Special Topics in Calamity Physics (11 page)

"I know who
you
are," he said. "Blue something. Don't tell me — "

"What on earth is that
hubbub
in the back there?"

Charles jerked back in his seat. I turned.

A stocky woman with sour orange hair—the same person who'd glowered at Dad shouting Byron when he dropped me off—had replaced Havermeyer on the auditorium stage. Wearing a turnip-pink suit that strained like a weight lifter to remain buttoned, she stared up at me with her arms crossed and legs planted firmly apart resembling Diagram 11.23, "Classic Turkish Warrior during the Second Crusade" in one of Dad's favorite texts,
For the Love of God: History of Religious War and Persecution
(Murgg, 1981). And she wasn't the only one staring. All sound had been sucked out of Love Auditorium. Heads were turned toward me like a troop of Seljuk Turks noticing a lone, unwitting Christian taking a shortcut through their camp on his way to Jerusalem.

"You must be a new student," she said into the microphone. Her voice sounded like amplified heel scuffs along pavement. "Allow me to let you in on a little secret. What's your name?"

I hoped it was a figurative question, one I might not be expected to answer, but she was waiting.

"Blue," I said.

She made a face. "What? What did she say?"

"She said
blue,"
someone said.

"Blue?
Well,
Blue,
at this school, when people take the stage, we give them the respect they deserve. We pay
attention."

Perhaps I need not point out that I was not accustomed to being stared at, not by an entire school. The Jane Goodall was accustomed to doing all the staring, always in solitude and always from a location of dense foliage, which made her in her khaki shorts and linen blouse virtually indistinguishable from the bamboo canopy. My heart stuttered as I stared back at all the eyes. Slowly, they began to peel off me like eggs on a wall.

"As I was saying. There are critical changes in the Add-Drop Deadlines and I will not make exceptions for anyone. I don't care how many Godiva chocolates you bring me —I'm talking to
you,
Maxwell. I ask you be on time when you make decisions about coursework, and I mean it."

"Sorry about that," Charles whispered behind me. "I should've warned you. Eva Brewster, you want to lie low around her. Everyone calls her Evita. It's a bit of a dictator situation. Technically, though, she's only a secretary."

The woman —Eva Brewster—dismissed the school to class.

"Now listen, I wanted to ask you something—hey, wait a sec — !"

I darted past Mozart, pushing my way to the end of the row and into the aisle. Charles managed to keep up with me.

"Hold on." He smiled. "Dang, you're really gung ho about classes— typical A personality, sheesh—but, uh, seeing how you're brand
new,
a few of my friends and I were hoping . . ." He was apparently talking to me, but his eyes were already floating up the stairs to the EXIT. Goodnight Moons all had heliumed eyes. They could never be tied to anyone for long. "We were hoping you'd have lunch with us. We snagged a pass to go off campus. So don't go to the cafeteria. Meet us at the Scratch. 12:15." He l
^ean
ed in, his face inches from mine: "And don't be late, or there'll be serious consequences. Understand?" He winked and dashed away.

I stood for a moment in the aisle, unable to move until kids started pushing against my backpack and I was forced up the stairs. I had no idea how Charles knew my name. I
did,
however, know exactly why he'd rolled out the red carpet: he and his friends were hoping I'd join their Study Group. I'd toiled through a long history of Study Group invites extended by everyone from the Almond-Eyed Football Hero Who'd Have a Son by Senior Year to the Rita Hayworth Sunday Newspaper Coupon Model. I used to be
thrilled
when I was asked to join a Study Group, and when I arrived at the designated living room equipped with note cards, highlighters, red pens, and supplemental textbooks, I was euphoric as any Chorus Girl who'd been asked to understudy the Lead. Even Dad was excited. As he drove me to Brad's, or Jeb's or Sheena's, he'd start muttering about this being a wonderful opportunity, one that would allow me to spread my Dorothy Parker wings and singlehandedly spearhead a contemporary Algonquin Round Table.

Once he dropped me off, though, it didn't take long to realize I hadn't been invited for my scathing wit. If Carla's living room was the Vicious Circle, I was the waiter everyone ignored unless they wanted another scotch or there was something wrong with the food. Somehow, one of them had discovered I was a "geek" (a "cardigan" at Coventry Academy), and I'd be assigned to research one out of every two questions on the Study Sheet, sometimes the entire Study Sheet.

"Let her do that one, too. You don't mind do you, Blues?"

The turning point came at Leroy's. Right in the middle of his living room crowded with porcelain Dalmatian miniatures, I started to cry—though I didn't know why I decided to cry on
that
particular occasion; Leroy, Jessica and Schyler had only assigned me one out of every
four
questions on the Study Sheet. They began to chant in high-pitched, saccharine voices, "Oh, my God, what's
wrong?"
causing the three live Dalmatians to run into the living room, circling and barking, and Leroy's mother emerged from the kitchen wearing pink dishwashing gloves shouting, "Leroy, I told you not to egg them on!" I ran out of the house, all the way home, about six miles. Leroy never returned my supplemental textbooks.

"So how do you know Charles?" asked Sal Mineo next to me as we reached the glass doors.

"I don't know Charles," I said.

"Well, you're lucky because everyone wants to know him."

"Why?"

Sal looked troubled, then shrugged and said in a soft, regretful voice: "He's royalty." Before I could ask what that meant, he skipped down the cement steps and disappeared into the crowd. Sal Mineos were always talking in spongy voices and making comments that were as vague as the outline of an angora sweater. Their eyes weren't like everyone else's but had enlarged tear glands and extra optic nerves. I thought about hurrying after him, letting him know by the end of the movie he'd be acknowledged as a character of great sensitivity and pathos, an archetype of all that was lost and injured about his generation, but would be gunned down by trigger-happy police if he wasn't careful, if he didn't come to an understanding about himself and who he was.

Instead, I'd spotted the royal: Prince Charles, backpack slung over his shoulder, a playful grin, was striding quickly across the courtyard toward a tall, dark-haired girl wearing a long brown wool coat. He snuck up behind her, threw his arm around her neck with an "Ah-haahhhh!" She shrieked, and then, when he jumped in front of her, laughed. It was one of those chime-laughs that knifed cleanly through the morning, through the tired muttering of all the other kids, hinting this person had never known embarrassment or awkwardness, that even her grief would be gorgeous in the off chance she ever experienced it. Obviously, this was his dazzling girlfriend, and they were one of those tan, hair-tossing
Blue Lagoon
couples (one per every high school) who threatened to destroy the bedrock of the chaste educational community simply by the muggy way they looked at each other in the halls.

Students observed them with wonder, like they were fast-sprouting pinto beans in a clammy covered aquarium. Teachers —not all, but some—stayed awake all night hating them, because of their weird grown-up youth, which was like gardenias blooming in January, and their beauty, which was both stunning and sad as racehorses, and their love everyone except them knew wouldn't last. I deliberately stopped staring (you'd seen one version of
Blue Lagoon,
you'd seen them all), but when I'd walked to Hanover and pulled open the side door, I nonchalantly glanced back in their direction and realized with shock, I'd made a major blunder in observation.

Charles now stood at a respectful distance (though the look on his face was still like a kitten staring at string) and she was talking to him with a teacherly frown (a frown all decent teachers mastered; Dad had one that instantly turned his forehead into rippled potato chips). She wasn't a student. In fact, I had no idea how I, given that stance, could possibly have mistaken her for one. A hand on her hip, chin tilted as if trying to make out a falcon circling above the Commons, she wore brown leather boots that resembled Italy and dug the heel of one into the pavement, grinding out an invisible cigarette.

It was Hannah Schneider.

When Dad was in a Bourbon Mood, he'd make a five-minute toast to old Benno Ohnesorg, shot by Berlin police at a student rally in 1967. Dad, nineteen years old, was next to him: "He was standing on my shoelace when he went down. And my life—asinine things I'd wasted time worrying about—my marks, my standing, my
girl
—it all congealed when I looked into his dead eyes." Here, Dad fell silent and sighed (though it wasn't so much a sigh as a Herculean exhale one could use to play a bagpipe). I could smell the alcohol, a strange hot smell, and when I was little I guessed it was what the Romantic poets smelled of, or those nineteenth-century Latin generals Dad enjoyed talking about who "surfed in and out of power on waves of revolution and resistance juntas."

"And that was my Bolshevik moment, so to speak," he said. "When I decided to storm the Winter Palace. If you're lucky, you'll have one."

And every now and then, after Benno, Dad might go on to expound upon one of his most beloved principles, that of the Life Story, but only if he didn't have a lecture to compose, or wasn't midway through a chapter in a new book on war written by someone he'd known at Harvard. (He'd dissect it like a gung-ho coroner hoping to find evidence of foul play: "Here it is, sweet! Evidence Lou Swann's a hack! Counterfeit! Listen to this dung! 'In order to be successful, revolutions require a highly visible armed force to unleash widespread panic; this violence must then gain momentum, escalating into out-and-out civil war.' Fool wouldn't know civil war if it bit him on the ass!")

"Everyone is responsible for the page-turning tempo of his or her Life Story," Dad said, scratching his jaw thoughtfully, arranging the limp collar of his chambray shirt. "Even if you have your Magnificent Reason, it could still be dull as Nebraska and that's no one's fault but your own. Well, if you feel it's miles of cornfields, find something to believe in other than yourself, preferably

a cause without the stench of hypocrisy, and then charge into battle. There's a reason they still put Che Guevara on T-shirts, why people
still
whisper about The Nightwatchmen when there's been no evidence of their existence for twenty years.

"But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone
else
s story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on
your
story. Reworking it. Making it better. Increasing the scale, the depth of content, the universal themes. And I don't care what those themes are—they're yours to uncover and stand behind—so long as, at the very least, there is courage. Guts.
Mut,
in German. Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last."

"How do you know?" I always asked, and when I spoke it sounded tiny and uncertain, compared to Dad. "I just know," he said simply, and then closed his eyes, which indicated that he didn't want to talk anymore. The only sound in the room was the ice melting his glass.

VII

Les Liaisons Dangereuses

Knowing that Charles was on familiar terms with Hannah Schneider tempted me a little, but in the end I decided not to meet him at the Scratch.

I didn't have a clue what the Scratch was and didn't have time to care. I was, after all, weighed down with six AP courses ("Enough to sink a fleet of USS Anythings," Dad said) and only a single free period. My professors had shown themselves to be sharp, methodical, altogether on the ball (not "entirely in the outhouse," as Dad described Mrs. Roper of Meadowbrook Middle who boldly brought a grand finale to her every sentence with a preposition: "Where's your copy of
The Aeneid
at?"). Most of them had perfectly respectable vocabularies (Ms. Simpson of AP Physics used
ersatz
within fifteen minutes of the bell) and one, namely Ms. Martine Filobeque of AP French, had Permanently Pursed Lips, which could present a serious threat as the year unfolded. "The enduring pursed lip, a trait associated exclusively with the female educator, is a sign of erratic academic anger," Dad said. "I'd think seriously about flowers, candy—anything to get yourself associated in her mind with all that's right in the world, rather than all that's wrong."