The Introspective Adventures of Pancakes Dunst!

#26

Paging Luigi Pirandello!

Just who is Pancakes Dunst? That’s what Pancakes Dunst wants to know. On a holiday retreat at an experimental theater workshop, the cleverest girl in the world comes face to face with her greatest foe of all time: her own public persona. How can one girl overcome the collective perception of millions? Her workshop mentor, legendary director Caleb Buono, tells her to look inside herself for motivation. “Your author will tell you what to do,” he insists. But the only thing Pancakes wants to do is get off the stage as soon as she can. “You’re only running away from yourself!” Buono calls to her. Pancakes knows it’s true, but she still can’t stop running. . . .

Pre-Nup

The press release from Lorinda St. Genome’s publicist claimed that the dazzling Broadway actress and her children’s book–author fiancé Emiliano Dunst wanted to keep their wedding small. Judging from the crowd that packed St. Bartolome’s Cathedral on Saturday afternoon, “small” as applied to celebrity wedding guest lists has come to mean “no fewer than three hundred.”

At least for all their troubles, their wardrobe extravagances, and their two-and-a-half hours waiting in the pews, the guests were treated not only to a theatrical spectacle of pomp and circumstance, but also to several incidents of high drama and histrionics. At the end of the day, only the wedding’s lack of requiring a ticket for entry quashed the rumors of the event’s being an exercise in experimental theater.

Even before the wedding march resonated throughout the hall from the cathedral’s 150-year-old pipe organ, the venue’s rafters reverberated with noise as the popular Hollywood actor Charles Mongol arrived with a last-minute declaration of love for the bride. One could hardly resist contrasting the similarities between Mongol’s performance on Saturday and his Oscar-nominated turn as Sidney Belew in last year’s Dawn’s Breaking. In the movie, his character’s wedding-day scene features restrained passions and a heartbreaking emotional revelation. Mongol’s real-life attempt at sabotaging his former flame’s wedding, however, was punctuated by poor diction, a profuse flop sweat, and a pitiful, sob-soaked voice that escalated in pitch as often as it did in volume. In addition, as most of the onlookers later agreed, the entire speech “came totally out of the blue. We all thought Charles was far too basic to have feelings that deep and tortured.”

In any event, Mongol himself seemed well convinced of his own complexity that afternoon. Calling to attention the crowd of astonished guests, Mongol delivered an impassioned, occasionally lucid speech that appeared to be fueled as much by alcohol as by romantic convictions. “We’ve shared the stage,” he said at one point. “We’ve shared our lives too. At one time, we did. And I can’t just let her go . . . and be shared with somebody else. No, sirree.”

Those nearest the actor tried to silence him with as little fuss and embarrassment as circumstances allowed, but he waved them off and poured forth an even louder exclamation of his romantic intentions. Within a few minutes, he had the horrified assembly in the thrall of his public address. If he sensed that he faced one of the most hostile audiences of his life--the friends and family of the bride and groom--he gave no indication of it in his performance.

As might be expected from a bride-to-be awaiting her cue, and in particular from the incomparably proper Lorinda St. Genome, the lady in white let Mongol have the scene to himself. Yet soon the groom, his anger visible in his eyes, led his best man and a small army of ushers to confront Mongol. In keeping with his reputation as a well-known child advocate, Emiliano Dunst checked his rage and attempted to reason with Mongol.

The inebriated actor fled at that point, clearly identifying Dunst as the enemy. Drawing, no doubt, on his scant two weeks of stunt training in preparation for the recent remake of The Seven Samurai, Mongol leapt into the pews and attempted to scamper across their seatbacks. But it was not to be. If perhaps Strategic Strike Squad Seven had not wrapped filming more than ten months earlier, Mongol might have retained enough nimbleness and athleticism not to have then collapsed awkwardly into the crowd, fracturing his wrist, splitting his lip, and providing tabloids around the globe with the week’s most obvious headline photos.

Prom Night

The lights swirled through the living room: across the high ceilings, over the hardwood floors, up the wall yellow walls. Blue, red, and white kept sweeping over the pale moon of Kelly’s face as she reclined against me on the couch. On the love seat on the other side of the room, the colored lights described the contours of Adam and Debra.

I nodded in their direction so Kelly would look their way. The two of them were locked into some precoital position, though both still remained fully clothed in their formal wear.

“The tux is rented, Adam,” said quietly. “They charge more if you return it soiled.”

Debra, as usual, took it upon herself to deflect my sarcasm. “Ha ha,” she muttered in monotone. “Sounds like the voice of experience talking.”

The CD had finished the near-silent track it had been playing, and I heard the disc changer engage to rotate the next selection into place. The warmth of Marvin Gaye’s voice soon filled the room. But I could hear the dissonant interjections of police radio transmissions from outside. And some man began protesting loudly, if only semicoherently, about his rights.

“Can you see anything of what’s going on?” I asked.

Adam’s head lifted slightly. “Not really. I think they’re arresting him.”

I heard car doors slamming, engines being engaged. The dancing lights departed in groups as the vehicles moved away, and soon the room was almost completely dark.

Working Title, part 3

[previous chapter]

Over here in the editorial side of our building, it’s all about servitude at the lower levels. Paying your dues. Biding your time. Faxing this amendment to the contract. Following up on details that you know damn well nobody ever remembered to do in the first place. Plotting your superiors’ downfall and your own rise to power.

Okay, not every second of every day. But sometimes the coup can’t come soon enough.

Sure, there might be some real opportunities . . . eventually. But in the meantime, what’s with the implication that my overlords are overburdened? Because they’re just not, as far as I can see.

And whenever they start to seem so, they just drop a few things off with me or Karen. “Here, I need these by the end of the day.” Then they scurry back into their offices. If I could unload my burdens as easily as that, I’d have time to take care of my personal business all day too. But I’m at the bottom of the hill. There’s nowhere for stuff to go once it’s with me. I either do it or . . . I do it.

There is one other option . . . but it’s very bad form and I’m not yet crazed enough to fall back on it. But I’ve heard a story about one of my predecessors, a woman from a few years back who started out here as an assistant editor—

(Oh, and please make the distinction between me—an editorial assistant—and the position just above me—the assistant editor. The similarity of the names confused me at first, but the crucial difference is the word “assistant.” I’m an assistant, nothing more. Karen is an editor, nothing less. For all the rest of the office, we’re virtually indistinguishable. To anyone who has moved up and dropped the word “assistant” from his title, the most important characteristic Karen and I share is our underling status. Much to her chagrin, I’m sure.)

So anyway, this assistant editor was thought to be a whiz in the office. She signed books, completed mounds of tedious paperwork, filed all manner of documents, contracted for use of text and photos, and much, much more. And she did it all with a smile and without utterly sacrificing herself to living in her office over the weekends and deep into the night. She was probably going to be promoted up to a full-fledged editor when she suddenly quit and moved to London with her fiancee.

So Karen, who had just started here as a college intern, got stuck clearing out this woman’s cubicle to make way for whomever they hired next. And then they found it: a frighteningly large cache of paperwork that had never actually been completed. Disorganized stashes of files that had had only the slightest work done on them. It was such a mess that nobody knew what to do with it. It implied that the company had published all sorts of stuff without a real permission having been cleared on it. Copyright information had never really been filed. The Library of Congress had never received paperwork on scores of already published titles. About the only thing this woman had kept up with, more or less, were contract payments. If she hadn’t done at least that much, she would have been found out a long, long time before. Nothing will turn up a payment oversight quicker than a literary agent’s whining complaint about money he’s owed.

Even better, though, was that there was yet another oversight yet to come to light. They finally pieced this together months after the secret slacker had left (with, strangely, no solid lead to her whereabouts except a P.O. box for her final paycheck and tax forms). Then the calls and letters started pouring in, wanting to know what Curate’s Egg Press was doing about the query letters, proposals, and unsolicited manuscripts still in the office. Still in the office? No, they weren’t that. They were just never replied to. Worse, they were nowhere to be found. As far as anybody could tell, this woman had just tossed them out. “No wonder she always kept such a neat desk,” one editor remarked. Uh, yeah. I can’t believe no one notice what an anomaly that was in the first place. They should have been suspicious from the get-go.

Whatever. I’m off to lunch. Y’know, it’d be nice—especially since we have such a small staff—if somebody would ask me to do lunch with them. The first day I was here, Carrie took Karen and me out to eat, and I thought, “Well, this is cool. I guess now that I’m officially in the salaried workforce, I get to enjoy lunches out at nice spots occasionally.” But that was the first and, so far, the last time such a thing happened. Karen usually just tends to bring pretty wilty-looking salads in Tupperware tubs and eat at her desk. So I’m on my own. No literary lunches for me. I can’t wait to find out how many other illusions of mine they’ll shatter at this office.

Still, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if there were someplace close by I could go. But our offices are tucked back in a weird industrial area here. It’s two miles to the nearest safe-looking eating establishment. Maybe I’ll get brave and try the sandwiches from the Roach Coach that serves the workers in the printing plant on the other side of the lot. Or I could try the barbecue place with the permanently blacked-out windows on the next block. But for now I’ll go with fast-food standbys. At least if I get served something bad there, I might have a chance at getting some compensation. These other places, I might just end up on the menu.

Birds

I couldn’t get any work done at all. If it wasn’t the chirping, it was the fluttering. Papers were swept from their place as soon as I lifted my hand from them. And small shadows darted all about, making it hard to read. For sure it was distracting.

It was impossible to count how many there were, but I reckoned at least two dozen birds were inside my office. They were small birds, sparrows and finches from what I could tell, but when you get that many in an office, it seems like hundreds.

There were feathers to deal with too, and that might have a cute detail except for the worst thing of all. Bird shit everywhere. My desk looked like the lining of a bird cage in no time. How was I going to route those invoices when they were spattered with green and white smears of bird feces? But I didn’t have time to redo everything. And with the birds, it would just get messed up again.

“How’d they get in there?” one of my coworkers asked me when I went to get coffee. My previous cup hadn’t lasted more than a minute before I found a few tufted white feathers floating in it. This time I was taking a saucer to put on top of the mug.

“How should I know?” I said. “They were in there when I got in on Monday.”

“I don’t understand. How can you work in there with birds all over the place?”

“Makes it tough,” I said. I took a danish from the box someone had left on the counter. I only wanted half, but I took a whole one back to my office. The birds would finish it off. It was the only real benefit of their presence.

She shook her head. “Somebody should do something about it.”

“I’ve been assured that they’ve called the management company. The maintenance guys are busy, I guess.”

“That’s ridiculous!” she said.

Our office manager darted into the kitchen and poured a quick cup of coffee. He smiled. “Yeah, but they’re cutting our rent in half for the month, so that’s something.” He darted out again.

“So something good’s coming out of it,” I said. “Anyway, I gotta get back. Last time I left, they landed on my keyboard and somehow rebooted my computer. This whole spreadsheet got corrupted somehow.”

I took my coffee, saucer, and danish back down the hall. The incessant birdsong grew louder as I got closer to my office. I picked a few pale tufts of stray feathers from my sleeve and pressed on. It would be a long week.

The Rambunctious Adventures of Jalasso Pei, part two

[previous chapter]

Direct Hit

With the match suspended and the threat to her record averted, Jalasso returned to the peril of the moment: the wrath of her mother. A new wave of panic washed over her, and she dashed to the makeshift net to see if she could disentagle the knotted afghans and reposition the chairs from which they hung.

Miranda watched with vague interest while slowly packing her tennis gear.

“Need some help?” she asked over her shoulder after several moments. Jalasso had started in desperation to pull loose thick strands of yarn from the knit throws.

Jalasso glanced over at her. “Would you?”

“Ha!” Miranda laughed sarcastically. She stood and heaved her bulky saffron tennis bag over her shoulder. “You wish.” She headed for the door at the far end of Jalasso’s bedroom.

In frustration, Jalasso accidentally pulled loose several more strands of yarn from her mother’s expensive afghans. It seemed to her that at any minute the entire collection of knit items might unravel into one long, messy strand. She dropped the twisted mess as she watched Miranda striding toward the door. “Oh, yeah?” she shouted. “Well, next time we play, you’re going to wish something! That I’d stop kicking your skinny butt!”

She should have known from her long nine years of experience that just such a line would signal her mother’s entrance. It never failed that Mrs. Pei arrived always at the height of her daughter’s most outrageous exclamations. As the word “butt” left Jalasso’s lips, the heavy oak door flew open with a soft thud.

Jalasso leapt back a foot and covered her mouth involuntarily. Not because of the sudden terror her mother inspired, though she did. And not because it seemed very likely that she’d lose her court privileges for at least a month, though she probably would. But rather because the door to her room had just burst open with a thud, whereas it typically tended toward more of a crash. The difference between the sounds was accounted for by Miranda. She had just reached the door as Jalasso’s mother came in, and the door hit the girl square in the face.

Mrs. Pei’s reaction was less immediate. She had entered the room admonishing her daughter for her rambunctious, destructive behavior, for her rude treatment of her guest, and for her distinctly unladylike language. It took her a couple of seconds to process the details of the situation in Jalasso’s bedroom, and her tirade sputtered out as she took it all in. Jalasso stood still, eyes wide, hands over her mouth. Several of the antique throws looked in danger of being unraveled, and they were strapped to the delicately wroght chairs she’d hoped would downplay the sporty look of her daughter’s room. And finally, it seemed that little blonde girl Jalasso had a tennis rivalry with stood just inside the doorway. She was holding her nose and wailing in pain.

Mrs. Pei sputtered as she shifted her primary concern from confronting Jalasso about the broken window to kneeling down in front of the girl she’d evidently just hit in the face with the door.

Mrs. Pei held Miranda by the shoulders. “Oh, I’m so sorry, dear! I’m sorry! I didn’t know you were behind the door.”

Miranda continued to cry in high-pitched screams interspersed with long, low sobs. Mrs. Pei tried to pull the girl’s hands away from her face to see how badly she was hurt, but Miranda wouldn’t let her. She kept her whole face hidden, and her endless hours of tennis practice gave the little girl considerable upper body strength.

“Please, honey, let me see,” Mrs. Pei implored the girl. She disliked have to use a soft, mothering tone. Dealing with Jalasso’s unbridled energy and crafty willfulness had made such gentle measures so rare that they now felt false and foreign. But she had to cope with this situation as best she could. She didn’t think it would help to get stern or to overpower the girl.

Slowly, Miranda relaxed her arms, and Mrs. Pei drew her hands back. When she saw the girl’s face, she blanched. She tried not to react for fear of scaring her, but Miranda recognized the look of concern and uncertainty. She knew something was wrong.

Plus, it was hard not to notice the blood that dripped from her nose and now covered the bottom half of her face and both of her hands. Immediately, Miranda’s whimpering escalated into a series of high, anguished shrieks. Her hands flew back to cover her face and she sat down heavily on the floor, her tennis bag sliding off her shoulder and slumping to one side.

Mrs. Pei did her best to make soothing sounds, but Miranda seemed to be going into some mild form of shock. “Jalasso,” the woman whispered loudly, never taking her eyes off the injured child, “call down to Marble. Tell him your friend is hurt.”

Jalasso stood at the far side of the room, shifting her weight from one foot the other. She wanted to spring into action. She knew it was time. But for the time being, she felt incapable of moving. Things would just get worse from here, and she knew it. If only she could rewind things. Back to the match. To those last few returns. To that awful backhand of hers.

“Jalasso!” Mrs. Pei shouted in her best commanding voice.

The girls sprang into action, practically vaulting over her canopy bed toward her phone. She used the intercom function and heard the butler pick up as he always did in two rings, no more, no less.

“Marble!” she shrieked. “Mother’s calling for you. Miranda’s hurt!”

“Very good, Miss Jalasso,” Marble said in his unhurried, unflappable manner. “First aid or emergency?”

The Rambunctious Adventures of Jalasso Pei, part one

Mishit

Jalasso had hoped the additional insulation and pricey soundproofing of her room would do the job. She needed it to muffle steady footfalls and shoe squeaks, to dampen the sharp smacks of tennis balls bouncing off the floor, and to smother her outraged cries as Miranda scored sneaky points.

And maybe it had worked. But even so, even the best soundproofing did nothing to hide a shattered bedroom window. Especially when the bright yellow tennis ball Jalasso had so terribly mishit sailed out that window, a shimmering trail of glass in its wake. Not when the spherical missile fell in bright noontime daylight four stories to the family estate’s vast green lawn. And not when the blasted thing then bounced, hopped, and rolled to a stop only a few yards from where her mother stood, discussing the details of Jalasso’s upcoming birthday lawn party with the groundskeeper.

As Jalasso stood looking out the windows and saw her mother’s beautiful pale moon of a face turn and look up at her angrily, she knew she would never be able to talk her way out of this one.

“So is that the match?” Miranda asked from over Jalasso’s shoulder as they watched Mrs. Pei walk stiffly toward the house.

Jalasso leapt down from the window seat and yanked one of the long, flowing curtains over the broken window. The wind outside gusted, pulling the curtain toward the jagged hole in the glass.

“What do you think, Miranda?” Jalasso asked testily, looking around the room at the obvious damage their game had caused.

“I think yeah,” Miranda said in a light tone. “But I’m just saying . . .”

Jalasso barely heard her. She had begun to run around her enormous bedroom, righting objects knocked over during the game, kicking stray tennis balls into her garage-sized walk-in closet, tucking the racquet she had been using under the mattress of her canopy bed. She did all this by force of habit, because she knew full well she could never get that window fixed before her mother made the long trek up to the fourth floor and down the long corridors toward the wing of the house that contained Jalasso’s bedroom. Besides, how would she ever have explained the ball? And all that glass outside? The makeshift net of antique afghan throws strung between two Chippendale chairs in the middle of the room?

Suddenly, she spun back toward Miranda, who still stood by the window, her racquet gripped lightly in her left hand. She glared. “You’re just saying what?” Jalasso asked suspiciously.

Miranda shrugged. “You’re down a set.”

Jalasso’s mouth fell open in astonishment. “What a cheap win!” she exclaimed. “That’s what it means to you when my mother’s about to come in here and revoke all my court privileges for the rest of the spring?”

Miranda tried to look hurt, but the expression was so unnatural for her that she looked instead like she was just recovering from a bad sneeze. “Like you wouldn’t! You’re still counting that game when I had an allergic reaction to that bee sting!”

For a moment, Jalasso forgot about the impending doom of Mrs. Pei. “That was totally fair,” she said. “Forfeiting for medical reasons.”

“My throat was going to close up!” Miranda yelled.

Jalasso threw her hands in the air. “So you made the right decision!”

Miranda grinned triumphantly. “So now it’s your turn,” she said. “Do we continue the game, or are you going to forfeit?”

Jalasso jumped up and down several times in frustration. She stomped her feet. “Why can’t we play it later?” she whined.

Miranda looked at her bare wrist as if she had a watch on it. “It’s match time now.”

Jalasso stopped suddenly and let her shoulders drop. She felt defeated, and she wanted just to fall down on the floor.

“Forfeit?” Miranda asked. She twirled her racquet in her hand.

Jalasso looked up at her sometime-friend and her small face broke into a grin. Her dark eyes glared up from under her choppy bangs. “Fine,” she said, “we’ll play. It’s still your serve.”

It was Miranda’s turn to look sincerely outraged. “What?” she asked. “We can’t play now! Your mom is coming up here to ground you for the rest of forever.”

Jalasso feigned an unconvincing look of innocence. “We can’t play?”

Miranda shook her head at Jalasso’s stupidity. “Of course not!”

Jalasso grinned wickedly and pumped her small fist. “Okay, then,” she said. “If we can’t play, then I don’t forfeit. Game postponed due to weather.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the weather,” Miranda protested.

Jalasso nodded. “Well, it’s about to get really bad in here. Stormy, even.”

Miranda tossed her head in irritation and stomped toward her tennis bag to gather her belongings. “Fine, Jalasso, the game’s postponed,” she said icily. “But I’m writing down the score. We’ll play again when you can go out, in like ten years.”

[next chapter]

Attack of the Perilous Page Count and the Deadlines of Doom

(or, No, I Do Not Think I'm Shel Silverstein)

I'm writing a book, and it seems I can't stop
It may not succeed, but it also can't flop
It can't be assessed, it can't be reviewed
For flat characters or for writing that's crude

I'm working on chapter three hundred and two
Right after the part with the crazed kangaroo
The treasure has yet to be found by the guy
With the Freudian fears and the patch on his eye

A publisher bought the whole thing on spec
I bet he now wishes he'd just stopped the check
Originally it was just s'posed to be
A treatise on life by the Caspian Sea

But since I got started, I can't seem to close
I keep rambling endlessly on with my prose
The plot just unravels, complications abound
And I think in truth there's no end to be found

For instance, I'm not sure the captain's alive
He's rumored to have been cut down with a scythe
But he was the one, least so far as I know
Who had the birth papers of Lady Gateux

And if I can't think of some way that he might
Have survived the storm on the Isle of Wight
Then Old Ragged Tom and his young urchin band
Are banished forever from Gondwanaland

Which means that Michel can never depose
The evil young prince who's stolen his clothes
The prince will at last get to marry Corinne
And sit on the throne, but I can't let him win!

The upshot is that there are more scenes in store
Plus desperate editor's calls to ignore
And what can I say to respond to his pleas?
This manuscript's now grown up way past my knees

I keep writing faster and faster to find
Some miracle to get me out of this bind
A birth or a death, a sword in a stone
Most anything now that my deadline is blown!

This epic must somehow be brought to an end
The way that it's sprawling I just can't defend
I've toyed with the cheats, but they all seem too pat
"Deus ex machina"—what the hell's that?

I could have it all be a mere endless dream
Like Winsor McKay and his Welsh rarebit fiend
Or a Joycean trick: just end where you start
But that admits there was no tale to impart

I have to decide, and I must do it soon
Ignore all the plot holes and wrap up by June
I must finish this, and with no backward glance
If I'm ever to get my final advance

El Museo Dificil (part one)

For years I had avoided visiting the Difficult Museum, although everyone always insisted it was a must. The guidebooks never failed to mention it. It was always a top attraction for tourists, and every art and design school considered it a foundation of a well-rounded education. It was, everyone always told me, “immersive.”

Invasive was more like it. My freshman college roommate had gone to the museum over spring break, and soon after we resumed classes I noticed that his behavior had changed radically. Chad had been a shy, retiring guy when I first knew him. He rendered quick and elegant nudes in charcoal. He preferred soft watercolors to bolder paints. Everything about his art was gentle and subtle, if a little childishly surreal.

After a weekend trip to the Difficult Museum, however, he traded to acrylics, with an emphasis on reds, yellows, and black. The lithe, nubile coeds he used to flatter with his sketches were soon put off by the craggy deterioration that began to creep into his drawings. Chad’s wide, blue eyes narrowed into troubled slits. I didn’t know the guy anymore, and I made sure not to sign up for another year as his roommate.

The fact that his art career took off in just another year and that he was mounting major exhibitions by late junior year meant nothing, as far as I was concerned. The museum had done something to him, and I didn’t want that done to me.

It was the same with a couple of girlfriends of mine as well. Neither of them hit the same professional stride that Chad did, but they both altered their behavior and their art soon after visiting the place. Raquel was a sculptor who liked to work dark woods into organic, vaguely erotic shapes. She finished and polished them all to a high gloss, and those sculptures were one of the first things that attracted me to her. There was a purity in her expression, and only a mild, if potent, sexuality. The sculptures reminded me of Raquel herself: slender but rounded, oddly beautiful, slightly divine.

Then she went to the Difficult Museum to gain extra credit for one of her Shape and Form seminars. The next time we went out, she was sullen and avoided my eyes. She seemed obsessed with the notion of objectification. She told me more than once that I stared at her too much. I told her that I simply found her attractive. She said, exactly, and that it was something of a problem.

Soon after, she stopped seeing me. She stayed in touch, but she literally refused to allow me any visual contact with her. When I saw her across campus, she hurried away and often ducked into the women’s restroom until she was sure I’d left. The only time I was allowed to see her was at our student exhibitions, to which she began submitting large numbers of new, strange work.

She still preferred to work in wood, but only as a base. All manner of implements--nails, pipes, screws, glass shards, jagged pieces of rock--were worked into the sculptures. She gouged the wood, splintered it, broke pieces awkwardly, and removed any traces of smoothness or shine. Eventually she started dating someone else, and they left school together prior to graduation. At the last exhibit of hers that I saw, she had started hammering other bits of wood into her pieces, handcarved nails of hardwood that she drove into soft pine. She’d also taken up woodburning, with alarming, frankly vulgar results.

For these and other reasons, I had absolutely no desire ever to go to that damn museum. As far as I could see, all it did was make happy people miserable. The only people who appeared unaffected were miserable to begin with. So lots of my fellow art students seemed to pass through its doors with little aftereffect, though they all raved about it sullenly.

I did, however, have cause to wonder over the course of the next decade whether I had made the right choice in avoiding the Difficult Museum. I had completed my courses, developed my own sense of artistic expression, and founds some mild success with my wry, brightly colored canvases of invented cartoon characters. They made for good T-shirts, and I had a certain cache with disaffected hipsters burdened by expendable cash. But I was nowhere near the level of professional success Chad had achieved. His work had become collectible by people whose names appeared in the mastheads of international art journals. Raquel had a few pieces acquired by museums. And other colleagues were headlining shows that were getting breathless reviews by bigwig tastemakers.

Meanwhile, I had a few characters I’d managed to license to a skateboard manufacturer. My works tended to get shown as one facet of multiartist shows. I was doing okay, but my writeups were in magazines that tended to be printed on newsprint in black-and-white. Most of my fans wore flat-bottomed sneakers and baggy pants. They didn’t care that there was no place for my work in the museums, because they only went there with class field trips. I was impressing the same kinds of people who had attended parties with me in high school. I was getting older, but most of my audience wasn’t.

That’s when Juanda called. We’d been at school together, and she and I often displayed our work at some of the same shows. She’d been asked to track me down to see if I wanted to contribute some pieces to a special exhibit. It was to be a “flash retrospective,” a quick look back at the ten years since my particular class left my particular college. Without my knowing it, our class had achieved some status as a talent collective. And because I was still working and selling my work, I got lumped in with the rest of them, although the other names on the list were, as far as the art community was concerned, actual Names. My former roommate Chad was chief among them, of course.

Juanda said she’d been asked to select some works of her own for inclusion, and that the organizer of the exhibition wanted to find a few people who weren’t with the galleries he’d already contacted. Which was a nice way of indicating that we hadn’t really made it the way our other classmates had. But they probably wanted the exhibit to have some variety and flavor. That’s where my work would come in, on the end of the spectrum about which some viewers would declare, “I guess they’ll let just anybody be an artist these days.”

But it was exposure, and you could never tell what might come of such things. I’d select some pieces for the shallow end of the pool and hope for some good reviews. Maybe the luster of my more successful colleagues would add a bit of shine to my own stature. I asked Juanda who I should contact.

“Anton Fighorn,” she said, “the curator at the Difficult Museum.”

Vincent Makes His Bold Move

As far as Vincent was concerned, there was a time and place for everything. He didn’t, unfortunately, know the times and the places as often as he would like. But he felt certain that both existed, and much of his thinking went toward identifying the right combination of both to achieve the things that mattered most to him.

He had known at once, therefore, that when Pancakes’s big-shot college boyfriend stood her up for the prom, she’d be unapproachable for a while. But he couldn’t have predicted the months-long length of her general disaffection for males in general, which even included her father and himself at times. And while he had known also that once he took Pastina's sister, Francesca, to the prom that Pastina would withhold her customary friendly sympathy for at least a month, he miscalculated how much longer she would try shaming him with the incident.

Most surprising, really, had been Francesca’s frank sexual overtures at the prom party several of her friends had organized in a hotel suite. Nothing in their acquaintance could have prepared him for that. She was his friend's little sister, after all. But it was almost a year before Fran stopped calling him a “wuss” for the way he fled the suite to escape her embrace that night.

A better assessment of times and places could have smoothed out all such incidents, he was sure. However, while his predictive abilities improved incrementally, the behavior of his friends grew ever more unruly.

One thing he felt certain he could always predict, however, was Pancakes’s unfailing interpretation of symbolism. In such matters, time and place made little difference. Sometimes she read too much into things, but if ever he knew someone certain to extract meaning from most everything, it was Pancakes. She saw significance in some of the slightest events, and she frequently astonished him with the clear-eyed way she sized up the books and movies they discussed. So he knew if he could make the right kind of symbolic gesture to demonstrate how he felt about her, she would never miss what he meant by it. The only questions then were the selection of the symbol and the determination of the time and place.

If he had been on regular speaking terms with Pastina, she would have told him not to think so hard about it. If he somehow could have consulted Pancakes about it, she would have asked him what he hoped to gain by an overt symbolic gesture. If Francesca had been willing to listen to Vincent’s concerns, she would have called him a wuss again and insisted, “If you like her like that, just grab her and kiss her. That’ll settle it one way or another.”

In the end Vincent decided to seek no one’s counsel. He could figure this out on his own. If he was willing to face how he felt about Pancakes, he could at least figure out how he should express those feelings. Probably.

And so he found himself at the end of that summer still mulling over the same questions. Pancakes’s period of aggression and alienation from the opposite sex had been something of a rollercoaster ride for anyone willing to get too near. She poured out pages of words on some new project, another play that seemed to be obsessing her all of a sudden. She dated a series of throwaway guys throughout the summer months, allowing herself to be pursued for a period, dating contentedly for a week or so, and then dismissing the guy in question with no warning or explanation. And in between she took strange pleasure in needling her bewildered father about his own romantic missteps. Her victim might have been her father, but her theme was specifically about the fickleness of the male heart. She never referred specifically to the numerous short-term boyfriends she'd had over the years. In her mind they were all the same guy. All of them shared in the guilt. Vincent knew that was in her mind, and so he delayed his plan from one week to the next, hoping for some break in which Pancakes might not see him as just another treacherous man.

Then came mid-August. It had been two weeks since Pancakes had cut loose another of her summer flings. It had been days since Pancakes had uttered his name editorially, putting undue emphasis on the first syllable (“Vincent”). And just a few days earlier, she had handed Vincent a wrinkled clutch of papers that contained scenes from her new play. Vincent knew he was back in the circle, and he knew that if there existed a right time, it was upon him. If there existed a right place, he would need to find it quickly. When he found himself sitting just a few feet from Pancakes in a public park at night, he figured both things had finally come into alignment.

A group of their friends had gathered that night, as they had many nights over that summer, to uncork a few bottles of wine and sip it from plastic cups. A stream ran along one side of the park, but the bugs were worse in that area, so they usually ended up sitting together on a set of low risers adjacent to a soccer field. Pancakes had brought five different boyfriends to that park throughout June, July, and August, but in the end the only males in attendance were Pastina’s current beau, Vincent, and Vincent’s longtime, still usually silent friend Lee. Vincent had been happy to witness Pancakes settling near him on the risers, and he felt the pressure of the moment upon him. He reached into the pocket of his battered denim jacket and felt the firm double teardrop shape of the quartz crystal heart he’d been carrying there for over a month.

Pancakes had been holding forth for several minutes on the specifics of her new play. “It’s basically the story of a trade-off,” she said. “The main character is this linguist who’s been helping to decrypt an old scroll. Ancient. Kinda Biblical, but that’s not for sure. But as he gets more into it and it gets more attention from all kinds of unexpected sources, he starts to realize that it has some kind of power if it can be translated. Or, anyway, that’s what everyone seems to think.” Vincent closed his eyes and enjoyed the sound of her voice. It had been a long time since he had heard pure excitement from her.

“Sounds like an adventure,” Pastina’s boyfriend said, and Pastina was glad he couldn’t see the pained expression on her face in the dark. Why did he have to be so simple in front of other people? “Could be more of a movie than a play. All you need is a love interest.”

“Ah!” Pancakes said. “But I have one. That’s the trade-off. A woman he falls in love with. A woman who ends up needing him to abandon his work. He could be in on something totally groundbreaking, a revelation of the old-school kind. So does he pursue that, or does he walk away from it in the hopes that helping out his love will be worth the loss?”

No one said anything for a moment. The sound of crickets filled the silence. Pancakes had still not abandoned her favorite topic of her parents' complicated dynamics, and even Pastina's boyfriend could see it.

But Pancakes couldn't, and Vincent didn't care as he listened to her description of her newest play. He took a deep breath and pulled the heart from his pocket. He held it tightly in his fist for a moment, then turned it over in his hands. It felt much heavier than its size would suggest.

“So?” Lee said finally. "What happens?" Most everyone had forgotten he was there, and his unexpected question made Vincent nervous again. He slipped the heart back into his pocket.

“Well, you have to come see the play, don’t you?” Pancakes said.

That started a sudden debate from everyone. Pancakes had teased them with the plot, then refused to follow through. The eruption of banter eased Vincent’s mind again, and he knew he would have to do this tonight or not do it at all.

What’s the worst that could happen? He knew she’d understand his gesture, and he knew that she would remain his friend even if she didn’t feel the same way. Probably she would. If only there were some way to be sure. But that was part of the point, wasn’t it? Would there be any reason to go through with it if he knew the outcome? If she would say yes for sure, would he even want her the same way? He held his breath and reached to get the heart again. It was now or never.

And suddenly it was . . . gone. The heart was gone! Vincent knew he must be wrong. He dug deep into his pocket, finding only lint and an oxidized paperclip. He reached into the opposite pocket, but there he found only a pencil stub and some change. Maybe he’d put it in one of his other pockets? He started feeling around everywhere, patting down all his pockets and touching lightly around the riser in the immediate area. Maybe it was somewhere nearby. Unless it fell, in which case . . .

“What are you doing?” Pancakes asked suddenly, and Vincent realized she was talking to him. “Did you lose something? Or do you have an itch or something?” Vincent realized he must have seemed more frantic than he realized.

“I, uh, yeah,” he said. “I dropped something, I think.”

“I hope it didn’t fall,” Pastina said. “It might be hard to find it under the risers. Was it important?”

“No, I guess not,” Vincent said. In his mind he was sketching diagrams of the trajectory such an object might take from that height. Maybe it would just fall straight down? Would it bounce or roll? And how far? Maybe he could still salvage it. “Lee, would you help me for a second? It’s just that it was a pen that I really like. Let’s just go down and look really quick.” Lee stood up and prepared to follow him.

“You want us to help you look?” Pancakes asked, starting to rise.

“No, that’s fine,” Vincent said. “If it’s down there, we’ll find it.” He started down and Lee followed after him.

“And if you don’t find it, we’ll go get you another one tomorrow,” Pancakes said.

“We’ll find it,” Vincent said. On the way down he had to confide in Lee what he’d actually lost, and each of the boys worked out a search pattern to cover the most likely places the heart could have fallen, bounced, or rolled. They paced off a large area, then walked in regular concentric patterns to cover as much of the space as possible. They sometimes got down on hands and knees to feel around the ground, especially near portions of the riser structure that might have stopped the roll of such and object. Lee fetched a flashlight from his car, and they panned around the most likely places.

They looked everywhere that the thing might logically have gone, and then they looked in some places that it seemed possible but rather unlikely that it might have gone. Finally, desperate and tired, Vincent started looking in some places that the heart could very likely have never gone. Eventually the rest of the party became restless and insisted Vincent call off the search. How much could a pen be worth, anyway?

Finally he gave up, and even though he returned to the park early the next day, he never did find the stupid thing again.

What I'm About to Do on My Summer Vacation

Vincent looked at the shiny green coupe in the driveway. Then he looked at the small mountain of luggage Pancakes had stacked in the driveway by the front door. He had yet to investigate the available space in the rear of the car, but even from this distance he could see that the entire interior of the vehicle would never hold all the bags Pancakes wanted to bring on their trip. They wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon.

“What exactly were you thinking when you rented this car?” Vincent asked.

Pancakes looked defiant. “I was thinking, basically, ‘go.’ You said to get a car, so I got a car.”

“And you also packed your bags. You were the one who knew how big the car was, and then you packed these enormous bags. I just don’t really get that,” Vincent said.

Pancakes turned to walk away. Since when did Vincent question her? This was unexpected and new. And unwelcome. That dumb girlfriend of his, Jalasso, had changed him somehow. She couldn’t believe those two hadn’t stayed broken up. “Vincent,” she said as she went back to the house, “you know what I don’t get? How your little girlfriend let you come on this trip in the first place. Isn’t she jealous?”

Vincent turned and followed her. “I don’t think so,” he said.

“Oh, you don’t? Well, what’d she say when you told her?”

“Nothing.”

“Yeah, right. Nothing?”

“Well, I didn’t tell her yet.”

Pancakes stopped and turned to face him. “Are you kidding? You didn’t tell her?” She was pleased by that, but she tried to sound appropriately outraged. “How could you not tell your girlfriend?”

Vincent shrugged. “I don’t have to,” he said. “We’re on hold for the summer.”

“On hold? What is that?”

Vincent shrugged again. “I don’t really know,” he said. “That’s what we agreed. She was going away for the whole summer, so we said we’d be on hold. I don’t have to check in with her on everything. She doesn’t check with me.”

Pancakes squinted at him. “This was your idea?” she asked.

“Not really.”

Their road trip together had been hastily arranged, and Pancakes hadn’t really done all that much planning other than securing a car and overpacking. Vincent was taking care of the details. She assumed he knew that. They hadn’t really discussed it in detail. She’d simply known that it was essential for her to get lost for a little while, and she especially needed to lose her boyfriend Brandon, who had grown a bit too serious about their undefined relationship. Apparently after a few months he felt the need to start asking her questions about her feelings and her intentions, and none of these questions were to her liking as she didn’t have ready answers for them. It was really, she thought, the wrong time to press her on anything. She didn’t know and she didn’t know and she didn’t know. All she knew for sure was that her college plans for the fall had been established, and for the moment she needed to prepare herself for the imminent onslaught of effort that would bring. A chain-smoking pseudo-boyfriend didn’t enter the picture. At least not in a good way.

One of the more irritating aspects of Brandon’s behavior was the increasing static he seemed to have with Vincent. It was funny at first. Pancakes liked the fact that, as she said to Pastina, “the boys are getting tough.” Given the temperaments of the two guys in question, it would never come to more than a battle of wits, but after a few months of that, Pancakes was tiring of the game. Vincent obviously had the upper hand, witswise, and that prompted Brandon to become a little meaner in his comments in order to hold up his end of the animosity. One moment in particular stood out to Pancakes as indicative of the degree to which things had devolved. In May, her long beloved cat Mourning Becomes Electra (she never tired of explaining that the cat’s name was not, in fact, “Morning,” as people tended to assume) had died. Pancakes had arranged a small funeral at her family home, and she had been astonished when, standing over the two-by-three foot grave, Brandon had intimated that Vincent might have had something to do with the cat’s demise.

“What are you, Charlie Chan?” Vincent had asked. “Are you going to explain the method, motive, and opportunity for my crime?” Brandon had been stymied for a proper reply, saying only, “Just so you know, I’ve got my eye on you.” Looking back now, Pancakes realized that was the beginning of the end for Brandon. She hated to admit that something like that was so important to her, but his inability to spar verbally turned her off. After all, Vincent wasn’t exactly a sarcastic knock-out artist.

A lengthy delay later, after which it was so late that they decided to eat lunch at Pancakes’s house rather than drive an hour down the road and stop somewhere far less inviting, the road trip finally got underway. “The only thing is,” Pancakes said as she settled into the passenger seat and leafed through the enormous cloth album of compact discs she’d brought, “we have to be back sometime in August so we can get ready for school.”

“That was kind of implied,” Vincent said. “Besides, Jalasso will be back at the end of August.”

“Who?” Pancakes asked innocently.

“Jalasso?”

“Your ex?”

“My on-hold,” Vincent corrected her.

Pancakes smiled. “We’ll see. We’re going to be out on the road for a long time together, Vincent. You may not want to go back to her after I’m done with you.”

Vincent looked a bit panicked and took a drink from his bottle of water. “I don’t know where that came from,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I don’t know why you’re not telling me something else, then,” Pancakes said. She selected a disc and slid it into the player. “If you’re in love with that girl, why did you let her go off all unattached? What are you doing out here with me, alone and unsupervised?”

“You wanted to go on a trip.”

“What did you want to do?”

“Get the hell out of there so I could stop thinking about how much I wanted Jalasso to be around.”

Pancakes sipped at a cup of watery iced coffee. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

Vincent sighed and shook his head. “It’s pathetic, I know.”

“It’s not pathetic to be in love with her,” Pancakes said. She felt very strange making the statement. She didn’t really believe it, but at the same time she realized it was still true.

“But the ‘on-hold’ part. I don’t want us to be on hold. We can not-be-together, but that doesn’t mean that we have to suspend things officially.”

“I get it.”

“I mean, after the spring break thing.” Vincent didn't have to explain further. He and Jalasso had come close to the end then. She'd spent her break in Florida. Enough said.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry too.”

The two rode in silence for a while, letting themselves be distracted by the insistent pulse of the music Pancakes had selected and the blur of scenery sliding past them as Vincent drove. Finally Pancakes said, “Well, if it makes you feel any better, Brandon actually cried when I told him I was leaving.”

Vincent tried unsuccessfully to suppress a small smile. “Sadly, it does make me feel better. Not that he was a bad guy, but still …”

“Yes, I know. And for the record, I never for a second thought you were a cat murderer.”

“It was just his whole thing,” Vincent said. “And always with the cigarettes. God, I mean, after a while the casual way he smokes seems really self-conscious, you know? Didn’t you say he smoked in the bath tub?”

Pancakes made a face. “Don’t remind me. I can’t tell you how gross it is to be in the shower and realize there’s ash and tobacco all over the place. He used the soap dish as an ashtray, and he never cleaned it out.”

“So you stopped smoking?” Vincent asked.

“Well …” Pancakes looked out the window. “Okay, not totally. I’m working on it. I hope I’ll be done by the time we get back.”

Vincent’s eyes widened. He took his gaze off the road for a moment to give Pancakes a look of fearful astonishment. “Are you telling me that you’re going to go through withdrawals with me along for the ride? I thought we were friends.”

“We are,” she said. “That’s what I’m counting on in the hopes that you won’t end up killing me if I get too cranky.”

“You were waiting to tell me that until after we crossed state lines, weren’t you?”

“I didn’t think we’d hit on it so early. Why? Are you going to turn back?”

“I guess not,” Vincent said.

“Yeah, so here we are: two old friends out on the road, recently single—”

“One of us is single. The other’s on hold.”

“Two old friends, one recently single, one quote on hold unquote. And one of us is giving up smoking. What about you, Vincent? Are you giving up something?”

“At this point,” he said, “hope.”

Detention Journal, part six

Did anyone realize that they take detention hall kids to lunch earlier than everybody else? So we don’t mix with the others, I guess.

It’s creepy being in the lunchroom when it’s empty. And the lunch-line ladies, who maybe never really noticed you before, are probably going, “Oh, look who’s in trouble now. She never looked like a delinquent, but I guess you never know.”

But apart from the unsettling feelings and the public shame—and much more important—who’s hungry for lunch at eleven o’clock? God, it makes the afternoon so much longer!

When they took us to lunch, the two burnout guys who’ve been trying to huff correction fluid all morning brought back a little plastic cup with a snap lid. Today was taco salad day, so it was one of the throwaway cups they give us with salsa in it. One of the guys washed his out in the water fountain when the teacher wasn’t looking. Then I saw him poking holes in the top with a pen once we got back in the room. It’s hard to see them very well from where I’m sitting, but it looks like they’ve made a major advance in their brain cell–killing pastime. Just pour the fluid in the cup, snap on the lid, and breathe in through the lid.

Wow. It’s moments like these when I’m particularly proud that my species is so adept at making tools. I felt the same way when this boy at summer camp a couple of years ago made a bong out of an apple. That’s the guy you want to have around if you’re ever stranded in the woods. He can’t find any fresh water or edible berries, but he can probably forage for the most psychoactive mushrooms in the forest.

And now those guys are back there look sleepy and pleased. You’d think the teacher would notice what’s going on with them. It’s hard not to. But I’m getting used to how naïve people are when they want to be. I mean, even if she did know that they were sucking up chemical fumes only about thirty yards away from her, what would she do? They’re already in detention. The school could suspend them, but then they’ll just go home and do the same thing. Or something worse. If they even wait long enough to get home.

Before today, I never even knew this detention hall was here. I mean, now that I see where it is, I realize it was here all along. I walked right by this spot on my way into the main building almost every day for nearly three years. But I never had a reason to walk through here, except one time my freshman year when I was trying to find a Coke machine and ended up in one of the hallways outside. Now every time I walk by this place, I’m going to know that behind these walls are some bored, bored people. And I’ll feel a little bit better about my day, no matter how crappy it is. At least I’ll be free to move around at will. At this moment, I can’t imagine wanting anything as much as I want that.

Hey, do you think that was part of the point of this punishment? Hmm. But look how effective. They’ve scared a straight student even straighter, all the while exposing her to outcasts, outsiders, and flagrant drug users. And what about them? I don’t think this is the first time in here for some of them. So how well does the system work? What’s the starting age for recidivism? (Yeah, that’s right. I said recidivism. Look it up.)

This afternoon is going to last FOREVER. And here I thought a fat Russian novel might distract me from isolation in the gulag. Yeah. Why didn’t I just bring some French existensialist writings along too? Almost as cheery. Today I am the most doomed girl in the history of doomed girls. See you on the Russian steppes.

Detention Journal, part five

I’m starting to fall right into their trap. They want this drab room to demoralize me . . . and it’s working. There’s a special kind of horribleness to it.

Part of it’s the lighting. In the regular classrooms, they have these same ugly fluorescent lights. They give off that weird, unnatural light, and they have this way of making this strange buzz that you can hear whenever things get really quiet. And things are supposed to be quiet in here, so it’s hard to miss that buzzzzzzzzzzz all day.

But at least in the other classrooms we also have windows so we can be reminded of the sun. And that reminds us of life. It’s the kind of light that first encouraged things to quiver to life in the primordial soup, after all.

But forget about it here. In here, they try to wipe out all hints of life-giving sunlight. They’ve actually painted over the glass! So not only are we denied the distraction of seeing the outside world, but we can’t even sense the sun. It could be nighttime out there. There might not even be an outside world anymore. We could be floating in space for all I know. I don’t have any evidence that the rest of the world is still there.

Some philosophies would say that it’s not there, because I’m not observing it anymore. Right now, those philosophies are very convincing. And not at all comforting.

You know, I’ve never played hooky before, and I end up here because I’ve been so damn good all my life. When I got home after the attendance office figured out our whole school-ditching scheme, I was ready for them. I know how to act contrite and play the good girl, but my parents must have been studying my book of tactics. So they go, “You want us to believe you’re an adult, so that’s the way we’re going to treat you. You make your decisions, you deal with the results.”

That’s why they didn’t even try to keep me out of detention. But otherwise they didn’t punish me at all. Instead, they just let me know that they now trust me just a little bit less. “If you want to regain our trust, you have to earn it,” my dad said. “We’re not going to punish you like a little kid.” Mom agreed. “You’re smart enough to understand that actions have consequences,” she said.

What do I do with that? I couldn’t even go off and feel angry and superior after all that. So I ended up just sitting in the dark in my room, listening to Fiona Apple sounding about as morose and hollow as I did. I think it was the creepiest, most subtle punishment I’ve ever had.

What’s worse, in my guilt I offered to cook dinner tomorrow night, so now there’s that joy to look forward to. Do you know how hard it is to feed former Midwesterners who no longer eat meat but still have a craving for all the horrible foods they grew up on? Fresh, light, and healthy foods are an insult to them. How much can you really do when your essential ingredients are potatoes, cheese, and cream of mushroom soup?

Whoa! News flash! It seems like I’ve made an ass out of “u” and “me”! Remember my new best friend, with the beads in her hair and the attitude and the humming? When we went to lunch, I got a chance to get a close look at her, and . . . she’s a guy! A total freak of a guy, sure, but definitely not female by nature. I have no idea where he got his personal sense of style, but I really think I can be forgiven for making a mistake.

Still, I don’t think things will ever be same between us. He led me on, and now he’s taken away my friend. All the humming games in the world can’t make up for it. But I still hope he’ll try.

Pancakes Dunst Hears Voices

Pancakes could hear her parents arguing. If she had asked, she knew, they would have said they were “having a discussion.” But their discussions sounded a lot like arguments to her, even if they weren’t all that loud. In discussions, people didn’t keep saying opposite things. They agreed about things a lot more. And nobody ever talked with their mouths half-closed like they were trying not to yell.

The reason she could hear their discussion wasn’t because they were being loud. It was because she had discovered a few months earlier that if she crawled into the large storage closet around the corner from the master bedroom, she could make her way all the way to the back and hear everything that was going on in there. One of the heating ducts to the master bedroom ran through part of the closet, and as long as the heat wasn’t on, the duct picked up the room’s sound. The only trick was getting out of the closet and back down the hall to her bedroom when her parents came out of their room and went looking for her. She hadn’t been caught so far, although a couple of times she’d been in such a hurry that she banged into the closet door handle and bruised her shoulder.

Right now her parents were arguing about her, or rather something that she had been playing with. A few days earlier, she had discovered a big deck of colorful cards in the house library. The cards were larger than regular playing cards, and there were more of them than the usual fifty-two. They had a lot of strange pictures of people and creatures on them. She had taken the deck out of their box and spread them out on the floor, looking at all the pictures and trying to figure out what they were for. All the cards were different, and she liked looking at them and making up stories about what was going on in each one. Knights rode horses and ships sailed into the distance. Kings and queens stared out at her. There were townspeople and people who lived in castles and all kinds of animals. Later when her father found her there on the carpet in the library, he explained that they were tarot cards. He said that some people used them to tell fortunes.

Pancakes felt disappointed when her father admitted that he couldn’t tell the future himself. There was a small booklet of instructions, and he paged through it for a few minutes, but after a while he told her it was a little too involved. Pancakes didn’t know what that meant. Involved with what? So Emiliano explained that telling the future with the cards was complicated. Every card meant something different, and they also meant different things depending on how you arranged them. Most of all, he told her, using the cards meant you had to study lots and lots of rules. That was enough for her. Rules meant not doing what she wanted, and she didn’t see any point in that.

Still, the cards were interesting, and Pancakes thought she might be able to figure out how to work them if she just thought about it for a while. She too the deck to her playroom, and every so often she took them out of their box, ignored the instruction booklet, and started laying them out in different patterns. She liked the storybook people from the kingdoms in the cards, but she grew more interested in the stranger cards. A big tower with a lightning bolt hitting it and a guy falling out. Some magical man with a wand or a candle or something. Flying people, Egyptian people, floating cups, people with swords. Every card had its own story, and she liked trying to figure out what was going on in them. And she really, really liked all the animals. It reminded her of the trip her class had taken to the zoo. Too bad the cards didn’t have any monkeys, though.

When her mother found Pancakes playing with the cards, however, she got upset. She took them away and asked where she’d gotten them. Pancakes had no idea why her mother was upset. Because of cards? It made her kind of mad, especially since Lorinda hadn’t been home all that long and she was already going around making rules as usual. “Dad let me,” she said. “I didn’t do anything.”

That had led to the present situation, with Emiliano and Lorinda “discussing” the matter in their bedroom while Pancakes listened from the closet.

“They’re just symbols, Lorinda. A bunch of pictures,” her father said. The sound was a little muffled. At first she though he’d said, “A bunch of pigtails.”

“Well, I know it sounds provincial, but I don’t like the fact that our daughter is dabbling in the occult,” her mother replied. Pancakes had a harder time with the end of that sentence. Something about a colt? Because there were horses on the cards? Horses weren’t bad. She knew some girls who even had their own horses, and no one got upset about that.

“She doesn’t even use any of the spreads or the interpretations,” her father said. “She just likes looking at the pictures.”

“And that’s fine,” her mother said. “But I don’t think she should be looking at some of those pictures. The devil? Death? She’s too young for those things, Emil.” Pancakes was surprised to hear this, and she wished she’d paid more attention to both of those cards. If she was too young for them, they must be a lot more interesting than she realized.

Emiliano sighed. Pancakes could tell it was his upset-sigh. He usually did that right before he told her that he’d had enough, and she always wished he had a sigh that meant he’d almost had enough so that she could stop whatever she was doing right before it was too late. “You’re coming in a little late for this kind of thing,” he said.

Lorinda paused. “What?” Pancakes recognized that “what” too. This discussion was getting a lot more arguey all of a sudden.

“For this level of parenting,” Emiliano said. “I’m not saying that you’re wrong about the tarot cards, but I never knew you felt that way.”

Now Lorinda sighed. It was a loud one. “Well, Pancakes hasn’t played with fortune-telling games before. Otherwise it might have come up.”

“But it wouldn’t have,” Emiliano said. “Because in all likelihood, you wouldn’t have been here to say anything about it. Pancakes could have been breathing the fumes in the cave of the Oracles for weeks at a time. Unless I called and told you, how the hell would you ever know?”

Pancakes didn’t realize the discussion was now over, but she knew it as soon as the bedroom door slammed shut and she heard her mother’s shoes clack angrily down the stairs. She really wished she hadn’t had her ear up to the duct at the time.

Behavior Unbecoming a Grade Schooler

Dear Mr. Dunst:

Please call me at your earliest convenience about arranging a meeting to discuss Pancakes's recent behavior in class. I don't mean to alarm you; she hasn't been misbehaving, exactly. But some of her responses of late have indicated that she may require a higher level of interactive teaching than we at Opal Anderson's Charter School for the Creatively Accelerated are prepared to give.

For instance, she has begun to incorporate what I believe some might interpret as performance art into her show-and-tell projects. Recently, the object she chose to share with the class involved a garish statuette of Bacchus that she had taken to various downtown office buildings and tried to get admitted for meetings with CEOs of major corporations. The photographs she took of baffled security guards and personal assistants confronting the ceramic figure were well executed, especially for an eight-year-old, but next to Billy Tompkinsonstein's new Tonka truck, her contribution seemed inappropriate and avant garde.

Additionally, she has been answering roll call by standing at attention by her desk, then offering up a quick aria. I congratulate you on her well-developed intelligence and fine singing voice, but I have to consider the disruptive effect such behavior has on the other children. It either baffles them entirely, or it spurs them to adopt such methods themselves. Melanie Grantalano answered a question about a story we were discussing with a few lines of gangsta rap last week. When I tried to admonish her for it (I should mention that the language she employed was entirely unsuitable for school-age children), Pancakes defended her by saying that she was merely “attempting to employ her skills across disciplines.”

These are just the most recent examples of what I'm afraid has become fairly regular and untenable behavior at this institution. I urge you to call me as soon as possible so that we may sit down to discuss better options for Pancakes's future than we here at this school are equipped to supply.

Sincerely,
Edna St. Vincent Carruthers Baxendale-on-Heath
Second Grade Instructor

Working Title, part 2

[previous chapter]

It’s early days yet. I know that. And if I didn’t know it, I’d certainly have to suspect it, because everybody around here keeps telling me that. “Just wait,” they say knowingly. “You’ll be busy soon enough. Then you’ll wish you had less to do.”

Very inspiring. These are the people I work with. My new colleagues. The people who are going to teach me all the basics about my chosen profession. And every single one of them has this barely-disguised malicious glee in their voices whenever they give me what I charitably call “advice.”

God, it’s not like I have nothing to do. I think what they mean is, “Pretty soon, you’ll be so swamped or worn down or apathetic that you won’t go asking questions, pointing out inconsistencies, or appearing to have something of a pleasant day.”

But seriously, there something not right here. Yeah, some people are seriously overworked. Take the scant junior-level staff. We young and wide-eyed few seem to be cranking on stuff much of the day. Karen may be in there sighing and sipping tea, but she’s getting stuff done almost every minute she’s here. And the couple of people working production never seem all that idle. They’re quietly working on repetitive-stress injuries and burning their retinas with impressions of their Mac screens.

But the editors? Half the freaking day on the phone! And not just to agents and authors, as they would have you believe. Not unless they’re throwing a lot of business toward people on their alma maters’ alumni committees. Or the to their significant others. Or to their doctors, friends, or credit card companies. Yeah, I realize I’m new to publishing, but I’m not new to this world.

Working Title, part 1

I have a degree, I have a cubicle, and I have a very slow PC.

This is what I’ve worked toward for nearly a decade and a half. You can almost hear the angels singing on high, can’t you?

Karen has the cubicle next to me. I can hear her sigh at least every eight minutes or so. I think that may be how she punctuates the end of most of her tasks. Type up a letter. Sigh. Take a phone call. Sigh. Review a chapter of edited copy. Sigh. Process a payment request on a new book. Sigh. It seems to be how she measures out most of her day.

She also goes to make cups of tea about half a dozen times during the day. I don’t know if she sighs then, because what passes for a lunchroom around here is down the hallway, well out of hearing. But I hear her get up and tread down the hall away from me, and then I hear her tread back about five minutes later, her spoon tink-tink-tinking against the side of her mug as she stirs a dollop of honey into the herbal mixture. She sits. The earthenware mug clunks on top of her maple-veneer desk. Then she half-sighs, although during teatime it sounds almost like satisfaction rather than frustration. But only during teatime.

Not counting her internship, Karen has been in publishing for two years. I’m pretty sure, though I’m still learning, that she didn’t bring the sigh with her. I think she got that here. I’m scared that’s what’s in store for me.

More on all that later. There are four stacks of unsolicited manuscripts in the empty cubicle in the corner. Someone—I don’t know who—tacked up a strip of paper on the outside of the cubicle. Printed in 128-point type—what is it, Copperplate Gothic Bold?—are the words The Doldrums.

Oh, how right they are. Those four stacks are each about a Billy Barty high. And God knows how long they’ve been piling up. Now it’s my job to sort through them, log them, and respond to them. And that’s just one of my back-burner tasks. I have about a hundred and fifty other chores that take precedence. Meanwhile, the Billys just keep getting taller day by day.

So, to answer the question that I now imagine someone reading this might ask: No, I don’t really have time to be writing this kind of stuff on the side. But I really, really have to. I just have to carve out a little time for myself. Otherwise there’s a perpetual sigh out there waiting for me.

In the past I’ve always found this kind of outlet the best way to keep myself from, you know, jamming a fork into my eye at times. If I can just have a little creative outlet, I can probably deal with all the mind-numbing tasks they pile on me.

And, man, they’ve been piling them on. I thought I was the new guy! It’s been a month, and I’m already wondering how this little publishing company has limped along until now with all this stuff going undone. What kind of creaky, broken-down wagon have I hitched myself to?

All right. I really have to get to these response letters that Carrie wants me to write. She’s been dropping the query letters with her extensive Post-It Note comments in my inbox for the past couple of hours. I’m already learning to hate the sight of yellow squares of paper. They have yet to signify anything but drudgery for me.

Oh, and there goes Karen with the sighing again. Maybe I’ll join her this afternoon. Sighing in stereo. The editorial assistant anthem.

Detention Journal, part four

My new best friend with the beads in her hair is still back there. She started this new game a little while ago where she hums some song really, really softly and then slowly gets louder and louder. The farther away you are from her, the longer it takes until the volume increases to where you can hear her. As soon as the teacher reacts to the sound, she stops. Then she waits a while and then starts all over again.

This is the third time she’s done it, and I’m just starting to pick up a little tune that’s very similar to a very “empowering” Avril Lavigne song about how she didn’t give it up to whatever mean boy she’s just been dumped by. Or that she’s dumped. Whatever. It can’t be easy being an angry hot girl.

Anyway, my friend’s humming and she’s humming and she’s … ah! Just stopped. The teacher’s been staring at us for almost two minutes, trying to figure out who’s messing with her. My new best friend’s beads make not a sound. She’s awesome.

The other notable person in the room is this weird nerdy guy sitting right up front. I can’t tell what kind of identity he’s going for. He wants to be a punk, but he wants to be hip-hop too. In truth he’s neither. He has really scraggly long hair and huge glasses and the kind of extremely unfortunate acne that hits some kids superhard once their hormones start messing with them. I think he’s trying on different things to see where he fits. I’m sure he’s not done trying yet.

He tried to sit in the back of the room at first, but we all got rearranged as soon as the bell rang, and it was his dumb luck to get put in the very front. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s always the kind of luck he has, dumb and unfortunate.

I don’t mean that in a mean way. That’s just the impression he gives. Like the way his whole body has an uncomfortable, burdened look. His shoulders are hunched over like he has a huge weight across them. And he sits so awkwardly that it makes you think he’s never sat any way that wasn’t awkward. He’s all sprawled out, slouched way down in his seat to where his butt’s almost completely off the desk and he’s practically sitting on his back.

He’s wearing dirty, torn jeans and a cheap, oversized sports jacket, the kind of jacket a young b-boy might get if he asked his grandparents for it for Christmas. It has some brand name sprawled across it in hard-to-read lettering, and that’s because it’s supposed to look like a name you’ve heard of, but it really isn’t. There’s something very thin and vinyl and bargain-store about the jacket. Plus, it’s dirty enough that you can tell he wears it all the time.

I don’t think the guy’s done any homework the whole time we’ve been in here. He just sits there and draws pictures that look kind of like his best pen-and-ink renderings of acid trips. There’s so much ink on the pages of his notebook that the paper’s kind of crinkly and heavy. And he’s got these smears of blue ballpoint pen ink on the sides of his hands from where they’ve rubbed the pictures while he’s painstakingly coloring in all the blobs and explosions he’s drawing. But he hasn’t stopped drawing for even a second unless he’s been shaking down the ink in his pen or turning a page. He just draws and draws. Maybe that’s the way the world looks to him. Who am I to say he’s wrong?

Pancakes Dunst on Hair Care

Lorinda had cleared her calendar so she and Pancakes could spend the day together. She imagined a picture-postcard afternoon: a medley of fairy tales at the puppet theater, high tea, light shopping. But already it seemed she would have to contend with her daughter’s argumentative behavior.

Pancakes had been excited about the puppet theater, but soon after the performance began she had reacted to key moments with exasperated sighs that did not go unnoticed by the other people sitting near them. At intermission, Pancakes complained that the material wasn’t “challenging enough,” but she didn’t want to leave. “I think I should see what else they come up with,” she told her mother. “Maybe part of the problem is their source material.” So they stayed, but Pancakes didn’t seem any more satisfied with the latter half of the show.

Later, when they were in a cab and heading across town to have tea, Pancakes offered her critique. “Not a bad production,” she admitted. “I guess I’m just surprised by the kinds of messages they’re sending to kids.” This last part she said as if she were not herself only a few months into being nine.

Lorinda felt on shaky ground. She suddenly wished Emiliano were with them. He enjoyed these kinds of conversations with Pancakes. Plus, then she could hit him on the arm for turning their little girl into a precocious literature critic. “What messages are they sending, honey?”

“Well, like Rapunzel. She’s just so passive about her whole situation. All she does is grow her hair!”

“What’s she supposed to do?” Lorinda asked. “She’s in the tower. She can’t escape from there. It’s too far down.”

“I don’t know,” Pancakes said. “But I don’t see how having a guy climb up there is going to help. She needs to get down.”

“But she can’t get down. She needs someone to come help her. And her true love does that.”

“I don’t buy it,” Pancakes said. That prompted an eye-roll from Lorinda. Pancakes grinned.

“What don’t you buy?” Lorinda asked.

“If her hair is long enough for somebody to climb up, why doesn’t she climb down?” Pancakes asked. “She could cut off her hair and make it into a rope. Then she could just climb down.”

“But what about her true love?” Lorinda asked. “What does he do?”

“Well, if he’s her true love, then they’ll meet anyway, right?” Pancakes asked. “Otherwise, he was just in the right place at the right time. Anybody could have come by and climbed up there. I bet if Rapunzel figured out how to get down on her own, she might meet some other guy. The way it is, she just waits around for whoever comes along.”

Detention Journal, part three

Is there some reason, by the way, that no one’s talking about how we’re reliving the Red Scare these days? Terrorism is the new Communism! Enforced Liberation is the new Containment! Gross Unchecked Consumerism is the new Gross Unchecked Consumerism!

Has it not occurred to anybody? Or is it just that our schools are really as bad as they say? Being in lockup makes you think about these things.

Well, being in lockup in addition to, say, all the geopolitical events of the past several years.

There’s this girl over in the corner who has on more makeup than anybody I’ve seen. At least anybody who wasn’t in a music video or playing a hooker in a movie. Or even on Jennifer’s sister, who one time had on so much eyeshadow that she couldn’t open her eyes all the way. We all thought she was sleepy for a whole day.

Anyway, the girl with the makeup never seems to turn her head. I keep seeing her looking around, but she does it all with her huge, huge eyes. Her mouth is all pursed up like she’s been eating supersour Altoids. She’s been like that ever since the teacher caught her text-messaging someone on her cell phone an hour ago and took it away. She got so annoyed, like she never expected it. Why was she surprised?

Plus, the teacher didn’t think to turn the phone off when she confiscated it, and in a couple of minutes you could hear it ringing from her desk drawer. There was some musical ringtone on it, and three separate people got the briefest of grooves on before we were all hushed up and she finally figured out how to switch it off.