Special Topics in Calamity Physics (34 page)

Jade stood up with the pitcher, banging the door closed with her foot.

"It's Mirtha Grazeley, who everyone knows is the Mad freakin' Hatter. Who'll listen to her if she croaks there's something missing? Besides. Most people just aren't that organized. Isn't that what
you
said the other
soir,
'no method to the madness' and such?" She opened one of the cabinets and took out two glasses. "All I'm saying is that I happen to think Hannah got
rid
of the man like I happen to know my mother's the Loch Ness Monster. Or Bigfoot. I haven't decided what monster she is but I'm positive she's one of the big ones."

"What was her motive then?" I asked. ("In my opinion," said Curry, "it is also a very useful achievement to make certain the speaker remains on course, does not skirt around what he knows, prattling on about latchkeys and boilers.")

"Monsters don't need a motive. They're monsters so they just—"

"I mean Hannah."

She looked at me, exasperated. "You don't get it, do you? No one
needs
a motive in this day and age. People look for motives and such because they're afraid of like, total chaos. But motives are out like clogs. The truth is, some people just like to execute, like some people have a thing for ski bums with moles all over like God spilled peppercorns or paralegals with full-sleeve tattoos."

"Then why him?"

"Who?"

"Smoke Harvey," I said. "Why him and not me, for example?"

She made a sarcastic
Ha
sound as she handed me the glass and sat down. "I don't know if you're aware of it but Hannah's completely obsessed with you. It's like you're her freaking lost
child.
I mean, we knew about you before you even freaking showed up at this place. It was so freaking weird."

My heart stopped. "What are you talking about?"

Jade sniffed. "Well, you met her at that shoe store, correct?"

I nodded.

"Well, like, immediately after that, or maybe even the day
of,
she was talking on and on about this Blue person who was so amazing and wonderful and we'd have to become friends with you or like,
die.
Like you were the fucking Second Coming. She still acts that way. When you're not around she's always, 'Where's Blue, anyone seen Blue?' Blue, Blue, Blue, for Christ sake. But it's not just you. She has all kinds of abnormal fixations. Like the animals and the furniture. All those men in Cottonwood. Sex for her's like shaking hands. And Charles. She's completely fucked him up and doesn't even realize it. She thinks she's doing all of us a big favor by being friends with us, educating us or whatever—"

I swallowed. "Something really did happen between Charles and Hannah?"

"Hel/o? Of course. I'm like,
ninety
percent positive. Charles won't tell anyone a thing, not even Black, because she's brainwashed him. But last year? Lu and I went to pick him up and we found him crying like I'd never seen a person cry in my whole life. His face was screwed up like this." She demonstrated. "He'd had a tantrum. The whole house was destroyed. He'd thrown paintings, attacked the wallpaper—huge chunks ripped right off the walls. We found him crying in a little ball by the TV. There was a knife on the floor, too, and we were afraid he was going to try to commit suicide or something—"

"He didn't, did he?" I asked quickly.

She shook her head. "No. But I think the reason he was freaking out was that Hannah told him they'd have to stop. Or who knows, maybe it just happened the one time. I mean, it was
probably
an accident. I don't think she set out to fuck him up, but she definitely did something, because he's not himself anymore. I mean, you should have seen him last year, the year before. He was amazing. This really happy person everyone loved. Now he's always pissed off."

She took a long drink of the eggnog. The darkness hardened her profile so her face looked like one of the colossal decorative jade masks Dad and I observed in the Olmec Room at the Garber Natural History Museum in Artesia, New Mexico. " The Olmec people were a singularly artistic civilization, deeply intrigued by the human face,' " Dad read grandly from the printed explanation on the wall. " 'They believed that though the voice often lies, the face itself is never deceitful.' "

"If you really think these things about Hannah," I managed to say, "how can you spend time with her?"

"I know. It's weird." She scrunched her mouth to one side, thinking. "I guess she's like crack." She sighed, hugging her shins. "It's a mint chocolate chip ice cream thing."

"What does that mean?" I asked, when she didn't immediately elaborate.

"Well." She tilted her head. "Have you ever felt that you loved,
loved
mint chocolate chip? That it was always your favorite flavor over every other in the entire world? But then one day you hear Hannah going on and on about butter pecan. Butter pecan this and butter pecan that and then you find yourself ordering butter pecan all the time. And you realize you like butter pecan best. That you probably liked it all along and just hadn't known." She was quiet for a moment. "You never eat mint chocolate chip again."

At this point, I felt as if I was drowning in the shadowed floats and the holdfasts and the Blood Henry Starfish clinging to the overhead lamp, but I told myself to take a deep breath, remember I couldn't believe all or any of what she said —not necessarily. Much of what Jade swore by, when she was drunk or sober, could be trapdoors, quicksand, trompe l'oeil, the hoax of light as it speeds through the air at a variety of temperatures.

I'd made the mistake of taking her words at face value for the first and last time when she confided to me how much she "hated" her mother, was "dying" to go live with her father, a judge in Atlanta, who was "decent" (despite having run off some four years prior with a woman she simply referred to as Meathead Marcy, about whom little was known, except that she was a paralegal with full-sleeve tattoos) and then, not fifteen minutes later, I watched her pick up the phone to call her mother, who was still in Colorado, happily trapped in some avalanche of a love affair with the ski instructor.

"But when are you coming home? I hate being looked after by Morella. I need you for my proper emotional development," she said tearfully, before noticing me, shouting, "What the fuck are
you
looking at?" and slamming the door in my face.

Though lovable (her signature tic, that absentminded way of blowing her hair out of her face couldn't be surpassed in charm by Audrey Hepburn), also blessed with the enviable properties of a mink coat—graceful, unreasonable and impractical no matter what she was draped over, whether it be couches or people (a quality that didn't diminish even when she was marginally torn and tatty, as she was now)—Jade was nevertheless one of those people whose personality proved to be the bane of modern mathematicians. She was neither a flat nor a solid shape. She showed no symmetry at all. Trigonometry, Calculus and Statistics all proved useless. Her Pie Chart was a muddle of arbitrary wedges, her Line Graph, the silhouette of the Alps. And just when one listed her under Chaos Theory—Butterfly Effects, Weather Predictions, Fractals, Bifurcation diagrams and whatnot—she showed up as an equilateral triangle, sometimes even a square.

Now she was on the floor with her filthy feet over her head, demonstrating a Pilâtes exercise that she explained, "made more blood flow along the spinal cord." (Somehow this translated into living longer.) I downed my glass of egg-nog.

"I say we go to her classroom," she said in a keyed-up whisper. She swung her skinny legs back onto the carpet in the fast, violent movement of a guillotine. "We could take a look around. I mean, it's not completely insane to imagine that she'd keep evidence in her classroom."

"Evidence of
what?"
"I told you. Murder. She killed that Smoke person." I took a deep breath. "Criminals put things where people are the least likely to look, right?"

she asked. "Well, who'd think to look in her classroom?" "We would." "We find something? Then we
know.
Not that it means anything. I

mean, giving her the benefit of the doubt, maybe Smoke had it coming to

him. Maybe he clubbed seals." "Jade — " "We don't find anything? Who cares? No harm, no foul." "We
cannot
go to her classroom." "Why not?" "Any number of reasons. One, we might get caught and kicked out of

school. Two, it makes no logical sense— "

"Oh, fuck off!"
she shouted.
"Can you forget your fucking stellar college career for once and have a good time? You're a fucking drag!"
She looked furious, but then almost immediately, the anger slipped off her face. She sat up, an inchworm smile. "Just
think,
Olives," she whispered. "We have a higher cause. Undercover investigations. Recon work. We could end up on the
news.
We could be America's fucking sweethearts."

I stared at her. " 'Once more unto the breach, dear friends/ " I said. "Good. Now help me find my shoes."

Ten minutes later, we were scurrying down the hall. Hanover had an old accordion floor, wheezing flat notes with every step. We pushed open the door, rushed down the hollow stairwell, outside into the cold, down the sidewalk trickling in front of the courtyard and Love. Stalactites of shadow grew around us, making Jade and me instinctively pretend we were nineteenth-century schoolgirls pursued by Count Dracula. We shivered and leaned into each other tightly, pretzeling our arms. We began to run, her hair splashing against my bare shoulder and face.

Dad once noted (somewhat morbidly, I thought at the time) that American institutions would be infinitely more successful in facilitating the pursuit of knowledge if they held classes at night, rather than in the daytime, from

8:00 P.M. to 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. As I ran through the darkness, I understood what he meant. Frank red brick, sunny classrooms, symmetrical quads and courts —it was a setting that mislead kids to believe that Knowledge, that Life itself, was bright, clear and freshly mowed. Dad said a student would be infinitely better off going out into the world if he/she studied the periodic table of elements,
Madame Bovary,
the sexual reproduction of a sunflower, for example, with deformed shadows congregating on the classroom walls, silhouettes of fingers and pencils leaking onto the floor, gastric howls from unseen radiators and a teacher's face not flat and faded, not delicately pasteled by a golden late afternoon, but serpentine, gargoyled, Cyclopsed by the inky dark and feeble light from a candle. He/she would understand "everything and nothing," Dad said, if there was nothing discernible in the windows but a lamppost mobbed by blaze-crazy moths and darkness, reticent and unfeeling, as darkness always was.

Two tall pines somewhere to our left inadvertently touched branches,

the sound of a madman's prosthetic limbs. "Someone's coming!" Jade whispered. We raced down the hill, past silent Graydon, and the basement of Love

Auditorium, and Hypocrite's Alley, where the music classrooms with their long windows were vacant and blind like Oedipus after he hollowed out his eyes.

"I'm scared," she whispered, tightening her grip on my wrist. "I'm terrified. And freezing." "Have you seen
School of Hell?"
"No." "Serial killer's a Home Ec teacher." "Ow." "Baking 203. Bakes the students into soufflés. Isn't that sick?" "I stepped on something. I think it went through my shoe." "We have to hurry, Retch. We can't get caught. We'll
die."
She broke away from me and skipped up the steps of Loomis, yanking on

the doors covered with dark, leafy announcements for Mr. Crisp's production of
The Bald Soprano
(Ionesco, 1950). They were locked. "We'll have to go in another way," she whispered excitedly. "Through the

window. Or the roof. I wonder if there's a chimney. We'll pull a Santa, Retch.

A Santa."

She grabbed my hand. Taking cues from movies featuring cat burglars and silent assassins, we circled the building, crunching through the shrubs and pine needles, trying the windows. Finally, we found one that wasn't latched, which Jade forced open into a narrow space of inward-leaning glass leading into Mr. Fletcher's Driver's Ed classroom. She slipped through the opening easily, landing on one foot. As I went through, I skinned my left shin on the window catch, my stockings ripped, and then I crashed onto the carpet, hitting my head on the radiator. (A poster on the wall featuring a kid wearing braces and a seat belt: "Always Check Your Blind Spot, on the Road and in Life!")

"Move it, slowpoke," Jade whispered and disappeared through the door.

Hannah's classroom, Room 102, was located at the very end of the root-canal hallway, a
Casablanca
poster taped to the door. I'd never been in her classroom before, and inside, when I opened the door, it was surprisingly bright; yellow-white floodlight from the sidewalk outside radiated through the wall of windows, X-raying the twenty-five or thirty desks and chairs and flinging long, skeletal shadows across the floor. Jade was already perched cross-legged on the stool at the front desk, one or two of the drawers hanging open. She paged intensely through a textbook.