Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

At this point, I felt as if I was drowning in the shadowed floats and the holdfasts and the Blood Henry Starfish clinging to the overhead lamp, but I told myself to take a deep breath, remember I couldn’t believe all or any of what she said — not necessarily. Much of what Jade swore by, when she was drunk or sober, could be trapdoors, quicksand, trompe l’oeil, the hoax of light as it speeds through the air at a variety of temperatures.

I’d made the mistake of taking her words at face value for the first and last time when she confided to me how much she “hated” her mother, was “dying” to go live with her father, a judge in Atlanta, who was “decent” (despite having run off some four years prior with a woman she simply referred to as Meathead Marcy, about whom little was known, except that she was a paralegal with full-sleeve tattoos) and then, not fifteen minutes later, I watched her pick up the phone to call her mother, who was still in Colorado, happily trapped in some avalanche of a love affair with the ski instructor.

“But when are you coming home? I hate being looked after by Morella. I need you for my proper emotional development,” she said tearfully, before noticing me, shouting, “What the fuck are you looking at?” and slamming the door in my face.

Though lovable (her signature tic, that absentminded way of blowing her hair out of her face couldn’t be surpassed in charm by Audrey Hepburn), also blessed with the enviable properties of a mink coat — graceful, unreasonable and impractical no matter what she was draped over, whether couches or people (a quality that didn’t diminish even when she was marginally torn and tatty, as she was now) — Jade was nevertheless one of those people whose personality proved to be the bane of modern mathematicians. She was neither a flat nor a solid shape. She showed no symmetry at all. Trigonometry, Calculus and Statistics all proved useless. Her Pie Chart was a muddle of arbitrary wedges, her Line Graph, the silhouette of the Alps. And just when one listed her under Chaos Theory — Butterfly Effects, Weather Predictions, Fractals, Bifurcation diagrams and whatnot — she showed up as an equilateral triangle, sometimes even a square.

Now she was on the floor with her filthy feet over her head, demonstrating a Pilates exercise that, she explained, “made more blood flow along the spinal cord.” (Somehow this translated into living longer.) I downed my glass of eggnog.

“I say we go to her classroom,” she said in a keyed-up whisper. She swung her skinny legs back onto the carpet in the fast, violent movement of a guillotine. “We could take a look around. I mean, it’s not completely insane to imagine that she’d keep evidence in her classroom.”

“Evidence of what? ”

“I told you. Murder. She killed that Smoke person.”

I took a deep breath.

“Criminals put things where people are the least likely to look, right?” she asked. “Well, who’d think to look in her classroom?”

“We would.”

“We find something? Then we know. Not that it means anything. I mean, giving her the benefit of the doubt, maybe Smoke had it coming to him. Maybe he clubbed seals.”

“Jade—”

“We don’t find anything? Who cares? No harm, no foul.”

“We can not go to her classroom.”

“Why not?”

“Any number of reasons. One, we might get caught and kicked out of school. Two, it makes no logical sense—”

“Oh, fuck off!” she shouted. “Can you forget your fucking stellar college career for once and have a good time? You’re a fucking drag!” She looked furious, but then almost immediately, the anger slipped off her face. She sat up, an inchworm smile. “Just think, Olives,” she whispered. “We have a higher cause. Undercover investigations. Recon work. We could end up on the news. We could be America’s fucking sweethearts.”

I stared at her. “‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends,’” I said.

“Good. Now help me find my shoes.”

Ten minutes later, we were scurrying down the hall. Hanover had an old accordion floor, wheezing flat notes with every step. We pushed open the door, rushed down the hollow stairwell, outside into the cold, down the sidewalk trickling in front of the courtyard and Love. Stalactites of shadow grew around us, making Jade and me instinctively pretend we were nineteenth-century schoolgirls pursued by Count Dracula. We shivered and leaned into each other tightly, pretzeling our arms. We began to run, her hair splashing against my bare shoulder and face.

Dad once noted (somewhat morbidly, I thought at the time) that American institutions would be infinitely more successful in facilitating the pursuit of knowledge if they held classes at night, rather than in the daytime, from 8:00 P.M. to 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. As I ran through the darkness, I understood what he meant. Frank red brick, sunny classrooms, symmetrical quads and courts — it was a setting that misled kids to believe that Knowledge, that Life itself, was bright, clear and freshly mowed. Dad said a student would be infinitely better off going out into the world if he/she studied the periodic table of elements, Madame Bovary , the sexual reproduction of a sunflower, for example, with deformed shadows congregating on the classroom walls, silhouettes of fingers and pencils leaking onto the floor, gastric howls from unseen radiators and a teacher’s face not flat and faded, not delicately pasteled by a golden late afternoon, but serpentine, gargoyled, Cyclopsed by the inky dark and feeble light from a candle. He/she would understand “everything and nothing,” Dad said, if there was nothing discernible in the windows but a lamppost mobbed by blaze-crazy moths and darkness, reticent and unfeeling, as darkness always was.

Two tall pines somewhere to our left inadvertently touched branches, the sound of a madman’s prosthetic limbs.

“Someone’s coming!” Jade whispered.

We raced down the hill, past silent Graydon, and the basement of Love Auditorium, and Hypocrite’s Alley, where the music classrooms with their long windows were vacant and blind like Oedipus after he hollowed out his eyes.

“I’m scared,” she whispered, tightening her grip on my wrist.

“I’m terrified. And freezing.”

“Have you seen School of Hell ?”

“No.”

“Serial killer’s a Home Ec teacher.”

“Ow.”

“Baking 203. Bakes the students into soufflés. Isn’t that sick?”

“I stepped on something. I think it went through my shoe.”

“We have to hurry, Retch. We can’t get caught. We’ll die. ”

She broke away from me and skipped up the steps of Loomis, yanking on the doors covered with dark, leafy announcements for Mr. Crisp’s production of The Bald Soprano (Ionesco, 1950). They were locked.

“We’ll have to go in another way,” she whispered excitedly. “Through the window. Or the roof. I wonder if there’s a chimney. We’ll pull a Santa, Retch. A Santa. ”

She grabbed my hand. Taking cues from movies featuring cat burglars and silent assassins, we circled the building, crunching through the shrubs and pine needles, trying the windows. Finally, we found one that wasn’t latched, which Jade forced open into a narrow space of inward-leaning glass leading into Mr. Fletcher’s Driver’s Ed classroom. She slipped through the opening easily, landing on one foot. As I went through, I skinned my left shin on the window catch, my stockings ripped, and then I crashed onto the carpet, hitting my head on the radiator. (A poster on the wall featuring a kid wearing braces and a seat belt: “Always Check Your Blind Spot, on the Road and in Life!”)