Marisha Pessl: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

In the past few weeks, when I’d imagined this day, I’d pictured, at this precise moment, Dad, making a Grand Final Appearance (for One Night Only). Just as I figured all along — there he’d be, far in front of me, a black figure on an empty hill. Or else he’d have climbed up into the topmost branches of one of those hulking oaks, decked in Tiger Striped camouflage in order to spy, unobserved, on my graduation proceedings. Or else he’d be sealed inside a limousine, which, just as I realized it was he, would come swooping down Horatio Way, almost knocking me over, cruelly reflecting me back to me before roaring around the curve, past the stone chapel and the wooden Welcome to The St. Gallway School sign, disappearing like a whale in a sound.

But I saw no swarthy black figure, no limousine and not a single lunatic in a tree. In front of me, Hanover Hall, Elton and Barrow lounged like dogs so old they wouldn’t raise their heads if you threw a tennis ball at them.

“Blue,” someone shouted behind me.

I ignored the voice, continuing up the hill, but he called out again, closer this time, so I stopped and turned. Red Shirt was walking quickly toward me. Instantly, I recognized him — well, let me revise that. Instantly, I was aware I’d inadvertently done the highly improbable thing of following my own advice — all that goldfish business — because it was Zach Soderberg, sure, yet I’d never seen him before in my life. He looked radically different, because sometime between our last AP Physics class and graduation, he’d decided to shave his entire head. And it wasn’t one of those heads plagued with disturbing potholes and dents (as if tipping people off to the fact the brain inside it was a bit squishy), but a pleasantly strong head. His ears, too, were nothing to be ashamed of. He looked brand new, a newness that hurt the eyes and was unsettling, which was why I didn’t say, “Sayonara, kid,” and break into a sprint, because the Volvo was packed, waiting for me in the Student Parking Lot. I’d said so long to 24 Armor, tallyho to the Citizen Kane desk, returned the three sets of house keys to Sherwig Realty in a sealed manila envelope, including a handwritten Thank-You note to Miss Dianne Seasons, throwing in a few!!! for good measure. I had organized road maps in the glove compartment. I had neatly divided the states between North Carolina and New York (like they were equitable pieces of birthday cake) into audiotapes from the Bookworm Library on Elm (most of them pulpy thrillers Dad would loathe). I had a license with an unfortunate picture and I planned to drive in every sense of the word.

Zach noticed my surprise at his new haircut and ran a hand over the top of his head. It probably felt like velveteen on a threadbare fainting couch. “Yeah,” he said sheepishly. “Last night I decided to turn over a new leaf.” He frowned. “So where are you going?” He was standing close to me, holding the black umbrella over my head so his arm was stiff as a drying rail on which one could hang wet towels.

“Home,” I said.

This surprised him. “But it’s just getting good. Havermeyer’s dancing with Sturds. There’s mini quiche.” His bright red shirt was doing that buttercup experiment to his chin — you held it there and if it glowed the person liked butter. I wondered what it meant when red glowed there.

“I can’t,” I said, hating how stiff it sounded. If he’d been police and I’d been guilty, he would have known, immediately.

He studied me and then shook his head, as if across my face someone had written an incomprehensible equation. “Gosh, you know, I liked your speech…I mean… man. ”

Something about the way he said that made me feel the urge to laugh — only the urge, though; it lost steam somewhere around my collarbone.

“Thanks,” I said.

“The part about the — what was it…when you talked about art…and who you are as a person…and art …that was so amazing.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. Nowhere in my speech had art or who I was as a person been mentioned. They weren’t secondary or even tertiary themes. But then, as I stared up at him, so tall — strange, I’d never noticed the minute creases at the edges of his eyes; his face was cheating, throwing out hints of the man he’d become — I noticed perhaps that was the point; if we wanted to listen to someone, we heard what we needed to in order to inch closer. And there was nothing wrong with hearing art, or who they were as a person, or goldfish; each of us could choose whatever materials we liked for our rickety boat. There’d been something, too, in his leaning so far forward, so awkwardly trying to get to me (giving goosenecked lamps a run for their money), wanting to catch every word I threw into the air, not wanting to let one hit the ground. I liked this little bit of truth, tried to think it twice, three times, so I wouldn’t forget it, so I could think about it on the highway, the best place to think about things.

Zach cleared his throat. He’d turned to squint at something, at Horatio Way, the part where it squeezed past the daffodils and the birdbath, or maybe higher up, the roof of Elton where the weathervane pointed at something off-screen.

“So I take it if I invited you and your dad to join us tonight at the club for the roast beef buffet, you’d say no.” He looked back at me, his eyes touching my face the sad way people look out, put their hands on windowpanes. And I remembered, in the click-stutter of Mr. Archer’s slide projector, that tiny painting trapped in his house. I wondered if it was still there, hanging bravely at the end of the hallway. He’d said I was like that painting, that unmanned boat.

He arched an eyebrow, another tiny talent I’d never noticed. “Can’t tempt you? They have great cheesecake.”

“I actually have to get going,” I said.

He accepted this with a nod. “So I take it if I asked if I could…see a little of you over the summer — and it doesn’t have to be the whole you, by the way. We could decide on…a toe. You’d say it’s impossible. You have plans ’til you’re seventy-five. You have grass stuck to your shoes, by the way.”

Startled, I leaned down and wiped the grass caked to my sandals, which hours ago had been white but now were blotchy and purpled like old ladies’ hands.

“I’m not going to be here this summer,” I said.

“Where’re you going?”

“To visit my grandparents. Maybe somewhere else.” (“Chippawaa, New Mexico, Land of Enchantment, Homeland of the Roadrunner, Blue Gamma Mosquito Grass, the Cutthroat Trout, Industries, mining, silver, po tash…”)

“You and your dad, or just you?” he asked.

The kid had an uncanny ability to nail every question, again and again. Dad was the first to debunk the No Wrong Questions policy thrown out to make dimwits feel better about themselves; yes, whether one wanted to accept it or not, there were a handful of right questions and billions of wrong ones and out of these, out of all of these, Zach had selected the one that made me feel like I’d sprung a leak in my throat, the one that made me afraid I’d cry or fall over, also causing an outbreak of those pretend itches on my arm and neck. Dad probably would have liked him — that was the funny thing. This one, this bull’s-eye, would have impressed Dad.

“Just me,” I said.

And then I walked away — without really realizing it. I headed up the wet hill, across the road. Not upset or crying or anything like that — no, I was remarkably fine. Well, not fine (“Fine is for dulls and slows.”) but something else — something I actually didn’t have a word for. I felt a shock from the blankness of the pale gray sky on which it was possible to draw anything, art or goldfish, as tiny or as huge as I wanted.