All-Day Breakfast Read online

  “Oh,” I said. “Jeez.”

  A purplish lip showed at the edge of the broken skin. The detached shoulder somehow reminded me of that hollow feeling I’d been having in my arms and legs.

  “See?” said Grace. “It’s gross.”

  “I must’ve slept on it funny,” said Amber.

  I ran my tongue around my teeth, collecting the lovely black fragments of bacon, and tried to picture exactly how much pink goo had hit Amber—more than had hit me, right? She lowered the hem and cradled the detached arm beneath the fabric, like it was a puppy she was sneaking into school. They needed some kind of help, these two, but it was hard to think past the heap of bacon I’d just set on the table.

  “Does it hurt?” I asked.

  They both shook their heads. As recently as Friday I’d have brought them in for breakfast if they’d come to the door for any reason, much less this dismemberment, but the bedside manner I’d perfected with Lydia had gone up the range hood like steam.

  “Take it to a hospital?” I suggested.

  Amber twisted her lips and studied my welcome mat.

  “She doesn’t like needles,” said Grace.

  “Tell the doctor you want general anaesthetic, that’ll be the mask.”

  Amber took a creaking step backward.

  “She doesn’t like gas either,” explained Grace.

  They’d stick a saline drip in her good arm anyway, and jab her for tetanus, but I wanted them gone before the nitrites ran off the bacon—man, the word rang in my head like a bell!

  “Take her to the hospital anyway,” I told Grace. “You’re driving, right? Or you want a cab instead?”

  They just looked at each other, so I went inside to the hallway phone and dialed for a taxi they didn’t need. I stood by the framed baby pictures but didn’t even glance up in case I saw my reflection in the glass, because I didn’t want to know what this version of me looked like.

  The dispatcher put me on hold. I glanced outside. The girls and car were gone.

  I slammed the phone down and ran back to the kitchen, fast as Antonio Brown. I found my kids in their terry-cloth housecoats at the kitchen table, knees up on their chairs as Josie pushed the plastic maple syrup bottle across to Ray. No bacon platter in sight. My quadriceps and hamstrings suddenly quit working so I fell on the floor—maybe I tripped? But I kept crawling toward the table.

  I twisted my face up at the kids. “Where—where is it?”

  “Holy cow!” said Ray. “You okay?”

  Josie didn’t even look at me, just held her hair back as she ferried a spoonful of cereal toward her mouth.

  “In the garbage,” she said.

  “Shit,” I yelled, “don’t you know I need that?”

  I stumbled to my feet and lurched toward the trash. With a gasp Deb turned from the sink, still testing the water with a finger under the tap.

  “I told her it was a waste,” she hissed, “but, Peter, I can see where she—”

  “I need it!”

  Like little nerve-gas victims the bacon strips lay splayed in the bottom of the bin, amongst apple cores, Deb’s gushy tissues and a Baker’s Chocolate wrapper. I scooped the bacon out, still warm like little birds, and thrust the handful accusingly under Josie’s nose. Both kids’ eyes widened and their little throats swallowed hard.

  “Now, Peter!” Deb called. “Just you—”

  I swung toward her, slammed the bacon back into the grease-smeared pan and carried the whole works into the sunshine on the back steps, slamming the door behind me.

  “Sorry!” I yelled into the reticent wood.

  I sat with the pan in my lap, gnawing through the bacon before tackling the pan itself, sucking back bubbly grease by the thumbful, but my arms still felt stuffed with lit matches. I licked the pan so the grease got all in my hair, then I dove under the steps for my dad’s shovel—yes, the one we’d buried Keister with—and knocked the kids’ birdhouse out of its maple tree and smashed the little thing to smithereens, bringing the shovel’s blade down again and again.

  I picked a splinter out of the shovel’s handle, and maybe the bacon had hit my system by then because I finally remembered to take a long breath in. Their birdhouse was pulp between my feet—was that normal? The situation was going to take figuring out.

  I remembered that I had Rob Aiken’s phone number.

  Inside, I told the kids I was sorry and Josie said she was sorry too. Deb leaned against the counter with her arms folded—she’d already changed into her jeans and hummingbird-patterned sweatshirt.

  “I’m going to call that grief counselor in Wahoo today,” she said. “Get him to recommend somebody here.”

  “Bring it on,” I said, for no reason I could really pin down.

  “Did Ms. Federici say I had to be there right away to scrape gum?” asked Ray.

  “No, buddy, no. Recess.”

  “I’ve started making the lunches,” announced Deb. “That’s okay?”

  I showered to get the pig fat out of my hair, then as I dressed for school the nail of my big toe cut through the end of my sock. That happens with socks, especially if you don’t clip your nails, so what was my civilized reaction? I lifted the tv from my dresser and flung it through the window into the front yard. The tv screen imploded on the lawn and long daggers of window-glass embedded themselves in the dirt. Deb was already out putting the kids in her car, so they were standing at the curb when it happened.

  “Dad?” Josie called, voice breaking again.

  Deb grabbed her hand and helped her into the back seat. An Alice’s Flowers van was parked across the street, and at first glance I thought the guy in the passenger seat was pointing a camera at our house. But then the van was squealing off down the street.

  I taped a garbage bag over the smashed window and headed to work.

  I didn’t see the lunchtime wiener massacre myself because I was back at home alone just then, standing at the kitchen counter to fry and eat a freshly bought pound of bacon, followed by an arduous session of flossing carcinogenic material out of my back teeth—drawing blood more than once—and that ate up time, so right before the second bell I was running, tie flapping, down the main hallway toward my classroom. Cam Vincent caught me by standing stock-still under the picture of Eisenhower, sporting the same rubber-lipped half-smile of our former president, arms folded with an identical stoicism, though with hairstyles from diametrically opposed ends of the animal kingdom.

  I thought those very words because, thanks to all that bacon, my brain was operating at the peak of lubrication.

  “Peter. So,” said Cam, “we had a cafeteria incident just now.”

  “Involving who?” I asked, though I knew. I might’ve gone wobbly in the knees if the bacon hadn’t propped me up.

  “Um.” He gave me a look. “These were all kids from your Chemistry 11. I’ve got them in my office while Mrs. Abel tries to get the cops to come back.”

  “Why, did somebody—?”

  “And I want the district counselors in here tomorrow, yeah. Amber Morton strolled in after C block, you see her?”

  “No.”

  “She’s got one arm. Acts like it’s nothing—told me she’s always had one arm, and the way she walks around, no trauma, no tears, I believed it for a second. I can’t even think straight about it, I mean, how—”

  “I need to talk to those kids, can I?”

  He squared his shoulders as we passed the half-empty trophy case.

  “I’d appreciate it if you could tell me what to do with them.”

  We sidled into the office and Kathleen, in a yellow dress, paused in watering her fern to give me an apologetic smile. We stopped at Cam’s blue door, six inches ajar.

  “Who’s your class right now?” Cam asked. “I’ll go hang out with them.”

  “The nines. Genetics quiz, m
ulticolored hamsters and that.”

  “They hear about that human ear somebody grew out of a mouse’s back?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Kids love that freaky stuff.”

  He strode out into the hallway, more of a spring in his step now that I was apparently on the case, though I still hadn’t found out what had actually happened in the cafeteria. Kathleen turned the fan on beside her desk and started typing.

  “Seriously!” Grace was saying in Cam’s office. “You weren’t in gym with him?”

  “I was last year,” said Shawn quietly, “but I never saw anything like that.”

  How many were in there?

  “But the size, I mean, it doesn’t really matter what size it is when it’s, like, soft.” Was that Megan Avery, seriously? “It can start out real small and get big, you know, after.”

  “Really, Megan, really?” asked Amber.

  “This whole thing is making me so turned on right now,” Clint said, stonily.

  “Sure it’s true,” said Megan.

  I slid into the gap in the doorway. Grace and Amber were perched on Cam’s desk and the rest of them sat in a circle on the floor like a “Kumbaya” singalong. Amber wore a green T-shirt that showed a snarling bear. One short sleeve hung like a napkin, because apparently she still had no left arm.

  “Know what, bitches?” Franny sat up on her knees, some godawful purple brooch on her shoulder. “If we want to know if it’s so big he passes out when it’s hard, all we’ve got to do is get him hard!”

  “Or we could ask his dick about it when Harv’s not in the room,” suggested Eric.

  “I would totally fuck him either way,” said Amber, applying chapstick then slipping the lid back on with just the one hand. “Front of my car. Gravel pit.”

  “Man, I would so pay to see that!” said Grace, hunting for something in Cam’s jar of pencils. “You guys would look so hot together!”

  This was the sad-eyed war protester? We’d lost our inhibitions, that’s all it was. And for years I’d wanted to throw a tv out a window?

  “Shit yes! So can we all at least agree on that?” Amber asked.

  Down on the floor, Franny, Shawn, Megan, Clint and Eric and his mullet all nodded grudgingly. This was enough of a lull for Franny to notice I’d come in.

  “Oh, hey, Gillbrick! They tell you we made the caff too popular?”

  “They haven’t told me a thing. So the hospital couldn’t get it back on?”

  Flexing her skinny right arm, Amber grimaced up at me. Whitest possible teeth.

  “We didn’t go,” said Grace.

  “Hey-hey, G,” said Franny, “you can totally take us to Walgreens! Independence, man, buy up some bacon, get us a load of frying pans—”

  “Shawn, am I freaking out right now?” asked Clint. “Is that what I think it is on your shirt?”

  Shawn pulled his bangs back to look at the shoulder of his plaid shirt.

  “It is!” hollered Clint, and though cross-legged he somehow launched himself across the office, tackling Shawn around the middle to press his face to his lapel.

  “Aw, damn!” Megan shuffled over to avoid getting squashed. “I was next to him all the time and never even smelled it!”

  “Dude,” Shawn grunted. “Off.”

  “All right, listen!” I said, and my hands produced an almighty clap. “Who else in here has bacon on their shirt?”

  They inspected each other, sniffed their own cuffs.

  “Shawn, sorry, man.” Clint sat up in the middle of the circle and retied his scarf. “That was a sweet little nugget.”

  “Can’t we go now?” asked Amber.

  “No, I’ve got to figure this out.” I sat down, squeezing between the mullet and Megan’s turquoise cardigan. “What the hell did you do to get shut in here?”

  “Oh, honky!” Franny snorted. “It was classic!”

  To synthesize the seven simultaneous stories: at 12:05, as I was sprinting across the parking lot to my car, these gentle, well-meaning kids approached the cafeteria and read the daily special scrawled in yellow chalk, bacon dogs. But they found a dozen kids already in line and, God forbid, a couple of ninth-grade freaks actually in the act of finishing their bacon dogs right there on the spot! Mrs. Abel had gone out for a smoke, leaving the Culinary Skills 12 students to man the chafing dishes. My seven grabbed slotted spoons and chased everybody out, barricading the doors by locking the wheels on the ketchup cart. Ninety seconds later the chafing dishes had been licked clean and my seven walked out as though nothing had happened. One of the freaks had already called the cops on his cell phone, unfortunately, but Mr. Vincent met the officers at the front doors and no one, it turned out, had wanted to press charges.

  “So where in all that,” I asked, glancing at Eric, “did you get the black eye?”

  “I was in the wrong,” he shrugged. “Took more than my share.”

  “Okay.” I draped my elbows across my knees. “I need to figure this out.”

  The kids looked at me. All sarcasm had evaporated from the air.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “Yesterday morning I was a vegetarian. Last night my mother-in-law cooked bacon for the family and I ate it before I realized what I was doing, I ate more this morning, then another pound from Walgreens just now at home. That’s—”

  “What kind did you get?” asked Franny.

  “Oscar Mayer Thick Cut. On sale, actually.”

  Clint leapt to his feet, straightening his jacket.

  “Stay on task, we aren’t going yet,” I said. “In the last eighteen hours I’ve eaten enough to make someone who really likes bacon sick, and I wasn’t even that crazy about it back when I ate meat. Now, is that roughly the same experience that everyone’s had?”

  “I kept saying last night I was only going to eat a couple of strips.” Grace rubbed her eye with the back of her hand. “So I cooked those, ate ’em, then I just did it again and again and again. I was up until one-thirty.”

  They all shifted how they were sitting.

  “I kept waiting to barf, the more I ate,” Shawn said quietly. “And I never did.”

  “And nobody had habitually eaten that much bacon prior to eighteen hours ago?”

  “I totally got into Rhinoceros last night!” said Amber. “Do I look twenty-one? No, but I’m, like, ‘Screw that, I’m not waiting five more frickin’ years, I’m going,’ and the bouncer just waved me in! I bought the wristband for dollar shots!” She held up her bare arm proudly. “Oh, it was the other wrist. But there were guys with rodeo belt buckles, like the big ones! And I said to this chick there, I just said, ‘Drool.’ ”

  “What about bacon, how much did you have?”

  Her shoulders slumped. “Half a package. Just what Grace hadn’t eaten yet, the little pig, and she’d stayed home to write some stupid Congo speech but she never did!”

  “You better not slag Congo, bitch,” said Grace.

  “I know why you’re into that, but you couldn’t come to Rhinoceros too?”

  “I threw down with my brother,” said Clint. “And I utterly kicked his ass, and he’s on the college wrestling team. He was crying at the bottom of the stairs, and I was, like, ‘I will eat your heart, man, I will totally eat your heart.’ ”

  “Oh,” I said. “What did you mean by that?”

  “No idea.”

  “C’mon, you!” Franny rolled her eyes at him.

  “Shut up,” said Clint, “you’re the one who ripped her bathroom door off!”

  “What? I had to pee so bad!”

  “What about any unusual cuts or bruises or…healing?” I asked. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you with the arm, Amber, but it’s really a miracle you never bled to death.”

  “Oh, no problem,” she said.

  “Okay,” said Eric, nervously stroking
his mullet. “The neighbor brought his dog over, ugly dog that looked like a butt, and I guess it didn’t like me because it jumped up and it…” His hand stopped over his ear. “It bit me a bit.”

  “Tore your ear off?” I asked.

  “Only halfway. But funny thing was, it didn’t even hurt. Whole bottom half was just flapping.” He moved his hand away but the ear looked pristine—maybe it’d been the other one. “I didn’t really say anything ’cause I didn’t want to bug the neighbor, right? So I put staples in it and went to bed.”

  “This ear that’s on your head?”

  “Yup.” He tugged at it. “Just needed a good night’s sleep!”

  “Staples!” Grace smiled at Amber. “That’s what we should’ve done!”

  “What about the people who aren’t here? What about Jacob or Ryan or Lydia, anybody seen them? Scott Barnes?”

  “Jacob’s brother said he’s sick.”

  “Okay, okay, wait,” said Amber from the desk, lifting her hand above us like a Baptist. “I just thought up a haiku about the thing we were talking about before.”

  “Seriously, Harv’s dick?” asked Shawn. “Is it cool to keep talking about that?”

  “What about Harv?” I asked. “He hasn’t been here at all?”

  “Aw, you never heard that?” Franny wiped her mouth. “Harv totally hates his sister, right? So the kid on the bus said Harv stuffed her mouth with bacon, Beanie Babies, then microwaved her head.”

  “It’s that pink stuff,” said Grace. She thudded her sneakers against the front of Cam’s desk. “Let’s be real. It’s not like this is complicated. It’s cause and effect.”

  “What was the name of their superstar—Rob something?” asked Clint. “We should call that guy up, ask him what the hell.”

  “Yeah, maybe Rob’ll say it’ll all go back to normal after, like, a day,” said Grace.

  “Why go back to normal,” asked Amber, “what’s so bad about this?”

  “I do have his number, that’s something.” I sprang to my feet—usually I got stiff sitting cross-legged, but I was spry as a fox. “My last class Thursday’s just prep, I could drive back to Velouria and talk to them, but let’s see how the next couple days go, maybe this’ll all, I don’t know, subside.” Maybe if I hadn’t been their teacher, diplomatic to a fault because that was the job, I would’ve admitted there was no chance of that happening. “Megan, hey, what’s your mom been like since Friday? Plenty of bacon?”