Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

She didn’t immediately continue. She contemplated, with narrowed eyes, the fuming end of her cigarette, the tatty ears of Old Bastard who’d crept over to her, licked her kneecap and then slumped to the rug, tired as a summer fling.

“What do you mean?” I asked softly.

A shy, sort of mischievous smile was sneaking into her face — though I couldn’t be certain of this; every time she moved her head the yellow lamplight raced across her cheekbones and mouth, but when she faced me fully it dashed away.

“You can’t tell anyone what I tell you,” she said sternly. “Not even your father. Promise me.”

I felt a nervous knife-stab in my chest. “Why?”

“Well, he’s protective, isn’t he?”

I supposed Dad was protective. I nodded.

“Yes, well, it’d traumatize him, I’m sure,” she said distastefully. “And what’s the point of that?”

Fear began to course through me. It made me woozy, like I’d injected it into my arm. I found myself rewinding the last six minutes, trying to figure out how we’d taken this bizarre detour. I’d shown up, intent to perform a quiet, un-choreographed routine on Dad, but I’d been shoved into the wings, and here she was, the seasoned artiste commanding the stage, about to begin her monologue — a terrifying monologue by the sound of things. Dad said it was imperative to avoid people’s fervent confidences and confessions. “Tell the person that you must leave the room,” he instructed, “that you ate something, that you’re ill, that your father has scarlet fever, that you feel the end of the world is imminent and you must rush to the grocery store to stock up on bottled water and gas masks. Or simply fake a seizure. Anything, sweet, anything at all to rid yourself of that intimacy they plan to lay on you like a slab of cement.”

“You won’t say anything?” she asked.

For the record, I did consider telling her Dad was riddled with smallpox, that I had to race to his bedside to hear his humble and heartfelt Final Words. But in the end, I found myself nodding, the unavoidable human response when someone asks if you’d like to hear a secret.

“When Jade was thirteen, she ran away from home,” she said, waiting for a moment, letting those words land somewhere in the darkness on the other side of the room before continuing.

“From what she told me, she was raised to be a very rich, spoiled girl. Her father gave her everything. But he was the worst kind of hypocrite — he was from oil money, so he had the blood and suffering of thousands on his hands, and her mother”—Hannah raised her shoulders, shivered theatrically—“well, I don’t know if you’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting her, but she’s someone who doesn’t bother to get dressed. She wears a bathrobe in the middle of the day. Anyway, Jade had a best friend growing up — she told me this — a beautiful girl, fragile. They were like sisters. She could confide in her, tell her everything under the sun — you know, the kind of friend everyone wants but never has — for the life of me, I can’t remember her name. What was it? Something elegant. Anyway”—she flicked ashes off her cigarette—“she was considered problematic. Was caught stealing for the third or fourth time. She was going to be sent to a juvenile detention center. So she ran away. Made it all the way to San Francisco. Can you imagine? Jade? Atlanta to San Francisco — she was in Atlanta at the time, before her parents divorced. That’s twenty-nine-hundred miles. She hitchhiked with truckers and families she encountered at rest stops and was finally picked up by the police at a drug store — Lord’s Drugstore, I think it was. Of all names, Lord’s Drugstore.” Hannah smiled and exhaled, the smoke tripping over itself. “She said it changed the course of her life. Those six days.”

She paused for a moment. The living room seemed to have sunk a few inches deeper into the ground, weighed down with the story.

As she’d started to speak, her voice weirdly relentless, trudging its way through the words, instantly my head switched off the lights and film-reeled: I saw Jade in grainy twilight (tight jeans, umbrella-thin) marching determinedly through the weedy junk along a highway — one in Texas or New Mexico — her gold hair ignited by the headlights, her face red from the unblinking eyes of the cars. But then, when I barreled past her in my mental eighteen-wheeler, I looked back and saw with surprise, it wasn’t Jade: only a girl that looked like her. Because “hitchhiked with truckers” didn’t sound like her and neither did the “beautiful, fragile” friend. Dad said it took a certain, rare revolutionary spirit to abandon “one’s home and family, however bleak the conditions, and hurtle oneself into the unknown.” Sure, every now and then, Jade slipped into handicapped stalls with hombres taking their fashion Must Haves off of Wanted posters, got so drunk her head hung from her shoulders like a squirt of glue, but for the girl to take such a chance, a running leap into the air and not be sure where she’d land, if she’d even make it to the other side — it seemed unbelievable. Of course, no detailed history of a human being could be laughed at or dismissed out of hand: “Never presume to know what a person is, was, or will be capable of,” Dad said.

“Leulah was in a similar situation,” Hannah continued. “Ran away with her math teacher when she was thirteen, too. She said he was handsome and passionate. In his late twenties. Mediterranean. I want to say Turkish. She thought she was in love. They made it all the way to — where was it…Florida, I think, before he was arrested.” She took a long drag on her cigarette, letting the smoke drool out of her mouth as she talked on. “This was at her school before St. Gallway, somewhere in South Carolina. Anyway, Charles was a ward of a state for most of his life. His mom was a prostitute, junkie — the usual fare. No dad. Finally, he was adopted. Nigel, too. Both of his parents are in a Texas prison for killing a police officer. I can’t remember the exact circumstances. But they shot him dead.”

She raised her chin, staring at the cigarette smoke cowering above the lamp. It seemed deathly afraid of Hannah — as I was, in that moment. I was afraid of her tone of voice, which threw out these secrets impatiently as if she’d been forced to play a dull game of horseshoes.

“It’s kind of funny,” she continued (and she must have sensed my alarm because her voice was now pasteled, the harsher edges shaded with fingertips), “the moments on which life hinges. I think growing up you always imagine your life — your success — depends on your family and how much money they have, where you go to college, what sort of job you can pin down, starting salary.” Her lips curled into a laugh before there was sound. (She’d been poorly dubbed.) “But it doesn’t, you know. You wouldn’t believe this, but life hinges on a couple of seconds you never see coming. And what you decide in those few seconds determines everything from then on. Some people pull the trigger and it all explodes in front of them. Other people run away. And you have no idea what you’ll do until you’re there. When your moment comes, Blue, don’t be afraid. Do what you need to do.”

She pulled herself upright, swung her bare feet onto the carpet, stared at her hands. They sat on each leg crumpled and useless like Dad’s discarded lecture beginnings. A piece of her hair had fallen over her left eye, turning her into a pirate, and she didn’t bother tucking it behind her ear.

Meanwhile, my heart was trying to crawl into my mouth. I didn’t know if it was right to passively sit there, listening to these awful skin-and-bones confessions, or to try to run for it, scramble to the door, fling it open with the force of Scipio Africanus when he ruthlessly sacked Carthage, sprinting to the truck, taking off into the pillaged night, gravel flying, tires wailing like captives. But where would I go? Back to Dad, like some president’s middle initial no one remembered, like some day in History on which nothing groundbreaking occurred apart from a few Catholic missionaries arriving in the Amazon and a minor native uprising in the East.