Special topics in calamity physics - By Marisha Pessl Page 0,57

kinetic energy to swing itself up into The Crimson Marshmallow, but frizzled stiffly off her head in a Red Zinger Silo. (If Dad saw her he would not hesitate to call her "a badly aged Barbarella." Or he'd use one of his Stale Candy remarks reserved for women who spent the greater portion of their week attempting to halt Middle Age as if Middle Age was nothing but a team of runaway stallions: "a melted red M&M," a "stale strawberry Sweet Tart.")

Jade was looking at me intently, arms crossed, eyes narrowed.

"She looks very nice," I said.

"About as nice as Hitler."

After the tour, we retreated to the Purple Room, "where Jefferson gets to really know her boyfriends if you know what I mean. Avoid the paisley couch by the fireplace." The others still hadn't arrived, and after Jade busied herself with making more mudslingers and turning over the Louis Armstrong record on the antique gramophone, she finally sat down, though her eyes flew around the room like canaries. She checked her watch a fourth time, then a fifth.

"How long have you lived here?" I asked, because I sort of wished we'd get along so when the others arrived we were performing our favorite number, "Just Two Little Girls from Little Rock," Jade, a skinnier, angrier Marilyn to my unquestionably-more-flat-chested Jane Russell. But, much to my own disappointment, the odds didn't look good for being bosom buddies.

"Three years," she said distractedly. "Oh, where the fuck are they? I loathe when people are late and Black swore he'd be here by seven, the fraud" she complained not to me, but the ceiling. "I'll castrate him." (Orion, the constellation under which we sat, had not had his light bulbs changed and thus he'd lost his legs and head. He was nothing but a belt.)

Soon the others arrived wearing quirky accessories (plastic bead necklaces, fast-food crowns; Charles wore an old fencing shirt, Milton a blazer in navy velveteen) and they stormed the room, Nigel crawling over the leather couch, hitching his legs on the coffee table, Leulah air-kissing Jade hellos. She only smiled at me, then glided to the bar, her eyes glassy and red. Milton wandered toward a wooden box on the writing desk in the corner and unlatched it, removing a cigar.

"Jadey, where's the cutter?" he asked, sniffing it. She dragged on her cigarette and glared at him. "You said you'd be on time and you're late. I'll hate you until I die. Top drawer."

He chuckled, a muffled sound, as if he was being smothered with a pillow, and I realized I wanted him to say something to me—"Glad you could join us," "Hey, Bluuue"—but he didn't. He didn't see me.

"Blue, how about a dirty martini?" Leulah asked.

"Or something else," said Jade.

"A Shirley Temple," suggested Nigel with a smirk.

"A cosmo?" asked Leulah.

"There's milk in the fridge/' Nigel said, deadpan.

"A—a dirty martini would be quite nice. Thank you," I said. "Three olives, please." Three Olives,Please: it was what Eleanor Curd specified, the emerald-eyed heroine that caused men to shudder with hungry desire in A Return to Waterfalls (DeMurgh, 1990), pilfered from June Bug Rita Cleary's gold leather purse when I was twelve. ("Where's my book?" she repeated to Dad for days like a woman with mental illness who'd wandered away from her sanitarium. She searched our every couch, rug and closet, at times on her hands and knees, frantic to find out if Eleanor ended up with Sir Damien or they stayed apart because he believed she believed he believed he'd impregnated a vicious tattletale with an illegitimate child.)

As soon as Leulah handed me my martini, I was forgotten like Line 2 on

a Corporate Headquarters Switchboard. "So Hannah had a date tonight," Nigel said. "No, she didn't," said Charles, smiling, though he sat up imperceptibly

as if he'd felt the prick of a needle in his seat cushion. "She did," said Nigel. "I saw her after school. She was wearing red." "Oh, boy," said Jade exhaling cigarette smoke. They talked on and on about Hannah; Jade again said something about

Goodwill and "bourgeois pigs," words that startled me (I hadn't heard the phrase since Dad and I, driving across Illinois, read Angus Hubbard's Acid Trips: The Delusionsof 60s Counterculture [1989]) though I didn't know who or what she was referring to, because I found it impossible to focus on the conversation; it was like that cruel little blurry line at the bottom of an eye chart. And I didn't feel like myself. I was a swirl