Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“You’re satisfied? You’re responsible? You respect the youths in this Ulysses Study Group, which unsurprisingly, spend more time roaming the mall and bleaching their hair than tracking the whereabouts of Stephen Dedalus?”

(No, I never quite disabused Dad of the idea that I spent Sunday afternoons trying to scale that Himalayan tome. Thankfully, Dad had no real taste for Joyce — excessive wordplay bored him, so did Latin — but in order to avoid even the most basic questioning, I told him periodically that due to the weak constitutions of others, we were still unable to make it past Base Camp, Chapter 1, “Telemachus.”)

“They’re actually pretty sharp,” I said. “Just the other day, one of them used ‘obsequious’ in conversation.”

“Don’t be cheeky. They’re thinkers?”

“Yes.”

“Not lemmings? Not leg warmers? Not nitwits, net-heads, neo-Nazis? Not anarchists or antichrists? Not pedestrian youths who believe they’re the first people on earth to be mizundahstood? Sadly, American teenagers are to a weightless vacuum as seat cushions are to polyurethane foam—”

“Dad. It’s fine.”

“You’re positive? Never rely on intoxicating surfaces.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll accept it then.” He frowned as I stood on my tiptoes to kiss his rough cheek. I made my way to the front door. It was Sunday and Jade was resting her elbow on the car horn. “Have a swell time with your chicks and charlies,” he said and sighed a little theatrically, though I ignored him. “‘If others have their will, Ann hath a way.’”

There were a handful of occasions when Jade, Lu and I screeched with laughter over something, like the one time they invited me “mall slumming” and a crew of chickenheads with their boxers on display trailed us with stupid smiles around Blue Crest Mall (“Serious mafuglies — just as I suspected,” Jade said, surveying them through a rack of scrunchies at Earringz N’ Thingz) or when Jade debated the mysterious dimensions of Nigel’s candlestick (“Given his shortness, it could be powerful, it could be pygmy” “Oh, God,” said Lu, slapping a hand to her mouth) or driving to Hannah’s, the time Jade and I flipped off a scab (her word for any “forty-plus hideous male”) who had the gall to drive a meandering Volkswagen in front of her. (Following her lead, I unrolled the window to stick my hand out and my hair — now a fascinating Bornite color, Atomic number 29—thrashed in the wind.)

During such moments, I thought to myself, maybe these were my friends, maybe I’d confide in them about sex over rhubarb pie in a diner at 3:00 A.M. and someday we’d phone each other to chat about Tuskawalla Trails Retirement Community and back pain and our turtle-bald husbands, but then their smiles fell off their faces like Visual Aids on bulletin boards missing a tack. They’d look at me irritably, as if I’d tricked them.

They drove me home. I’d sit in the backseat doing my best to lip-read due to the ear-splitting levels of the heavy-metal CD (I decoded agonizingly shadowy phrases: “meet us later,” “hot-ass date”), knowing full well because I hadn’t said anything breathtaking (because I was about as cool as Bermuda shorts), they’d drop me like laundry and accelerate into the whispery night with its plum sky and black mountains snooping over the spiked tops of the pine trees. At an undisclosed location, they’d join Charles, Nigel and Black (what they called Milton), and probably park and neck, and race cars off cliffs (don leather jackets emblazoned with T-BIRD or PINK LADY).

“Astalowaygo,” Jade said to my general vicinity as she smeared on red lipstick in the rearview mirror. I slammed the car door, heaved my backpack onto my shoulder.

Leulah waved. “See you Sunday,” she said sweetly.

I trudged inside, the veteran who wished war had lasted longer.

“What on earth did you find compulsory to purchase at a store called Bahama-Me-Tan?” shouted Dad from the kitchen when he returned from his date with Kitty. He appeared in the doorway of the living room with the orange plastic shopping bag I’d thrown on the foyer floor, holding it as if it were the carcass of a hedgehog.

“Bali-Me Bronzer,” I said drearily without looking up from some book I’d yanked off the shelf, The South American Joven Mutiny (Gonzalez, 1989).

Dad nodded and wisely decided not to probe further.

There was a turning point. (And I’m sure it had everything to do with Hannah, although her role, what she must have said to them — an ultimatum perhaps, a bribe or one of her suggestions — was never clear.)

It was the first week of October, on a Friday, during sixth period. It was a harsh, bright day for fall, glaring as a washed car, and Mr. Moats, my instructor for Beginning Drawing, had entreated the class to go outside with our No. 2 pencils and sketch—“Find your melting clocks!” he’d ordered, swooshing open the door as if freeing mustangs, his other hand Olé ing in the air so for four seconds he was a Flamenco dancer in tight pants of Cadmium Green. Slowly, lazily, the class floated out across the campus with their giant sketch pads. I found it tricky to choose what to draw, and wandered for fifteen minutes before deciding upon a faded package of M&Ms hiding in a bed of pine needles behind Elton. I was sitting on the cement wall, drawing my first few wimpy lines, when I heard someone traipsing down the sidewalk. Instead of passing me, the person stopped.

“Hey, there,” he said.

It was Milton. His hands were stuffed in his pockets and his stringy hair mumbo-jumboed over his forehead.

“Hi,” I said, but he didn’t answer or even smile. He simply stepped over to my sketchpad and tilted his head to inspect my rickety pencil lines like a teacher looming over your shoulder, blithely helping himself to what you scribbled during an Essay Test.

“What’re you doing out of class?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m sick,” he said, smiling. “Flu. Goin’ to the infirmary, then home to rest.”

I should mention: while Charles was the obvious Cassanova at St. Gallway, popular among chicks, charlie-boys and cheerleaders, Milton, I’d learned, was sort of the Studhorse for the smart and strange. A girl in AP English, Macon Campins, who drew henna-style swirling designs in permanent ink on her palms, claimed to be obsessively in love with him, and before the bell, before flustered Ms. Simpson shuffled into the room muttering in escalating whispers—“no toner, nothing but legal paper, no staples, everything in this school, no, this country, no, the world , all going to seed”—you could hear Macon discussing Milton’s mystery tattoo with her best friend, Engella Grand: “I think he did it himself. See, I was staring at his rolled-up sleeve in Biology? And I’m pretty sure it’s a huge freakin’ oil slick on his arm. That’s sooo sexy.”

I, too, felt there was something undercover and sexual about Milton, which made me act sort of inebriated whenever I was alone with him. I was once rinsing plates, loading them into Hannah’s dishwasher when he came in with seven water glasses in his giant hands and, as he leaned past me to put them in the sink, my chin accidentally touched his shoulder. It was damp and muggy as a greenhouse and I thought I was going to fall down. “Sorry, Blue,” he said when he stepped away. Whenever he said my name, which he did often (so often, I felt it came tantalizingly close to satire), his accent yo-yoed it, or else, turned it into a piece of elastic. Bluuue.

“Got plans tonight, Blue?” he asked me now.

“Yes,” I said, though my response didn’t seem to register. (I think they’d figured by now, unless Hannah had actively arranged a suitor, no one came calling — not an outrageous assumption.)