Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

In truth, of course, he was being ridiculed, mocked and mimicked.

“Hey, what’re you reading?” a boy asked behind me.

I did not think the words were directed at me until they were repeated very close to my right shoulder. I stared down at the worn-out play in my hand, p. 18. Do ya make Brick happy?

“Hello, miss? Ma’am?” He leaned even closer, leaving breath-hotness on my neck. “You speak English?”

A girl next to him giggled.

“Parlay vu fronsai? Sprekenzee doyche?”

According to Dad, in every circumstance when it was difficult to flee, there was what he called The Oscar Shapeley, a man of great repugnance who’d mysteriously come to the conclusion that what he had to offer in the way of conversation was intensely fascinating and what he had to offer in the way of sex was wholly irresistible.

“Parlate Italiano? Hello?”

The dialogue in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Williams, 1955) trembled before my eyes. “One of those no-neck monsters hit me with some ice cream. Their fat little heads sit on their fat little necks without a bit of connection…” Maggie the Cat wouldn’t withstand such harassment. She’d cross her legs in her flimsy slip and say something passionate and shrill and everyone in the room, including Big Daddy, would choke on the ice they were chewing from their mint juleps.

“What’s a guy gotta do to get a little attention around here?”

I had no choice but to turn around.

“What?”

He was smiling at me. I expected him to be a no-neck monster, but to my shock, he was a Goodnight Moon (Brown, 1947). Goodnight Moons had duvet eyes, shadowy eyelids, a smile like a hammock and a silvered, sleepy countenance that most people wore only during the few minutes prior to sleep, but which the Goodnight Moon sported all day and well into the evening. Goodnight Moons could be male or female and were universally adored. Even teachers worshiped them. They looked to Goodnight Moons whenever they asked a question and even though they answered with a drowsy, wholly incorrect answer, the teacher would say, “Oh, wonderful,” and twist the words around like a thin piece of wire until they resembled something glorious.

“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to disturb you.”

He had blond hair, but he wasn’t the sort of washed-out Scandinavian blond person who desperately looked as if he needed to be dyed, tinted, hand dipped in something. He wore a crisp white shirt, a navy blazer. His red-and-blue striped tie was loose and slightly askew.

“So what are you, a famous actress? Headed to Broadway?”

“Oh, no—”

“I’m Charles Loren,” he said, as if revealing a secret.

Dad was a devotee of Sturdy Eye Contact, but what Dad never addressed was that staring directly into a person’s eyes was nearly impossible at close range. You had to choose an eye, right or left, or veer back and forth between the two, or simply settle for the spot between the eyes. But I’d always thought that was a sad, vulnerable spot, unkempt of eyebrow and strange of tilt, where David had aimed his stone at Goliath and killed him.

“I know who you are,” he said. “Blue something. Don’t tell me—”

“What on earth is that hubbub in the back there?”

Charles jerked back in his seat. I turned.

A stocky woman with sour orange hair — the same person who’d glowered at Dad shouting Byron when he dropped me off — had replaced Havermeyer on the auditorium stage. Wearing a turnip-pink suit that strained like a weight lifter to remain buttoned, she stared up at me with her arms crossed and legs planted firmly apart resembling Diagram 11.23, “Classic Turkish Warrior during the Second Crusade” in one of Dad’s favorite texts, For the Love of God: History of Religious War and Persecution (Murgg, 1981). And she wasn’t the only one staring. All sound had been sucked out of Love Auditorium. Heads were turned toward me like a troop of Seljuk Turks noticing a lone, unwitting Christian taking a shortcut through their camp on his way to Jerusalem.

“You must be a new student,” she said into the microphone. Her voice sounded like amplified heel scuffs along pavement. “Allow me to let you in on a little secret. What’s your name?”

I hoped it was a figurative question, one I might not be expected to answer, but she was waiting.

“Blue,” I said.

She made a face. “What? What did she say?”

“She said blue, ” someone said.

“ Blue? Well, Blue , at this school, when people take the stage, we give them the respect they deserve. We pay attention. ”

Perhaps I need not point out that I was not accustomed to being stared at, not by an entire school. The Jane Goodall was accustomed to doing all the staring, always in solitude and always from a location of dense foliage, which made her in her khaki shorts and linen blouse virtually indistinguishable from the bamboo canopy. My heart stuttered as I stared back at all the eyes. Slowly, they began to peel off me like eggs on a wall.

“As I was saying. There are critical changes in the Add-Drop Deadlines and I will not make exceptions for anyone. I don’t care how many Godiva chocolates you bring me — I’m talking to you, Maxwell. I ask you be on time when you make decisions about coursework, and I mean it.”

“Sorry about that,” Charles whispered behind me. “I should’ve warned you. Eva Brewster, you want to lie low around her. Everyone calls her Evita. It’s a bit of a dictator situation. Technically, though, she’s only a sec retary.”

The woman — Eva Brewster — dismissed the school to class.

“Now listen, I wanted to ask you something — hey, wait a sec—!”

I darted past Mozart, pushing my way to the end of the row and into the aisle. Charles managed to keep up with me.

“Hold on.” He smiled. “Dang, you’re really gung ho about classes — typical A personality, sheesh — but, uh, seeing how you’re brand new, a few of my friends and I were hoping…” He was apparently talking to me, but his eyes were already floating up the stairs to the EXIT. Goodnight Moons all had heliumed eyes. They could never be tied to anyone for long. “We were hoping you’d have lunch with us. We snagged a pass to go off campus. So don’t go to the cafeteria. Meet us at the Scratch. 12:15.” He leaned in, his face inches from mine: “And don’t be late, or there’ll be serious consequences. Understand?” He winked and dashed away.

I stood for a moment in the aisle, unable to move until kids started pushing against my backpack and I was forced up the stairs. I had no idea how Charles knew my name. I did, however, know exactly why he’d rolled out the red carpet: he and his friends were hoping I’d join their Study Group. I’d toiled through a long history of Study Group invites extended by everyone from the Almond-Eyed Football Hero Who’d Have a Son by Senior Year to the Rita Hayworth Sunday Newspaper Coupon Model. I used to be thrilled when I was asked to join a Study Group, and when I arrived at the designated living room equipped with note cards, highlighters, red pens, and supplemental textbooks, I was euphoric as any Chorus Girl who’d been asked to understudy the Lead. Even Dad was excited. As he drove me to Brad’s, or Jeb’s or Sheena’s, he’d start muttering about this being a wonderful opportunity, one that would allow me to spread my Dorothy Parker wings and single-handedly spearhead a contemporary Algonquin Round Table.

Once he dropped me off, though, it didn’t take long to realize I hadn’t been invited for my scathing wit. If Carla’s living room was the Vicious Circle, I was the waiter everyone ignored unless they wanted another scotch or there was something wrong with the food. Somehow, one of them had discovered I was a “geek” (a “cardigan” at Coventry Academy), and I’d be assigned to research one out of every two questions on the Study Sheet, sometimes the entire Study Sheet.