Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  Incredibly too, at the bottom of the driveway, when we were about to make a right, I glanced back, up the sharp wooded hill toward his house, and saw that Patsy and Roge were still standing there, most likely with their arms still snug around each other's waist. Patsy's green blouse was visible, shredded by the matchstick trees. And though I'd never confess it to Dad, I did wonder, for a second, as Zach turned up the pop song on the radio, if it was

  really so atrocious to have a family like that, to have a dad that twinkled and a boy with eyes so blue you wouldn't be shocked to see sparrows winging through them, and a mother who stared, unwaveringly, at the last place she'd seen her son like a dog in a supermarket parking lot, never taking its eyes off the automatic doors.

  "Are you excited about the dance?" asked Zach.

  I nodded.

  The Housebreaker of Shady Hill

  The Christmas Cabaret was held in the Harper Racey '05 Cafeteria, I which, under Student Council President Maxwell's iron fist, had trans-

  formed into a sweltering, Versailles-styled nightclub with imitation-Sèvres vases on the side tables, French cheeses and pastries, gold tinsel, big, crudely painted posters of deformed girls on makeshift swings affixed over the "World Enough and Time" Wall (Gallway class photos from 1910 to present) which were meant to invoke the flouncing fiddle-dee-dee of Fragonard's The Swing (c. 1767), but inadvertently conjured The Scream (Munch, c. 1893).

  At least half of all St. Gallway faculty had shown up, those who'd been asked to chaperone, and there they were, the Mondo-Strangos, turned out in their monkey suits. Havermeyer stood next to his pale, rawboned wife, Gloria, in black velvet. (Gloria only rarely made public appearances. They said she rarely left the house, preferring to laze around, nibbling marshmallows and reading romance novels by Circe Kensington, a beloved author of many June Bugs, and thus I knew the most popular title, The Crown Jewels of Rochester de Wheeling [1990].) And there was bulge-eyed Mr. Archer gripping the window ledge, neatly fitted into his navy suit like an invitation into an envelope, and Ms. Thermopolis talking to Mr. Butters in flighty Hawaiian oranges and reds. (She'd done something to her hair, a styling mousse that turned locks to lichen.) There was Hannah's favorite, Mr. Moats, nearly as tall as the door frame by which he stood, wearing a jacket in Prussian Blue and plaid pants. (His was a disastrous face; his nose, puffy mouth, chin, even most of his cheeks seemed to crowd into the lower half of his face, like passengers on a sinking ship trying to avoid sea water.)

  Jade and the others had promised (sworn on a range of grandparents' graves) they'd show up at nine, but now it was ten-thirty and there was no sign of them, not even Milton. Hannah was supposed to be here, too—"Eva Brewster asked me to drop by," she'd told me—but she was nowhere. And thus I was stuck deep in the heart of Zachville, homeland of the Sticky Palm, the Hazardous Wingtip, the Rickety Arm, the Calcutta Breath, the Barely Discernable Off-Key Hum Annoying as Any Wall's Drone of Electricity, largest city, cluster of freckles on his neck beneath left ear, rivers of sweat at his temples, in that small gorge at his neck.

  The dance floor was meat-packed. To our right, less than a foot away, Zach's ex-girlfriend, Lonny Felix, danced with her date, Clifford Wells, who had an upturned, elfin face and wasn't as tall as she was. He didn't weigh as much either. Every time she instructed him to dip her ("Dip me," she coached) he gnashed his teeth together as he struggled to keep her from falling to the floor. Otherwise, she seemed to be enjoying her self-styled tornado-twirls, flinging her elbows and thorny bleached hair harrowingly near my face every time Zach and I completed one revolution, when I was facing the buffet table (where Peron was making Nutella crêpes, uncharacteristically subdued in a puff-sleeved Rhapsody in Blue) and Zach faced the windows.

  Maxwell, a sort of mad Phineas T. Barnum in crimson velvet jacket and cane, completely ignored his date, Kimmie Kaczynski (a sad, dejected mermaid in green satin unable to lure her sailor) and presided with delight over his sideshow of freaks, the bleary-eyed, burnt-out Jelly Roll Jazz Band.

  "Pardon me," said a voice behind me.

  It was Jade, my knight in shining armor. Immediately, however, I noticed something was wrong. Donnamara Chase in her unwieldy pink Liberty Bell dress and her date, lip-licking Trucker, and a few others, like Sandy Quince-Wood, Joshua Cuthbert and Dinky, a living, breathing booby trap, arms tightly clamped around the neck of poor, destined-for-captivity Brett Carlson, they'd all stopped dancing and were staring at her.

  I saw why.

  She was wearing a thin silk dress the color of tangerines, the neckline plunging down her front with the force of a skydiver's free fall. She was drunk, in possession of neither a bra nor shoes, and though she surveyed Zach and me with a hand on her hip, her customary gesture of intimidation, now it simply looked as if she was doing her best to hold onto herself, in case her self fell over. She was holding a pair of black stilettos.

  "If you don't mind, coup-coupon"—she lurched forward; I was terrified she might fall —"I need to borrow Gag for a minute."

  "Are you okay?" Zach asked.

  Quickly, I stepped forward and grabbed her arm. Force-feeding a smile to my face, I pulled her after me, hard, but not so hard she dissolved into a puddle of orange juice on the dance floor.

  "Geez. I'm sorry I'm late. What can I say? I hit traffic."

  I managed to move her away from most of the faculty chaperones, and pushed her straight into a crowd of freshmen tasting the gâteaux au chocolat et aux noisettes and the French cheeses. ("This tastes like ass," someone said.)

  My heart was pounding. Within minutes, no, seconds, she'd be spotted by Evita and would be arrested, in Gallwanian terms, "roundtabled," inevitable suspension, Saturday morning community service with men who licked their lips at her when she served them lukewarm vegetable soup—perhaps even expulsion. In my head, I began to stitch together an excuse, something to do with an accidental pill slipped into her 7-Up by some pimply psycho; there were plenty of articles I could reference on the subject. There was also, of course, simply pretending to be stupid ("When in doubt, feign oblivion," Dad chanted in my head. "No one can fault you for being born with a lean IQ"). But before I knew it, we were slipping past the buffet table and the bathrooms and out the wooden doors, undetected. (Mr. Moats, if you are reading this, I'm certain you saw us. I thank you for simply replacing your look of marked boredom with one of cynical delight, sighing, and doing nothing more. And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, ignore the above.)

  Outside, I yanked her across the brick patio ringed with wrought-iron love seats ("Ow. That hurts, you know.") where Gallway's most earnest couples were marooned.

  Glancing over my shoulder to be certain no one followed, I yanked Jade across the lawn, down the mineral-gritty sidewalks, through the orange floodlights where our thin shadows dragged farther and farther behind us. I didn't let go of her until we were in front of Hanover, where it was dark and desolate, where everything—the black windows, the wooden steps, a folded sheet of Algebra homework mumbling in its sleep—was nightwashed, uniformed in grays and blues.

  "Are you out of your mind?" I shouted.

  "What?"

  "How can you show up like this?"

  "Oh, stop yelling, Gag. Gaggle."

  "I —are you trying to get kicked out?" "Fuck you," she said, giggling. "And your little dog too." "Where is everyone? Where's Hannah?" She made a face. "At her house. They're making apple pie and watching

  Heaven & Earth. You guessed it. They ditched you. Thought this scene would be a bore. I'm the one with loyalty. You should thank me. I take cash, check, MasterCard, Visa. No American Express."

  "Jade."

  "The others are traitors. In our midst. Aye too brew tays. And in case you're wondering, Black and that little petunia are off somewhere doing the nasty in a cheap motel. He's so in love I want to kill him. That girl's a Yoko Ono and we're going to break up—"

  "Get a hold of yourself." "For Pete's sake, I'm fine." She smiled. "Let's go somew
here. Some bar

  where the men are men and the women are hairy. And have smiles of beer." "You have to go home. Now." "I was thinking Brazil. Gag?" "What." "I think I'm going to throw up." She did look ill. Her lips had faded into her face and she stared at me

  with huge nocturnal eyes, touching a hand to her throat.

  I took her arm with the intention of directing her toward the crowd of now ill-fated young pines to our right, but suddenly, she made the short, high-pitched squeak of a kid when it didn't want to eat some final piece of cauliflower or get strapped into a car seat, and she tore free, sprinting up the stairs and across the porch. I thought the doors would be locked, but they weren't. She disappeared inside.

  I found her in Mirtha Grazeley's admissions bathroom on her knees in one of the stalls getting sick. "I hate throwing up. I'd rather die. Kill me, would you? Kill me. I beg you." For fifteen sickened minutes, I held her hair. "Better," she said, wiping her eyes and mouth. After she rinsed her face in the sink, she collapsed facedown on one of the couches in Mirtha's Greeting Room. "We should go home," I said. "Give me a second."

  Sitting there in the quiet, the lights off, the green floodlights from the

  M. Bella Chancery lawn spilling through the windows, it felt as if we were at the bottom of the ocean. The thin shadows from the bare trees outside stretched across the wooden floor like sea grass and sargassum weed, the grit dappling the windows, a little bit of zooplankton, the floor lamp in the corner, a glass-rope sponge. Jade sighed and turned over onto her back, her hair stuck to her cheeks.

  "We should get out of here," I said.

  "You like him," she said.

  "Who?"

  "Coupon."

  "Like I like noise pollution."

  "You're going to run off with him."

  "Right."

  "You're going to have tons of sex with him and have his gift certificates. Seriously. I know these things. I'm psychic." "Shut up." "Hurl?" "What." "I hate the others." "Who?" "Leulah. Charles. I hate them. I like you. You're the only one who's decent. The others are all sick. And I hate Hannah most of all. Ugh."

  "Oh, come on."

  "No. I pretend I don't because it's easy and fun to go over and have her cook and watch her act like St. Francis of friggin' Assisi. Sure. Blah blah. But deep down I know she's sick and repulsive."

  I waited for a moment, enough time for, say, a spinner shark to swim by seeking a school of sardines, for that peculiar word she used, repulsive, to disband, dissolve slightly, like ink from a cuttlefish.

  "Actually," I said, "it's a common feeling for people to feel intermittent antipathy toward individuals they're familiar with. It's the Derwid-Loeverhastel Principle. It's discussed in Beneath the Associated—"

  "Fuck David Hasselhoff." She raised herself up on an elbow, narrowing

  her eyes. "I don't like the woman." She frowned. "You like her?" "Sure," I said. "Why?"

  "She's a good person."

  Jade huffed. "Not that good. I don't know if you're aware of it, but she killed that guy." "Who?" Obviously, I knew she was talking about Smoke Harvey, but I chose to

  feign ignorance, volunteer only the barest words as a question, much in the reserved manner of Ranulph (pronounced "RALF") Curry, the intemperate chief inspector of Roger Pope Lavelle's three standoffish detective masterpieces composed in a decade-long fit of inspiration, from 1901 to 1911, works ultimately overshadowed by the sunnier tomes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was a pretext artfully assumed by Curry while interviewing all eyewitnesses, bystanders, informants and suspects, and, more often than not, leading to the discovery of a certain sharp detail that ripped open the case. "Tut, tut, Horace," says Curry in the 1017-page Conceit of a Unicom (1901). "It is a capital error in the art of detection to insert one's own voice into the ungoverned words of another. The more one speaks, the less one hears."

  "That Smoke person," Jade went on. "Dubs. Knocked him off. I'm positive."

  "How do you know?"

  "I was watching when they told her about him, remember?" She paused, staring at me, her eyes snatching, then holding on to what little light there was in the room. "You weren't around, but I saw the performance. Completely overdone. She's really the worst actress on the planet. If she was an actress she wouldn't even make the B movies. She'd be in the D or the E movies. I don't even think she's good enough for porn. Of course, she thinks that she's going on Inside the Actor's Studio like next friggin' week. She went over the top, shouting like a crazy person when she saw the guy dead. For a second I thought she was screaming, 'The dingo ate my baby.' "

  She rolled off the sofa and walked toward the kitchenette behind Mirtha's desk. She opened the small refrigerator door and, crouching down, was illuminated by a rectangle of gold light so her dress became transparent and you could see, in this X-ray, how thin she was, how her shoulders were no wider than a coat hanger.

  "There's that eggnog in here," she said. "Want some?"

  "No."

  "There's tons. Three full containers."

  "Mirtha probably measures how much is left at the end of every day. We don't want to get in trouble."

  Jade stood up with the pitcher, banging the door closed with her foot.

  "It's Mirtha Grazeley, who everyone knows is the Mad freakin' Hatter. Who'll listen to her if she croaks there's something missing? Besides. Most people just aren't that organized. Isn't that what you said the other soir, 'no method to the madness' and such?" She opened one of the cabinets and took out two glasses. "All I'm saying is that I happen to think Hannah got rid of the man like I happen to know my mother's the Loch Ness Monster. Or Bigfoot. I haven't decided what monster she is but I'm positive she's one of the big ones."

  "What was her motive then?" I asked. ("In my opinion," said Curry, "it is also a very useful achievement to make certain the speaker remains on course, does not skirt around what he knows, prattling on about latchkeys and boilers.")

  "Monsters don't need a motive. They're monsters so they just—"

  "I mean Hannah."

  She looked at me, exasperated. "You don't get it, do you? No one needs a motive in this day and age. People look for motives and such because they're afraid of like, total chaos. But motives are out like clogs. The truth is, some people just like to execute, like some people have a thing for ski bums with moles all over like God spilled peppercorns or paralegals with full-sleeve tattoos."

  "Then why him?"

  "Who?"

  "Smoke Harvey," I said. "Why him and not me, for example?"

  She made a sarcastic Ha sound as she handed me the glass and sat down. "I don't know if you're aware of it but Hannah's completely obsessed with you. It's like you're her freaking lost child. I mean, we knew about you before you even freaking showed up at this place. It was so freaking weird."

  My heart stopped. "What are you talking about?"

  Jade sniffed. "Well, you met her at that shoe store, correct?"

  I nodded.

  "Well, like, immediately after that, or maybe even the day of, she was talking on and on about this Blue person who was so amazing and wonderful and we'd have to become friends with you or like, die. Like you were the fucking Second Coming. She still acts that way. When you're not around she's always, 'Where's Blue, anyone seen Blue?' Blue, Blue, Blue, for Christ sake. But it's not just you. She has all kinds of abnormal fixations. Like the animals and the furniture. All those men in Cottonwood. Sex for her's like shaking hands. And Charles. She's completely fucked him up and doesn't even realize it. She thinks she's doing all of us a big favor by being friends with us, educating us or whatever—"

  I swallowed. "Something really did happen between Charles and Hannah?"

  "Hel/o? Of course. I'm like, ninety percent positive. Charles won't tell anyone a thing, not even Black, because she's brainwashed him. But last year? Lu and I went to pick him up and we found him crying like I'd never seen a person cry in my whole life. His face was screwed up like this." She demonstrated. "He'd had a tantrum. The w
hole house was destroyed. He'd thrown paintings, attacked the wallpaper—huge chunks ripped right off the walls. We found him crying in a little ball by the TV. There was a knife on the floor, too, and we were afraid he was going to try to commit suicide or something—"

  "He didn't, did he?" I asked quickly.

  She shook her head. "No. But I think the reason he was freaking out was that Hannah told him they'd have to stop. Or who knows, maybe it just happened the one time. I mean, it was probably an accident. I don't think she set out to fuck him up, but she definitely did something, because he's not himself anymore. I mean, you should have seen him last year, the year before. He was amazing. This really happy person everyone loved. Now he's always pissed off."

  She took a long drink of the eggnog. The darkness hardened her profile so her face looked like one of the colossal decorative jade masks Dad and I observed in the Olmec Room at the Garber Natural History Museum in Artesia, New Mexico. " The Olmec people were a singularly artistic civilization, deeply intrigued by the human face,' " Dad read grandly from the printed explanation on the wall. " 'They believed that though the voice often lies, the face itself is never deceitful.' "

  "If you really think these things about Hannah," I managed to say, "how can you spend time with her?"

  "I know. It's weird." She scrunched her mouth to one side, thinking. "I guess she's like crack." She sighed, hugging her shins. "It's a mint chocolate chip ice cream thing."

  "What does that mean?" I asked, when she didn't immediately elaborate.

  "Well." She tilted her head. "Have you ever felt that you loved, loved mint chocolate chip? That it was always your favorite flavor over every other in the entire world? But then one day you hear Hannah going on and on about butter pecan. Butter pecan this and butter pecan that and then you find yourself ordering butter pecan all the time. And you realize you like butter pecan best. That you probably liked it all along and just hadn't known." She was quiet for a moment. "You never eat mint chocolate chip again."