The Basic Eight Read Online Free PDF

named Jean Bodin who is as large as a truck and half as smart. He was giving Millie a bad time for not spon- soring a club. Every faculty member was supposed to sponsor a club.

    It was Jennifer Rose Milton, beautiful Jennifer Rose Milton, who had the idea. It was when she was going out with Douglas, and he was trying to woo her away from the wispy-voiced fem- inist songwriters she liked to put in her tape deck by steering her toward the classics. So, over dinner with Maman , Jennifer Rose Milton conceived of the Grand Opera Breakfast Club, an organiz- ation so pretentious that no one but our friends would join it, which would enable us to have a salon after all, except not in French, and would give Millie a club to sponsor. Once a week or so we’d meet before school in a classroom, listen to opera and eat breakfast. In her gratitude, Millie volunteered to buy the pastries. This morning was La Boheme , and so was the opera, if you catch my meaning. Millie, Jennifer Rose Milton, Douglas, Kate, Gabriel, Natasha, and V : I felt for the first time that I was amongst comrades and that we were all facing the new year together. Of course we couldn’t meet two whole hours before classes began, so we only listened to the first act, with the artist/lovers meeting in their garret. We munched and listened. We got powdered sugar all over the libretto. Douglas, in a dark blue three-piece suit, tried to lecture us; we shushed him. Gradually the burnt play, the shirked rent, the pawned key all became background
    for our own small dramas.
    “I can’t believe all my babies are seniors,” Millie said, adding accent marks to someone’s homework with a leaky red pen. A single red drop stained her cheek like a bloody tear; I note this image now for a future poem.
    “I can certainly believe it,” Natasha said. She was looking in a small hand mirror and examining her lipstick for flaws–she might as well have been examining it for the crown jewels which were just as likely to be there. “Douglas, what were you saying Marcello had to do?”

    “Not Marcello, Schaunard . He’s telling the story right now,” Douglas said, and his eyes lit up. I think one of the reasons it ended was that his eyes never lit up for me the way they did for classical music. I realize that in the long run I may not be as wonderful as a Brahms symphony but I think I’m good for a Haydn quintet. “He was hired to play for a duke, and–”
    “ Lord ,” Kate corrected, looking up from the libretto.
    “Well, a royal , anyway. The lord told him he had to play the violin until his parrot died.”
    “I’m sorry,” V said, fingering her pearls. The pearls were real; she wore real pearls to high school . “How and why did a starving musician have a pet parrot?”
    “The lord’s parrot,” Douglas said. “Honestly, V .”
    “ The Lord’s Parrot ,” I said, “will be the name of my first play.” “Your first play for whom?” Natasha asked, raising an eyebrow delicately highlighted with glitter. Maybe the crown jewels were
    to be found on her face, after all.
    “Hush, you savages,” Douglas said. “Anyway, Marcello has to play until the parrot dies.”
    “Well, my point, lost somewhere in all this, is that that’s how I’ve been feeling. We’ve been at Roewer all this time, waiting for some goddamn parrot to die.” Natasha took another doughnut. What I would do to be able to take another doughnut and still look as good as she does.
    Douglas thought for a second. “Well, Marcello manages to bribe the maid into poisoning the parrot. Who could we bribe?” “To kill whom?” Lily said, always demanding accuracy. It was still early, so none of her hip-length hair had strayed from her
    sculptured bun. “Who is the parrot in this situation?”

    “ Bodin ,” Millie said, muttering the name of our beloved prin- cipal under her breath, and then, suffering from a rare bout of professionalism, looked up from another scarred homework as- signment,