Special topics in calamity physics - By Marisha Pessl Page 0,55

sure it had everything to do with Hannah, although her role, what she must have said to them—an ultimatum perhaps, a bribe or one of her suggestions—was never clear.)

It was the first week of October, on a Friday, during sixth period. It was a harsh, bright day for fall, glaring as a washed car, and Mr. Moats, my instructor for Beginning Drawing, had entreated the class to go outside with our No. 2 pencils and sketch —"Find your melting clocks!" he'd ordered, swooshing open the door as if freeing mustangs, his other hand O/éing in the air so for four seconds he was a Flamenco dancer in tight pants of Cadmium Green. Slowly, lazily, the class floated out across the campus with their giant sketch pads. I found it tricky to choose what to draw, and wandered for fifteen minutes before deciding upon a faded package of M&Ms hiding in a bed of pine needles behind Elton. I was sitting on the cement wall, drawing my first few wimpy lines, when I heard someone traipsing down the sidewalk. Instead of passing me, the person stopped.

"Hey, there," he said. It was Milton. His hands were stuffed in his pockets and his stringy hair mumbo-jumboed over his forehead.

"Hi," I said, but he didn't answer or even smile. He simply stepped over to my sketchpad and tilted his head to inspect my rickety pencil lines like a teacher looming over your shoulder, blithely helping himself to what you scribbled during an Essay Test.

"What're you doing out of class?" I asked.

"Oh, I'm sick," he said, smiling. "Flu. Goin' to the infirmary, then home to rest."

I should mention: while Charles was the obvious Cassanova at St. Gallway, popular among chicks, charlie-boys and cheerleaders, Milton, I'd learned, was sort of the Studhorse for the smart and strange. A girl in AP English, Macon Campins, who drew henna-style swirling designs in permanent ink on her palms, claimed to be obsessively in love with him, and before the bell, before flustered Ms. Simpson shuffled into the room muttering in escalating whispers—"no toner, nothing but legal paper, no staples, everything in this school, no, this country, no, the world, all going to seed"—you could hear Macon discussing Milton's mystery tattoo with her best friend, Engella Grand: "I think he did it himself. See, I was staring at his rolled-up sleeve in Biology? And I'm pretty sure it's a huge freakin' oil slick on his arm. That's sooo sexy."

I, too, felt there was something undercover and sexual about Milton, which made me act sort of inebriated whenever I was alone with him. I was once rinsing plates, loading them into Hannah's dishwasher when he came in with seven water glasses in his giant hands and, as he leaned past me to put them in the sink, my chin accidentally touched his shoulder. It was damp and muggy as a greenhouse and I thought I was going to fall down. "Sorry, Blue," he said when he stepped away. Whenever he said my name, which he did often (so often, I felt it came tantalizingly close to satire), his accent yo-yoed it, or else, turned it into a piece of elastic. Bluuue.

"Got plans tonight, Blue?" he asked me now.

"Yes," I said, though my response didn't seem to register. (I think they'd figured by now, unless Hannah had actively arranged a suitor, no one came calling—not an outrageous assumption.)

"Well, we're hangin' at Jade's tonight if you want to come. I'll get her to pick you up. Should be mad crazy. If you can handle it."

He continued past me, down the sidewalk.

"I thought you had the flu," I said under my breath, but he heard me, because he turned and, walking backward, winked at me, saying: "Feelin' better by the minute."

He then began to whistle and, tightening his green-and-blue plaid tie as if about to interview for a job, he swung open the back doors of Elton and disappeared inside.

Jade lived in a thirty-five-room Tara-inspired McMansion (what she called the Wedding Cake) built atop a hill in a hick town "sprinkled with trailer parks and people without molars" known as Junk Spread (pop. 109).

"The house is vulgar when you see it for the first time," she said cheerfully, swinging open the massive front door. (From the moment Jade had picked me up, her spirits had approached Gzc/gef-like gladness, which made me wonder what kind of stellar deal she'd cut with Hannah; it had to have had something to do with immortality.)

"Yeah," she said, fixing