Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“Where’s Jade?” I asked. “I don’t see her.”

“Around,” she said airily, not looking away from a guy named Luke with a white T-shirt like cling film and arms like basement lead pipes. Using words with no more than two syllables, he was telling her the fascinating story of how he’d been kicked out of West Point for hazing.

“But I don’t see her,” I said nervously, my eyes wandering the room.

“She’s in the bathroom.”

“Is she all right?”

“Sure.” Leulah’s eyes were hooked to Luke’s face; it was like the guy was Dickens, fucking Samuel Clemens.

I pushed my way into the GIRLS bathroom.

“Jade?”

It was sticky, murky as unclean aquariums. Girls in tube tops and tight pants swarmed the mirror, applying lipstick, running fingernails through hair stiff as soft-drink straws. Unrolled toilet paper wormed along the floor and the hand dryer shrieked, though no one dried their hands.

“Jade? Jade? Hello?”

I crouched down and spotted her green metallic sandals in the handicapped stall.

“Jade? Are you okay?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, what is it? WHAT?!”

She unlatched the door. It bashed against the wall. She marched out. Behind her, stuffed between the toilet and the toilet-paper dispenser, was a man, approximately forty-five years old with a thick brown beard that cut his face into crude shapes first graders tape to windows during Art Time. He wore a jean jacket too short in the sleeves and looked as if he’d respond to various shouted commands, including, “C’mere boy!” and “Sick ’em!” His belt was undone, hanging like a rattlesnake.

“Oh, I–I–” I stuttered. “I—”

“Are you dying?” Her face was pale green in the light, seal slick. Fine gold hairs stuck to her temples in question marks and exclamation points.

“No,” I said.

“Are you planning to die anytime soon?”

“No—”

“Then what are you bothering me for? What am I, your fucking mother?”

She turned on her heel, slammed the door, and locked it.

“What a bitchy slut,” said a Hispanic woman reapplying liquid eyeliner at the sink, her top lip stretched tight over her teeth like Saran Wrap over leftovers. “That your friend?”

I nodded, somewhat dazed.

“You kick her skanky ass.”

There were times, to my infinite horror, Leulah disappeared, too, for fifteen, sometimes twenty, minutes into GIRLS (Beatrice had come a long way in seven hundred years; so had Annabel Lee) and afterward, she and Jade both sported pleased, even conceited looks on their faces, as if, in that handicapped stall they believed they’d single-handedly come to the last digit of pi, discovered who killed Kennedy, found the Missing Link. (From the looks of some the guys they brought in with them, maybe they had.)

“Blue should try it,” Leulah said once on the drive home.

“No way, ” Jade said. “You have to be a pro.”

Obviously, I wanted to ask them what they thought they were doing, but I sensed they didn’t care to know what Robard Neverovich, the Russian who’d volunteered in more than 234 American runaway shelters, wrote in Kill Me (1999) or his follow-up account of his trip to Thailand to investigate the child porn industry, Wanting It All, All At Once (2003). It was evident Jade and Leulah were doing just fine, thank you, and certainly didn’t need the feedback of a girl who stands “deaf and dumb when some dude wants to buy her a hurricane,” who “wouldn’t know what to do with a guy if she had a manual with illustrations and an interactive CD-rom.” But at the same time, as scared as I was every time one of them vanished, afterward, when we were back in the Mercedes; when they were howling over some scab they’d taken into GIRLS together, who’d emerged from that handicapped stall with a sort of madness and, as we walked outside, chased after them shouting, “Cammie! Ashley!” (the names on their fake IDs) before the bouncer threw him down like a sack of potatoes; when Jade was speeding back to her house, crisscrossing between semis and Leulah screamed for no reason, head back, hair tangling around the headrest, her arms reaching out of the sunroof as if grabbing at the tiny stars sticking to the sky and picking them off like lint, I noticed there was something incredible about them, something brave, that no one in my immediate recollection had written about — not really.

I doubted I could write about it either, being “the total flat tire in any bar or club,” except that they seemed to inhabit a completely different world than the one I did — a world that was hilarious, without repercussion or revolting neon light or stickiness or rug burn, a world in which they ruled.

There was one night that wasn’t like the others.

“This is it, Hurl,” Jade said. “The night that will change your everything.”

It was the first Friday of November and Jade had gone to considerable lengths to pick out my outfit: four-inch malevolent gold sandals two sizes too big and a gold lamé dress that rippled all over me like a Shar-pei (see “Traditional Wife’s Bound Feet,” History of China , Ming, 1961, p. 214; “Darcel,” Remembering “Solid Gold,” LaVitte, 1989, p. 29).

It was one of the rare occasions someone at the Blind actually approached me —a guy in his thirties named Larry, heavy as a keg of beer. He was attractive only in the way of a seriously unfinished Michelangelo sculpture. There were tiny patches of remarkable detail in his delicate nose, full lips, even in his large, well-molded hands, but the rest of him — shoulders, torso, legs — had not been liberated from the raw slab of marble, nor would they be any time soon. He’d bought me an Amstel Light and stood close to me while he talked about quitting smoking. It had been the most difficult thing he’d ever done in his life. “Patch is the greatest thing medical science’s come up with. They should use that technology for everything. Don’t know ’bout you, but I got no problem eatin’ and drinkin’ with the patch. Days you’re really busy. ’Stead of fast food, ya stick on the patch. Half hour later? You’re full. We could all have sex with the patch too. Sure save everyone a lot of time and energy. What’s yer name?”

“Roxanne Kaye Loomis.”

“What do you do, Roxy?”

“I attend Clemson University with a major in engineering. I’m from Dukers, N.C. Also an organ donor.” Larry nodded and took a long drink of his beer, shifting his heavy body toward me so my leg pressed against his chunky one. I took a tiny step in the only other possible direction, bumping into the back of a girl with thorny blond hair.

“’Scuse you,” she said.

I tried stepping back in the other direction but effigy-Larry was there. I was a piece of hard candy stuck in a throat.

“Where do you see yourself in, say, twenty years?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. In fact, he looked as if he didn’t speak English anymore. He was losing altitude, and fast. It was like the afternoon Dad and I parked the Volvo station wagon a few meters from the end of the airport runway in Luton, Texas, and spent an hour sitting on the hood, eating pimento cheese sandwiches and watching the planes land. Watching the planes was like floating in the depths of the ocean and observing a 105-foot Blue Whale drift over you, but unlike the private jets, the airbuses, and the 747s, Larry actually crashed. His lips hit my teeth and his tongue darted into my mouth like a tadpole escaping from a jar. He slapped a hand onto my chest, squeezing my right breast like a lemon over dover sole.

“Blue?”

I tore myself away. Leulah and Jade stood next to me.

“We’re blowing this joint,” Jade said.