Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

The boys were diligently Lindy Hopping behind Zach, who spun in place again. Ms. Hambone’s left hand twitched.

At last, the music faded and they froze.

It was silent for a moment, and then everyone — the kids at the door, Ms. Hambone, those in second period Study Hall (all except Little Nose) — erupted into mind-numbing applause.

“Oh, my God, ” said Dee.

“That did so not happen,” said Dum.

I clapped and beamed as everyone stared at me with big astonished faces as if I were a Crop Circle. I beamed at Ms. Hambone dabbing her eyes with the frilly cuff of her Rococo poet’s blouse. I beamed at Mr. Fletcher, who looked so happy you’d think he had just finished an exceptionally grueling crossword, like last week’s Battle of Bunker Hill, “Not Waving but Drowning?” I even beamed at Dee and Dum, who were staring at me with incredulous yet fearful looks on their faces (see Rosemary at the end of Rosemary’s Baby when the old people shout, “Hail Satan!” ).

“Blue van Meer,” said Zach. He cleared his throat and approached my desk. The fluorescent lights made a soured halo around his hair so he looked like a hand-painted Jesus one finds hanging on clammy walls of churches that smell of Gruyère. “How about going to the Christmas formal with me?”

I nodded and Zach didn’t pick up on my acute reluctance and horror. A Cadillac-sized smile drove away with his face as if I’d just agreed to pay him “in cayash,” as Dad would say, for a Sedona Beige Metallic Pontiac Grand Prix, fully loaded, two grand over sticker price, driving it off the lot right then and there. He also didn’t pick up on — no one did — the fact that I was experiencing a very severe lost Our Town feeling, which only intensified when Zach left the library with his Temptations, a supremely satisfied look on his face (Dad had described a similar look on Zwambee tribesmen in Cameroon after they’d impregnated their tenth bride).

“Think they’ve had sex? ” asked Dum with slitty eyes. She was sitting with her sister a few feet behind me.

“If they had sex, you think he’d be skadiddiling over her? It’s publicized knowledge the nanosecond you have sex with a guy you go from being a headline to being all blurbatized in the obituary section. He just Timberlaked in front of our very eyes. ”

“She must be insane in bed. She must be man’s best friend.”

“It takes six Vegas strippers and a leash to be man’s best friend.”

“Maybe her mom works at The Crazy Horse.” They began to laugh shrilly, not even bothering to quiet down when I turned around to glare at them.

Dad and I had seen Our Town (Wilder, 1938) during a torrential downpour at the University of Oklahoma at Flitch (one of his students was making his Flitch stage debut as the Stage Manager). Although the play had its share of faults (there seemed to be great confusion with the address, as “In the Eye of God” came before “New Hampshire”) and Dad found the carpe diem premise much too syrupy (“Wake me up if someone gets shot,” he said as he nodded off), I still found myself more than a little moved when Emily Webb, played by a tiny girl with hair the color of sparks off railroad tracks, realized no one could see her, when she knew she had to say good-bye to Grover’s Corners. In my case, though, it was skewed. I felt invisible though every one had seen me, and if Zach Soderberg and his mantelpiece hair were Grover’s Corners, I could think of nothing I’d rather do than get the hell out of town.

This grim feeling reached a record high when, that same day, as I walked to AP Calculus in Hanover I passed Milton walking hand in hand with Joalie Stuart, a sophomore, one of those highly petite girls who could fit into a carry-on suitcase and look at home on a Shetland pony. She had a baby-rattle laugh: a jelly-bean sound that irked even if you were minding your own business about a light year away. Jade had informed me Joalie and Black were a magnificently happy couple in the Newman and Woodward tradition. “Nothing will come between those two,” she said with a sigh.

“Hey there, Hurl,” Milton said as he passed me.

He smiled and Joalie smiled. Joalie was wearing a blue icing sweater and a thick brown velvet headband that looked like a giant woolly worm was rummaging behind her ears.

I’d never contemplated relationships very much (Dad said they were preposterous if I was under twenty-one and when I was over twenty-one Dad considered it Fine Points, Minutiae, a question of transportation or ATM location in a new town; “We’ll figure it out when we get there,” he said with a wave of his hand) and yet, in that moment, when I moved past Milton and Joalie, both of them smiling confidently in spite of the fact that at distances greater than fifteen feet they looked like a gorilla walking a teacup Yorkie, I actually felt awed by the remote possibilities of the person you liked ever liking you back a corresponding amount. And this mathematical conundrum started its long division in my head at breakneck speed, so by the time I sat down in the front row of AP Calculus and Ms. Thermopolis at the dry-erase board was trying to wrestle to the ground a robust function from our homework, I was left with a disturbing number.

I suppose it was why, after years of playing the odds, some people cashed in their measly chips for their Zach Soderberg, the kid who was like a cafeteria, so rectangular and brightly lit there wasn’t a millimeter of exciting murk or thrilling secret (not even under the plastic chairs or behind the vending machines). The only saturnine miasma to be found in him was maybe a bit of mold on the orange Jell-O. The boy was all creamed spinach and stale hot dog.

You couldn’t make a grisly shadow on his wall if you tried.

I suppose it was just one of those December Dog Day Afternoon s, when Love and its wired cousins — Lust, Crush, Eat Up, Have It Bad (all of whom suffered from ADHD or Hyperkinetic Syndrome) were on the loose and in heat, terrorizing the neighborhood. Later that day, when Dad dropped me at home before heading back to the university for a faculty meeting, I was only five minutes into my homework when the telephone rang. I picked it up and no one said anything. A half hour later, when it rang again, I switched on the answering machine.

“Gareth. It’s me. Kitty. Look, I need to talk to you.” Click.

Less than forty-five minutes later, she called again. Her voice was cratered and barren as the moon, exactly as Shelby Hollow’s voice had been, and Jessie Rose Rubiman’s before her, and Berkley Sternberg’s, old Berkley who used The Art of Guiltless Living (Drew, 1999) and Take Control of Your Life (Nozzer, 2004) as coasters for her potted African violets.

“I–I know you don’t like it when I call, but I do need to speak to you, Gareth. I have a feeling you’re home and choosing not to pick up. Pick up the phone.”

She waited.

Whenever they waited, I always pictured them on the other end, standing in their yellowed kitchens, twisting the telephone cord around an index finger so it turned red. I wondered why it never occurred to them I was the one listening, not Dad. I think if one of them had said my name, I would’ve picked up and done my best to console them, explained that Dad was one of those theories you could never know for certain, never prove beyond a reasonable doubt. And though there was a chance you could be struck by the lightning of genius it took to solve the man, the odds were so infinitesimal, so unbearable, the act of trying only had the effect of making one feel very small (see Chapter 53, “Superstrings and M-Theory, or Mystery Theory, the Theory of Everything,” Incongruities , V. Close, 1998).