Special topics in calamity physics - By Marisha Pessl Page 0,40

the way people at airports grab the hands of people they haven't seen in years, asking how the flight was. She pulled me next to her, her arm around my waist. She was unexpectedly thin.

"Blue meet Fagan, Brody, he's got three legs—though it doesn't stop him from going through the garbage — Fang, Peabody, Arthur, Stallone, the Chihuahua with half-a-tail—accident with a car door—and the Old Bastard. Don't look him in the eye." She was referring to a skin-and-bones greyhound with the red eyes of a middle-aged, midnight tollbooth collector. The other dogs glanced at Hannah doubtfully, as if she were introducing them to a poltergeist. "Somewhere around here are the cats," she continued. "Lana and Turner, the Persians, and in the study we have our lovebird. Lennon. I'm in desperate need of an Ono, but there aren't many birds that show up at the shelter. Want some oolong tea?"

"Sure," I said.

"Oh, and you haven't met the others yet, have you?"

I looked up from the black-and-tan Chihuahua, who'd snuck over to me to consider my shoes, and saw them. Including Jade, who'd flopped down onto a half-melted chocolate couch and lit a cigarette (aiming it at me like a dart), they each stared with eyes so immobile and bodies so stiff, they might have been the series of paintings Dad and I scrutinized in the nineteenth-century Masters Gallery at the Chalk House outside Atlanta. There was the scrawny girl with brown seaweed hair, hugging her knees on the piano bench (Portrait of a Peasant Girl, pastel on paper); a tiny kid wearing Ben Franklin spectacles, Indian-style by a mangy dog, Fang (Master with Foxhound, British, oil on canvas); and another, a huge, boxy-shouldered boy leaning against a bookshelf, his arms and ankles crossed, brittle black hair sagging across his forehead (The Old Mill, artist unknown). The only one I recognized was Charles in the leather chair (The Gay Shepherd, gilt frame). He smiled encouragingly, but I doubted it meant much; he seemed to hand out smiles like a guy in a chicken costume distributing coupons for a free lunch.

"Why don't you introduce yourselves?" Hannah said cheerfully.

They said their names with paint-by-numbers politeness.

"Jade."

"We've met," said Charles.

"Leulah," said the Peasant Girl.

"Milton," said the Old Mill.

"Nigel Creech, very pleased to meet you," said the Master with Foxhound, and then he flashed a smile, which disappeared instantly like a spark off a defunct lighter.

If all histories have a period known as The Golden Age, somewhere between The Beginning and The End, I suppose those Sundays during Fall Semester at Hannah's were just that, or, to quote one of Dad's treasured characters of cinema, the illustrious Norma Desmond as she recalled the lost era of silent film: "We didn't need dialogue. We had faces."

I sort of like to think the same was true back in those days at Hannah's (Visual Aid 8.0). (Forgive my regrettable rendering of Charles—and Jade for that matter; they were much more beautiful in real life.)

Charles was the handsome one (handsome in the opposite way of Andreo). Gold-haired, mercury-tempered, he was not only St. Gallway's Track and Field star, excelling at both hurdles and the high jump, but also its Travolta. It wasn't unusual to see him sliding between classes engaged in a shameless, campus-wide soft shoe, involving not only known Gallway beauties but also the less physically heralded. Somehow he was able to twirl one girl away by the Teacher's Lounge just as another rumbaed over to him, and they pachangaed down the hall. (Amazingly, no one's feet were ever stepped on.)

Jade was the terrifying beauty (see "Tawny Eagle," Magnificent Birds of Prey, George, 1993). She swooped into a classroom and girls scattered like chipmunks and squirrels. (The boys, equally afraid, played dead.) She was brutally blond ("bleached to the hilt," I heard Beth Price remark in AP English), five-feet-eight ("wiry"), stalked the halls in short skirts, her books in a black leather bag ("Guess she's Donna fucking Karan") and what I took to be a severe and sad look on her face, though most took it for conceit. Due to Jade's fortresslike manner, which, like any well-built castle, made access challenging, girls found her existence not only threatening, but flat out wrong. Although Bartleby Athletic Center featured the latest advertising campaign of Ms. Sturds's three-member Benevolent Body-Image Club (laminated Vogue and Maxim covers above captions, "You Can't Have Thighs Like This and Still Walk" and "All Airbrushing"), Jade would only have to swan by, munching on a Snickers to