Special Topics in Calamity Physics (20 page)

"A Shirley Temple," suggested Nigel with a smirk.

"A cosmo?" asked Leulah.

"There's milk in the fridge/' Nigel said, deadpan.

"A—a dirty martini would be quite nice. Thank you," I said. "Three olives, please."
Three Olives,Please:
it was what Eleanor Curd specified, the emerald-eyed heroine that caused men to shudder with hungry desire in A
Return to Waterfalls
(DeMurgh, 1990), pilfered from June Bug Rita Cleary's gold leather purse when I was twelve. ("Where's my book?" she repeated to Dad for days like a woman with mental illness who'd wandered away from her sanitarium. She searched our every couch, rug and closet, at times on her hands and knees, frantic to find out if Eleanor ended up with Sir Damien or they stayed apart because he believed she believed he believed he'd impregnated a vicious tattletale with an illegitimate child.)

As soon as Leulah handed me my martini, I was forgotten like Line 2 on

a Corporate Headquarters Switchboard. "So Hannah had a date tonight," Nigel said. "No, she didn't," said Charles, smiling, though he sat up imperceptibly

as if he'd felt the prick of a needle in his seat cushion. "She did," said Nigel. "I saw her after school. She was wearing red." "Oh, boy," said Jade exhaling cigarette smoke. They talked on and on about Hannah; Jade again said something about

Goodwill and "bourgeois pigs," words that startled me (I hadn't heard the phrase since Dad and I, driving across Illinois, read Angus Hubbard's
Acid Trips: The Delusionsof 60s Counterculture
[1989]) though I didn't know who or what she was referring to, because I found it impossible to focus on the conversation; it was like that cruel little blurry line at the bottom of an eye chart. And I didn't feel like myself. I was a swirl of Interstellar Material, a mist of Dark Matter, a case in point of General Relativity.

I stood up and tried to make my way to the door, but my legs felt as if

they were being asked to measure the universe.
^u
]esus"
said Jade from somewhere. "What's wrong with her?" The floor was transmitting in a wide array of wavelengths. "What'd you give her to drink?" Milton asked. "Nothing. A mudslinger."
"Told
you to give her milk," Nigel said. "I gave her a martini," added Leulah. Suddenly I was on the floor, gazing at the stars. "Is she going to die?" asked Jade. "We should take her to the hospital," Charles said. "Or call Hannah," said Lu.

"She's
fine."
Milton was leaning over me. His tendriled black hair resembled squid. "Let her sleep it off."

A tidal wave of nausea was starting to flood my stomach and there was nothing I could do to stop it. It was like the black seawater overtaking a crimson
Titanic
stateroom, as recounted in one of Dad's favorite autobiographies of all time, the gripping eyewitness account
Black in My Mind, Yellow in My Legs
(1943) by Herbert J. D. Lascowitz, who finally, in his ninety-seventh year, came clean about his Machiavellian behavior aboard the legendary ocean liner, admitting he strangled an unidentified woman, stripped her body, donned her clothes in order to pretend he was a woman with child, thereby securing a choice spot for himself on one of two remaining lifeboats. I tried to roll over and stand, but the carpet and the couch swerved upward and then, as shocking as lightning striking inches from my shoes, I was sick: cartoonishly sick all over the table and the carpet and the paisley couch by the fireplace and Jade's black leather Dior sandals, even on the coffee-table book,
Thank God for the Telephoto Lens: Backyard Photos of the Stars
(Miller, 2002). There were also small but identifiable splatters on the cuffs of Nigel's pants.

They stared at me.

And this, I am ashamed to say, is where memory abruptly drops off (see Figure 12, "Continental Shelf Cliff,"
Oceanic Terrain,
Boss, 1977)- I can recall only a few flimsy sentences ("What if her family presses charges?"), faces peering down at me as if I'd tumbled down a well.

Yet I don't really need a memory here, because that Sunday at Hannah's, when they were calling me Gag, Retch, Hurl and Olives, they each went to great lengths to give me their eyewitness account of what happened. According to Leulah, I passed out on the South Lawn. Jade claimed I'd muttered a phrase in Spanish, something along the lines of "E/
perro que no camina, no encuentra hueso,"
or "The dog that doesn't walk, doesn't find a bone," and then my eyes rolled into the back of my head and she thought I'd died. Milton said I got "nekkid." Nigel claimed I "partied like Tommy Lee during the Theater of Pain tour." Charles rolled his eyes when hearing these versions, these "gross distortions of the truth." He said I walked up to Jade and she and I began to make out in flawless reenactment of his favorite film, the cult masterpiece of French fetishist director, Luc-Shallot de la Nuit,
Les Salopes Vampires et Lesbiennes de Cherbourg
(Petit Oiseau Prod., 1971).

"Guys spend
whole lives
wishing to see that kind of thing, so thank you, Retch. Thank you."

"Sounds like you really enjoyed yourselves," Hannah said with a smile, her eyes glistening as she sipped her wine. "Don't tell me any more. It's not fit for a teacher's ears."

I could never decide which version I believed.

It was after I had a nickname that everything changed.

Dad said my mother, the woman who "left people holding their breaths in awe when she entered a room," always acted the same no matter who she talked to or where she was, and sometimes Dad couldn't tell when she answered the phone, if she was talking to "her childhood best friend from New York or a telemarketer, because she was so thrilled to hear from both." " 'Believe me, I'd be overjoyed to schedule a carpet cleaning—your product is obviously terrific—but I have to be honest, we don't actually have any carpets.' She could go on and on with apologies for hours," Dad said.

And I let her down, because I'll admit, I
did
act differently now that I was friends with them, now that Milton, immediately following Morning Announcements shouted "Retch!" and the entire courtyard of students looked ready to Stop, Drop and Roll. Not that overnight I morphed into, a tyrannical foulmouthed girl who'd started out in Chorus, and managed to claw her way to the Lead. But, strolling through first-floor Hanover with Jade Whitestone between third and fourth periods ("I'm bushed," Jade would sigh, hitching her elbow around my neck the way Gene Kelly does to a lamppost in
Singin in the Rain)
was an unforgivably paparazzi moment; I thought I understood, completely, what Hammond Brown, the actor in the 1928 Broadway hit
Happy Streets
(known throughout the Roaring Twenties simply as The Chin) meant when he said "a crowd's eyes have a touch like silk"
(Ovation,
1952, p. 269).

And at the end of the school day, when Dad picked me up and we fought about something, like my "tinseled" hair or a new slightly edgier essay I'd written —"Tupac: Portrait of a Modern Romantic Poet," on which I received a derisory B ("Your senior year of high school is not the time to suddenly become alternative, hip and cool.")—afterward, it was strange; before my friendship with the Bluebloods, after an argument with Dad, when I retreated to my room I'd always felt like a smudge; I couldn't perceive where I began and where I ended. But now, I felt as if I could still see myself, my outline—a thin, but perfectly respectable black line.

Ms. Gershon of AP Physics perceived the change too, if solely on the subconscious level. For example, when I first arrived at St. Gallway, whenever I raised my hand to ask a question in her class, she couldn't immediately make me out; I blended effortlessly with the lab tables, the windows, the poster of James Joule. Now, I only had to hold my hand up for three, maybe four seconds before her eyes snapped to me: "Yes, Blue?" It was the same with Mr. Archer—all delusions he'd entertained about my name were gone.
"Blue,"
he said, not with shakiness or unease, but supreme faith (similar to the tone he used for
Da Vinci).
And Mr. Moats, when he wandered over to my easel to inspect my Figure Drawing, his eyes almost always veered away from the drawing to my head, as if I were more worthy of scrutiny than a few wobbly lines on a page.

Sal Mineo noticed the difference too, and if
he
noticed, it had to be Agonizingly True.

"You should be careful," he said to me during Morning Announcements.

I glanced over at his intricate wrought-iron profile, his soggy brown eyes.

"I'm happy for you," he said, looking not at me but at the stage where Havermeyer, Eva Brewster and Hilary Leech were unveiling the new look of
The Gallway Gazette:
"A colored front page, advertisements," Eva was saying. Sal swallowed and his Adam's apple, which pushed against his neck like a metal coil in an old couch, trembled, rose and fell. "But they only hurt people."

"What are you talking about?" I asked, irritated by his ambiguity, but he didn't answer, and when Evita dismissed the school to class, he flew out of the aisle, quick as a wren off a lamppost.

The twins in my second period Study Hall, the Great Social Commentators of the Age, Eliaya and Georgia Hatchett (Nigel and Jade, who had them in a Spanish class, called them
Dee
for Tweedledee and
Dum
for Tweedledum, respectively) naturally had all kinds of dirt on my association with the Bluebloods. Before, they'd always gossiped messily about Jade and the others, their slurpy voices splattering all over each other and everyone else, but now they sat in the back, next to the water fountain and Hambone Reading Recommendations, carrying on in crackly, roast-potato whispers.

I ignored them for the most part, even when the words
blue
and
Shhh, she'll hearyou,
hissed over to me like a couple of Gaboon Vipers. But when I didn't have any homework to do, I asked Mr. Fletcher if I could be excused to the restroom and slipped into row 500 and then the densest section of row 900, Biography, where I repositioned some of the larger books from row 600 to the holes between the shelves, in order to avoid detection. (Librarian Hambone, if you're reading this, I apologize for the biweekly repositioning of

H. Gibbons' bulky
African Wildlife
[1989] from its proper place in the 650s to just above
Mommie Dearest
[Crawford, 1978] and
Notorious: My Years with Cary Grant
[Drake, 1989]. You weren't going mad.)

"So do you or don't you want to hear the icing, the cake, the double whammy, the Crown Jewel, the Jewel après orthodontia, the Madonna abs après hatha yoga"—she took a swift breath, swallowed—"the Ted Danson après hair plugs, the J-Lo avant
Gigli,
the Ben avant J-Lo but après psychiatric treatment for gambling, the Matt après—"

"You think you're like a blind bard and all?" asked Dum, glancing up from
Celebrastory Weekly.
"I don't
think
so."

"Okay, so Elena Topolos."

"Elena Topolos?"

"Mediterranean freshman who needs to wax that lip. She told me the

blue person's some weird autistic savant. Not only that, but we lost a man to her."

"What?"

"Hard Body. He's neurotic for her. It's already myth. Everyone on the soccer team calls him Aphrodite and he doesn't even care. He and the blue person have a class together and someone saw him digging through the garbage can to find a paper she threw away because she'd
touched
it."

"Whatever."

"He's asking her to Christmas formal."

"WHAT?" shrieked Dee.

Mr. Fletcher looked up from
The Crossword Fanatic's True Challenge

(Albo, 2002) and fired a disapproving glace at Dee and Dum. They were unfazed.

"Formal's like three months away," Dee said, wincing. "That's all a holy war in high school. People get pregnant, caught with pot, get a bad haircut so you find out it was their only decent feature and they have awful ears. It's
way
too soon to ask. Is he out of his
mind?"

Dee nodded. "He's
that
haunted. His ex, Lonny, is pissed. She vows she's gonna jihad her ass by the end of the year."

"Ouch."

Dad was fond of pointing out the rule of thumb that "at times, even fools are right," but I was still surprised when, a day later, as I collected books from my locker, I noticed a kid from my AP Physics class passing me not once, but three times, faux-frowning at some giant hardback open in his hands, which I realized the second time he passed was our class textbook,
Fundamentals of Physics
(Rarreh & Cherish, 2004). I assumed he was waiting for Allison Vaughn, the sedate yet mildly popular senior with a locker near mine who wandered around with a wan smile and polite hair, but when I slammed my locker door, he was behind me.

"Hi," he said. I’m Zach."

"Blue." I spasm-swallowed.