Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Now, caught in some gluey moment with this kid, feeling like I was still in Kansas, the reality of her getting so close to Doc she could count the number of gray hairs on his chin felt gruesome. How could she stomach his hands, his rocking-chair shoulders or the next morning, the sky sterile as a hospital floor? What was wrong with her? Something was wrong, of course, yet I’d been too preoccupied with myself, with Black and the number of times he sneezed, with Jade, Lu, Nigel, my hair, to take it to heart. (“The average American girl’s principal obsession is her hair — simple bangs, a perm, straightening, split ends — to the breathtaking rebuff of all else, including divorce, murder and nuclear war,” writes Dr. Michael Espiland in Always Knock Before Entering [1993].) What had happened to Hannah to make her descend into Cottonwood the way Dante had willfully descended into Hell? What had caused her to perpetuate a marked pattern of self-annihilation, which was obviously replicating at an alarming rate with the death of her friend Smoke Harvey, the drinking and swearing, her thinness, which made her look like a starved crow? Misery multiplied unless it was treated immediately. So did misfortune, according to Irma Stenpluck, author of The Credibility Gap (1988), which detailed on p. 329 one had only to suffer a tiny misfortune before one found one’s “entire ship sinking into the Atlantic.” Maybe it was none of our business, but maybe it was what she’d been hoping for all along, that one of us would unstick from our self and ask about her for once, not out of snoopy intrigue but because she was our friend and obviously crumbling a little bit.

I hated myself, standing there in the hallway, next to the Turner and Zach still hovering on the edge of his dry canyon of a kiss.

“You have something on your mind,” he quietly observed. The kid was Carl Jung, fucking Freud.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said harshly, taking a small step backward.

He smiled. It was incredible; his face had no expression for anger or annoyance, just as some Native Americans, the Mohawks, the Hupa, had no word for purple.

“You don’t want to know why you’re like that boat?” he asked.

I shrugged and my dress sighed.

“Well, it’s because the moon shines right on it and nowhere else in the picture. Right here. On the side. She’s the only thing that’s incandescent,” he said, or some other word-of-the-day response to that effect, full of oozing lava, lumps of rock, ash and hot gas I opted not to stick around for because I’d already turned and headed down the stairs. At the bottom, I again encountered Patsy and Roge, positioned right where we’d left them like two shopping carts abandoned in the cookie aisle.

“Isn’t it some thing?” Patsy exclaimed.

They waved good-bye as Zach and I climbed into the Toyota. Big smiles fireworked through their faces when I waved and shouted out the unrolled window, “Thank you! Look forward to seeing you again!” How strange it was that people like Zach, Roge and Patsy floated through the world. They were the cute daisies twirling past the mirror orchids, the milk thistle of the Hannah Schneiders, the Gareth van Meers snared in the branches and the mud. They were the sort of giddy people Dad loathed, called fuzz, frizz (or his most contemptuous put-down of all, sweet people ) if he happened to be standing behind one of them in a checkout aisle and eavesdropped on what was always a painfully bland conversation.

And yet — and I didn’t know what was wrong with me — though I couldn’t wait to unload Zach as soon as we arrived at the Cabaret (Jade and the others would be there, Black and Joalie too, Joalie, I hoped, suffering from an unforeseen skin irritation that refused to budge, even with persistent entreaties of various over-the-counter medications) I sort of marveled at the kid’s buoyancy. I’d approached his would-be kiss with no less dread than if a plague of locusts had started to descend upon my lands, and yet, now, he smiled at me and cheerfully asked if I had enough leg room.

Incredibly too, at the bottom of the driveway, when we were about to make a right, I glanced back, up the sharp wooded hill toward his house, and saw that Patsy and Roge were still standing there, most likely with their arms still snug around each other’s waist. Patsy’s green blouse was visible, shredded by the matchstick trees. And though I’d never confess it to Dad, I did wonder, for a second, as Zach turned up the pop song on the radio, if it was really so atrocious to have a family like that, to have a dad who twinkled and a boy with eyes so blue you wouldn’t be shocked to see sparrows winging through them, and a mother who stared, unwaveringly, at the last place she’d seen her son like a dog in a supermarket parking lot, never taking its eyes off the automatic doors.

“Are you excited about the dance?” asked Zach.

I nodded.

The Christmas Cabaret was held in the Harper Racey ’05 Cafeteria, which, under Student Council President Maxwell’s iron fist, had transformed into a sweltering, Versailles-styled nightclub with imitation-Sèvres vases on the side tables, French cheeses and pastries, gold tinsel, big, crudely painted posters of deformed girls on makeshift swings affixed over the “World Enough and Time” Wall (Gallway class photos from 1910 to present), which were meant to evoke the flouncing fiddle-dee-dee of Fragonard’s The Swing (c. 1767), but inadvertently conjured The Scream (Munch, c. 1893).

At least half of all St. Gallway faculty had shown up, those who’d been asked to chaperone, and there they were, the Mondo-Strangos, turned out in their monkey suits. Havermeyer stood next to his pale, rawboned wife, Gloria, in black velvet. (Gloria only rarely made public appearances. They said she hardly left the house, preferring to laze around, nibbling marshmallows and reading romance novels by Circe Kensington, a beloved author of many June Bugs, and thus I knew the most popular title, The Crown Jewels of Rochester de Wheeling [1990].) And there was bulge-eyed Mr. Archer gripping the window ledge, neatly fitted into his navy suit like an invitation into an envelope, and Ms. Thermopolis talking to Mr. Butters in flighty Hawaiian oranges and reds. (She’d done something to her hair, a styling mousse that turned locks to lichen.) There was Hannah’s favorite, Mr. Moats, nearly as tall as the door frame by which he stood, wearing a jacket in Prussian Blue and plaid pants. (His was a disastrous face; his nose, puffy mouth, chin, even most of his cheeks seemed to crowd into the lower half of his face, like passengers on a sinking ship trying to avoid sea water.)

Jade and the others had promised (sworn on a range of grandparents’ graves) they’d show up at nine, but now it was ten-thirty and there was no sign of them, not even Milton. Hannah was supposed to be here, too—“Eva Brewster asked me to drop by,” she’d told me — but she was nowhere. And thus I was stuck deep in the heart of Zachville, homeland of the Sticky Palm, the Hazardous Wingtip, the Rickety Arm, the Calcutta Breath, the Barely Discernible Off-Key Hum Annoying as Any Wall’s Drone of Electricity, largest city, cluster of freckles on his neck beneath left ear, rivers of sweat at his temples, in that small gorge at his neck.

The dance floor was meatpacked. To our right, less than a foot away, Zach’s ex-girlfriend, Lonny Felix, danced with her date, Clifford Wells, who had an upturned, elfin face and wasn’t as tall as she was. He didn’t weigh as much either. Every time she instructed him to dip her ( “Dip me,” she coached) he gnashed his teeth together as he struggled to keep her from falling to the floor. Otherwise, she seemed to be enjoying her self-styled tornado-twirls, flinging her elbows and thorny bleached hair harrowingly near my face every time Zach and I completed one revolution, when I was facing the buffet table (where Perón was making Nutella crêpes, uncharacteristically subdued in a puff-sleeved Rhapsody in Blue) and Zach faced the windows.