Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Not that we did It, mind you, not that we had the blank-faced handshake sex rampant among America’s twitchy youths (see “Is Your Twelve-Year-Old a Sex Fiend?” Newsweek , August 14, 2000). We did take off our clothes, however, and roll around like logs. His angel tattoo said hello to more than a few freckles on my arm and back and side. We scratched each other accidentally, our bodies blunt and mismatched. (No one tells you about the frank lighting or lack of mood music.) When he was on top of me, he looked calm and inquisitive, as if he were lying at the edge of a swimming pool, staring at something shiny at the bottom, contemplating diving in.

I will thus confess a stupid truth regarding this encounter. For a minute afterward, lying on Hannah’s bed with him, my head on his shoulder, my skinny white arm garlanding his neck, when he said, wiping his drenched forehead, “Is it fuckin’ hot in here or is it me?” and I said without thinking, “It’s me,” I sort of felt — well, fan tas tic. I felt as if he was my American in Paris, my Brigadoon. (“Young love come like roseth petals,” writes Georgie Lawrence in his last collection, So Poemesque [1962], “and like lightning boltheth flees.”)

“Tell me about the streets,” I said softly, staring at Hannah’s ceiling, square and white. Then I was horrified: without thought, the sentence had drifted out of my mouth like a boat Victorian people float around on with parasols, and he hadn’t immediately answered so obviously I’d blown things. That was the problem with the Van Meers; they always wanted more, had to dig deeper, get dirtier, doggedly cast their fishing line in the river over and over again, even if they only caught dead fish.

But then he answered, yawning: “Streets?”

He didn’t continue, so I swallowed, my heart on the edge of its seat.

“I just meant…when you were involved with your… gang —you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

“I’ll talk about anythin’ with you,” he said.

“Oh. Well…you ran away from home?”

“No. You?”

“No.”

“ Wanted to on plenty of occasions, but I never did.”

I was confused. I’d been expecting shifty eyes, words jamming in his throat like coins in a faulty pay phone.

“But then how did you get your tattoo?” I asked.

He turned his right shoulder around and stared at it, the corners of his mouth plunging down. “My older bro, fuckin’ John. His eighteenth birthday. He and his friends took me to a tattoo parlor. Total shithole. We both got tattoos, only he royally fucked me, because his , freakin’ salamander, is this big ”—he displayed the width of a blueberry in his fingers—“an’ he talked me into getting this monster motherfuckin’ can of worms. You shoulda seen my mom’s face.” He chuckled, remembering. “Never seen her so pissed. It was classic. ”

“But how old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“Not twenty-one?”

“Uh, not unless I fell into a coma.”

“You never lived on the streets?”

“What?” He scrunched up his face like he had sun in his eyes. “I can’t even sleep on those fuckin’ couches at Jade’s. I like my own bed, Sealy Posturepedic or whatever — hey, what’s with the questions?”

“But Leulah,” I persisted, my voice crashing out of my mouth now, determined to hit something. “When she was thirteen she ran away with a — a Turkish math teacher and he was arrested in Florida and he went to jail.”

“What?”

“And Nigel’s parents are in prison. That’s why he has a preoccupation with suspense novels and is vaguely pathological — he doesn’t feel guilt and Charles was adopted—”

“You can’t be serious.” He sat up, looking down at me like I was loco . “Nigel feels stuff. He still feels bad for ditchin’ that kid last year, what’s his name, sits next to you in Mornin’ Announcements and second of all, Charles is not adopted.”

I frowned, feeling that vague sense of irritation when tabloid stories turned out not to be true. “How do you know? Maybe he just never said anything.”

“Ever met his mom?”

I shook my head.

“They could be brother and sister. And Nigel’s parents aren’t in prison . Jesus. Who told you that?”

“But what about his real parents?”

“His real parents own that pottery place — Diana and Ed—”

“They didn’t serve time for shooting a police officer?”

That particular claim made Milton guffaw (I’d never heard a real guffaw, but what he did was definitely one) and then, seeing I was serious and more than a little worked up — blood was rushing into my cheeks; I’m sure I was red as a carnation — he lay back and rolled toward me so the bed went ugh , and his puffy lips and eyebrows and the tip of his nose (on which stood, rather heroically, a freckle) were inches from my own.

“Who told you this stuff?”

When I didn’t answer, he whistled.

“Whoever he is, he’s a nut case.”

“Ido not believe in madness,” Lord Brummel notes dryly at the end of Act IV in Wilden Benedict’s charming play about the sexual depravity of the British upper class, A Bev’y of Ladies (1898). “It’s too uncouth.”

I agreed.

I believed in the madness of destitution, drug-induced madness, also Dictator Dementia and Wartime Whacked (with its tragic subsets, Frontline Fever, Napalm Non Compos Mentis). I could even confirm the existence of Checkout-Aisle Crackers, which abruptly afflicts an ordinary, unassuming person standing behind a man with seventy-five exotic grocery items, none of which sport price tags, but I did not buy Hannah’s madness, even though she had the hair for it, had killed or hadn’t killed herself, had slept or hadn’t slept with Charles, had picked up strange men and shamelessly fashioned lavish lies out of the plain cotton histories of the Bluebloods.

Thinking about it, I felt dizzy, because it’d been such a classy con; she’d been Yellow-Kid Nickel, the most acclaimed confidence man in history, and I’d been the easy mark, the fall guy, the unwitting casino.

“If Jade rode a mile in some cruddy eighteen-wheeler then I’m Elvis reincarnated,” Milton said as he drove me home.

Naturally, I now felt dim for believing her. It was true. Jade wouldn’t go fifty feet unless there was fur, silk or fine Italian leather involved. Sure, the girl disappeared into handicapped stalls with men who had faces like busted-up Buicks, but that was simply her brand of thrill, her bump of cocaine at fifteen minutes a pop. She wouldn’t ride out of the parking lot with one of them, much less into a sunset. I’d also completely overlooked how much the girl shirked responsibility. She had trouble dropping a History class. “Can’t deal with the paperwork,” she said, the paperwork being a slip of paper requiring three lines to be filled out.

When I admitted to Milton that Hannah had told me these stories, he declared her certifiable.

“In your defense, I see how you’d believe her,” he said, stopping the Nissan by my front door. “If she told me that story about myself, that I’d joined a gang — hell, that my parents were aliens — I’d probably believe it. She made everythin’ real.” He hooked his fingers on the steering wheel. “So that’s it, I guess. Hannah was bojangled. Never woulda guessed it. I mean, why go through the trouble to invent that shit?”

“I don’t know,” I said grimly as I climbed from the car.

He blew me a kiss. “See you Monday? You. Me. A movie.”