Special topics in calamity physics - By Marisha Pessl Page 0,42

daintily along everything but sidewalks, had to have Birch's persona of bean curd, that esprit de spirulina, until I discovered someone had actually hexed the girl, cast a powerful spell, so her oddities were eternally unthinking, careless and unscripted, so she never questioned what people thought or how she looked, so the cruelties of the entire kingdom ("There's something sour about her. She's totally past her Eat-by date," I heard Lucille Hunter remark in AP English) dissolved miraculously—never reaching her ears.

Since much has already been made of Hannah's paramount face, I won't mention it again, except to say, unlike other Helens of Troy, who can never quite get over their own magnificence, like a pair of perilously high heels they're always wandering around in (self-consciously stooped over or haughtily towering over everyone), Hannah managed to wear hers day and night and still be only vaguely aware she was wearing shoes. With her, you noticed how exhausting beauty actually was, how used up one might feel after a day of strangers rubbernecking to watch you pour Sweet'N Low into your coffee or pick out the tin of blueberries with the least mold.

"Whatever," Hannah said, without a trace of false modesty when, one Sunday, Charles commented how great she looked in a black T-shirt and army fatigues. "I'm just a tired old lady."

There was, too, the problem of her name.

While it cartwheeled off the tongue nimbly enough, more elegantly than, say, Juan San Sebastien Orillos-Maripon (the lip-calisthenics name of Dad's teaching assistant at Dodson-Miner), I couldn't help but think there was something criminal about it. Whoever had named her—mother, father, I didn't know—was a person harrowingly out of touch with reality, because even as an infant, Hannah could never have been one of those troll-babies, and a troll-baby was what you dubbed "Hannah." (Granted, I was biased: "Thank God that thing's incarcerated in his carriage. Otherwise, people might start to panic, thinking we have a veritable War of the Worlds on our hands," Dad said, peering down at a happy, yet decidedly elderly baby parked in an aisle at Office Depot. Then the mother arrived. "I see you've met Hannah!" she cried.) If she had to have a common name, she was Edith or Nadia or Ingrid, at the very least, Elizabeth or Catherine; but her glass-slipper name, the one that really fit, was something along the lines of Countess Saskia Lepinska, or Anna-Maria d'Aubergette, even Agnes of Scudge or Ursula of Poland ("Hideous names on beautiful women tend to rumplestiltskin quite nicely," Dad said).

"Hannah Schneider" fit her like stonewashed Jordache jeans six sizes too big. And once, oddly enough, when Nigel said her name during dinner, I could have sworn I noticed a funny delay in her response, as if, for a split second, she had no idea he was talking to her.

It made me wonder, even if it was solely on the subconscious level, maybe Hannah Schneider didn't love "Hannah Schneider" either. Maybe she wished she was Angélique von Heisenstagg too.

Many people speak enviously of the Fly on a Wall. They yearn for its characteristics: virtually invisible, yet privy to the secrets and shifty dialogues of an exclusive group of people. And yet, as I was nothing more than a fly on a wall for those first six, maybe seven Sunday afternoons at Hannah's, I can say with some authority such disregard gets old fairly quickly. (Actually, one could argue flies elicited more attention than I did, because someone always rolled up a magazine and doggedly chased them around a room, and no one did that to me —unless one counted Hannah's erratic attempts to insert me into the conversation, which I found more embarrassing than the others' disdain.)

Of course, that very first Sunday ended up nothing more than a disastrous humiliation, in many ways worse than the Study Group at Leroy 's, because at least Leroy and the others had wanted me there (granted, wanted me as their beast of burden, so I could haul them up the steep hill toward eighth grade), but these kids —Charles, Jade and the others—they made it clear my presence at the house was entirely Hannah's idea, not theirs.

"Know what I hate?" Nigel asked pleasantly as I helped him clear the plates off the dinner table.

"What?" I asked, grateful he was attempting small talk.

"Shy people," he replied, and of course there was no ambiguity about what shy person had prompted this announcement; I'd remained entirely mute during both dinner and dessert and the