Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  They stared at me.

  And this, I am ashamed to say, is where memory abruptly drops off (see Figure 12, "Continental Shelf Cliff," Oceanic Terrain, Boss, 1977)- I can recall only a few flimsy sentences ("What if her family presses charges?"), faces peering down at me as if I'd tumbled down a well.

  Yet I don't really need a memory here, because that Sunday at Hannah's, when they were calling me Gag, Retch, Hurl and Olives, they each went to great lengths to give me their eyewitness account of what happened. According to Leulah, I passed out on the South Lawn. Jade claimed I'd muttered a phrase in Spanish, something along the lines of "E/ perro que no camina, no encuentra hueso," or "The dog that doesn't walk, doesn't find a bone," and then my eyes rolled into the back of my head and she thought I'd died. Milton said I got "nekkid." Nigel claimed I "partied like Tommy Lee during the Theater of Pain tour." Charles rolled his eyes when hearing these versions, these "gross distortions of the truth." He said I walked up to Jade and she and I began to make out in flawless reenactment of his favorite film, the cult masterpiece of French fetishist director, Luc-Shallot de la Nuit, Les Salopes Vampires et Lesbiennes de Cherbourg (Petit Oiseau Prod., 1971).

  "Guys spend whole lives wishing to see that kind of thing, so thank you, Retch. Thank you."

  "Sounds like you really enjoyed yourselves," Hannah said with a smile, her eyes glistening as she sipped her wine. "Don't tell me any more. It's not fit for a teacher's ears."

  I could never decide which version I believed.

  It was after I had a nickname that everything changed.

  Dad said my mother, the woman who "left people holding their breaths in awe when she entered a room," always acted the same no matter who she talked to or where she was, and sometimes Dad couldn't tell when she answered the phone, if she was talking to "her childhood best friend from New York or a telemarketer, because she was so thrilled to hear from both." " 'Believe me, I'd be overjoyed to schedule a carpet cleaning—your product is obviously terrific—but I have to be honest, we don't actually have any carpets.' She could go on and on with apologies for hours," Dad said.

  And I let her down, because I'll admit, I did act differently now that I was friends with them, now that Milton, immediately following Morning Announcements shouted "Retch!" and the entire courtyard of students looked ready to Stop, Drop and Roll. Not that overnight I morphed into, a tyrannical foulmouthed girl who'd started out in Chorus, and managed to claw her way to the Lead. But, strolling through first-floor Hanover with Jade Whitestone between third and fourth periods ("I'm bushed," Jade would sigh, hitching her elbow around my neck the way Gene Kelly does to a lamppost in Singin in the Rain) was an unforgivably paparazzi moment; I thought I understood, completely, what Hammond Brown, the actor in the 1928 Broadway hit Happy Streets (known throughout the Roaring Twenties simply as The Chin) meant when he said "a crowd's eyes have a touch like silk" (Ovation, 1952, p. 269).

  And at the end of the school day, when Dad picked me up and we fought about something, like my "tinseled" hair or a new slightly edgier essay I'd written —"Tupac: Portrait of a Modern Romantic Poet," on which I received a derisory B ("Your senior year of high school is not the time to suddenly become alternative, hip and cool.")—afterward, it was strange; before my friendship with the Bluebloods, after an argument with Dad, when I retreated to my room I'd always felt like a smudge; I couldn't perceive where I began and where I ended. But now, I felt as if I could still see myself, my outline—a thin, but perfectly respectable black line.

  Ms. Gershon of AP Physics perceived the change too, if solely on the subconscious level. For example, when I first arrived at St. Gallway, whenever I raised my hand to ask a question in her class, she couldn't immediately make me out; I blended effortlessly with the lab tables, the windows, the poster of James Joule. Now, I only had to hold my hand up for three, maybe four seconds before her eyes snapped to me: "Yes, Blue?" It was the same with Mr. Archer—all delusions he'd entertained about my name were gone. "Blue," he said, not with shakiness or unease, but supreme faith (similar to the tone he used for Da Vinci). And Mr. Moats, when he wandered over to my easel to inspect my Figure Drawing, his eyes almost always veered away from the drawing to my head, as if I were more worthy of scrutiny than a few wobbly lines on a page.

  Sal Mineo noticed the difference too, and if he noticed, it had to be Agonizingly True.

  "You should be careful," he said to me during Morning Announcements.

  I glanced over at his intricate wrought-iron profile, his soggy brown eyes.

  "I'm happy for you," he said, looking not at me but at the stage where Havermeyer, Eva Brewster and Hilary Leech were unveiling the new look of The Gallway Gazette: "A colored front page, advertisements," Eva was saying. Sal swallowed and his Adam's apple, which pushed against his neck like a metal coil in an old couch, trembled, rose and fell. "But they only hurt people."

  "What are you talking about?" I asked, irritated by his ambiguity, but he didn't answer, and when Evita dismissed the school to class, he flew out of the aisle, quick as a wren off a lamppost.

  The twins in my second period Study Hall, the Great Social Commentators of the Age, Eliaya and Georgia Hatchett (Nigel and Jade, who had them in a Spanish class, called them Dee for Tweedledee and Dum for Tweedledum, respectively) naturally had all kinds of dirt on my association with the Bluebloods. Before, they'd always gossiped messily about Jade and the others, their slurpy voices splattering all over each other and everyone else, but now they sat in the back, next to the water fountain and Hambone Reading Recommendations, carrying on in crackly, roast-potato whispers.

  I ignored them for the most part, even when the words blue and Shhh, she'll hearyou, hissed over to me like a couple of Gaboon Vipers. But when I didn't have any homework to do, I asked Mr. Fletcher if I could be excused to the restroom and slipped into row 500 and then the densest section of row 900, Biography, where I repositioned some of the larger books from row 600 to the holes between the shelves, in order to avoid detection. (Librarian Hambone, if you're reading this, I apologize for the biweekly repositioning of

  H. Gibbons' bulky African Wildlife [1989] from its proper place in the 650s to just above Mommie Dearest [Crawford, 1978] and Notorious: My Years with Cary Grant [Drake, 1989]. You weren't going mad.)

  "So do you or don't you want to hear the icing, the cake, the double whammy, the Crown Jewel, the Jewel après orthodontia, the Madonna abs après hatha yoga"—she took a swift breath, swallowed—"the Ted Danson après hair plugs, the J-Lo avant Gigli, the Ben avant J-Lo but après psychiatric treatment for gambling, the Matt après—"

  "You think you're like a blind bard and all?" asked Dum, glancing up from Celebrastory Weekly. "I don't think so."

  "Okay, so Elena Topolos."

  "Elena Topolos?"

  "Mediterranean freshman who needs to wax that lip. She told me the

  blue person's some weird autistic savant. Not only that, but we lost a man to her."

  "What?"

  "Hard Body. He's neurotic for her. It's already myth. Everyone on the soccer team calls him Aphrodite and he doesn't even care. He and the blue person have a class together and someone saw him digging through the garbage can to find a paper she threw away because she'd touched it."

  "Whatever."

  "He's asking her to Christmas formal."

  "WHAT?" shrieked Dee.

  Mr. Fletcher looked up from The Crossword Fanatic's True Challenge

  (Albo, 2002) and fired a disapproving glace at Dee and Dum. They were unfazed.

  "Formal's like three months away," Dee said, wincing. "That's all a holy war in high school. People get pregnant, caught with pot, get a bad haircut so you find out it was their only decent feature and they have awful ears. It's way too soon to ask. Is he out of his mind?"

  Dee nodded. "He's that haunted. His ex, Lonny, is pissed. She vows she's gonna jihad her ass by the end of the year."

  "Ouch."

  Dad was fond of pointing out the rule of t
humb that "at times, even fools are right," but I was still surprised when, a day later, as I collected books from my locker, I noticed a kid from my AP Physics class passing me not once, but three times, faux-frowning at some giant hardback open in his hands, which I realized the second time he passed was our class textbook, Fundamentals of Physics (Rarreh & Cherish, 2004). I assumed he was waiting for Allison Vaughn, the sedate yet mildly popular senior with a locker near mine who wandered around with a wan smile and polite hair, but when I slammed my locker door, he was behind me.

  "Hi," he said. I’m Zach."

  "Blue." I spasm-swallowed.

  He was a tall, tan, supremely American-looking kid: square chin, big straight teeth, eyes an absurd Jacuzzi blue. I knew, vaguely, based on chatter during labs, he was shy, a little bit funny (my partner, Krista, was forever neglecting our experiment to giggle at something he said), also captain of the soccer team. His lab partner was his supposed ex-girlfriend, Lonny, cocaptain of Gallway Spirit, a girl with soggy platinum hair, a fake tan and a marked tendency to break the equipment. No cloud chamber, potentiometer, friction rod or alligator clip was safe with her. On Mondays, when the class wrote up our results on the dry-erase board, our teacher, Ms. Gershon, consistently threw out Lonny and Zach's findings, as they always flew daringly in the face of Modern Science, discrediting Planck's constant, undermining Boyle's law, amending the theory of relativity from E=mc2 to E=mc5. According to Dee and Dum, Lonny and Zach had gone out since sixth grade, and for the past few years had partaken in something called "lion sex" every Saturday night in the "hineymooner's suite," Room 222 at the Dynasty Motel on Pike Avenue.

  He was handsome, sure, but as Dad once said, there were people who'd completely missed their decade, were born at the wrong time—not in the intellectually gifted sense, but due to a certain look on their face more suitable to the Victorian Age than, say, the Me Decade. Well, this kid was some twenty years too late. He was the one with thick brown hair that flyingsaucered over an eye, the one who inspired girls to make their own prom dress, the one from the country club. And maybe he had a secret diamond earring, maybe a sequin glove, maybe he even had a good song at the end with three helpings of keyboard synthesizer, but no one would know, because if you weren't born in your decade you never made it to the ending, you floated around in your middle, unresolved, in oblivion, confused and unrealized. (Pour some sugar on him and blame it on the rain.)

  "I was kinda hoping you could help me out with something," he said, contemplating his shoes. "I have a serious problem."

  I felt irrationally frightened. "What?"

  "There's a girl. . ." He sighed, hooked his thumbs through his belt loops. "I like her. Yeah. I really do." He was doing an embarrassed thing with his head, chin down, eyes sticking to me. "I've never talked to her. Never said a word. And normally this wouldn't throw me —normally, I'd go right up to her, ask her for pizza . . . movie . . . yeah. But this one. She throws me."

  He ran his right hand through his hair and it was absurdly knot free like a shampoo commercial. His left hand was still cradling our Physics textbook, bookmarking, for some bizarre reason p. 123, which featured a sizeable diagram of a magenta Plasma Ball. I was able to make out, upsidedown, around the crook of his arm: "Plasma is the fourth state ofmatter."

  "So I say to myself, fine," he said with a shrug. "It's not meant to be. 'Cause if you don't feel comfortable talking to someone, how're you gonna handle . . . well, you have to trust the person, right, or what's the point. But then" —frowning, he gazed all the way down the hall toward the EXIT—"it's like every time I see her I feel... I feel. . ."

  I didn't think he was going to continue, but then he broke into a smile. "Fucking.Great."

  The smile was pinned to his face, delicate as a prom corsage.

  It was my turn to speak. Words were in my throat—advice, council, some pithy line from a screwball comedy—but they were grinding together, disappearing fast like celery in a sink disposal.

  "I..." I began.

  I could feel his minty breath on my forehead, and he was staring at me with his eyes the color of a kiddy pool (blue, green, suspicious hints of yellow). He was searching my face as if he took me to be a cruddy masterpiece in somebody's attic and if he scrutinized my deft use of color and shading as well as the direction of my brushstrokes, he'd figure out who my artist was.

  "Hurl?"

  I turned. Nigel was inching his way toward us, visibly amused.

  "I really can't help you, so if you'd be so kind as to excuse me," I blurted quickly, then darted past his shoulder and the Physics textbook. I didn't turn around, not even when I reached Nigel and the German Language Bulletin Board and then the EXIT. I assumed he stood in the hall staring after me with his mouth open like a newscaster reading Breaking News when the teleprompter goes dead.

  "What'd the Chippendale want?" Nigel asked as we headed downstairs.

  I shrugged. "Who knows. I-I couldn't really follow his logic."

  "Oh, you're terrible." Nigel laughed, a quick, skidding sound, then linked his arm through mine. We were Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion.

  Obviously, a few short months ago, I would have been astounded, maybe even knock-kneed that the El Dorado rode over to me and made a long speech about A Girl. ("All of history comes down to a girl," Dad said with a hint of regret as we watched The Dark Prince, the award-winning documentary on Hitler's youth.) In the past, I had all sorts of Hidden Desire moments when I gazed at El Dorados riding through the hushed corridors, the empty football fields of a lonesome school—like old Howie Easton at Clearwood Day with the cleft chin and gap in his teeth making him such a sophisticated whistler he could've whistled Wagner's entire Der Ring des Nibelungen (1848-74) if he'd wanted to (he didn't want to)—and I'd wished, just once, I might ride into the wilderness with them, that I, not Kaytee Jones with the Hawaiian eyes nor Priscilla Pastor Owensby with legs as long as highways, could be their favorite Appaloosa.

  But now things were different. Now I had copper hair and sticky, myrtle lips, and as Jade said that Sunday dinner at Hannah's: "The Zach Soderbergs of the world are cute, sure, but they're boring as Saltines. Okay—you hope if you scratch one you'll find Luke Wilson. Even Johnny Depp with his clothing missteps at major award ceremonies you'd be happy with. But trust me, all you get is bland cracker."

  "Who's this?" asked Hannah.

  "Some kid in my physics class," I said.

  "He's a pretty popular senior," said Lu.

  "You should see his rug," Nigel said. "I think he has hair plugs."

  "Well, he's barking up the wrong tree," Jade said. "Retch is already in a puddle over someone."

  She gazed triumphantly at Milton, but to my relief, he was cutting into his Danish roasted chicken with sunflower seasoning and hash of sweet potato and didn't see her.

  "So Blue's breaking hearts," Hannah said and winked at me. "It's about time."

  I did wonder about Hannah.

  And I felt guilty wondering about her, because the others trusted her in the uncomplicated way an old horse accepts a rider, a child grabs an outstretched hand to cross the street.

  Yet immediately following my attempt to Parent Trap her with Dad, sometimes at her house, I'd find myself falling out of the dinner conversation. I'd look around the room as if I was a snooping stranger outside, pressing my nose to the window. I wondered why she took so much interest in my life, my happiness, my haircut ("Ac/orable," she said. "You look like a dispossessed flapper," Dad said); why, for that matter, any of them were of interest to her. I wondered about her adult friends, why she hadn't married or done any of the things Dad referred to as "domesticated hooey" (SUVs, kids), the "sitcom script people stick to as they hope for meaning in their canned-laughter lives."

  In her house, there were no photographs. At school, I never once saw her conversing with other teachers apart from Eva Brewster, and only then on a single occasion. As much as I adored her—particularly those moments she let herself be silly, when a favorite
song came on and she did a funny little jig with her wineglass in her bare feet in the middle of the living room and the dogs stared at her the way fans stared at Janis Joplin singing "Bobby McGee" ("I was in a band once," Hannah said shyly, biting her lip. "Lead singer. I dyed my hair red.")—I couldn't overlook a certain book by leading neurophysicist and criminologist Donald McMather MD, Social Behaviors and Nimbus Clouds (1998).

  "An adult with a fastidious interest in those considerably younger than him or herself can not be completely sincere or even rational," he writes on p. 424, Chapter 22, "The Allure of Children." "Such a preoccupation often hides something very dark."

  X

  The Mysterious Affair at Styles

  I'd been in thick with the Bluebloods three, maybe four weeks, when Jade invaded, Sherman-style, my nonexistent sex life. , L Not that I took her assault too seriously. When it came down to the nitty-gritty, I knew I'd probably flee without warning, like Hannibal's elephants during the Battle of Zama in 202 B.c. (I was twelve when Dad wordlessly presented me with various tomes to read and reflect upon, including

  C. Allen's Shame Culture and the Shadow World [1993], Somewhere Between Puritans and Brazil: How to Have a Healthy Sexuality [Mier, 1990], also Paul D. Russell's terrifying What You Dont Know About White Slavery

  [1996].)

  "You've never gotten laid, have you, Retch?" Jade accused one night, deliberately ashing her cigarette in the cracked blue vahze next to her like some movie psychiatrist with switchblade fingernails, her eyes narrowed, as if hoping I'd confess to violent crime.

  The question hung in the air like a national flag with no wind. It was obvious the Bluebloods, including Nigel and Lu, approached sex as if it were cute little towns they had to whizz through in order to make good time on their way to Somewhere (and I wasn't so sure they knew their final destination). Immediately, Andreo Verduga flashed into my head (shirtless, trimming shrubs) and I wondered if I could speedily make up a steamy experience involving the bed of his pickup truck (propped up against mulch, rolling onto tulip bulbs, hair snagging the lawnmower) but prudently decided against it. "Virgins advertise their stunning lack of insight and expertise with the subtlety and panache of Bible salesmen," wrote British comic Brinkly Starnes in A Harlequin Romance (1989).