Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Jade’s eyes widened. “You think she wants to kill us?” she whispered.

“Oh, please.”

“Seriously. We’re targets because we’re bourgeois.”

I frowned. “What is it with you and that word?”

“It’s Hannah’s word. Ever noticed when she’s drunk everyone’s a pig?”

“She’s just kidding,” I said. “Even my Dad jokes about that sometimes.” But Jade, her teeth bricked into a tiny wall, grabbed the book from my hands and started furiously spinning through the pages, stopping at the black-and-white photographs in the middle, tilting them so they caught the light. “‘Charles called Susan Atkins Sexy Sadie,’” she read slowly. “Ew. Look how freaky this woman looks. Those eyes. Honestly, they kind of look like Hannah’s —”

“Stop it,” I said, snatching the book from her. “What’s the matter with you?”

“What’s the matter with you? ” Her eyes were narrowed, tiny incisions. Sometimes, Jade had a very severe way of looking at you that made you feel as if she were a 1780 sugarcane plantation owner and you, the branded slave on the Antiguan auction block who hadn’t seen your mother and father in a year and probably never would again. “You miss your coupon, is that it? You want to give birth to food stamps?”

At this point, I think we would have broken into an argument, which would have ended with me fleeing the building, probably in tears, her laughing and shouting a variety of names. The terrified look on her face, however, caused me to turn and follow her stare out the windows.

Someone was walking down the sidewalk toward Loomis, a heavy-set figure wearing a bulging, bruise-colored dress.

“It’s Charles Manson,” Jade whimpered. “In drag. ”

“No,” I said. “It’s the dictator.”

In horror, we watched Eva Brewster move to the front doors of Loomis, yanking on the handles before turning and walking out onto the lawn by the giant pine tree, shading her eyes as she peered into the classroom windows.

“Oh, fuck me, ” said Jade.

We leapt across the room, to the corner by the bookshelf where it was pitch black (under Cary and Grace, as it so happened, Caccia al ladro ).

“Blue!” Eva shouted.

The sound of Evita Perón shouting one’s name could make anyone’s heart lurch. Mine thrashed like an octopus thrown to the deck of a ship.

“Blue!”

We watched her come to the window. She wasn’t the most attractive woman in the world: she had a fire-hydrant’s bearing, hair the fluffy texture of home insulation and dyed a hideous yellow-orange, but her eyes, as I’d observed once in the Main Office in Hanover, were shockingly beautiful, sudden sneezes in the dull silence of her face — big, wide-set, in a pale blue that tiptoed toward violet. She frowned now and deliberately pressed her forehead to the glass so it became one of those Ramshell Snails feeding on the side of aquariums. Although I was petrified and held my breath and Jade dug her nails into my right knee, the woman’s puffy, slightly blued face, flanked by large, garish pine-cone earrings, didn’t look particularly angry or devious. Frankly, she appeared more frustrated, as if she’d come to the window with the express hope of glimpsing the rare Barkudia Skink, the limbless lizard notorious among the reptilian elite as something of a Salinger, gallingly incommunicado for eighty-seven years, and now it was choosing to stay hidden under a moist rock in the exhibit, ignoring her no matter how many times she shouted, tapped on the glass, waved shiny objects or took flash pictures.

“Blue!” she called again, a little more emphatically, craning her neck to glance over her shoulder. “Blue!”

She muttered something to herself, and hurried around the corner of the building, ostensibly to search the opposite side. Jade and I couldn’t move, our chins conjoined to our knees, listening for the footsteps that reverberate down the linoleum asylum corridors of one’s most terrifying dreams.

But the minutes dripped by and there was only silence and the occasional coughs, sniffs, and throat clearings of a room. After five minutes, I crawled past Jade (she was frozen solid in fetal position) and moved toward the window where I looked out and saw her again, this time standing on the front steps of Loomis.

It would have been a stirring view, one of the Thomas Hardy variety, if she’d been someone else — someone with decent posture, like Hannah — because her cottony hair was blowing up off her forehead and insistent wind had seized her dress and pushed it far behind her, giving her the wild, secret air of a widow staring at the sea, or a magnificent ghost, pausing for a moment before continuing a sad search along the mottled moors for relics of dead love, a Ruined Maid, a Trampwoman’s Tragedy. But she was Eva Brewster: stout and sobering, bottlenecked, jug-armed and cork-legged. She tugged at the dress, scowled at the dark, took a last look at the windows (for a harrowing second, I thought she saw me) and then turned, heading briskly back down the sidewalk and disappearing.

“She’s gone,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

Jade lifted her head and pressed a hand to her chest.

“I’m having a heart attack,” she said.

“No, you’re not.”

“It’s possible. My family has a history of heart failure. It happens just like this. Out of the blue.”

“You’re fine.”

“I feel a tightness. Here. That’s what happens when you’re having pulmonary embrosis.”

I stared out the window. Where the sidewalk twisted out of sight around Love Auditorium, a lone tree stood guard with a thick black trunk, its shivering, thin limbs with the tops bent backward into tiny wrists and hands, as if feebly holding up the sky.

“That was really strange, huh?” Jade made a face. “How she called your name like that — wonder why she wasn’t calling my name.”

I shrugged, trying to act nonchalant, though in truth I felt ill. Maybe I had the gauzy constitution of a Victorian woman who fainted because she heard the word leg, or perhaps I’d read L’Idiot (Petrand, 1920) too attentively with its lunatic hero, the sickly and certifiable Byron Berintaux, who saw in every upholstered armchair his upcoming Death waving at him enthusiastically. Maybe I’d simply had too much darkness for one night. “Night is not good for the brain or the nervous system,” contends Carl Brocanda in Logical Effects (1999). “Studies show neurons are constricted by 38 percent in individuals who live in locations with little daylight, and nerve impulses are 47 percent slower in prison inmates who go forty-eight hours without seeing the light of day.”

Whatever it was, it wasn’t until Jade and I crept our way outside, sneaking past the cafeteria, still lit but silent (a few teachers lingered on the patio, including Ms. Thermopolis, a dying ember by the wooden doors), hightailing it out of St. Gallway in the Mercedes without encountering Eva Brewster, roaring down Pike Avenue past Jiffy’s Eatery, Dollar Depot, Dippity’s, Le Salon Esthetique — when I realized I’d forgotten to return the Blackbird book to Hannah’s desk. I was actually still holding it and in my haste, confusion, the darkness, only dimly aware I’d been doing so.

“How come you still have that book?” Jade demanded as we swung into a Burger King drive-thru. “She’s going to know it’s gone. Hope she doesn’t dust for fingerprints — hey, what do you want to eat? Hurry and decide. I’m starved.”

We ate Whoppers drenched in the acid light of the parking lot, barely speaking. I suppose Jade was one of those people who flung handfuls of wild accusations into the air, smiling as they rained on everyone’s head, and then the festivities were over and she went home. She looked contented, refreshed even, as she jostled fries into her mouth, waved at some scab making his way to his pick-up balancing a tray of Cokes in his arms, and yet, deep in my chest, unavoidable as the sound of your heart when you stopped to hear it beating, I felt, as deadbeat gumshoe Peter Ackman (who had a weakness for the chalk-tube and flutes of skee) said at the end of Wrong Twist (Chide, 1954), “like the bean-schnozzle been jammed far up my lousy, threatening to sneeze metal.” I stared at the wrinkled cover of that book, where, despite the faded ink, the creases, the man’s black eyes rose off the page.