Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

The Bluebloods wedged themselves into the row in front of me.

“We gather here today in this sacred haven both to grieve and to give thanks,” began Mr. Johnson in the pulpit. He licked his lips as he paused to glance down at his papers. (He was always licking his lips; they were like potato chips, salty and addictive.) “Since our beloved Hannah Schneider left us over three weeks ago, throughout our community there have been resounding accolades, words of warmth and kindness, stories of how she affected our lives in ways both great and small. Today, we join together to give thankfulness for being blessed with such an extraordinary teacher and friend. We give thanks for her kindness, her humanity and caring, her courage in adversity and the overwhelming joy she brought to so many. Life is eternal and love is everlasting and death is nothing but a horizon and a horizon is nothing but the boundary of our sight.”

Johnson went on and on, giving an equal amount of eye contact to every third of the congregation with the mechanized surety of a sprinkler system, most likely having learned this from a course, How to Give a Mesmerizing Sermon, with its concepts of Bringing Everyone In and Evoking a Feeling of Togetherness and Universal Humanity. The speech wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t at all specific to Hannah. It was teeming with She Was a Lights and She Would Have Wanteds, mentioning nothing of her real life, a life that Havermayer and the rest of the administration were now all deeply afraid of, as if they’d secretly discovered asbestos in Elton House or found out Christian Gordon, St. Gallway’s Head Chef, had Hepatitis A. I could almost see the paper on the lectern filled with ( Insert Deceased’s Name Here ) (see www.123eulogy.com, #8).

When it was over, the Choral Society erupted, marginally off-key, into “Come Down O Love, Divine,” and students began to spill out of the pews, smiling, laughing, loosening their ties, tightening their ponytails. I took my last contraband look at the Bluebloods, shocked at how still they sat, how stony their faces. They hadn’t whispered or grimaced a single time during Johnson’s speech, although Leulah, as if feeling my eyes on her, had abruptly turned her doilied face in my direction during Eva Brewster’s Psalms Reading and, teeth clenched so her cheek dented, looked straight at me. (But then, almost immediately, she’d turned into one of those Highway Window Gazers; Dad and I would speed past them in the Volvo all the time, and they always stared past us, at something infinitely more interesting than our faces: the grass, the billboards, the sky.)

As Havermeyer made his way down the aisle, smiling a lead pipe smile with no joy behind it, rolling Gloria along next to him, and Mr. Johnson after her, jolly as Fred Astaire fox-trotting with one helluva girl (“Have a great day everybody!” he sang), without a word to anyone, chins held at the exact angle Hannah held hers while salsaing with her wineglass to Peggy Lee’s “Fever” (or at dinner, pretending to be interested in one of their meandering stories), one by one, the Bluebloods rose and paraded down the aisle, disappearing into the bright bland day waiting for them.

I’d forgotten to tell Dad it was a half day, so I hurried down the deserted first floor of Hanover to use the pay phone.

“Olives,” I heard someone shout behind me. “Wait up.”

It was Milton. I wasn’t exactly overjoyed at the prospect of chatting with him — who knew what sort of abuse I’d have to endure, unleashed by that tepid memorial service — but I forced myself to stand ground. “Never retreat unless death is certain,” wrote Nobunaga Kobayashi in How to Be a Shogun Assassin (1989).

“Hey,” he said with one of his sloth smiles.

I only nodded.

“How ya doin’?”

“Great.”

He raised his eyebrows at this and shoved his big hands into his pockets. Yet again, he took his Grand Ole Time with conversation. One Ming Dynasty rose and fell between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next.

“I wanted to talk to you,” he said.

I didn’t say a word . Let the big ninja do the talking. Let him scrounge around for a few sentences.

“Well.” He sighed. “I don’t see how she coulda killed herself.”

“Not bad, Quiet Man. Now why don’t you tie that notion into a noose and see if it’s strong enough to hang yourself?”

He looked stunned, maybe even flabbergasted. Dad said it was nearly impossible to flabbergast a person in this tawdry day and age, when “kinky sex was mundane,” “a flasher in a trench coat in a public park, routine as cornfields in Kansas,” but I think I’d done it to this kid — I really did. Obviously, he wasn’t used to my tough ranchero tone of voice. Obviously, he wasn’t used to the new Blue, Blue the Conqueror, the Hondo, King of the Pecos, Blue Steel, the feral Born to the West Blue, that Lucky Texan, that Lady from Louisiana, who shot from the hip, sat tall in the saddle and rode the lonely trail. (Obviously, he’d never read Grit [Reynolds, 1974]. It was what Buckeye Birdie said to Shortcut Smith.)

“Want to get the hell out of here?” Milton asked.

I nodded.

I suppose everyone has his/her Open Sesame, his/her Abracadabra or Presto Chango, the arbitrary word, event or unforeseen signal that knocks a person down, causes him/her to behave, either permanently or for the short term, out of the blue, contrary to expectation, from nowhere. A shade is pulled, a door creaks open, some kid goes from Geek to Glamour Boy. And Milton’s Hocus-Pocus, his Master Key, happened to be a flowy sentence in Mr. Johnson’s generic speech, a speech Dad would call “stirring as a wall of cinder blocks,” indicative of the “Hallmark fever infecting our politicians and official spokesmen of late. When they speak, actual words don’t emerge, but summer afternoons of draining sun and tepid breeze and chirping Tufted Titmice one would feel gleeful shooting with a handgun.”

“When he said that thing about Hannah bein’ like a flower,” Milton said, “like a rose and all, I felt kinda moved.” His big right arm lumber-rolled on top of the steering wheel as he edged the Nissan between the cars and out of the Student Parking Lot. “I couldn’t stay angry ’bout what happened, ’specially not at my girl, Olives. I tried telling Jade and Charles it wasn’t your fault, but they’re not seein’ straight.”

He smiled. It was like one of those Viking ships in amusement parks, swerving up onto his face, dangling there for a few seconds nearly vertical to the ground, before swinging off again. Love, or more accurately, infatuation (“Take as much care with words expressing your sentiments as you will crafting your doctoral dissertation,” Dad said.) was one of those no-good drifter emotions. After everything that had happened, I didn’t think I felt a thing for Milton, not anymore; I assumed my feelings had skipped town. But now he smiled, and there they were, those old sweaty sentiments slinking down the road again, waiting for me to acknowledge them by the bus station in a greasy wife-beater, cowboy hat, muscles frighteningly potholed and slick.

“Hannah told me I had to take you to her house when we got back from the camping trip. I figured we’d head over there, if you can handle it.”

I glanced over at him, confused. “What?”

He let my words sit on the dock of the bay for at least thirty seconds before answering.

“Remember Hannah had those private conversations with each of us hikin’ up the mountain?”

I nodded.

“That’s when she said it. I forgot about it ’til a couple of days ago. And now—”

“What did she say?”

“‘Take Blue to my house when you get back. Just the two of you.’ She repeated it three times. Remember how crazy she was that day? Orderin’ everyone around, screamin’ off mountaintops? And when she said it, I didn’t even recognize her. She was mean . Still, I laughed it off and said, ‘I don’t get it. You can have Blue over anytime.’ Instead of answering directly, she only repeated the sentence. ‘Take Blue to my house when you get back. You’ll understand.’ She made me swear I’d do it and that I wouldn’t say anything to the others.”