Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

And thus I have to mention tensions ran quite high at Hannah’s, too, though I often wondered if I, like Feisty Freddie, was the only one who noticed. Sometimes it felt as if Hannah were J. J. Hunsecker and the others were sinuous Sidney Falcos vying to be her chosen charlie, her preferred pajama playboy, her dreamy de luxe.

I remember those occasions Charles was working on his Third Reich timeline or his research paper on the USSR collapse for AP European History. He’d throw his pencil across the room. “I can’t do this fucking assignment! Fuck Hitler! Fuck Churchill, Stalin and the Red Fuckin’ Army!” Hannah would run upstairs to get a history book or an Encyclopaedia Britannica and when she returned, for an hour, their brown and gold heads huddled together like cold pigeons under the desk lamp, trying to figure out the month of Germany’s invasion of Poland or exactly when the Berlin Wall fell (September 1939, November 9, 1989). Once I spoke up, tried giving them a hand by pointing them in the direction of the 1200-page history text Dad always put at the top of his Required Reading, Hermin-Lewishon’s famed History Is Power (1990), but Charles looked through me, and Hannah, flipping through the Britannica , was apparently one of those people who, while reading, could sit through an entire civil war between Sandinistas and U.S. backed Contras and hear nothing. During these interludes, though, I always noticed Jade, Lu, Nigel and Milton stopped working, and if their perpetual glances across the room were any indication, they sort of became hyperaware of Hannah and Charles, maybe even a little jealous, like a pride of starving lions in a zoo when only one of them is singled out and hand-fed.

To be honest, I didn’t particularly care for the way they acted around her. With me, they were edgy and aloof, but with Hannah — they seemed to confuse her rapt attention for Cecil B. DeMille’s camera and a couple of klieg lights turned in their direction for principal shooting of The Greatest Show on Earth . Hannah would only have to ask Milton a question, commend him on some B+ he received in Spanish, and without delay he’d shuck off his usual deliberating Alabama drawl and weirdly take to the stage as plucky lil’ Mickey Rooney, posturin’, posin’, moonin’ and muggin’ all over the place like a six-year-old vaudeville veteran.

“Spent all night studyin’, never worked so hard in my life,” he’d gush, his eyes running around her face, desperate for praise like spaniels after retrieving a shot duck. Leulah and Jade, too, were not above turning into lil’ Bright Eyes and Curly Tops themselves. (I especially detested the occasions Hannah referred to Jade’s beauty, as she turned into the sweetiest of all sweetie pies, Little Miss Broadway.)

These manic tap dances were nothing compared with the awful occasions Hannah gave me the spotlight, like the night she mentioned I had the highest rank in school and was thus poised to be valedictorian. (Lacey Ronin-Smith had announced the coup d’etat during Morning Announcements. I’d ousted Radley Clifton, who’d reigned, uncontested, for three years, and apparently believed, because his brothers, Byron and Robert, had been valedictorian, he, Radley the Razor-dull, held Divine Right to the title. Passing me in Barrow, his eyes narrowed and his mouth shrank, doubtlessly praying I’d be found guilty of Cheating and exiled.)

“Your father must be so proud of you,” Hannah said. “ I’m proud of you. And let me tell you something. You’re a person who can do anything with your life. I mean that. Anything. You can be a rocket scientist. Because you have the rare thing everyone wants. The smarts, but also the sensitivity. Don’t be afraid of it. Remember — God, I can’t remember who said it—‘Happiness is a hound dog in the sun. We aren’t on Earth to be happy, but to experience incredible things.’”

This happened to be one of Dad’s favorite quotations (it was Coleridge and Dad would tell her she’d butchered it; “If you’re using your own words it isn’t quite a quotation, is it?”). And she wasn’t smiling as she said it to me, but looked solemn, as if talking about death (see I’ll Think About That Tomorrow , Pepper, 2000). (She also sounded like FDR declaring war against Japan in his historic 1941 radio address, Track 21 on Dad’s Great Speeches, Modern Times three-CD boxed set.)

On the very best of days I was their burden, their bête noire, and so, if you considered Newton’s Third Law of Motion, “All actions have an equal and opposite reaction,” and the five of them spontaneously turned into lil’ Baby Face Nelsons and Dimples, they also had to turn into old Lost Weekends and Draculas, which best describes the looks on their faces in that instance. For the most part though, I did my best to deflect such personal attention. I didn’t especially long for Table 25, The Royal Circle. I was still elated to be one of the jelly beans allowed in off the street, and was thus perfectly content to spend the evening, rather the entire swank decade, sitting at wholly undesirable Table 2, too close to the orchestra and with an obscured view of the door.

Hannah, during their song’n’dance antics, remained impassive. She was all diplomatic smiles and kind “Fantastic, darlings,” and it was during these moments I found myself wondering if I’d made a few errors in my breathless reading of her, if, as Dad said bluntly in the rare event he admitted he was wrong (accompanying said sentence with a contrite gaze at the floor): “I’d been a blind ass.”

She was, after all, highly peculiar when it came to talking about herself. Attempts to exhume details about her life, indirectly or otherwise, went nowhere. You think it’d be impossible for someone not to give some semblance of an answer when asked a question point-blank, making some very revealing dodge (sharp intake of breath, shifty eyes), which you could subsequently translate into a Dark Truth About Her Childhood using Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) or The Ego and the Id (1923). But Hannah had a very plain way of saying, “I lived outside Chicago, then San Francisco for two years. I’m not that interesting, guys.”

Or she’d shrug.

“I–I’m a teacher. I wish I could say something more interesting.”

“But you’re part-time,” Nigel said once. “What do you do with the other part?”

“I don’t know. I wish I knew where the time went.”

She laughed and said nothing more.

There was also the question of a certain word: Valerio. It was their mythical, tongue-in-cheek nickname for Hannah’s secret Cyrano, her cloak-and-dagger Darcy and her QT Oh Captain! My Captain! I’d heard them mention the word on countless occasions, and when I finally found the courage to inquire who, or what, it was, so exciting was the subject, they forgot to ignore me. Eagerly, they recounted a puzzling incident. Two years ago, when they were sophomores, Leulah had left behind an Algebra textbook at Hannah’s house. When her parents drove her back for the book the following day, while Hannah retrieved it upstairs, Lu went into the kitchen for a glass of water. She noticed, by the telephone, a small yellow notepad. On the topmost page, Hannah had doodled a strange word.

“She’d written Valerio all over it,” Lu said heatedly. She had a funny way of wrinkling her nose, which made it look like a tiny bunched-up sock. “Like a million times. Kind of crazily too, the way a psycho killer writes things when the investigator breaks into his house on CSI . The one word over and over, like she was talking on the phone, unaware of what she was drawing. Still, I do stuff like that, so I didn’t think anything of it. Until she walked in. She picked up the notepad immediately, facing the pages toward her so I couldn’t see it. I don’t think she put it down until I was in my car, driving away. I’d never seen her act so strange.”