Special Topics in Calamity Physics (50 page)

"Fuck you!"
Hannah screamed.

The sound didn't echo, as it would in a Looney Tune, but was swallowed immediately, like a thimble hurled at the sea. Charles turned and stared at her. The look on his face clearly indicated he thought she was crazy. The rest of us shifted like nervous cattle in a boxcar.

"F-Fuck you!"
she shouted again, her voice hoarse.

She turned to us. "You should all say something." She took another deep breath, tipped her head back and closed her eyes in the manner of someone preparing to sunbathe on a deck chair. Her eyelids trembled, her lips too.

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments!"
she screamed.

"You okay?" Milton asked her, laughing.

"There's nothing funny about this," Hannah said with a serious face. "Put some muscle into it. Pretend you're a bassoon. And then say something. Something that comes from your soul." She took a deep breath.
"Henry David Thoreau!"

"Don't be afraid to be afraid!"
Leulah gasped rather abruptly, sticking out her chin like a child in a spitting contest.

"Nice," said Hannah. Jade huffed. "Oh, God. I guess we're going to be born again from this ex

perience?" "I can't hear you," Hannah said. "This is fucking
ridiculous!"
Jade shouted. "Better." "Dang," said Milton. "Wimpy."

"Dang!"

"Jenna Jameson?" shouted Charles. "Is it a question or an answer?" said Hannah.

"Janet Jacme!" "Get me the fuck out of here!"
screamed Jade.
"Set limits and goals with equal
precision!" "I want to fucking go
home!" "Say hello to my leetle friend!"
yelled Nigel, his face red.
"Sir William
Shakespeare!"
shouted Milton. "He wasn't a sir," said Charles. "Yes, he was." "He wasn't knighted." "Let it go," said Hannah.

"Jenna Jameson!"

"Blue?" Hannah asked.

I didn't know why I hadn't shouted anything. I felt like a person who couldn't unstick their stutter. I believe I was trying to think of someone with a decent last name, someone who deserved this privilege of being sent into the wind. Chekhov, I'd been about to say him, but he seemed too stilted, even if I added the first name. Dostoevsky was too long. Plato seemed irritating, as if I were trying to one-up everyone by choosing the Very Root of Western Civilization and Thought. Nabokov, Dad would have approved, but no one, Dad included, seemed certain of the pronunciation. ("NA-bo-kov" was incorrect, the pronunciation of amateurs who bought
Lolita
under the impression it was a bodice ripper; yet "Na-BO-kov" fired like a defunct pistol.) It was even worse with Goethe. Molière was an interesting choice (no one had yet mentioned a Frenchman) but there was a problem shouting the guttural R. Racine was too obscure, Hemingway too macho, Fitzgerald fine, but in the end it was unforgivable what he did to Zelda. Homer was a good choice, though Dad said
The Simpsons
had bastardized his reputation.

"Be-be true to yourself."
shouted Leulah.
"Scorsese!" "Behave
yourself."
said Milton. "That's not a good one," said Hannah. "Never behave yourself."

"Never behave yourself" "]ust
do it!" "Be all that you can be!
"

"Don't rely on the sound-bites of American advertising to tell you how you feel/' said Hannah. "Use your own words. What you have to say, what's in your heart, is always powerful."

"Full-sleevedtattoos!"
shouted Jade. Jade's face was now screwed up with

emotion like a ringing out washcloth. "Blue, you're thinking too much," said Hannah, turning to me. "I —uh —" I said.

"The Canterbury Tales!" "Mrs. Eugenia Sturds! May she live happily ever after with
Mr.
Mark Butters but may they not procreate and terrorize the world with their
offspring!"

"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 was 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." "If you don't eat enough, your body goes into starvation mode and then when you eat a slice of angel food cake your body treats it like it's penne à la vodka. You balloon within twenty-four hours." "I don't like
the fact that someone was here
' Leulah said suddenly. Everyone looked at her, startled by her voice. "That cigarette butt," she whispered. "Don't worry about it," Milton said. "Hannah's not worried. And she goes

camping all the time."

"Anyway, we couldn't leave now if we wanted to," said Charles. "It's the middle of the night. We'd get lost. Probably
would
stumble into whatever it is that wanders around—"

"Convicts," said Jade, nodding. "And that guy who bombed abortion clinics." "They found him," I said. "But you didn't see Hannah's face," said Leulah. "What was wrong with her face?" asked Nigel. Lu looked forlorn in her blue windbreaker, her arms hugging her knees,

that Rapunzeled cord of hair roping her left shoulder, touching the ground. "You could tell she was as scared as I was. But she didn't want to say so

because she thought she had to be an adult, responsible and everything." "Anyone pack a firearm?" asked Charles. "Oh, I should have brought Jefferson's," Jade said. "It's
this big.
Adorable.

She keeps it in her underwear drawer."

"We don't need guns," said Milton, lying back, staring at the sky. "If I had to go —I mean if it was
really
my fuckin' time —I wouldn't mind doing it here. Under these stars."

"Well, you're one of those contented morbid people," said Jade. "I for one will do anything I can to make sure my number doesn't come up for at least seventy-five years. If that means shooting someone in the head or biting off some parkie's chu-chu, so be it." She looked in the direction of the tents. "Where is she anyway? Hannah. I don't see her."