Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

He ran his right hand through his hair and it was absurdly knot free like a shampoo commercial. His left hand was still cradling our Physics textbook, bookmarking, for some bizarre reason, p. 123, which featured a sizeable diagram of a magenta Plasma Ball. I was able to make out, upsidedown, around the crook of his arm: “Plasma is the fourth state of matter.”

“So I say to myself, fine, ” he said with a shrug. “It’s not meant to be. ’Cause if you don’t feel comfortable talking to someone, how’re you gonna handle…well, you have to trust the person, right, or what’s the point. But then”—frowning, he gazed all the way down the hall toward the EXIT—“it’s like every time I see her I feel…I feel…”

I didn’t think he was going to continue, but then he broke into a smile. “Fucking. Great. ”

The smile was pinned to his face, delicate as a prom corsage.

It was my turn to speak. Words were in my throat — advice, council, some pithy line from a screwball comedy — but they were grinding together, disappearing fast like celery in a sink disposal.

“I…” I began.

I could feel his minty breath on my forehead, and he was staring at me with his eyes the color of a kiddy pool (blue, green, suspicious hints of yellow). He was searching my face as if he took me to be a cruddy masterpiece in somebody’s attic and if he scrutinized my deft use of color and shading as well as the direction of my brushstrokes, he’d figure out who my artist was.

“Hurl?”

I turned. Nigel was inching his way toward us, visibly amused.

“I really can’t help you, so if you’d be so kind as to excuse me,” I blurted quickly, then darted past his shoulder and the Physics textbook. I didn’t turn around, not even when I reached Nigel and the German Language Bulletin Board and then the EXIT. I assumed he stood in the hall staring after me with his mouth open like a newscaster reading Breaking News when the teleprompter goes dead.

“What’d the Chippendale want?” Nigel asked as we headed downstairs.

I shrugged. “Who knows. I–I couldn’t really follow his logic.”

“Oh, you’re terrible.” Nigel laughed, a quick, skidding sound, then linked his arm through mine. We were Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion.

Obviously, a few short months ago, I would have been astounded, maybe even knock-kneed that the El Dorado rode over to me and made a long speech about A Girl. (“All of history comes down to a girl,” Dad said with a hint of regret as we watched The Dark Prince , the award-winning documentary on Hitler’s youth.) In the past, I had all sorts of Hidden Desire moments when I gazed at El Dorados riding through the hushed corridors, the empty football fields of a lonesome school — like old Howie Easton at Clearwood Day with the cleft chin and gap in his teeth making him such a sophisticated whistler he could’ve whistled Wagner’s entire Der Ring des Nibelungen (1848–74) if he’d wanted to (he didn’t want to) — and I’d wished, just once, I might ride into the wilderness with them, that I, not Kaytee Jones with the Hawaiian eyes nor Priscilla Pastor Owensby with legs as long as highways, could be their favorite Appaloosa.

But now things were different. Now I had copper hair and sticky, myrtle lips, and as Jade said that Sunday dinner at Hannah’s: “The Zach Soderbergs of the world are cute, sure, but they’re boring as Saltines. Okay — you hope if you scratch one you’ll find Luke Wilson. Even Johnny Depp with his clothing missteps at major award ceremonies you’d be happy with. But trust me, all you get is bland cracker.”

“Who’s this?” asked Hannah.

“Some kid in my physics class,” I said.

“He’s a pretty popular senior,” said Lu.

“You should see his rug,” Nigel said. “I think he has hair plugs.”

“Well, he’s barking up the wrong tree,” Jade said. “Retch is already in a puddle over someone.”

She gazed triumphantly at Milton, but to my relief, he was cutting into his Danish roasted chicken with sunflower seasoning and hash of sweet potato and didn’t see her.

“So Blue’s breaking hearts,” Hannah said and winked at me. “It’s about time.”

I did wonder about Hannah.

And I felt guilty wondering about her, because the others trusted her in the uncomplicated way an old horse accepts a rider, a child grabs an outstretched hand to cross the street.

Yet immediately following my attempt to Parent Trap her with Dad, sometimes at her house, I’d find myself falling out of the dinner conversation. I’d look around the room as if I were a snooping stranger outside, pressing my nose to the window. I wondered why she took so much interest in my life, my happiness, my haircut (“A dor able,” she said. “You look like a dispossessed flapper,” Dad said); why, for that matter, any of them were of interest to her. I wondered about her adult friends, why she hadn’t married or done any of the things Dad referred to as “domesticated hooey” (SUVs, kids), the “sitcom script people stick to as they hope for meaning in their canned-laughter lives.”

In her house, there were no photographs. At school, I never once saw her conversing with other teachers apart from Eva Brewster, and only then on a single occasion. As much as I adored her — particularly those moments she let herself be silly, when a favorite song came on and she did a funny little jig with her wineglass in her bare feet in the middle of the living room and the dogs stared at her the way fans stared at Janis Joplin singing “Bobby McGee” (“I was in a band once,” Hannah said shyly, biting her lip. “Lead singer. I dyed my hair red.”) — I couldn’t overlook a certain book by leading neurophysicist and criminologist Donald McMather MD, Social Behaviors and Nimbus Clouds (1998).

“An adult with a fastidious interest in those considerably younger than him or herself can not be completely sincere or even rational,” he writes onp. 424, Chapter 22, “The Allure of Children.” “Such a preoccupation often hides something very dark.”

I’d been in thick with the Bluebloods three, maybe four weeks, when Jade invaded, Sherman-style, my nonexistent sex life.

Not that I took her assault too seriously. When it came down to the nitty-gritty, I knew I’d probably flee without warning, like Hannibal’s elephants during the Battle of Zama in 202 B.C. (I was twelve when Dad wordlessly presented me with various tomes to read and reflect upon, including C. Allen’s Shame Culture and the Shadow World [1993], Somewhere Between Puritans and Brazil: How to Have a Healthy Sexuality [Mier, 1990], also Paul D. Russell’s terrifying What You Don’t Know About White Slavery [1996].)

“You’ve never gotten laid, have you, Retch?” Jade accused one night, deliberately ashing her cigarette in the cracked blue vahze next to her like some movie psychiatrist with switchblade fingernails, her eyes narrowed, as if hoping I’d confess to violent crime.

The question hung in the air like a national flag with no wind. It was obvious the Bluebloods, including Nigel and Lu, approached sex as if it were cute little towns they had to whizz through in order to make good time on their way to Somewhere (and I wasn’t so sure they knew their final destination). Immediately, Andreo Verduga flashed into my head (shirtless, trimming shrubs) and I wondered if I could speedily make up a steamy experience involving the bed of his pickup truck (propped up against mulch, rolling onto tulip bulbs, hair snagging the lawnmower) but prudently decided against it. “Virgins advertise their stunning lack of insight and expertise with the subtlety and panache of Bible salesmen,” wrote British comic Brinkly Starnes in A Harlequin Romance (1989).