Special topics in calamity physics - By Marisha Pessl Page 0,59

Drop and Roll. Not that overnight I morphed into, a tyrannical foulmouthed girl who'd started out in Chorus, and managed to claw her way to the Lead. But, strolling through first-floor Hanover with Jade Whitestone between third and fourth periods ("I'm bushed," Jade would sigh, hitching her elbow around my neck the way Gene Kelly does to a lamppost in Singin in the Rain) was an unforgivably paparazzi moment; I thought I understood, completely, what Hammond Brown, the actor in the 1928 Broadway hit Happy Streets (known throughout the Roaring Twenties simply as The Chin) meant when he said "a crowd's eyes have a touch like silk" (Ovation, 1952, p. 269).

And at the end of the school day, when Dad picked me up and we fought about something, like my "tinseled" hair or a new slightly edgier essay I'd written —"Tupac: Portrait of a Modern Romantic Poet," on which I received a derisory B ("Your senior year of high school is not the time to suddenly become alternative, hip and cool.")—afterward, it was strange; before my friendship with the Bluebloods, after an argument with Dad, when I retreated to my room I'd always felt like a smudge; I couldn't perceive where I began and where I ended. But now, I felt as if I could still see myself, my outline—a thin, but perfectly respectable black line.

Ms. Gershon of AP Physics perceived the change too, if solely on the subconscious level. For example, when I first arrived at St. Gallway, whenever I raised my hand to ask a question in her class, she couldn't immediately make me out; I blended effortlessly with the lab tables, the windows, the poster of James Joule. Now, I only had to hold my hand up for three, maybe four seconds before her eyes snapped to me: "Yes, Blue?" It was the same with Mr. Archer—all delusions he'd entertained about my name were gone. "Blue," he said, not with shakiness or unease, but supreme faith (similar to the tone he used for Da Vinci). And Mr. Moats, when he wandered over to my easel to inspect my Figure Drawing, his eyes almost always veered away from the drawing to my head, as if I were more worthy of scrutiny than a few wobbly lines on a page.

Sal Mineo noticed the difference too, and if he noticed, it had to be Agonizingly True.

"You should be careful," he said to me during Morning Announcements.

I glanced over at his intricate wrought-iron profile, his soggy brown eyes.

"I'm happy for you," he said, looking not at me but at the stage where Havermeyer, Eva Brewster and Hilary Leech were unveiling the new look of The Gallway Gazette: "A colored front page, advertisements," Eva was saying. Sal swallowed and his Adam's apple, which pushed against his neck like a metal coil in an old couch, trembled, rose and fell. "But they only hurt people."

"What are you talking about?" I asked, irritated by his ambiguity, but he didn't answer, and when Evita dismissed the school to class, he flew out of the aisle, quick as a wren off a lamppost.

The twins in my second period Study Hall, the Great Social Commentators of the Age, Eliaya and Georgia Hatchett (Nigel and Jade, who had them in a Spanish class, called them Dee for Tweedledee and Dum for Tweedledum, respectively) naturally had all kinds of dirt on my association with the Bluebloods. Before, they'd always gossiped messily about Jade and the others, their slurpy voices splattering all over each other and everyone else, but now they sat in the back, next to the water fountain and Hambone Reading Recommendations, carrying on in crackly, roast-potato whispers.

I ignored them for the most part, even when the words blue and Shhh, she'll hearyou, hissed over to me like a couple of Gaboon Vipers. But when I didn't have any homework to do, I asked Mr. Fletcher if I could be excused to the restroom and slipped into row 500 and then the densest section of row 900, Biography, where I repositioned some of the larger books from row 600 to the holes between the shelves, in order to avoid detection. (Librarian Hambone, if you're reading this, I apologize for the biweekly repositioning of

H. Gibbons' bulky African Wildlife [1989] from its proper place in the 650s to just above Mommie Dearest [Crawford, 1978] and Notorious: My Years with Cary Grant [Drake, 1989]. You weren't going mad.)

"So do you or don't you want to hear the icing, the cake, the