Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Larry shouted (a markedly unenthusiastic “Wait a minute, Roxy!”), but I didn’t turn around. I followed them outside to the car.

“Where are we going?”

“To see Hannah,” Jade said flatly. “By the way, Retch, what’s up with your taste in men? That guy was fugly.”

Lu was staring at her apprehensively, her green Bellmondo prom dress sagging open at the neck in a permanent yawn. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

Jade made a face. “Why not?”

“I don’t want her to see us,” Lu said.

Jade yanked on her seatbelt. “We’ll take another car. Jefferson’s boyfriend’s. His heinous Toyota’s in our driveway.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“We’ll probably bump into Charles,” Jade said, ignoring me, glancing at Lu as she jammed the key in the ignition and started the car. “He’ll be wearing camouflage and those night-vision goggle things.”

Lu shook her head. “He’s with Black on a double date. Sophomores.”

Jade turned around to see if I’d overheard this (a triumphantly sympathetic look on her face), then accelerated out of the parking lot, merging onto the highway and heading toward Stockton. It was a cold night, with thin, greasy clouds streaking the sky. I pulled the gold lamé tight over my knees, staring at the passing cars and Lu’s fancy parenthesis profile, the taillights signaling her cheekbones. Neither of them spoke. Their silence was one of those tired adult silences, that of a married couple driving home from a dinner party, not wanting to talk about someone’s husband getting too drunk or how they secretly didn’t want to go home with each other but someone new, someone whose freckles they didn’t know.

Forty minutes later, Jade had disappeared inside her house for the car keys—“Only be a sec”—and when she emerged, still in her rickety red sandals and firebird dress (it looked like she’d gone through the garbage at a rich kid’s birthday, removed the most exotic scraps of wrapping paper and taped them to herself), she carried a six-pack of Heineken, two giant bags of potato chips and a pack of spaghetti licorice, one piece dangling from her mouth. Looped around her shoulder was a giant pair of binoculars.

“We’re going to Hannah’s house?” I asked, still confused, but Jade only ignored me again, dumping the food into the backseat of the beat-up white Toyota parked by the garage. Leulah looked furious (her lips were pulled tightly together like a fabric change purse), but without a word, she walked across the driveway, climbed into the front seat and slammed the door.

“Fuck.” Jade squinted at her watch. “We don’t have much time.”

Minutes later, we were in the Toyota, merging onto the highway again, this time heading north, the opposite direction of Hannah’s house. I knew it was pointless to ask where we were going; both of them had fallen into that trench-silence again, a silence so deep it was difficult and tiring to heave oneself out. Leulah stared at the road, the sputtering white lines, the drifting red sequins of the cars. Jade was more or less her usual self, though as she chewed a strand of licorice (the girl was chain-licoricing; “Hand me another one,” she demanded three times before I wedged the packet by the emergency brake), she wouldn’t stop fiddling with the radio.

We drove a half hour before swerving down Exit 42—“Cottonwood,” read the sign — barreling across the deserted two-lane road into a truck stop. A gas station was off to our left, and, in front of the eighteen-wheelers slung across the pavement like dead whales, a wooden A-framed restaurant sat glumly on bald hill. STUCKEY’S, announced the yellow letters over the entrance. Jade was slinking the Toyota between the trucks.

“See her car?” she asked.

Leulah shook her head. “It’s already 2:30. Maybe she’s not coming.”

“She’s coming.”

We circled the lot until Leulah tapped a fingernail on the window.

“There.” She was indicating Hannah’s red Subaru; it was sandwiched between a white pickup truck and a van.

Jade swung into the next row and reversed into a spot by a bank of pine needles and the road. Leulah flung off her seatbelt, crossed her arms, and Jade blithely helped herself to another black shoelace, gnawing one end, and wrapping the other fast around her knuckles like a boxer before he puts on his gloves. Hannah’s Subaru was in front of us, two lines of cars away. Across the parking lot on the hill slumped the restaurant, legally blind (three windows in the back boarded up) and seriously balding (roofing coming off in clumps). You couldn’t see much in the dimmed windows — a few shifts of tired color, a row of green lamps hanging down like moldy showerheads — but one didn’t have to go inside to know the menus were sticky, the tables seasoned with pie crumb, the waitresses crabby, the clientele beefy. One definitely had to beat the saltshaker senseless — maggotlike grains of rice visible inside — to coax out a mere speck of salt. (“If they can’t do salt, I wonder what makes them think they can do chicken cacciatore,” Dad would say in such a place, holding the menu at a safe distance from his face in case it sprang to life.)

I hunched forward and cleared my throat, a signal for Jade or Lu to explain what we were doing at this awful roadie watering hole (a place Dad and I would go to great distances to avoid; it wasn’t unheard for us to take a twenty-mile detour simply to avoid breaking bread with “men and women who, if one squinted, resembled piles of tires”) but when they still said nothing (Lu, too, was stuffing her mouth with licorice now, chewing goatishly) I realized it was one of those things they couldn’t put into words. Putting it into words made it real and they’d be guilty of something.

For ten minutes, the only sound was an occasional door slam — some loot-stomached trucker coming, going, starving, stuffed — and the angry hisses of the freeway. Visible through the dark trees edging the parking lot was a bridge with an endless bullet-fire of cars, red-and-white sparks shooting into the night.

“Who’ll it be?” Jade asked blandly, looking through the binoculars.

Lu shrugged, chewing her licorice cud. “Don’t know.”

“Fat or skinny.”

“Skinny.”

“See, I think pork this time.”

“She doesn’t like pork.”

“Yes, she does. They’re her Beluga. Reserved for special occasions. Oh. ” Jade jolted forward, banging the binoculars on the windshield. “Oh, fuck me …shit.”

“What — is he a baby?”

Jade’s mouth was open. Her lips moved, but there were no words. Then she exhaled heavily: “Ever seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s ?”

“No,” Lu said sarcastically, putting her hands on the dashboard and leaning forward to survey the two people who’d just emerged from the restaurant.

“Well”—without looking away from the binoculars, Jade’s right hand plunged into the bag of chips and stuffed a clump into her mouth—“it’s that awful Doc person. Only ancient. Normally, I’d say at least it’s not Rusty Trawler, but in this case I’m not so sure.” She sat back, swallowed, and, with a grim look, handed Lu the binoculars. “Rusty has teeth.”

After a quick glimpse (a revolted expression spilled all over her face), Lu handed me the binoculars. I swallowed and pressed them to my eyes: Hannah Schneider had just left the restaurant. She was walking with a man.

“I always hated Doc,” Lu said softly.

Hannah was dolled up as I’d never seen her before (“painted,” they’d say at Coventry Academy) wearing a furry black coat — I guessed rabbit, due to its teenybopperish look (the zipper graced with a pompom) — gold hoops, dark lipstick charring her mouth. Her hair recoiled from her shoulders and sharp, white high heels peered out of the cuffs of her Saran-tight jeans. When I shifted the binoculars to inspect her companion, I immediately felt sick, because in comparison to Hannah, he was shriveled. Wrinkles Etch A Sketched his face. He was in his late sixties, maybe even early seventies, shorter than she and skinny as a roadside curb. His torso and shoulders were meatless, like thick plaid flannel had been chucked over a picture frame. His hair was pretty thick, his hairline not eroding (his lone, remotely attractive feature). It mopped up whatever light was around, going green as they passed under the floodlight, then an oxidized, bicycle-spoke gray. As he moved down the steps after her — Hannah was walking swiftly, unzipping a weird pink fur purse, searching for her car keys — his bony legs jerked out to the sides like a retractable drying rack.