The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler Page A

get drunk with me. He said it just like that–at least I think he did. “I’ll just see you there,” he said glumly. What is up with that? Anyway, Kate was game, but by then there were too few people for me to call Lily and Douglas because I didn’t want it to be one kissy couple and the two single girls, drinking out at the lake. I’ve seen that movie; they all end up revealing deadly secrets and killing one another. Anyway Lily and Douglas didn’t even show up.
    Well I showered and changed my clothes and took the bus down to the lake, clutching the champagne neck inside my backpack, feeling the delicious paranoia that only a minor clutching alcohol on public transportation can feel. Spun off the bus and sat on a log, watching the sun setting and a bunch of grimy freshman girls drinking something they’d snuck out of the house in a food storage container. They shrieked with laughter as they spilled whatever-it-was on their shirts; I remember thinking that Carr would smell the liquor on them and lead them, shaken but still tipsy-giggly, to the office to wait for their parents to pick them up. All right, I couldn’t have been thinking about Carr before I found out he was chaperoning, but you probably didn’t catch that, anyway.
    “Happy New Year!” Kate cried out as I popped the cork. Kate was wearing an outfit consisting entirely of the color dark blue. She always wears outfits consisting entirely of the color dark blue, and always will wear

    outfits consisting entirely of the color dark blue, world without end. We gulped and giggled and talked about nothing, enjoying the Indian summer night but not the mosquitoes that flew in it. Just when the bottle was drained, what I thought was a large black backpack of one of the freshgirls looked up and it was no backpack but Rachel State, the Frosh Goth, Sister Of The Groom. She stared at me from eyes circled in what looked like coal. In fact, between her black lipstick and her black clothes and dyed black hair I would have to say her overall impression was dis- tinctly mesquitelike. If you were bad all year and of the Christian faith, you could expect Rachel State in your stocking.
    “Rachel!” I cried out, hoping I was impressing the hell out of her, “Come meet my friend Kate!”
    She scowl-staggered over while her friends gaped. The bubbly must have mellowed Queen Bee Kate Gordon (did I just use the phrase the bubbly ?!?), because she didn’t cringe or mock or any- thing; she just said hello. How ’bout that.
    “Rachel is Adam State’s sister,” I told Kate brightly.
    “And you–,” Rachel slurred, pointing a black nailpolished hand vaguely in my direction. “ You’re the one who wrote Adam love letters all summer.”
    If this were a movie–and don’t tell me it’s not melodramatic enough to be one–some great disaster would have struck right then, and we would have glossed over the mortifying moment by running to shelter, bailing out the boat, comforting the be- reaved, calming the horses, anything, anything but standing there–with Kate , Queen Bee Kate Gordon no less, while the worst poet I’ve ever seen went and blabbed my only secret. But as it turned out, no tidal wave was needed; not that Lake Merced could have produced much of one.

    “No, she’s not,” Kate said, without blinking. She wasn’t cover- ing up for me; she was genuinely, drunkenly, stupid , just for a moment. Tomorrow morning, I have to drag my hungover ass out of bed and spend all my money on novena candles. If ever the proof of a Benevolent Deity, this.
    “Oh,” said the Frosh Goth, closing her eyes to regain her bal- ance. Her black lipstick was smeared like she had just eaten fudge. “Then you must be the one he really likes.” She turned to her surprisingly nonblackened friends and explained, gesturing limply. “There are two girls, one who is chasing him, one who he wants to chase.”
    Fuck the novena candles, I’m sleeping late. “Come on,” I said to Kate,