK, STROKING HER HAIR EVEN. Enough said, I trust. Not only that, they were blocking the drinking fountain. I turned and went down the hallway you’re not supposed to go down during school dances because, I don’t know, something horrible might happen to you, and like I was a character in one of those religious pamphlets they give out, something horrible did happen, right then, because there was

  EXHIBIT THREE: DRUNK MARK WALLACE, leaning against some lockers with his bloodshot eyes and a sweat-stained T-shirt that read: “Black By Popular Demand.” Just what I needed. Mark Wallace is perhaps the most obnoxious person at Roewer, and when drunk he’s downright belligerent. Natasha had to crack a bottle of beer over his head at a cast party once–but that’s another story. This story goes like this:

  Once upon a time, in a hallway too far from supervision, the Big Bad Mark Wallace asked Flan what was up, and Flan said nothing much and the B. B. M. W. asked what her hurry was, and Flan stuttered something and then Mark told me I had nice tits. What do you say to that, exactly? So I said nothing, and turned around and that’s when he reached over and grabbed one of them, trying to kiss me on the neck at the same time. I think that Mark hoped that my body would respond in ways that were beyond my control, and he was right: I threw up, all over his political statement. Then, while he gasped and gaped, I turned and ran. I turned the corner and ran the rest of the way down the hallway. I had almost reached the gym when I felt a tap on the shoulder. It was Carr; behind him, a cheerleader looked at me with the same smugness as the States.

  “Culp,” he said, licking his lips nervously, “you’re not supposed to go down that hallway.” He put his arm authoritatively on my shoulder; I think that’s what did it.

  “Carr,” I said, “we all do things we’re not supposed to. Now get your hand the fuck off my shoulder.”

  “OK, Flan, time to go home,” Gabriel said, appearing from nowhere. He put an arm around me and I instantly broke down. I kept my head down so I couldn’t see any more Horrors. People were probably laughing at me, pointing at me, but I didn’t see them. I kept my head down and kept walking, a strategy that turned out to be handy later, on courthouse steps and the like.

  “So,” Gabriel said conversationally as he buckled me in and started the car. “Have a nice evening?” I laughed and he laughed and I told him about the only Exhibit I thought it was appropriate to talk about: Jennifer Rose Milton and Frank Whitelaw. He was impressed.

  “Not bad work for a lush,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said. “You’d be a lush too if you’d have joined me at the lake. What, did you have a better offer or something?” He looked so sad, so suddenly.

  “I just–” he said, and I looked at him and saw that he was longing to say som
ething. He had rolled down the window for me, and the night air chilled me. I waited, but he didn’t say anything.

  “You just what?” I said as he pulled onto my street. The air kept chilling me, and I kept waiting.

  “I just–” he said, and stopped at my house. He sighed and then smiled emptily. “I’m just tired,” he said, and let me out. I went inside and swallowed all the aspirin and water in sight. What was that all about? Well, it’s too late to think anymore about that or anything else. It’s too late to think about it. I keep dozing between sentences, but I’m going to stay awake and write a poem or die trying.

  There’s no poem here. Draw your own conclusions.

  Saturday September 18th

  Back here, in editing land, as I retype this journal and try to set everything right, I have drowning dreams. The gurgles I hear all night break through my only window, and dribble onto the floor. I wake up when the water level reaches the mattress and soaks it. By that time it’s pouring down. It’s hard for me to get out of bed because the itchy wool blanket is heavy and bloated in the torrent. The gurgling is everywhere. Water fills my hands, my mouth and my own screams add to the gurgles as I wake up, this time for real. Sometimes if I’ve been shouting this fat matron of a woman asks me if I’m OK. Now there’s an essay question that nobody would give me an A on. On which they’d give me an A.

  This morning the Satanic Minion of Hangover Hell must have had it in for me because the phone rang in the middle of a dream in which something terrible was chasing me. It was Kate, asking if I wanted to meet everyone for focaccia at The Curtain Rises, this upscale non-Italian Italian place across from the theater. Hamlet. I forgot about Hamlet just like we forgot all about Cymbeline last week. If we had remembered Cymbeline then I wouldn’t be worried about Hamlet. He’s going to be there. “Should we invite Adam for focaccia, too?” Kate asked, and I wish those science fiction phones had been invented so I could have reached into the screen and my hand could have come out in her bedroom and slapped her. She could barely keep her delight at my disastrous evening out of her voice. So many exciting things for you to spread around, Kate! How nice for you! I told Kate I’d invite him myself–let her choke on that, little gossipy twit–and took a shower. Do you think if I turned the shower on to its harshest frequency it could wear some of the flesh off me? I mean, if babbling brooks can do it to stone…