Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“What is this stuff?” asked Eva, moving to examine the fourth box, jutting out her chin.

“Just some bugs.” I was standing right behind her. Gray lint balls pimpled the sides of her white wool jacket. A strand of her sulphur orange hair swerved into a? on her left shoulder. If we’d been in a film noir it would’ve been the moment I jammed a pistol into her back through the pocket of my trench coat and said, through teeth: “Make a funny move and I’ll blow you from here to next Tuesday.”

“I don’t like this kinda thing,” she said. “Gives me the creeps.”

“How’d you meet my dad?” I asked as cheerfully as I could.

She turned around, narrowing her eyes. They really were an incredible color: the softest blue-violet in all the world, so pure, it actually seemed cruel to make it witness this scene.

“He didn’t tell you?” she asked suspiciously.

I nodded. “I think he did. I just can’t remember.”

She stepped away from the cases and bent over Dad’s desk to scrutinize his desk calendar (stuck in May 1998) covered with his illegible scrawl.

“I’m the type of person who stays professional,” she said. “A lot of the other teachers don’t. Some father comes by, tells them he likes their teaching style and suddenly they’re in the throes of some cheap romance. And I tell them over and over, you’re meeting at lunch hours, you’re driving by his house in the middle of the night — you really think it’s going to turn into something cute? Then your dad comes along. He wasn’t fooling anyone. The average woman, sure. But me? I knew he was a fraud. That’s the funny thing, I knew , but I didn’t know, you know what I mean? Because he also had such a heart. I’ve never been one of those romantic types. But suddenly I thought I could save him. Only you can’t save a fraud.”

With her long fingernails (painted the pink of kitten noses) she was riffling through Dad’s mug of pens. She picked one out — his favorite actually, an 18-carat gold Mont Blanc, a good-bye gift from Amy Pinto, one present from a June Bug he’d actually liked. Eva turned it in her fingers, sniffing it like a cigar. She put it in her purse.

“You can’t take that,” I said, horrified.

“If you don’t win Hollywood Squares , you still get a consolation prize.”

I couldn’t breathe. “Maybe you’d be more comfortable in the living room,” I suggested. “He’ll be home”—I looked at my watch and to my panic it was only nine-thirty—“in a few minutes. I can make you some tea. I think we have some Whitman’s chocolates—”

“Tea, huh? How civilized. Tea. That’s something he would say.” She threw me a look. “You should watch that, you know. Because sooner or later we all turn into our parents. Poof. ”

She slumped down into Dad’s office chair, pulled open a drawer and started to page through the legal pads.

“Won’t know what hit…‘Interrelationships Between Domestic and International Politics from Greek Site-Cit — City States to the Present-Day.’” She frowned. “You get any of this crap? I had a good time with the guy, but mostly I thought what he said was a load of dung. ‘Quantitative methods.’ ‘The role of external powers in peacekeeping processes—’”

“Ms. Brewster?”

“Yeah.”

“What are your…plans?”

“Making it up as I go along. Where’d you move from, anyway? He was always fuzzy about it. Fuzzy about a lot of things—”

“I don’t mean to be rude, but I think I might have to call the police.”

She threw the legal pads back in the drawer, hard, and looked at me. If her eyes had been buses I’d have been run over. If they’d been guns I’d have been shot dead. I found myself wondering — ridiculously — if she perhaps had a gun on her and perhaps she wasn’t afraid to use it. “You really think that’s a good idea?” she asked.

“No,” I admitted.

She cleared her throat. “Poor Mirtha Grazeley, you know, crazy as a dog struck by lightning, but pretty organized when it comes to that Admissions Office. Poor Mirtha came back to school on Monday. Last term. Found her place not as she’d left it but with a couple of moved chairs and messy seat cushions, a liter of eggnog gone. It also looked like someone had lost her cookies in the bathroom. Not pretty. I know it wasn’t a professional job because the vandal left her shoes behind. Black. Size 9. Dolce & Gabbana. Not a lot of kids can afford the hoity-toity stuff. So I narrow it down to the big donors’ kids, Atlanta types who let their kids run around in the Mercedes. I cross-reference that with the kids who went to the dance and come up with a list of suspects that, surprisingly, ain’t all that long. But I have a conscience, you know. I’m not one of those people who get a kick out of wrecking some kid’s future. It’d be sad. From what I hear the Whitestone girl has enough problems. Might not graduate.”

I couldn’t speak for a moment. The hum of the house was audible. As a child, some of our house hums were so loud, I used to think an invisible glee club had gathered in the walls, wearing burgundy choir robes, mouths open in earnest Os, chanting all night and all day.

“Why were you calling out my name?” I managed to ask. “At the dance—”

She looked surprised. “You heard me?”

I nodded.

“I thought I saw you two running toward Loomis.” She made an odd “rumph” sound and shrugged. “Just wanted to chew the fat. Talk about your dad. Kinda like we’re doing now. Not that there’s much to say anymore. Jig is up. I know who he is. Thinks he’s God, but really, he’s just a small…”

I thought she was going to stop there, at the searing declaration, “He’s just a small,” but then she ended it, her voice soft.

“A small little man.”

She was silent, crossing her arms, tipping back in Dad’s office chair. Even though Dad himself had warned me, one should never take notice of the words that barged out of an irate person’s mouth, I still hated what she said. I noticed too, it was the cruelest thing to say about a person — that they were small. I was only consoled by the fact that, in truth, all humans were small when one considered them in the Grand Scheme of Things, put them side by side with Time, the Universe. Even Shakespeare was small and Van Gogh — Leonard Bernstein too.

“Who is she?” Eva demanded suddenly. She should have been triumphant, having made all those groundbreaking assertions about Dad, but there was a discernible sprain in her voice.

I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“You don’t have to tell me who she is, but I’d appreciate it.”

She was obviously referring to Dad’s new girlfriend, but he didn’t have one — at least, not to my knowledge.

“I don’t think he’s seeing anyone, but I could ask him for you.”

“Fine,” she said, nodding. “I believe you. He’s good. I’d never know, never even suspect if I hadn’t been friends since second grade with Alice Steady who owns the Green Orchid on Orlando. ‘What’s the name of the guy you’re dating again?’ ‘Gareth.’ ‘Uh-huh,’ she says. Guess he came in, blue Volvo, used a credit card to buy a hundred bucks’ worth of flowers. Said no to Alice’s offer of free delivery. And that was sneaky, see — no delivery address, no evidence, right? And I know the flowers weren’t for himself because Alice said he asked for one of the little message cards. And from the look on your face, they weren’t for you either. Alice’s one of those romantic types, says no man buys a hundred bucks’ worth of barbaresco orientals for someone he isn’t madly in love with. Roses, sure. Every cheap piece of ass gets roses. But not barbaresco orientals. I’ll be the first to admit I was upset — I’m not one of those people who pretends they never cared in the first place, but then he started not returning my calls, sweeping me under the rug like I’m crumbs or something. Not that I care. I’m seeing someone else now. An optometrist. Divorced. His first wife I guess was a real clinker. Gareth can do whatever he wants with himself.”