Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

I dialed Leulah. I sensed she’d be the most unglued out of all of us, so I hesitated calling her, but I had to talk to someone. She answered on the first ring.

“Hey, Jade,” she said. “Sorry about that.”

“Oh, it’s Blue actually.” I was so relieved, I oil-spilled. “I’m glad you picked up. How are you? I–I’ve been going crazy. I can’t sleep. How are you?”

“Oh,” said Leulah. “This isn’t Leulah.”

“What?”

“Leulah’s asleep,” she said in a strange voice. I could hear, on her end, a television. It was thrilled about house paint, only a single coat necessary for total coverage, Herman’s Paints are guaranteed to last five years regardless of exposure to rainfall and wind.

“Can I take a message?” she asked.

“What’s wrong?”

She hung up.

I sat down on the edge of my bed. The bedroom windows were crammed with late-day light, soft, yellow, the color of pears. The paintings on the wall, oil landscapes of pastures and cornfields, looked so shiny they might have still been wet. I might have run my thumb through them and made a finger painting. I began to cry, dumb, lethargic tears, as if I’d cut into a scarred old gum tree and the sap could barely leak out.

This, I remember distinctly, was the worst moment — not the insomnia, not my wasted courtship of the TV, not the endless chanting in my head of a certain hysterical phrase that became less alive the more I said it— someone killed Hannah, someone killed Hannah —but this awful desolate feeling, desert-island aloneness. Worst of all, I knew it was the beginning of it, not the middle or the end.

In 44 B.C., ten days after he stabbed Caesar in the back, Brutus probably felt the same way I did when the student body returned to St. Gallway for the commencement of Spring Term. Brutus, strolling down the dusty roads of the Forum, doubtless came face-to-face with the harsh realities of “Corridor and Country Road Ostracism,” with its principal tenets, “Keep a wide girth,” and “As you come closer, fasten your eyes to a point immediately north of the leper’s head so for a second he/she thinks you’re acknowledging his/her pitiable existence.” Brutus most likely became well versed in “Modes of Seeing Through,” the most startling of which were the “Pretend Brutus Is a Diaphanous Scarf” and “Pretend Brutus Is a Courtyard-Facing Window.” Though he once drank watered-down wine with the perpetrators of this unspoken cruelty, once sat next to them at Circus Maximus and rejoiced in the overturning of a chariot, once bathed with them, naked, in both the hot and the cold pools of the public baths, these things meant nothing now. Because of what he’d done, he was and always would be their object of disgrace.

At least Brutus had done something productive, albeit controversial, carrying out a meticulously laid plan to seize power for what he believed to be the continued well-being of the Roman Empire.

I, of course, had done nothing at all.

“See, if you remember, everyone thought she was amazing, but I always thought there was something hair-raising about her,” said Lucille Hunter in my AP English class. “Ever watch when she’s taking notes?”

“Huh-uh.”

“Barely looks up from the page. And when she’s taking an essay test she mouths what she’s writing the whole time. My grandmother in Florida, who my mom says is to tally going senile, does the same thing while watching Wheel of Fortune or writing checks.”

“Well,” said Donnamara Chase, leaning forward in her seat, “Cindy Willard told me this morning that Leulah Maloney announced to her entire Spanish class that…”

For some reason, it perpetually slipped both Lucille and Donnamara’s meager minds that my assigned seat in Ms. Simpson’s AP English class was, and always had been, immediately behind Donnamara’s. The girl handed me The Brothers Karamazov handouts still warm from the Faculty Lounge copier and seeing me, nervously bared her long and pointy teeth (see “Venus Flytrap,” North American Flora , Starnes, 1989).

“Wonder if she’ll leave school,” mused Angel Ospfrey, four seats away.

“Absolutely,” whispered Beth Price. “Expect some announcement in the next few weeks that her dad, Account Executive for Whatever Corp, was recently promoted to Regional Manager of the Charlotte branch.”

“Wonder what her last words were,” said Angel. “Hannah’s, I mean.”

“From what I hear Blue doesn’t have too long to say hers,” said Macon Campins. “Milton detests her. He said, and I quote, that if he ever meets her in a dark alley, he’ll ‘Jack-the-Ripper her ass.’”

“Ever heard that old wives’ tale,” asked Krista Jibsen in AP Physics, “that it’s okay never to be wealthy or famous or whatever because if you never had it, you won’t miss it? Well — and I bet this is how Blue feels — if you’ve tasted fame, then lost it, that’s like, extreme torture. You end up with a cocaine addiction. You have to spend time in rehab. And when you come out you make vampire movies that go straight to video.”

“You got that off the Corey Feldman True Hollywood Story ,” said Luke “Trucker” Bass.

“Well, I heard Radley’s mom is over the moon,” said Peter “Nostradamus” Clark. “She’s throwing a Return-to-Power party for Radley because after undergoing such an ordeal, the girl won’t be able to hold on to Valedictorian.”

“I heard from a very reliable source — wait. No. I feel bad spreading it around.”

“What?”

“She’s a full-scale lesbian,” sang Lonny Felix that Wednesday during Physics Lab 23, “Symmetry in Physical Laws: Is Your Right Hand Really Your Right Hand?” “The Ellen kind, by the way. Not the Anne Heche kind, when you can go either way.” Lonny pony-tossed her hair (long, blond, the texture of Wheaties) and glanced toward the front of the room where I was standing with my lab partner, Laura Elms. She hunched closer to Sandy Quince-Wood. “Guess Schneider was one, too. That’s why they went off together in the middle of the night. How two women get it on is beyond my comprehension but what I do know is that something went fatally wrong during the sex act. That’s what the police are trying to figure out. That’s why it’s taking so long for them to have a verdict.”

“That same thing was on CSI: Miami last night,” said Sandy distractedly as she wrote in her lab manual.

“Little did we know what’s going on on CSI: Miami is happening right here in our physics class.”

“For gosh sakes,” said Zach Soderberg, turning around to look at them. “Would you guys keep it down? Some of us are trying to figure out these laws of reflection symmetry.”

“Sorry, Romeo,” said Lonny with a smirk.

“Yes, let’s try to keep things quiet, shall we?” said our substitute teacher, a bald man named Mr. Pine. Pine smiled, yawned and stretched his arms high over his head revealing sweat stains the size of pancakes. He resumed his scrutiny of a magazine, Country Life Wall & Windows .

“Jade’s trying to get the Blue girl kicked out of school,” whispered Dee during second period Study Hall.

Dum scowled. “For what?”

“Not murder, but like, coercion or brute force or something. I heard her pleading her case in Spanish. I guess Hannah was all bueno. Then she goes off with this Blue person and five minutes later ends up muerto. It’s all not going to hold up in court. They’re going to declare a mistrial. And no one can use a race card to get her off.”