Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Ms. Gershon of AP Physics perceived the change too, if solely on the subconscious level. For example, when I first arrived at St. Gallway, whenever I raised my hand to ask a question in her class, she couldn’t immediately make me out; I blended effortlessly with the lab tables, the windows, the poster of James Joule. Now, I only had to hold my hand up for three, maybe four seconds before her eyes snapped to me: “Yes, Blue?” It was the same with Mr. Archer — all delusions he’d entertained about my name were gone. “Blue,” he said, not with shakiness or unease, but supreme faith (similar to the tone he used for Da Vinci ). And Mr. Moats, when he wandered over to my easel to inspect my Figure Drawing, his eyes almost always veered away from the drawing to my head, as if I were more worthy of scrutiny than a few wobbly lines on a page.

Sal Mineo noticed the difference too, and if he noticed, it had to be Agonizingly True.

“You should be careful,” he said to me during Morning Announcements.

I glanced over at his intricate wrought-iron profile, his soggy brown eyes.

“I’m happy for you,” he said, looking not at me but at the stage where Havermeyer, Eva Brewster and Hilary Leech were unveiling the new look of The Gallway Gazette : “A colored front page, advertisements,” Eva was saying. Sal swallowed and his Adam’s apple, which pushed against his neck like a metal coil in an old couch, trembled, rose and fell. “But they only hurt people.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, irritated by his ambiguity, but he didn’t answer, and when Evita dismissed the school to class, he flew out of the aisle, quick as a wren off a lamppost.

The twins in my second period Study Hall, the Great Social Commentators of the Age, Eliaya and Georgia Hatchett (Nigel and Jade, who had them in a Spanish class, called them Dee for Tweedledee and Dum for Tweedledum, respectively), naturally had all kinds of dirt on my association with the Bluebloods. Before, they’d always gossiped messily about Jade and the others, their slurpy voices splattering all over each other and everyone else, but now they sat in the back, next to the water fountain and Hambone Reading Recommendations, carrying on in crackly, roast-potato whispers.

I ignored them for the most part, even when the words blue and Shhh, she’ll hear you, hissed over to me like a couple of Gaboon Vipers. But when I didn’t have any homework to do, I asked Mr. Fletcher if I could be excused to the restroom and slipped into row 500 and then the densest section of row 900, Biography, where I repositioned some of the larger books from row 600 to the holes between the shelves, in order to avoid detection. (Librarian Hambone, if you’re reading this, I apologize for the biweekly repositioning of H. Gibbons’ bulky African Wildlife [1989] from its proper place in the 650s to just above Mommie Dearest [Crawford, 1978] and Notorious: My Years with Cary Grant [Drake, 1989]. You weren’t going mad.)

“So do you or don’t you want to hear the icing, the cake, the double whammy, the Crown Jewel, the Jewel après orthodontia, the Madonna abs après hatha yoga”—she took a swift breath, swallowed—“the Ted Danson après hair plugs, the J-Lo avant Gigli , the Ben avant J-Lo but après psychiatric treatment for gambling, the Matt après—”

“You think you’re like a blind bard and all?” asked Dum, glancing up from Celebrastory Weekly . “I don’t think so.”

“Okay, so Elena Topolos.”

“Elena Topolos?”

“Mediterranean freshman who needs to wax that lip. She told me the blue person’s some weird autistic savant. Not only that, but we lost a man to her.”

“What?”

“Hard Body. He’s neurotic for her. It’s already myth. Everyone on the soccer team calls him Aphrodite and he doesn’t even care. He and the blue person have a class together and someone saw him digging through the garbage can to find a paper she threw away because she’d touched it.”

“Whatever.”

“He’s asking her to Christmas formal.”

“WHAT?” shrieked Dee.

Mr. Fletcher looked up from The Crossword Fanatic’s True Challenge (Albo, 2002) and fired a disapproving glace at Dee and Dum. They were unfazed.

“Formal’s like three months away,” Dee said, wincing. “That’s all a holy war in high school. People get pregnant, caught with pot, get a bad haircut so you find out it was their only decent feature and they have awful ears. It’s way too soon to ask. Is he out of his mind ?”

Dee nodded. “He’s that haunted. His ex, Lonny, is pissed. She vows she’s gonna jihad her ass by the end of the year.”

“Ouch.”

Dad was fond of pointing out the rule of thumb that “at times, even fools are right,” but I was still surprised when, a day later, as I collected books from my locker, I noticed a kid from my AP Physics class passing me not once, but three times, faux-frowning at some giant hardback open in his hands, which I realized the second time he passed was our class textbook, Fundamentals of Physics (Rarreh & Cherish, 2004). I assumed he was waiting for Allison Vaughn, the sedate yet mildly popular senior with a locker near mine who wandered around with a wan smile and polite hair, but when I slammed my locker door, he was behind me.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Zach.”

“Blue.” I spasm-swallowed.

He was a tall, tan, supremely American-looking kid: square chin, big straight teeth, eyes an absurd Jacuzzi blue. I knew, vaguely, based on chatter during labs, he was shy, a little bit funny (my partner, Krista, was forever neglecting our experiment to giggle at something he said), also captain of the soccer team. His lab partner was his supposed ex-girlfriend, Lonny, cocaptain of Gallway Spirit, a girl with soggy platinum hair, a fake tan and a marked tendency to break the equipment. No cloud chamber, potentiometer, friction rod or alligator clip was safe with her. On Mondays, when the class wrote up our results on the dry-erase board, our teacher, Ms. Gershon, consistently threw out Lonny and Zach’s findings, as they always flew daringly in the face of Modern Science, discrediting Planck’s constant, undermining Boyle’s law, amending the theory of relativity from E=mc 2to E=mc 5. According to Dee and Dum, Lonny and Zach had gone out since sixth grade, and for the past few years had partaken in something called “lion sex” every Saturday night in the “hineymooner’s suite,” Room 222 at the Dynasty Motel on Pike Avenue.

He was handsome, sure, but as Dad once said, there were people who’d completely missed their decade, were born at the wrong time — not in the intellectually gifted sense, but due to a certain look on their face more suitable to the Victorian Age than, say, the Me Decade. Well, this kid was some twenty years too late. He was the one with thick brown hair that flyingsaucered over an eye, the one who inspired girls to make their own prom dress, the one from the country club. And maybe he had a secret diamond earring, maybe a sequin glove, maybe he even had a good song at the end with three helpings of keyboard synthesizer, but no one would know, because if you weren’t born in your decade you never made it to the ending, you floated around in your middle, unresolved, in oblivion, confused and unrealized. (Pour some sugar on him and blame it on the rain.)

“I was kinda hoping you could help me out with something,” he said, contemplating his shoes. “I have a serious problem.”

I felt irrationally frightened. “What?”

“There’s a girl…” He sighed, hooked his thumbs through his belt loops. “I like her. Yeah. I really do.” He was doing an embarrassed thing with his head, chin down, eyes sticking to me. “I’ve never talked to her. Never said a word. And normally this wouldn’t throw me — normally, I’d go right up to her, ask her for pizza…movie…yeah. But this one. She throws me.”