Breakfast Served Anytime (15 page)

“All righty,” I grinned, waggling my fingers at her. God, poor Jenny. She had absolutely zero life. I felt bad for her, and nothing’s worse than pitying people. Who wants to be pitied? Nobody, that’s who. I also felt bad because her role as resident adviser was pretty much null and void, because anytime any of the girls on our floor needed something — whether it was a Band-Aid or some eyeliner or a shoulder to cry on about homesickness, heartache, whatever — they went straight to Sonya. She had taken on the all-purpose role of mom, relationship coach, makeover artist, and general ass-kicker. Sonya’s one of those people who came into the world as a self-assured thirty-two-year-old; I could never imagine her in an awkward phase, or with a bad hair day, or without the right answer to whatever needed answering. Seeing her at odds with Jessica was enough to make me feel even more ill than I already felt after reading Carol’s letter.

“So they took us to Perryville today, Glo,” Jessica informed me. “As in the Battle of Perryville, as in the Civil War?”

“You know, the Civil War,” Sonya broke in. “That little dispute that happened a million years ago —”

“Try a hundred and fifty,” Jessica muttered. She was cotton-balling her face with makeup remover.

“Whatever. It’s over! Let’s move on!” Sonya gave a weary laugh.

“Oh, let’s move
on,
” Jessica groaned. “But first let’s make a very big scene in the middle of a restaurant in front of the whole world.”

Sonya fell silent, pressing elegant fingers to her eyes. I looked from her to Jessica, who was now busy yanking a brush through her hair in angry strokes.

“What happened?”

“I wouldn’t call it a scene,” Sonya said. “But it might have involved a minor theft.”

“Show her,” Jessica said, nodding toward Sonya’s bag. “Show her your big prize.”

“Fine,” Sonya said. “Yall can hang it up in your room for decoration and inspiration. How about that?” Sonya reached into her bag and brought out what I thought at first was some kind of T-shirt — had she raided the battlefield gift shop? — but which revealed itself to be a Confederate flag, filched, as Sonya admitted, from the wall of the famous Perryville Battlefield Canteen, est. 1971.

I couldn’t resist offering an appreciative guffaw. “You
stole
that?”

“Of course I did! I’m gonna stick it in the bathroom so we can all wipe our asses with it.”

“Okay, okay, who am I?” Jessica snatched the flag, jumped up onto the bed, and stuck out her chest in an impressive impersonation of Sonya, who admittedly did like to let her rack lead the way. She waved the flag around and in her best Sonya voice hollered, “Scuse me, scuse me, yall . . . Am I supposed to think this flag is cute?”

I clapped a hand over my mouth to keep from laughing out loud. Jessica, who was not laughing, hopped off the bed and folded the flag into a neat triangle. “For a lot of people, it’s a symbol of heritage,” she said, her voice low. “It’s a way of remembering people who died, you know? That’s all. That’s all I’m trying to say. I mean, it doesn’t really apply to us, to our generation, is what I’m saying.”

I had to replay Jessica’s words in my head to make sure I’d heard them right.

“What?”

“It applies to me,” Sonya said.

Jessica shook her head, a quick erasure. “Forget it. Just forget it. That’s not what I meant.”

“What
did
you mean?” Sonya asked, eyes glistening. When Jessica didn’t answer, she turned to me. “Hey Gloria. You’re from Louisville, right?”

God. Here it came. I felt like I’d been apologizing for being the Big City girl from the moment I set foot on campus.

“Yeah,” I answered. The tension in the room was awful; I felt all three of us hovering around on the verge of laughter or tears. The scales could’ve tipped either way.

“Yeah, well. Be grateful that you come from a place that actually has more black people than Wal-Marts. That’s all I have to say.” Wearily, Sonya picked up GoGo’s book. “Great book,” she said. “I love this book. Who doesn’t love this book? The whooooooooole world loves this book. Sometimes, though, I think about it, and it’s like, you know what? White Man Saves the Day. White Writer Gets a Pulitzer.”

Jessica groaned. “God, Sonya! Are you
trying
to pick a fight with everyone?”

“What?” Sonya said. “Can’t I say how I feel? Can’t anybody say anything true around here?”

My face burned. I felt like apologizing, but I wasn’t sure for what. “I’ve always liked the father-daughter part,” I said. “You know, the way Atticus loves Scout, how she and Jem are like his conscience the whole way through.” This was true: I had always felt like that was me, that I was Scout, that the book had been written for my eyes only.

“Yeah,” Sonya conceded. “They sure-as-shit don’t make dads like Atticus Finch anymore.”

Yes, they do,
I wanted to say but didn’t. An uncomfortable silence settled over the room. I wasn’t really sure what was happening, but I was determined not to be the first person to speak.

“She’s also got a jones for Boo Radley,” Jessica muttered, smiling sideways. “Give this girl a surprise delivery in a tree and she’s yours for life.”

I was relieved to hear Jessica’s voice return to its gentle self, and I hoped that this was it, that the storm was over, that we could return to ourselves, cracking up and drinking Ale-8 and alternately envying and making fun of celebrities in magazines.

“So X took us on a flyover today,” I said, aiming for a casual change of subject. “You know, over a mountaintop-removal site? You guys, it was the freaking most awful thing I have ever seen in my life. It looked like the end of the world, I swear to God.”

Wrong thing to say, wrong thing to say
. I felt the reverberating gong of the wrongness as soon as the words escaped my mouth and knew it as soon as Jessica looked at me, hard, disbelieving. “Really?” she asked, eyes narrowing. “You swear to God?”

And to make matters worse, I had just sworn to God. You could
Oh
my God all day long, apparently, but you couldn’t
swear
to God. Strike two.

Jessica looked from me to Sonya and back to me. Her face was about nine shades of heartbreak. “
I’m
sorry,” she said, “but I must not have gotten the memo! Nobody told me it was Shit All Over Jessica Day. I’m very sorry that I was born white, Sonya. Like that’s my fault. Like it’s my fault that I happen to have ancestors who fought and died in the Civil War.”

“Jess —” I started.

“And you,” Jessica said, wheeling around. “What do I need to say to you? That I’m sorry about the mountains? Since I tore them down
myself
and all, with, you know, my bare hands. What are you going to do, Gloria? Move to Perry County? Run for mayor? Save mountains for a living?”

I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

“Have you ever even been there before today? Could you find it on a map if somebody paid you?”

My face was burning.

“The answer is no,” Jessica said. “You wouldn’t last three seconds in Eastern Kentucky, Gloria. I’m sorry, but you wouldn’t. You have absolutely no freaking idea, so don’t march in here with your weird shoes and superior attitude and stupid emo music and liberal big-city
shit
and try to talk to me about something you know nothing about.”

Sonya rose to her feet, put a hand on Jessica’s shoulder. “Jess. Let’s cool off. Let’s take a walk. How about we just take a walk?”

Jessica shrugged away. She closed her eyes and addressed us in a voice that was quieter now, calmer, but trembling on the edge of something. “I think,” she said, “I think I’ll go take a walk by myself, thanks, if that’s all right with you two. If I have your freaking permission.”

Without looking at us, without even opening her eyes, Jessica turned and walked out of the room. We listened to her footsteps on the stairs.

“Okay,” I said to Sonya. I was trying not to cry. I had never had a fight with a friend in my life. It’s just something I didn’t do. “Okay, what just happened?”

Sonya sighed, rubbed her eyes. “Glo. Girl. Haven’t you figured out that Jessica is like a millionth-generation coal kid? You were flying around in her backyard. Her mom? Crazy Diane? Hello, poster woman for the Coal Coalition campaign. Coal is paying for Jessica’s sisters to go to Morlan and it’ll pay for her to go here when she graduates. That’s her life whether she likes it or not.”

Oh, God
. I wanted to die. “What do you mean, coal kid? Like she comes from a family of actual coal miners? Like people risking their lives every day working at the bottom of a mine?”

Sonya looked at me like I was an idiot, which of course I was. “Gloria. Come on. Do you think the people working in the mine are the same people driving around with Coal Coalition stickers on the backs of their Range Rovers?”

I blinked.
Coal Coalition
. The sticker on Jessica’s refrigerator, which hadn’t fully registered with me that first day and which I had stared at without seeing every time I went for an Ale. And to think I thought it was a freaking band! The Munch, after all, is plastered with Magnetic Fields stickers, and it’s not like I’m advertising my love for math (which, while we’re talking about my mental lapses, is another thing I’m incapable of understanding). Now that my mind was rewinding, I could see X’s sticker on the Mystery Machine, the one that matched so many others I saw on move-in day:
SOL COALITION.
As in Solar-Powered Energy, of course. As in Get Your Hands Off My Mountains, You Greedy Bastards. God. How had I missed the connection? It was right there in the song Sonya had played for me about her beloved Muhlenberg County, the song that was her anthem and her freaking ringtone, which by now I’d heard dozens of times:
I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking, Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away
.

I was starting to realize that my own keen Powers of Observation, on which I prided myself beyond reason, were selective and mostly ridiculous. The truth was that I noticed things if I cared about them. If I didn’t immediately care or understand, they just filtered right through. Expert Reader of Signs from the Universe, Illiterate Disregarder of Actual Signs About Timely Topics Such as Mountaintop Removal. That was me. I was just like Sophie Allen, who had showed up at school one day wearing a shirt that said
DARFUR
, which she had bought for six bucks on eBay after watching some YouTube video of Ryan Gosling wearing the same shirt while he made out with Rachel McAdams onstage at the Video Music Awards about a million years ago. Somebody asked Sophie if she knew where Darfur even was, and she was all
What?
Because of course she had zero clue and probably thought Darfur was Ryan Gosling’s own personal clothing line, like
Hey Girl, You Look Hot in My Shirt
. Never mind genocide, Sophie Allen. Never mind the rape and plunder of mountains, Gloria Bishop. I really was a walking advertisement for why so many people at Geek Camp seemed suspicious of Louisvillians. Those assholes! They don’t say they’re from
Jefferson County
. Oh, no. They say they’re from
Louisville,
of course. What do they know about old ham? Assholes.

“So they’re not
miners,
” I said. “Right?”

Sonya threw an exasperated look at the ceiling. “Does Jessica look like freaking Loretta Lynn to you?”

Loretta Lynn: Hadn’t she had done that album with the guy from the White Stripes? Alex listened to that stuff. That much I knew. But at this point I knew better than to share a Sophie-Allen-Meets-Darfur observation like that.

“Shit,” Sonya said, rising from the bed. I couldn’t tell if she was exhausted with me or just exhausted or both. “Girl, you really are straight outta La-La Land. Blows my freaking mind.” She stopped to give me a look that hovered somewhere between affection and pity. “Look, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. If I know Jessica, she won’t be mad at you, she’ll be mad at your teacher for taking yall on that flyover on the government’s time and dollar. He better watch it — Crazy Diane’ll be over here to rearrange his ass before he knows what’s what.”

“Oh, God,” I breathed into my hands. Now I was worried that X was going to get fired, that it would be all my fault, that I had thrown into motion a domino-string of events that would end very badly, all because I had opened my mouth to say something that I believed to be absolutely true. Truer than true. I mean: Mountains trump Humans. Isn’t that obvious? Mother Nature gets the final word, and she’s not to be messed with, I don’t care who you are. It’s a fact as simple and profound as the Golden Rule, and it goes way beyond political discourse and bumper stickers, in my naive, idiotic, big-city-moron opinion.

“Yeah, well,” Sonya continued, “you never know who you’re gonna piss off. Kevin wants to play ball for UK when he graduates, right? Golden ticket to the NBA? Chance to give the granny who raised him a new knee, a decent place to live, money in her pocket for the first time in her life? But there’s that whole thing about the dorm where the players live — the Wildcat Coal Lodge, give my ass a break. Talk about the shit hitting the fan, and all over a name. Coal paid for that place, too, and a whole lot of people aren’t happy about it, but what are you gonna do? Skip out on your dream, on every single gift God gave you, because you’ve got some kind of moral hang-up about a building? Because some hotshot holier-than-thou writer pulls his stuff out of the university archives in protest?”

This was all ringing a bell. Who had told me about it? Calvin. In the Mystery Machine, when he was talking about his family’s farm. The hotshot writer was Calvin’s own personal hero, the author of the book he wanted to present in X’s class as his Great American Novel of choice. You learn a new word, you hear it all the time.

“So,” I said to Sonya, “if Kevin’s going to be a one-and-done and go straight for the NBA, why does he even care about the University of Nowheresville, Kentucky?” Without thinking about it I had stolen X’s phrase. “Why does it even matter?”

Sonya rubbed her eyes. “It always matters to somebody. It matters to me, for example, that everybody’s got their undies in a wad about the name of a stupid
dorm,
but nobody seems to care about the name of the great big huge hallowed arena where they actually play ball — where they win the games and retire their jerseys and get their asses kissed to high heaven. It’s like: New era, people. Name the place after somebody who didn’t miss the integration boat.”