Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“Wish we could light the candles.”

“Let me do it. You’re going to ruin the whole design, Kara—”

“Maybe we should light them anyway. For her sake, you know?”

“We can’t. Didn’t you listen to Ms. Brewster? It’s a fire hazard.”

The taller, pale girl was taping a large card to the door, which sported a giant gold sun and read, “A star has dimmed…” The other girl, bowlegged, with black hair, was holding an even larger card, this one handmade with crude orange lettering: TREASURED MEMORIES. There were at least fifty more cards propped up on the floor around the flowers. I bent down so I could read a few.

“Rest in peace. Love, the Friggs,” wrote the Friggs. “C U N HEV N,” wrote Anonymous. “In this world of bitter religious hatred and unmitigated violence against our fellow man, you were a shining star,” wrote Rachid Foxglove. “We’ll miss you,” wrote Amy Hempshaw and Bill Chews. “I hope you’re reincarnated as a mammal and our paths cross again, sooner rather than later because when I go to med school I doubt I’ll have a life,” wrote Lin Xe-Pen. Some cards were introspective (“Why did it happen?”) or harmlessly irreverent (“It’d be cool if you could send me a sign that indicates there’s a discernible afterlife, that it’s not just eternity in a box because if that’s what it is, I’d rather not go through with it.”). Others were filled with remarks suitable for Post-its, for shouts out of unrolled windows of cars driving away (“You were an awesome teacher!!!”).

“Would you be interested in signing the Condolence Card?” the black-haired girl asked me.

“Sure,” I said.

The inside of the Condolence Card was graffitied with student signatures and read: “We find peace and comfort knowing you are now in a Perfect Place.” I hesitated signing, but the girl was watching me so I squeezed my name between Charlie Lin and Millicent Newman.

“Thank you very much,” said the girl, as if I’d just given her enough change to buy a soft drink. She taped the card to the door.

I walked outside again and stood in the shade of a pine tree in front of the building until I saw them leave, and then returned inside. Someone (the black-haired girl, self-appointed Executor of the H. Schneider Memorial) had placed a plastic green tarp beneath the flowers (all stems pointing in the same direction), as well as a clipboard next to the door that read, “Sign here and pledge a special amount to raise money for the Hannah Schneider Hummingbird Garden. (Minimum donation $5.)”

To be honest, I wasn’t especially thrilled with all the grief. It felt artificial, as if they’d taken her away somehow, stolen her, replaced her with this frightening smiling stranger whose giant color faculty photo was laminated and propped up on the floor by a squat unlit candle. It didn’t look like her; school photographers, armed with watery lighting and smeary neutral backgrounds, cheerfully leveled everyone’s uniqueness, made them look the same. No, the real Hannah, the cinematic one who sometimes got a little too drunk with her bra straps showing, she was being held against her will by all these limp carnations, wobbly signatures, humid sentiments of “Missing U.”

I heard a door slam, the stark punctuation of a woman’s shoes. Someone pulled open the door at the end of the hall, letting it slam. For one mad moment, I thought it was Hannah; the slim person walking toward me was wearing all black — a black skirt and short-sleeved shirt, black heels — exactly what she wore the first time I saw her, all those months ago in Fat Kat Foods.

But it was Jade.

She looked pale, gutter-thin, her blond hair slicked back in a ponytail. As she passed under the fluorescent lights the top of her head flashed a whitish green. Shadows swam through her face as she walked, staring at the floor. When she finally noticed me, I knew she wanted to turn back, but didn’t let herself. Jade hated all retreats, U-turns, backpedaling, and second thoughts.

“I don’t have to see you if I don’t want to,” she said as she stopped in front of the flowers and cards. She leaned down and inspected them, a pleasant, relaxed smile on her face as if she were peering in at cases of expensive watches. After a minute, she turned around and stared at me.

“You planning to stand there all day like a moron?”

“Well, I—” I began.

“Because I’m not going to sit here and lug it out of you.” She put a hand on her hip. “I assumed because you’ve called me like some lunatic stalker for the past week you had something decent to say.”

“I do.”

“What?”

“I don’t understand why everyone’s angry at me. I didn’t do anything.”

Her eyes widened in shock. “How can you not understand what you did? ”

“What did I do?”

She crossed her arms. “If you don’t know, Retch, I’m not going to tell you.” She turned and leaned down to inspect the cards again. A minute later, she said: “I mean, you disappeared on pur pose and made her go look for you. Like some weird game or something. No, don’t even try to say you went to the bathroom because we found that roll of toilet paper still in Hannah’s backpack, okay? And then you — well, we don’t know what you did. But Hannah went from laughing with us without a care in the world to hanging from a tree. Dead. You did something.”

“She signaled for me to get up and disappear into the woods. It was her idea.”

Jade made a face. “When was this?”

“Around the campfire.”

“Not true. I was there. I don’t remember her—”

“No one saw her but me.”

“ That’s convenient.”

“I left. She came and found me. We walked into the woods for ten minutes, then she stopped and said she had to tell me something. A secret.”

“Ooo, what was the secret? That she sees dead people?”

“She never told me.”

“Oh, God. ”

“Someone followed us. I didn’t see him clearly but I think he was wearing glasses, and then — this is the part I can’t figure out — she went after him. She told me to stay where I was. And that’s the last time I saw her.” (It was a white lie, of course, but I’d decided to remove the fact I’d seen Hannah dead from my history. It was an appendix, a functionless organ that could become infected and thus it could be surgically removed without upsetting any other part of the past.)

Jade stared at me, skeptical. “I don’t believe you.”

“It’s the truth. Remember the cigarette butt Lu found? Someone had been there.”

She looked at me, eyes wide, and then shook her head. “I think you have a serious problem.” She allowed her bag to fall to the floor, on its side. It belched up two books, The Norton Anthology of Poetry (Ferguson, Salter, Stallworthy, 1996 ed.) and How to Write a Poem (Fifer, 2001). “You’re desperate. And completely sad and embarrassing. Whatever your lame excuses are, no one gives a shit. It’s over.”

She was waiting for me to protest, fall to my knees, moan, but I couldn’t. I sensed the impossibility of it. I remembered what Dad said once, that some people have all of life’s answers worked out the day they’re born and there’s no use trying to teach them anything new. “They’re closed for business even though, somewhat confusingly, their doors open at eleven, Monday through Friday,” Dad said. And the trying to change what they think, the attempt to explain, the hope they’ll come to see your side of things, it was exhausting, because it never made a dent and afterward you only ached unbearably. It was like being a Prisoner in a Maximum-Security Prison, wanting to know what a Visitor’s hand felt like (see Living in Darkness , Cowell, 1967). No matter how desperately you wanted to know, pressing your dumb palm against the glass right where the visitor’s hand was pressed on the opposite side, you never would know that feeling, not until they set you free.