The Basic Eight Page 9

  “You’re being too harsh on her,” Natasha said to me when I bitched about Kate. How’s this for a friend: She had let herself into my house using the key that everyone knows we keep under the flowerpot (Attention burglars: it is there no more) and fixed poached eggs and coffee and Bloody Marys. She was slicing celery into suggestive stalks when I came down in sweats.

  “I thought you might need some recuperation assistance,” she said as I hugged her.

  “Sometimes having you around is like hanging out with those gorgeous bitter single girlfriends of the heroine in romantic comedies.”

  Natasha bit the tip off one of the, um, stalks. “But baby,” she said. “I’m the real thing. What happened last night? Each person I talked to only had a scrap of the story; it was like some Robert Louis Stevenson ripped-up treasure map thing.”

  I told her the whole Chamber Of Horrors, but the problem was I couldn’t tell her everything because nobody but nobody knows that I’m the one who wrote Adam all those damn letters and that postcard that I would give my right arm to go back in time, beat up the Italian postal carrier and destroy. Natasha listened intently, sipping the Bloody Mary and the coffee alternately, and eventually I got around to Kate’s phone call, and that’s when she told me I was being too harsh on her. Thought I’d never return to that, did you? Remember, I was hungover then, but now, typing this, I’m stone sober. Remember what’s real.

  “Flan,” Natasha said. “Kate’s not delighted you had a terrible evening. But you must admit, telling Carr to get his hand the fuck off your shoulder is a pretty irresistible tidbit.”

  “How does she know about everything already?”

  “How does she ever know? Don’t worry about it.”

  “But she’s going to tell everybody about Mark,” I said.

  “What if she does? Everybody knows Mark’s a scumbag already,” Natasha said. “You may recall a certain incident involving his skull and my beer bottle? Now calm down and eat your egg and we’ll go catch a movie. There’s a one-fifteen matinee of Stage Fright; if I drive quickly we can make it.”

  If she drove quickly indeed. “I don’t think my stomach could take food right now,” I said. The poached egg gaped at me like a ripe breast. I thought of my own sagging ones–not in the least bit nice; Mark must have been even drunker than me–and didn’t dare put anything into my body that could turn into more body. What a perfect excuse a hangover is not to eat anything. I should drink more often.

  “You have to give your stomach something else besides a Bloody Mary and a cup of coffee or you aren’t going to last through the fall of Denmark,” she said.

  “I’ll have focaccia. Oh, speaking of which, I told Kate I’d invite Adam tonight. I can’t believe he’s going to be there. How did that happen?”

  “Who would think we would have forgotten Cymbeline?” Natasha said. “Whoever–or wherever–Cymbeline is. So call him.”

  “I don’t have his number,” I said.

  “You most certainly do,” Natasha said. She took the rest of her celery and poked my uneaten egg right in the nipple. “Who exactly do you think you’re talking to? I’m sure that you looked it up months ago and wrote it down in that gorgeous black leather notebook thing. Where is it, anyway? It’s never far from you.”

  “It’s right here,” I said. “I’m writing down this conversation.”

  Sorry. I just can’t hear myself think around here with that damn radio down the hall. If you can believe it, they’re playing the same song that I have in my head today: Tonight tonight tonight. How the present resonates with the past! How the Flan of yesterday and the Flan of today intermingle, like best friends, like confidantes!

  I left a message on his machine and by then it was three o’clock, with no chance of catching the movie. Natasha said she’d go home to change and pick me up. “What are you going to wear?” I said, out of the sheer desire to keep her in my house. “You looked great in that sequined thing last night.”

  “X marks the spot,” she said, tracing last night’s rhinestones on her body like she hoped to die, sticking a needle in her eye. “You want to borrow it tonight?”

  “There’s no way I’d fit into that,” I said.

  “It’s bigger than it looks,” she said.

  I crossed my arms in front of my stomach. “Thanks.”

  “Oh Flan,” she said, “I didn’t mean it like that. Come on. You know that. I just mean–”

  “Forget it,” I said. “I’ll see you soon. I have to iron my muu-muu now.”

  “Flan,” she said, putting on some really smashing sunglasses. “I came over and fixed you breakfast, listened to your woes. What more do you want from me?”

  I felt dumb. “Your forgiveness,” I said meekly, and she smiled and hugged me, patting me on the back like a weary mom. She waved and headed out the door. “And a ride!” I called out. In front of the house, the world still looked a little too bright, but I was going to survive. “I also need a ride!”

  Natasha zoomed off, and I went upstairs, found my journal right next to my bed, and wrote this all down. I’ll let you know what happens with the inscrutable man and the crazy woman who loves him and all the intrigue and deception and murder. And how the play turns out, ha ha ha.

  Sunday September 19th

  So I haven’t been in Bean and Nothingness five minutes–I’m still savoring the first frothy sips of latte and haven’t even opened the journal yet–when Flora Habstat walks in, sits at my table and talks at me for the rest of the day. A whole day, wasted. Not a word in edgewise, either to her or my journal, lying there neglected on my table as Flora went into a free-form monologue on applying for colleges, how tired she was of school, this new band Darling Mud–had I heard of them?–and assorted World Records. She literally talked to me for about an hour and a half, and when I said I had to go to a bookstore, she went with me and dragged behind me as I pretended to scan the shelves, babbling and babbling and babbling. By the time I took the bus home it was seven o’clock and time to do my homework before turning in. And after such a miserable evening last night, too: Douglas and Lily tense as hell over some offstage fight, a whiny, inappropriately plump Ophelia, Gabriel not showing and Kate, coyly and significantly, refusing to tell me why and a blunt and obvious fake plaster skull. Plus Flora sat between Adam and me and talked Records to him from curtain to curtain. Dammit, Flora, why do you always ruin everything?

  A prophetic remark. I hope you picked up on that.

  Vocabulary:

  ALLEGED

  PHOSPHOLIPIDS

  VENDETTA

  PSYCHOSEXUAL

  DISTRAUGHT

  PROPHETIC

  TÊTE-Á-TÊTE

  BELLIGERENT

  Study Questions:

  1. What would you do in Flan’s shoes, if you received an A you didn’t really deserve even though you were a really good student, but you just didn’t care very much about biology, and if you got it as sort of an apology or a bribe from a sleazy biology teacher that you probably couldn’t do anything about? Consider the issues before deciding, and remember that you can’t really imagine what it would be like to be in the shoes of Flannery Culp because you’re not her.

  2. What functions do you think are biologically important for the sustenance of a living system?

  3. What is the best experience you have had at a high school dance?

  Monday September 20th

  After such a refreshing weekend, I am looking forward to starting another week of being pushed to the limit academically, athletically and socially at Roewer High School. Go team! The bus was forty-five minutes late this morning.

  I’m sitting on the lumbering late bus, thinking about the way I’m going to start my Monday: by filling out an unexcused absence form for the cranky secretary. The last time the bus was late she actually told me, “Don’t tell me the bus was late. That excuse won’t work anymore today. About ten kids ahead of you said that their bus was late, too.” I tried to explain that we all took the same bus
, but there was no pulling the wool over her eyes. She wasn’t born yesterday.

  LATER

  When I walked into the building I thought for a moment I had mistakenly come in on Sunday. It was time for homeroom to be over but no one was in the hallways. I ran into some grumpy gym teacher who barked “Go back to homeroom!” so I went to homeroom, opened the door and everyone was sitting silently at their desks. Dodd was standing formally at the front of the room with his hands behind his back like he was waiting for the firing squad. Written on the blackboard, underlined, was the phrase “MOMENT OF SILENCE.” No kidding, I thought, and found my seat. Even Natasha looked respectful; that’s when I knew something serious was up. It didn’t seem right to ask during the MOMENT OF SILENCE, so I waited it out. Finally Dodd cleared his throat and everyone relaxed and talked quietly. “Now you know why you shouldn’t be late,” he said to me pointedly.

  “What in the world?” I asked Natasha. She sighed and took my hand, and that’s when I knew someone was dead. I feel really guilty when I write this, but it was something of an anticlimax when Natasha told me it was Mark Wallace. Of course, anticlimax is not the word for how Mark’s death was rewritten later. Dr. Eleanor Tert, of course, was the biggest culprit. I quote extensively and without permission from her Crying Too Hard to Be Scared:

  The tragic death of Mark Wallace, one of the most visionary students I have ever had the privilege of analyzing, was key in Flannery’s development of her apocalyptic anti-religious fervor. Seeing her ex-boyfriend punished so immediately with a vengeful lightning bolt in the form of an automobile accident undoubtedly added to Flannery’s God-wish. Mark Wallace was killed by an act of God, she reasoned; therefore, anyone who ever did her wrong in her tumultuous love life was doomed to die, and maybe God needed a little help. Hence the ritualistic murder.

  And from Peter Pusher’s What’s The Matter with Kids Today?: Getting Back to Family Basics in a World Gone Wrong:

  Flannery Culp saw in her high school’s rather limp-wristed reaction to the inevitable result of juvenile delinquency, particularly among minorities, a chance to exploit the freeloading humanist environment to which her educational system had fallen. It should come as no surprise that a school whose honors poetry class studied “ignored geniuses” like Anne Bradstreet and Emily Dickinson but not Keats or Shelley would soft-pedal the moralistic side of the death of the Negro teen Mark Wallace, or that a teenager, being educated in a moral vacuum, would see these soft-pedaling surroundings as the perfect environs to hide the almost-perfect crime. [Wake up, America!]

  Inaccuracy, inaccuracy, inaccuracy. Oh, and please note: That last sentence isn’t at the end of that particular paragraph, but is at the end of so many others in the book that I couldn’t resist adding it. I can’t even begin to address the inaccuracy, but suffice to say that the reason we weren’t studying Keats or Shelley in my AMERICAN Poetry class should be self-evident, even to Mr. Pusher, and that one cry of “nice tits”–are you listening, incidentally flat-chested Dr. Tert?–does not an ex-boyfriend make. Not to mention that the good Dr. Tert did not “analyze” Mark until he was already dead.

  Here is what actually happened, from Flannery Culp’s Journal of a Woman Wronged:

  Sometime Friday night, Mark Wallace, a boy no one liked very much, neither for his generally nasty behavior nor his self-righteous up-from-slavery politics he used to justify it, after getting smashed and making a slimy pass at me, stole a car with some buddies and smashed it into a telephone pole while Roewer High School slept. When Mark Wallace woke up, his buddies had fled into the night and he was dead. When Roewer woke up, Mark Wallace was a noble young martyr, killed for being, as Principal Bodin said over the squawking PA, “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Doesn’t everyone die by being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Bodin droned on and on, praising Mark’s mischievous sense of humor and his artistic skills. Last year he had spray-painted an unflattering portrait of Vice Principal Mokie, with a speech bubble containing his annoying motto–“the last word in principal is pal”–coming out of his crotch like some sort of auto-erotic ventriloquist’s act, for which he had been suspended despite the fact that he claimed he was protesting Mokie’s racism. Dodd walked around the room with a shellacked frown on his face, occasionally putting a gentle hand on people’s hairdos. He started to do it to Natasha but she bared her teeth at him.

  It was in choir that things got ridiculous. They stopped auditions so we could rehearse the special number for tomorrow’s Memorial Assembly. Tipsy John Hand actually took the helm and went on and on about Mark, of course, telling some stories that must have been about somebody else, and finally passing out copies of the gospel song “Ride the Chariot,” which Mr. Hand had heard was one of Mark’s favorites. Uh-huh. I can’t believe that tomorrow (actually, today–it’s after midnight as I write this, sitting in my room with Darling Mud on low) I’m going to get up at an assembly and sing “I’m gonna ride the chariot in the morning, Lord,” in memory of someone who died in a car accident. The only good thing about choir was that Adam, deposed from conducting by the boozy eulogist, was standing in front of me in the skimpy tenor section and I didn’t have to face him.

  Biology was a travesty–no surprise there, I guess, but Carr talked about being able to trace the end of a life to an ultimate cause.

  “Mark died from a blow to the head, but that isn’t scientifically complete,” he said. He began to draw a car on the chalkboard, and everyone’s eyes widened. “After all, any one of us can go up to a telephone pole and bang our heads on it.” I sat and hoped for a demonstration, but no dice. “We’ll get a sore head, maybe a lump, but we don’t die.” Carr stared at the car on the board like he had no idea what to do with it. “So obviously the speed of the car had something to do with it. Now, I haven’t seen any official reports of the accident, but let’s assume that he was going at around eighty miles per hour, or ‘mph.’” He put it in quotes in that annoying gesture that makes each hand into a little bunny. Prosecutors use that gesture all the time. “So we could say that Mark died from going eighty mph, but even that is not scientifically complete. Why was he going eighty miles an hour? Everyone knows that eighty miles an hour is not a safe speed at which to travel. But his judgment was impaired–by alcohol.” Suddenly tomorrow’s assembly was looking quite tasteful. “Therefore, we can scientifically determine that the ultimate cause of Mark’s death was alcohol, and I think there is a stronger moral lesson when we have a scientifically complete explanation than if we just were to say that Mark died due to a blow to the head.”

  “But that isn’t scientifically complete,” some student said. I slouched down lower in my desk. Great, after a tacky monologue now it’s time for a tacky discussion. “Why did Mark have alcohol? He was at a chaperoned school dance, with adult supervision. Perhaps those adults failed because they were too busy flirting with the goddamn cheerleaders!”

  “You may recall, Flannery,” said Mr. Carr, “that as a chaperon I was busy chasing down other people who were breaking the rules, such as yourself.”

  Everybody was staring at me. One girl snapped her gum. “I happen to be a cheerleader,” she said. “Do you have a problem with that?”

  The teaching assistant poked her head out of the office, curious about the commotion. “There’s something you should all know about the good Mr. Carr,” I said, and the bell rang. Everyone scattered except me and Carr and the teaching assistant. We had a MOMENT OF SILENCE.

  “I know you’ve been upset lately,” Carr said, “but your behavior in class today was absolutely unacceptable.”

  “My behavior?” I said. I heard the fury in my voice, but I didn’t quite feel it. It was like I could hear the real Flannery, telling me to calm down because this was a very important semester and if I blew up at Carr my chances of an A would be greatly reduced, and all the while this angry, violent Flannery went on and on. “My behavior? You’re making passes at your assistant, you try to bribe me by givin
g me a good grade I don’t deserve, and you let a student die because you’re so busy making moves on–”

  “I think you’ve said just about enough,” Carr said in a deadly voice. “You’re obviously very upset about the death of your boyfriend, so why don’t you take it easy instead of taking it out on your teachers.”

  “My boyfriend?” I said. “You and Dr. Tert both!” I stalked out of the classroom and right to Bodin’s door. The situation was obviously escalating, and I needed outside help. My temper was getting out of control, and Carr had dropped in my eyes from a slightly sleazy teacher to an absolute monster. I was going to tell all and let the chips fall where they may. In short, I was going to ask to transfer to a different Advanced Biology class.

  Principal Jean Bodin’s secretary is a perfectly nice woman, except for the fact that she has snakes for hair.

  “What?” she snarled immediately when I entered the room.

  “I need to see Mr. Bodin.”

  “Principal Bodin’s schedule is full today.”

  “Well, I have an appointment to meet with him right now.”

  Suspiciously, she opened her appointment book. I could see that it was blank, had been blank forever, world without end. Who ever needs to see a high school principal? “And who are you?”