Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

When I was with the Bluebloods, though, it was easy to pretend I hadn’t committed anything to memory except the lyrics of a thousand corn syrup R&B songs, that I’d never heard of anyone named Blake except that junior who always had his hands in his pockets and looked like he wanted to hit someone, that I could simply notice a fly and not think anything but shrill girlish expressions (Ew). Naturally, if Dad had known about my attitude, he would’ve called it “stomach-turning conformity,” maybe even “a disgrace to the Van Meers.” (It often slipped his mind he was an orphan.) Yet I saw it as thrilling, Romantic, if I allowed the current to take me along the “willowy hills and fields,” or wherever it wanted, regardless of the consequences (see “The Lady of Shalott,” Tennyson, 1842).

This was why I had no objections the following slattern Saturday night, November 22, when Jade made an entrance in the Purple Room wearing a black wig and a billowing white pantsuit. Colossal shoulder pads jutted off of her like the White Cliffs of Dover and she’d drawn duomo eyebrows over her eyes with what appeared to be a burnt sienna Crayola crayon.

“Guess who I am.”

Charles turned to survey her. “Dame Edna.”

“‘I never go out unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. You want The Girl Next Door? Go next door.’” She threw her head back and villain-laughed, falling onto the leather couch, and putting her feet with their big, dinghy-like black pumps in the air. “Guess where I’m headed.”

“Hell,” said Charles.

She rolled over, sitting up. A clump of wig stuck to her lipstick.

“The Burns County Animal Shelter cordially invites you to our annual—”

“Not a chance.”

“—charity soir ay —”

“We can’t.”

“—RSVP—”

“Absolutely not.”

“Rowdy sex very possible.”

“No.”

“I’ll go,” said Leulah.

In the end, we couldn’t agree on a group costume, so Charles was Jack the Ripper (for blood, Leulah and I doused him with A.1. Steak Sauce), Leulah was a French maid (helping herself to the array of Hermès silk scarves in various equestrian motifs, folded into neat squares in Jefferson’s bureau), Milton, refusing to dress up, was Plan B (the ambiguous sense of humor that bubbled up whenever he smoked pot), Nigel was Antonio Banderas as Zorro (he used Jeff’s toenail scissors to cut small holes around the rhinestone ZZZZZs of her black sleeping mask), Jade was Anita Ekberg of La Dolce Vita complete with stuffed kitten (she duct-taped it to a headband). I was one very unlikely Pussy Galore in shrublike red wig and baggy, teal nylon bodysuit (see “Martian 14,” Profiling Little Green Men: Sketches of Aliens from Eyewitness Accounts , Diller, 1989, p. 115).

We were drunk. Outside, the air was supple and warm as a dance hall girl after her opening number; and in our costumes, we sprinted sloppily across the nighted lawn, laughing at nothing.

Jade, in her giant conch-shell gown, crunchy with crinolines, ruffles and ribbons, screamed and threw herself against the grass, rolling down the hill.

“Where are you going?” shouted Charles. “It started at eight! It’s nine-thirty!”

“Come on, Retch!” shouted Jade.

I crossed my arms over my chest and hurled myself forward.

“Where are you?”

I rolled. Grass needled me and my wig ripped off. Stars catapulted between dull pauses of ground, and at the bottom, the quiet hit me. Jade was lying a few feet away, her face serious and blue. Staring at the stars naturally encouraged one’s face to appear serious and blue, and Dad had a variety of theories explaining this phenomenon, the majority of which centered on human insecurity and sobering realizations of absolute smallness when measured against such unfathomable things as the Spiral, the Barred Spiral, the Elliptical and the Irregular Galaxy.

But I remember, I couldn’t recall a single one of Dad’s theories at that moment. The black sky, pinpricked with light, couldn’t help but show off like Mozart at five. Voices scratched the air, words wobbly and unsure of themselves, and soon Milton was hurtling through the darkness, and Nigel’s loafers rocketed past my head, and Leulah fell right next to me with a teacup sound (“Ahh!”). The silk scarf escaped her hair and settled over my neck and chin. When I breathed, it bubbled like a pond when something drowns in it.

“You bastards!” screamed Charles. “By the time we get there, it’ll be over! We need to leave now! ”

“Shut up, Nazi,” Jade said.

“Think Hannah will be mad?” asked Leulah.

“Probably.”

“She’ll kill us,” said Milton. He was only a few feet away. When he breathed it was dragon breaths.

“Hannah shmanna,” Jade said.

Somehow, we peeled ourselves off the ground and trekked up the hill to the Mercedes, where Charles was waiting in a bad mood wearing Jade’s eighth-grade clear plastic raincoat so he wouldn’t get A.1. Steak Sauce all over the driver’s seat. I was the smallest, and Jade said it was necessary to take one car, so I acted as the human seat belt across Nigel, Jade and Leulah, who was making babies’ feet with her fist in the fogged window. I concentrated on the car light, my big white high heels touching the door handle, the cloud of smoke loitering around Milton’s head in the front seat where he smoked one of his joints thick as lipstick.

“Gonna be messy,” he said, “showin’ up there unannounced. Not too late to change the plan, friends.”

“Stop being mind-numbing,” Jade said, plucking the joint from his fingers. “We see Evita, we hide. Make like rugs. It’ll be fun.”

“Perón won’t be there,” said Nigel.

“Why not?”

“Hannah didn’t really invite her. She was lying. She said it just to have a valid reason why we couldn’t come.”

“You’re paranoid.”

Nigel shrugged. “She showed the classic signs of lying. I’d bet my life Eva Brewster will not be at the party. And if anyone asks her about it on Monday, she wouldn’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

“ You are the spawn of Satan,” Jade pronounced, then accidentally bumped her head against the window. “Ow.”

“Want some?” asked Leulah, handing me the joint.

“Thanks,” I said.

At the risk of protesting too much, I’d become well acquainted with the crafty behavior of both ceilings and floors under the influence of nip, tipple, hooch, booze, jet fuel, grog, zip, ex, pippin, poison and snifter (the Tremble, the Swoop Out of Nowhere, the Apparently Sinking Ship, the Fraudulent Earthquake). Much of the time when I was with them, I was only pretending to take all those superhuman swigs from Milton’s silver M.E.B. flask full of his preferred liquid arsenic, Wild Turkey, passed around the Purple Room like a Native American Peace Pipe.

Unbeknownst to the others, midway through any given evening, I was not, as it appeared, throwing them back with the best of them. “Look. Hurl’s deep in thought,” Nigel once commented as I stared into space on the couch. I wasn’t deep in thought, I was trying to pin down a covert means via which I might dispose of Leulah’s latest potion, something she simply called “Claw,” a deceitfully clear concoction that charred one’s esophagus and entire digestive system. One of my preferred scenarios was walking outside unaccompanied for some “fresh air” and, with the porch light off, stealthily pouring whatever it was down one of Jeff’s bronze, open-mouthed lions, final gifts from Andy Warhol in January 1987, a month before he died from complications after a gallbladder operation. Obviously, I could have simply dumped it in the grass, but I found a certain woozy satisfaction in feeding it to the lions, who obediently held their giant mouths open and stared up at me as if hoping with this final batch I’d finish them off. I only prayed Jeff never decided the hulking beasts would look better by the front door; when she uprooted them, she’d drown in a tidal wave of nip, tipple, hooch, booze, jet fuel, poison and snifter.