Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“Say the first thing that comes into your head—”

“Blue van Meer!” I blurted.

It slipped out like a big catfish. I froze. I prayed no one had heard me, that it’d swum into the air, far ahead of everyone’s ears.

“Hannah Schneider!” shouted Hannah.

“Nigel Creech!”

“Jade Churchill Whitestone!”

“Milton Black!”

“Leulah Jane Maloney!”

“Doris Richards my fifth-grade teacher with the incredible tits!”

“Hell yeah!”

“You don’t have to be lewd to be passionate. Dare to be real. To be serious.”

“Never listen to the awful things people say about you because they’re jealous!” Leulah pushed her hair out of her tiny, demure face. She had tears in her eyes. “One — one must persevere despite great adversity! One can never give up!”

“Don’t just be that way here,” Hannah said to us. She pointed at the mountains. “Be that way down there.”

The remaining hike to Sugartop Summit (now a disturbing dotted line on our keyless map) took another two hours and Hannah told us we needed to pick up the pace if we wanted to get there before dark.

As we walked, the light weakening, bony pines crowding closer and closer around us, Hannah again became engrossed in a private conversation, this time with Milton. She walked very close to him ( so close that, at certain moments, she with her great blue backpack and he with his red one collided at the shoulders like bumper cars). He nodded at something she said, his large frame hunched down on the side where she walked, as if she were causing him to erode.

I knew how complimentary it could feel when Hannah talked to you, when she singled you out — opened your meek cover, boldly creased the spine, stared inside at your pages, searching for the point at which she’d stopped reading, anxious to find out what happens next. (She always read with great concentration, so you thought you were her favorite paperback until she abruptly put you down and started to read another with the same intensity.)

Twenty minutes later, Hannah was talking to Charles. They broke into screechy seagull laughter; she touched his shoulder, pulling him to her, their arms and hands for a moment entwined.

“Aren’t they the happy couple,” said Jade.

Not fifteen minutes later, Hannah was walking next to Nigel (I could tell from his lowered head and sideways glances, he was listening to her a little uneasily), and soon, she was in front of me talking to Jade.

Naturally, I assumed she’d eventually move back to talk to me, that this was a Hannah — Student Conference, and I, bringing up the rear, was the last on the list. But when they finished their conversation — Hannah was encouraging Jade to apply for a summer internship at The Washington Post (“Remember to be kind to yourself,” I also heard her say) — she whispered something more, gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, and then hurried to the front of our procession without so much as a glance in my direction.

“Okay! Don’t worry, guys!” she shouted. “We’re almost there!”

I was a mixture of indignation and melancholy by the time we reached Sugartop Summit. One tries not to pay attention to blatant favoritism (“Not everyone can be a member of the Van Meer Fan Club,” noted Dad), but when it is so unashamedly flung in one’s face, one can’t help but feel hurt, as if everyone else gets to be pine needles, but one is forced to be sap. Mercifully, the others didn’t realize she hadn’t talked to me, and so when Jade threw her backpack to the ground, stretched her arms over her head, a big smile sunseting her face and said, “She really knows what to say, you know what I mean? Amazing, ” I admit I lied; I nodded in emphatic agreement and said, “She does.”

“Let’s try to get the tents up first,” Hannah said. “I’ll help with the first one. But go take a look at that view! You’ll be speechless!”

Despite Hannah’s patent enthusiasm, this campground I found dreary and anticlimactic, especially after the sprawling majesty of Abram’s Peak. Sugartop Summit comprised a circular dirt clearing flanked by mangy pines, and a blackened campfire where a few logs had recently burned, soft and gray around their edges like the muzzles of old dogs. Off to the right, beyond a cluster of boulders, was a bald rock ledge, narrow as a nearly closed door, where one could sit and spy on a naked, purplish mountain range sleeping under a shabby bedspread of fog. By now, the sun had drained away. Runny oranges and yellows clogged the horizon.

“Someone was here five minutes ago,” said Leulah.

I turned from the lookout point. She was standing in the middle of the clearing, pointing at the ground.

“What?” asked Jade next to her.

I walked over to them.

“Look.”

In front of the toe of her boot was a cigarette butt.

“It was burning three seconds ago.”

Crouching down, Jade picked it up as one picks up a dead goldfish. Carefully, she sniffed it.

“You’re right,” she said, throwing it on the ground. “I can smell it. Great. All we need. Some mountain scab waiting for nightfall to come fuck us all in the ass.”

“Hannah!” shouted Lu. “We have to get out of here!”

“What’s wrong?” asked Hannah.

Jade pointed at the cigarette butt.

“This is a very popular place to camp,” Hannah said.

“But it was burning,” Leulah said, her eyes saucered. “That’s how I saw it. It was orange. Someone’s here. Watching us.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“But none of us were smoking,” said Jade.

“It’s fine. It was probably a hiker stopping for a rest on his way up the trail. Don’t worry about it.” Hannah strolled back over to Milton, Charles and Nigel, who were trying to set up the tents.

“It’s all such a joke to her,” said Jade.

“We have to leave,” said Leulah.

“That’s what I’ve been saying from the beginning,” said Jade, walking away. “Would anyone listen to me? No. I was the killjoy. The wet blanket.”

“Hey,” I said to Leulah, smiling. “I’m sure it’s okay.”

“Really?”

Despite having no evidence to back up my claim, I nodded.

Half an hour later, Hannah was starting a campfire. The rest of us were sitting on the bald rock eating rigatoni with Newman’s Own Fra Diavolo tomato sauce, heated up on the ministove, and French bread hard as igneous rock. We faced the view, even though there was nothing to see but a cauldron of darkness, a dark blue sky. The sky was a little nostalgic; it didn’t want to let go of the last frayed streak of light.

“What would happen if you fell off this rock thing?” asked Charles.

“You’d die,” said Jade through pasta.

“There’s no sign or anything. No ‘Please Remain Alert.’ No ‘Bad Place to Get Wasted.’ It’s just there. You fall? Too damn bad.”

“Is there any more parmesan cheese?”

“Wonder why it’s called Sugartop Summit,” said Milton.

“Yeah, who cooks up the lame names?” asked Jade, chewing.

“Rural folk,” said Charles.

“The best part is the quiet,” said Nigel. “You never notice how loud everything is until you’re up here.”

“I feel sorry for the Native Americans,” said Milton.

“Read Redfoot’s Dispossessed, ” I said.

“I’m still hungry,” said Jade.

“How’re you still hungry?” asked Charles. “You ate more than everyone. You commandeered the hot pot.”

“I didn’t commandeer anything.”

“Thank God I didn’t go in for seconds. You probably would’ve bitten my hand off.”