Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“Stop acting like you’re all Greta van Susteren with an eyelift because here’s a breaking headline for you. You’re not. Neither are you Wolf Blitzer.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Dum shrugged, tossing her crumpled copy of Startainment on the library table. “It’s like so obvious. Schneider pulled a Sylvia Plath.”

Dee nodded. “Not a terrible assumption actually. Think about my last Intro to Film class.”

“What about it?”

“I told you. The woman was supposed to give us an essay test on the Italians, Divorce Italiano Style, L’Avventura, Eight and a Friggin’ Half —”

“Oh, yeah—”

“But when we showed up, all prepared and everything, yet again she was all flailin’ and flappin’. It’d to tally slipped her mind. She played it off, said not having the test was our surprise, but everyone was creeped out — it was ob vious she was blowin’ those excuses out the wazoo. She plain old-fashioned for got. So she hastily puts in Reds , which isn’t even Italian, right? Plus we’d already seen it nine times because three days in a row she forgot to bring in La Dolce Friggin’ Vita . The woman had no teach cred, was hopelessly ding-headed, suffered epizootics of the blowhole and was full of booty-cheddar. But what kind of teacher forgets their own essay test?”

“A bugged-out teacher,” whispered Dum. “One who’s mentally unstable.”

“Damn straight.”

Unfortunately, my instinctive response to overhearing campus-wide chitchat of the aforementioned kind was not The Pacino (godfather-styled vengeance), The Pesci (urges to stick a ballpoint pen in someone’s throat), The Costner (flat, frontierlike amusement), The Spacey (scathing verbal retaliation accompanied by a blank facial expression) nor The Penn (blue-collared bellows and moans).

I can only compare how I felt to being inside an austere clothing store when one of the workers silently follows you around to make sure you don’t steal anything. Though you have no intention of stealing anything, though you’ve never come close to stealing anything in your life, knowing they see you as a potential shoplifter unexpectedly turns you into a potential shoplifter. You try not to peer suspiciously over your shoulder. You peer suspiciously over your shoulder. You try not to look at people sideways or sigh artificially or whistle or shoot people nervous smiles. You look sideways, sigh, whistle, shoot nervous smiles and put your extremely sweaty hands in and then out of your pockets over and over again.

Not to complain all of St. Gallway was hashing me over like this, and certainly not to whimper about such abysmal treatment or feel sorry for myself. There were some extraordinary kindnesses, those first few days back at school, such as the moment my old lab partner, Laura Elms, who at four-feet-nine and approximately ninety to ninety-five pounds typically exuded the personality of rice (white, easy on the stomach, went well with every kid), suddenly snatched my left hand as it was copying down F= q vx Bfrom the dry-erase board: “I totally know what you’re going through. One of my best friends found her father dead last year. He was outside on their driveway washing their Lexus when he just collapsed. She ran outside and she totally didn’t recognize him. He was this really weird blueberry color. She went crazy for a while. All I’m saying is if you ever want to talk I’m here for you.” (Laura, I never took you up on your offer, but please accept my thanks. I apologize for the rice comment.)

And there was Zach. If velocity affected the mass of all objects, it wouldn’t affect Zach Soderberg. Zach would be the Amendment, the Correction, the Tweak. He was a lesson in durable materials, a success story of sustainable good moods. He was c, the constant.

On Thursday, in AP Physics, I returned from the bathroom to find a mysterious folded piece of notebook paper sitting on my chair. I didn’t open it until class was over. I stood very still, right in the middle of the hallway with all those kids gushing past me with backpacks, sagging hair and lumpy jackets, staring at the words, at his schoolgirl’s handwriting. I was refuse in a river.

HOW ARE YOU

I’M AROUND

IF YOU WANT TO TALK

ZACH

I kept the note folded in my backpack for the rest of the day and surprised myself by deciding I did want to chat with him. (Dad said it never hurt to glean as many perspectives and opinions as possible, even those one suspects will be unsophisticated and Calibanesque.) Throughout AP World History, I found myself fantasizing about going home not with Dad, but with Patsy and Roge, having a supper not of spaghetti, lecture notes, a one-sided debate of J. Hutchinson’s The Aesthetic Emancipation of the Human Race (1924), but roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, a discussion of Bethany Louise’s softball tryouts or Zach’s recent paper on The American Dream (the most ho-hum of paper topics). And Patsy would smile and squeeze my hand while Roge embarked on an impromptu sermon — if I was lucky, “The Fourteen Hopes.”

As soon as the bell rang, I hurried out of Hanover along the sidewalk to Barrow, up the stairs to the second floor where I’d heard Zach had his locker. I stood just inside the doorway and watched him in khaki pants and a blue-and-white striped shirt talking to that Rebecca girl, the one with prehistoric carnivore eyeteeth. She was tall, propping a stack of spiral notebooks against her jutted-out hip, her other bony arm hooked on the top of the lockers so she resembled an angular Egyptian character scrawled on papyrus. And something about the way Zach gave her his full attention (aware of no one else in the hall), the way he smiled and ran that giant hand through his hair made me realize he was in love with her, that they were doubtlessly both Kinko’s employees always shoulder-to-shoulder and engaged in tons of color-copying, and now I’d stand there trying to talk to him about Death with that Hieroglyph breathing down my neck, her eyes sticking to my face like smashed figs, bushy black hair flooding her shoulders like the River Nile — I couldn’t do it. I spun around, darted back into the stairwell, shoved open the door and raced outside.

I also can’t overlook the Good Samaritan Kindness of another occasion, that Friday in Beginning Drawing, when I, exhausted from the sleepless nights, dozed off in the middle of class, forgetting about my Line Drawing of Tim “Raging” Waters, who’d been chosen to sit at the center of this week’s Life Drawing Circle.

“What on earth is wrong with Miss Van Meer?” roared Mr. Moats, glaring down at me. “She’s green as El Greco’s ghost! Tell us what you ate for breakfast and we’ll make a point of avoiding it.”

Mr. Victor Moats was, for the most part, a gentle man, but at times, for no rhyme or reason (perhaps it was moon phases) he relished degrading a student in front of the class. He snatched my Strathmore drawing pad from the easel and held it high over his seal-slick head. Immediately, I saw the tiny disaster: there was nothing, nothing at all in the Pacific Ocean of the white page, except way down in the lower right-hand corner, I’d drawn Raging the size of Guam. I’d also drawn his leg over his muddled face, which would have been fine if Mr. Moats hadn’t spent ten minutes at the beginning of class detailing the essentials of life drawing and proportion.

“She is not concentrating! She must be dreaming about Will Smith or Brad Pitt or any number of brawny heartthrobs, when what she should be doing is— what? Can someone please inform us what Miss Van Meer should be doing instead of wasting our time? ”