Special topics in calamity physics - By Marisha Pessl Page 0,48

tell you something. You're a person who can do anything with your life. I mean that. Anything. You can be a rocket scientist. Because you have the rare thing everyone wants. The smarts, but also the sensitivity. Don't be afraid of it. Remember—God, I can't remember who said it—'Happiness is a hound dog in the sun. We aren't on Earth to be happy, but to experience incredible things.' "

This happened to be one of Dad's favorite quotations (it was Coleridge and Dad would tell her she'd butchered it; "If you're using your own words it isn't quite a quotation, is it?"). And she wasn't smiling as she said it to me, but looked solemn, as if talking about death (see I'll Think About That Tomorrow, Pepper, 2000). (She also sounded like FDR declaring war against Japan in his historical 1941 radio address, Track 21 on Dad's GreatSpeeches, Modern Times three-CD boxed set.)

On the very best of days I was their burden, their bête noire, and so, if you considered Newton's Third Law of Motion, "All actions have an equal and opposite reaction," and the five of them spontaneously turned into HI' Baby Face Nelsons and Dimples, they also had to turn into old Lost Weekends and Draculas, which best describes the looks on their faces in that instance. For the most part though, I did my best to deflect such personal attention. I didn't especially long for Table 25, The Royal Circle. I was still elated to be one of the jelly beans allowed in off the street, and was thus perfectly content to spend the evening, rather the entire swank decade, sitting at wholly undesirable Table 2, too close to the orchestra and with an obscured view of the door.

Hannah, during their song'n'dance antics, remained impassive. She was all diplomatic smiles and kind "Fantastic, darlings," and it was during these moments I found myself wondering if I'd made a few errors in my breathless reading of her, if, as Dad said bluntly in the rare event he admitted he was wrong (accompanying said sentence with a contrite gaze at the floor): "I'd been a blind ass."

She was, after all, highly peculiar when it came to talking about herself. Attempts to exhume details about her life, indirectly or otherwise, went nowhere. You think it'd be impossible for someone not to give some semblance of an answer when asked a question point-blank, making some very revealing dodge (sharp intake of breath, shifty eyes), which you could subsequently translate into a Dark Truth About Her Childhood using Freud's The Psychopathology of EverydayLife (1901) or The Ego and the Id (1923). But Hannah had a very plain way of saying, "I lived outside Chicago, then San Francisco for two years. I'm not that interesting, guys."

Or she'd shrug.

"I —I'm a teacher. I wish I could say something more interesting."

"But you're part-time," Nigel said once. "What do you do with the other part?"

"I don't know. I wish I knew where the time went."

She laughed and said nothing more.

There was also the question of a certain word: Valerio. It was their mythical, tongue-and-cheek nickname for Hannah's secret Cyrano, her cloak-anddagger Darcy and her QT Oh Captain! My Captain! I'd heard them mention the word on countless occasions, and when I finally found the courage to inquire who, or what it was, so exciting was the subject, they forgot to ignore me. Eagerly, they recounted a puzzling incident. Two years ago, when they were sophomores, Leulah had left behind an Algebra textbook at Hannah's house. When her parents drove her back for the book the following day, while Hannah retrieved it upstairs, Lu went into the kitchen for a glass of water. She noticed, by the telephone, a small yellow notepad. On the topmost page, Hannah had doodled a strange word.

"She'd written Valerio all over it," Lu said heatedly. She had a funny way of wrinkling her nose, which made it look like a tiny bunched-up sock. "Like a million times. Kind of crazily too, the way psycho killers write things when the investigator breaks into his house on CSI. The one word over and over, like she was talking on the phone, unaware of what she was drawing. Still, I do stuff like that, so I didn't think anything of it. Until she walked in. She picked up the notepad immediately, facing the pages toward her so I couldn't see it. I don't think she put it down until I was in my car, driving away.