The Basic Eight

by Daniel Handler

  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 after him, 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 Chronic Ill (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.”

  “I always park here. The student lot is simply too shabby.”

  “What about the parking guards?”

  “Flannery, look at me. They’re never sure if I’m a teacher or not.” She was right. The tailored suit, along with the stockings and omnipresent pearls, brought her to that nebulous area between eighteen and twenty-eight. It was very handy when we went to nightclubs. We walked right past the parking guards, who were two huge black men. She even nodded to them, professionally.

  When we reached the front doors we had to go our separate ways. “Lily and I are having coffee after school,” V__ said, “and I’d be delighted if you would join us.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “The Myriad meets today. Got to do the literary editor thing. Thanks for the ride.”

  “Anything,” she said, reaching up and fixing my collar, “for one of the Basic Eight.”

  “Don’t tell me that term has been canonized,” I said. “I’m not sure I like it. It sounds too much like some mystical society, or like something concerned with a master race.”

  V__ thought for a second. “I–,” she said, and the bell rang. She dashed off, and that was the last of any discussion about the propriety of the term. But I’ve typed it into the record: it was never a concept with which I was comfortable. So all this talk that the Basic Eight was some unholy alliance, some secret society, should stop with this conversation. Whatever we were, we were bound together unofficially, casually; and I objected to it loudly from the start. Or would have, anyway; the truth of the matter is that I walked all the way to school, but that conversation happened sometime, surely; plus, I needed to fully introduce V__ and voice my objections to my reading public, to all wary parents and curious teenagers.

  Idea for a story: A woman loves a man, but through some slip of the tongue everyone thinks it is the wrong man, including the wrong man himself, who begins to pursue her. When she finally makes the truth clear, all of society shuns her as a woman who leads men on. She dies alone. The story could be called “A Slip of the Tongue.”

  I didn’t go to choir today. I just couldn’t take it. Luckily, some people have lunch third period (yes, lunch, third period, at a time that’s even a little early for brunch. It’s sickening that all over America the promising young generation is made to eat at ten-thirty in the morning), so it didn’t look like I was cutting class. Of course, I ran into Gabriel, who has the worst schedule on earth, world without end. He was sitting in the courtyard, staring at a sandwich so intently it looked like he was making some sort of political statement: black man, white bread.

  “Hi,” I said. “You’re not seriously thinking of eating lunch at ten-thirty in the morning, are you?”

  “Seriously is the only way I can think at ten-thirty in the morning,” he said glumly. “The worst thing is that they still haven’t worked out my schedule. I still have to go to gym four times a day. There I sit, a senior surrounded by trotting sophomores, baffling gym teachers.”

  “Quit bragging,” I said. “It’s not difficult to baffle gym teachers. Listen, will you take a walk with me? I can’t face going to choir.”

  “Why?” he said. “Calculus I could understand, but choir? I thought nothing ever happened in choir.”

  “It doesn’t,” I said. “I’ll tell you about it as we walk.”

  “To the lake?” he asked, rewrapping his sandwich.

  “To the lake,” I agreed. By the time this diary is found, the plates of the earth will probably have moved and covered up Lake Merced, a small body of bile across the street from Roewer surrounded by fairly pretty groves of trees amidst which you can find the occasionally intertwined pair.

  I didn’t even wait until we got there, though, to tell Gabriel everything. I told him I had an unrequited crush as soon as we reached the tennis courts at the edge of campus, which lay damp and empty and clogged with dull brown leaves. I told him that it wasn’t just a crush but love as we jaywalked across the cracked asphalt that separated Roewer from Lake Merced. I told him it was Adam State when we reached the jogging path, littered with dogshit and somebody’s dingy discarded sweatband.

  “Adam State?” he said, doubtfully, as if I had misspoken.

  “Why does everybody say it like that?” I said, stepping off the path, toward the trees.

  “Because they’re surprised,” he said. “Douglas we expected. He’s as pretentious as the rest of us. But Adam State? How did you even end up talking to him?”

  “He was in Arsenic and O
ld Lace last year, remember? Adam and I both had small parts, so we ended up talking a lot. That’s when I knew.”

  “I can’t believe you’re calling it love when you don’t even have a relationship with him.”

  I can remember my speech word for word, even though I’m writing it after school as I wait for lit magazine people to show up, and yes, even one year later as I’m rewriting it. “Gabriel, there are two kinds of love. One kind is gradual, like what I had with Douglas. We were acquaintances, we were friends, we were more than friends, we were in love. It was steady, like warming soup. It’s part of a process that people go through with everybody–like with me and you, for instance. We warmed through acquaintance to friend, and we won’t warm any further. But the other kind is more like Cajun cooking. Like pan-blackening something.” I knew this metaphor would connect with Gabriel because he cooks for all our dinner parties. “It just strikes you. It’s just as delicious. It’s just as real. In fact it’s probably more real; it’s an entrée rather than a soup. That’s how I feel about Adam. It’s a connection, a connection bigger and stronger, in many ways, than I ever had with Douglas. It’s not all about the façades of shared interests or attitudes. It’s something deeper.”

  “Then there’s no need to despair,” Gabriel said, looking elsewhere. It was almost as if he were talking to himself. “If it’s something that goes beyond all façades, then it’s out of your control. If it’s meant to be, he’ll respond. If not, then it wasn’t meant to be. I know when I’m feeling something that strong, I just get paralyzed and don’t know what to do. Maybe he’s feeling the same way and doesn’t know how to respond.”

  “Do you really think so?” I said, hugging him. I watched his hands flutter around for a minute before hugging me back.

  “We’re going to be late,” Gabriel said, but when I told him it was my lunch period he agreed to stay by the lake. “I suppose I can cut my third English class of the day.” We rounded a corner and there was Jennifer Rose Milton, sitting on the grass in the middle of a clearing. She jumped up.

  “Hi guys,” she said, looking behind us. “What are you doing here?”

  “Having a conversation, Jenn,” I said. I don’t call her “Jennifer Rose Milton” out loud, of course. “What are you doing here? Alone?”

  “Oh, you know,” she said vaguely, gesturing toward the lake. “I’m just–”

  Gabriel turned and gave me a look. “We’d better go,” he said. “We’ll be late.”

  “Right, OK,” I said, and Jennifer Rose Milton smiled. We walked away and back toward school. “She must be meeting somebody,” I said. “And it must be somebody special. She doesn’t have lunch with me. She’s cutting a class. Jenn never cuts class. Her grades are perfect. Let’s go get coffee.”

  “You’ll have to miss more than lunch,” he warned.

  I shrugged. “Civics, Bio. I’ll be back in time for Millie. We can walk to the Mocha Monkey.”

  We walked to the Mocha Monkey. The Mocha Monkey is an embarrassing cafe, but it’s the only one within walking distance of Roewer. We usually end up there after school dances; it’s also one of the few cafes open late. It’s embarrassing not only for its name but also for the monkey faces embroidered on each of the chairs. You can try to have a meaningful conversation, but all the while in the back of your head you know you’re sitting on a monkey’s face. I ordered a latte and Gabriel had tea, which was served in its own individual pot with a monkey’s face painted on it. The two of us sat there for most of the afternoon, talking and laughing there in the monkey house.

  Lit meeting went fine. Jennifer Rose Milton came, of course, and so did Natasha. And so did…drumroll please…none other than Rachel State, freshman sister of Adam, a waif of a girl swathed in black clothes and white makeup. Natasha nicknamed her The Frosh Goth on the way home, as we sat in her car listening to Darling Mud and trying to think of ways I can abuse my power as editor in chief to get to Adam through his gloomy sister. She invited me to spend the night (there was a Dietrich movie on TV she wanted me to watch with her), but I declined, not that I attended enough classes today to have much homework. But I wanted to read Bradstreet, and write some poetry of my own, and think about wise Gabriel’s words about what was meant to be.

  Friday September 10

  While I sat around last night waiting for Adam to call, somebody must have sacrificed a lamb or something, because all of yesterday’s gray was all burned off, and by the time I was riding the bus to school the sun was searing through the tinted windows like something that killed all the dinosaurs. I reached into my bag and immediately found my sunglasses in a rare case of morning luck. I put them on and didn’t talk to anyone. I looked for V__ when I got off the bus, hoping that V__’s gorgeous car could become a permanent morning motif, but as yesterday’s ride was added, as you remember, one year later in rewrites, V__of course was nowhere to be seen.

  Halfway up the hill, however, Kate tapped me on the shoulder. “I’ve been calling out your name for an hour and a half,” she said. “You walk extremely fast. Quickly, rather. Didn’t you hear me?”

  “Well, for most of an hour and a half ago I was home, across town, so no,” I said.

  Kate rolled her eyes. “Hey,” she said, “did you invite Adam to our dinner party last night?”

  “No,” I said, “and I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “OK,” she said, lining up a new subject like the next bullet in the chamber. “I wish to attend an extremely modern event tonight, with you if you’re free: the cinema.”

  “What’s playing?”

  “It’s Benjamin Granaugh’s new movie. Henry IV.” Kate was the only one of us who could successfully pronounce Granaugh every time.

  “Of course I’ll go. Want to do dinner beforehand?”

  “Sure. And speaking of dinner, do you want me to invite Adam for you? Not to discuss the undiscussable.” But discussing it anyway.

  “I guess you’d better. We shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for me to make a move.”

  “Well, suit yourself.” By now we were at the side entrance, which is closest to Kate’s homeroom. The PTA had placed a welcoming sign there which said: “WELCOME! HOPE YOUR SUMMER PREPARED YOU FOR A YEAR WHERE YOU WILL BE PUSHED TO THE LIMIT ACADEMICALLY, ATHLETICALLY AND SOCIALLY!” framed by smiling faces drawn in Magic Marker. I’m pretty sure it should be “a year in which you will be pushed.” Kate leaned against the doorway and absentmindedly poked one of the faces in its eye. “It will be a shame, though, if Adam gets stolen by somebody who writes love letters to him over the summer. To introduce yourself like that over the summer, when nobody can do anything about it, is so tacky, don’t you think?”

  “Speaking of love lives,” I said, plowing on, “do you know if Jenn is seeing anyone?”

  “That’s one of my missions for today,” Kate announced. “Do you know that she cut class yesterday and went to the lake? Gabriel told me. If she was meeting somebody, it must be somebody very interesting if she doesn’t want us to know.”

  “I was with Gabriel,” I said, eager to be considered a primary player in all this intrigue. “She acted really flustered when Gabriel and I ran into her. She was definitely meeting somebody. I can’t believe you don’t know who it is yet. Are you losing your touch, Mata Hari?”

  “Certainly not,” Kate said, archly. “I just found out about this lake incident late last night. Give me time.”

  The bell rang. “Time is something I don’t have,” I said. “I’ve got to run to my date with Lawrence.”

  “Who?” she shrieked after me, but I didn’t look back. You’re always guaranteed more attention from Kate if you keep her on the edge of her seat.

  Saturday September 11th

  Waking up this morning felt like a logistical problem, but though I haven’t solved it I have identified what the problem is. I am large. No, Flannery, say it outright: I am fat. I forgot to pull my shades down last night so morning came on like gangbusters. The sun reminded me of that w
oman riding six white horses in “Comin’ round the Mountain.” Then I began to feel like the mountain. I moved one leg, then the other, to the floor. Gradually I became aware of how much room even half my body took up in this bed. It was startling: I remove half my body from the bed, and my bed stays full. Now either Archimedes was wrong and none of us really take up any space at all or I just hadn’t noticed my full load lately. If only half of me fills the bed, I wondered to myself sleepily, is that because I have small legs, or is it for some other reason?

  Small legs–fat chance. I walked into the bathroom and the scales simultaneously rose beneath my feet and fell from my eyes. I’m not going to write down the number here in this expensive Italian leather-bound journal, but rest assured, for those who crave statistics, that the sum of my parts is truly elephantine. All that bullshit I was crowing to Gabriel down by the lake–how there’s no attraction between us–all that isn’t rooted in some achieved platonic ideal, it’s rooted in my own generous thighs. Nobody wants me because I’m large and ugly. I looked at myself in the mirror, naked, and assessed myself like the headmistress of a girls’ finishing school. I’m large and ugly.

  It’s funny, you’d think that ugliness is pretty much innate and that there isn’t anything you can do about it, but if you think about it logically that’s not true. After all, I’m not just ugly; I’m also large. If I were smaller, there wouldn’t just be less of the largeness, there’d be less of the ugliness, too. And if someone has less ugliness than they did before, one could just as well say they have more beauty. Kate called me to ask which Bradstreets we were supposed to read, and I ran my theory by her.

  “Kate,” I said, after reading her some titles and page numbers I had somehow managed to write down, “if one person were less ugly than another, we could also say they were more beautiful, right?”