Special topics in calamity physics - By Marisha Pessl Page 0,49

I'd never seen her act so strange."

Strange indeed. I took the liberty of looking up the word in Cambridge etymologist Louis Bertman's Words, Their Origin and Relevance (1921). Valerio was a common Italian patronymic meaning "brave and strong," derived from the Roman name Valerius, derived in turn from the Latin verb valere, "to be in healthy sprits, to be robust and sturdy." It was also the name of several minor saints in the fourth and fifth centuries.

I asked them why they didn't simply ask Hannah outright who he was.

"Can't do that," said Milton.

"Why?"

"We already did," said Jade with irritation, exhaling smoke from her cigarette. "Last year. And she turned a weird red color. Almost purple."

"Like we'd smacked her in the head with a baseball bat," said Nigel.

"Yeah, I couldn't tell if she was sad or pissed," Jade went on. "She just stood there with her mouth open, then disappeared into the kitchen. And when she came out, like, five minutes later, Nigel apologized. And she said in a fake administrator voice, oh, no, it's fine, it's just that she doesn't like us snooping or talking about her behind her back. It's hurtful."

"Total bullshit," said Nigel.

"It wasn't bullshit," Charles said angrily.

"Well, we can't bring it up again," Jade said. "We don't want to give her another heart attack."

"Maybe it's her Rosebud," I said, after a moment. Naturally, none of them were ever thrilled when I opened my mouth, but this time, every one of their heads swiveled toward me, almost in unison.

"Her what?" asked Jade.

"Have you seen Citizen Kane?" I asked.

"Sure," said Nigel with interest.

"Well, Rosebud is what the main character, Kane, searches for his entire life. It's what he's desperate to get back to. An unrequited, aching yearning for a simpler, happier time. It's the last thing he says before he dies."

"Why didn't he just go to a florist?" asked Jade distastefully.

And thus Jade (who, although sometimes very literal, had a flair for the dramatic) enjoyed fashioning all kinds of exciting conclusions out of Hannah's mysteriousness whenever Hannah happened to be out of the room. Sometimes Hannah Schneider was an alias. At other times, Hannah was a member of the Federal Witness Protection Program after testifying against crime-tsar Dimitri "Caviar" Molotov of the Howard Beach Molotovs, and was thus chiefly responsible for his being found guilty of sixteen counts of fraud. Or else, she figured Hannah was one the Bin Ladins: "That family's big as the Coppolas." Once, after she happened to watch Sleeping with the Enemy at midnight on TNT, she told Leulah Hannah was hiding in Stockton in order to avoid detection by her ex-husband, who happened to be both physically abusive and clinically insane. (Naturally, Hannah's hair was dyed, her eyes, colored contacts.)

"And that's why she hardly ever goes out and pays cash for everything. She doesn't want him to trace her credit cards."

"She doesn't pay cash for everything," said Charles.

"Sometimes she does."

"Everyone on the planet sometimes pays cash."

I humored these wild speculations, even designed a few interesting ones of my own, but of course, I didn't genuinely believe them.

Dad, on Double Lives: "It's fun to imagine they're as epidemic as illiteracy or chronic fatigue syndrome or any other cultural malaise that graces the covers oîTime and Newsweek, but sadly, most Bob Joneses off the street are just that, Bob Jones, with no dark secrets, dark horses, dark victories, or dark sides of the moon. It's enough to make you give up on Baudelaire. Mind you, I'm not counting adultery, which isn't dark in the slightest, but rather clichéd."

I thus secretly concluded Hannah Schneider was a typo. Destiny had been sloppy. (Most likely because she was overworked. Kismet and Karma were too flighty to get anything done and Doom couldn't be trusted.) Quite by accident, she'd assigned an outstanding person of breathtaking beauty to a buried mountain town, where grandeur was like that slighted tree always falling in the woods and no one noticing. Somewhere else, in Paris, or Hong Kong probably, someone named Chase H. Niderhann with a face compelling as a baked potato and a voice like a throat clearing, happened to be living her life, a life of opera, of sun and lakes and weekend excursions to Kenya (pronounced "keen-YA"), of gowns that went "Shhhhh" across a floor.

I decided to take control of the situation (see Emma, Austen, 1816).

It was October. Dad was dating a woman named Kitty (whom I hadn't yet had the pleasure of swatting away from our screen), but she was