Special topics in calamity physics - By Marisha Pessl Page 0,33

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."

My peers too—they were not exactly airheads or fools (pasta, as Dad called every kid at Sage Day). When I'd raised my hand in AP English to answer Ms. Simpson's question regarding Primary Themes in InvisibleMan (Ellison, 1952) (which turned up on Summer Reading Lists with the regularity of corruption in Cameroon), incredibly, I wasn't quite fast enough; another kid, Radley Clifton, pudgy, with an eroded chin, already had his fat hand in the air. While his answer wasn't brilliant or inspired, it also wasn't crude or Calibanesque, and it dawned on me, as Ms. Simpson handed out a nineteen-page syllabus solely covering Fall Term, perhaps St. Gallway wouldn't be such Child's Play, such Easy Victory. Perhaps if I actually wanted to be Valedictorian (and I think I did, though sometimes What Dad Wanted blatantly made its way into What I Wanted without having to go through Customs), I'd have to launch an aggressive campaign with all the ferocity of Attila the Hun. "One is only eligible for Valedictorian once in one's life," Dad noted, "just as one only gets one body, one existence, and thus one shot at immortality."

I also didn't respond to the letter I received the next day, though I read it twenty times, even in the middle of Ms. Gershon's introductory AP Physics lecture, "From Cannonballs to Light Waves: The History of Physics." Paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, when stumbling upon early hominid "Lucy" in 1974, probably felt the way I did when I opened my locker door and that cream envelope fell at my feet.

I had no idea what I'd found: a wonder (that would forever change history) or a hoax.

Blue,

What the heck happened?? You missed out on a nice broccoli cheddar baked potato at Wendy's. Guess you're playing hard to get. I'll play.

Shall we try this again? You're filling me with longing. (Kidding.)

Same place. Same time.

Charles

I also ignored the two letters discovered in my locker the next day, Wednesday: the first in the cream envelope, the second written in pointy cursive on celery green paper emblazoned at the top with an elaborate tangle of initials: JCW.

Blue,

I'm hurt. Well, I'll be there