Special topics in calamity physics - By Marisha Pessl Page 0,62

winked at me. "It's about time."

I did wonder about Hannah.

And I felt guilty wondering about her, because the others trusted her in the uncomplicated way an old horse accepts a rider, a child grabs an outstretched hand to cross the street.

Yet immediately following my attempt to Parent Trap her with Dad, sometimes at her house, I'd find myself falling out of the dinner conversation. I'd look around the room as if I was a snooping stranger outside, pressing my nose to the window. I wondered why she took so much interest in my life, my happiness, my haircut ("Ac/orable," she said. "You look like a dispossessed flapper," Dad said); why, for that matter, any of them were of interest to her. I wondered about her adult friends, why she hadn't married or done any of the things Dad referred to as "domesticated hooey" (SUVs, kids), the "sitcom script people stick to as they hope for meaning in their canned-laughter lives."

In her house, there were no photographs. At school, I never once saw her conversing with other teachers apart from Eva Brewster, and only then on a single occasion. As much as I adored her—particularly those moments she let herself be silly, when a favorite song came on and she did a funny little jig with her wineglass in her bare feet in the middle of the living room and the dogs stared at her the way fans stared at Janis Joplin singing "Bobby McGee" ("I was in a band once," Hannah said shyly, biting her lip. "Lead singer. I dyed my hair red.")—I couldn't overlook a certain book by leading neurophysicist and criminologist Donald McMather MD, Social Behaviors and Nimbus Clouds (1998).

"An adult with a fastidious interest in those considerably younger than him or herself can not be completely sincere or even rational," he writes on p. 424, Chapter 22, "The Allure of Children." "Such a preoccupation often hides something very dark."

X

The Mysterious Affair at Styles

I'd been in thick with the Bluebloods three, maybe four weeks, when Jade invaded, Sherman-style, my nonexistent sex life. , L Not that I took her assault too seriously. When it came down to the nitty-gritty, I knew I'd probably flee without warning, like Hannibal's elephants during the Battle of Zama in 202 B.c. (I was twelve when Dad wordlessly presented me with various tomes to read and reflect upon, including

C. Allen's Shame Culture and the Shadow World [1993], Somewhere Between Puritans and Brazil: How to Have a Healthy Sexuality [Mier, 1990], also Paul D. Russell's terrifying What You Dont Know About White Slavery

[1996].)

"You've never gotten laid, have you, Retch?" Jade accused one night, deliberately ashing her cigarette in the cracked blue vahze next to her like some movie psychiatrist with switchblade fingernails, her eyes narrowed, as if hoping I'd confess to violent crime.

The question hung in the air like a national flag with no wind. It was obvious the Bluebloods, including Nigel and Lu, approached sex as if it were cute little towns they had to whizz through in order to make good time on their way to Somewhere (and I wasn't so sure they knew their final destination). Immediately, Andreo Verduga flashed into my head (shirtless, trimming shrubs) and I wondered if I could speedily make up a steamy experience involving the bed of his pickup truck (propped up against mulch, rolling onto tulip bulbs, hair snagging the lawnmower) but prudently decided against it. "Virgins advertise their stunning lack of insight and expertise with the subtlety and panache of Bible salesmen," wrote British comic Brinkly Starnes in A Harlequin Romance (1989).

Jade nodded knowingly at my silence. "We'll have to do something about it then," she said, sighing.

After this painful revelation, on Friday nights, after I got clearance from Dad to spend the night at her house ("And this Jade individual—she's one of your Joycean aficionados?"), Jade, Leulah and I, decked out in Jefferson's Studio 54 prom getup, drove an hour to a roadside bar in Redville, just over the South Carolina border.

It was called the Blind Horse Saloon (or lin ors loon, as the sign whispered in dying pink neon), a grouchy place Jade claimed the five of them had been frequenting for "years," which, from the outside looked like a burnt loaf of pound cake (rectangular, black, no windows) stranded in an expanse of stale-cookie pavement. Armed with farcically fake IDs (I was brown-eyed Roxanne Kaye Loomis, twenty-two, five-feet-seven, a Virgo organ donor; I attended Clemson with a major in Chemical Engineering;