Special topics in calamity physics - By Marisha Pessl Page 0,66

Also an organ donor." Larry nodded and took a long drink of his beer, shifting his heavy body toward me so my leg pressed against his chunky one. I took a tiny step in the only other possible direction, bumping into the back of a girl with thorny blond hair.

" 'Scuse you," she said. I tried stepping back in the other direction but effigy-Larry was there. I was a piece of hard candy stuck in a throat. "Where do you see yourself in, say, twenty years?" I asked. He didn't answer. In fact, he looked as if he didn't speak English any

more. He was losing altitude, and fast. It was like the afternoon Dad and I parked the Volvo station wagon a few meters from the end of the airport runway in Luton, Texas, and spent an hour sitting on the hood, eating pimento cheese sandwiches and watching the planes land. Watching the planes was like floating in the depths of the ocean and observing a 105-foot Blue Whale drift over you, but unlike the private jets, the airbuses, and the 747s, Larry actually crashed. His lips hit my teeth and his tongue darted into my mouth like a tadpole escaping from a jar. He slapped a hand onto my chest, squeezing my right breast like a lemon over dover sole.

"Blue?" I tore myself away. Leulah and Jade stood next to me. "We're blowing this joint," Jade said. Larry shouted (a markedly unenthusiastic "Wait a minute, Roxy!"), but I didn't turn around. I followed them outside to the car. "Where are we going?" "To see Hannah," Jade said flatly. "By the way, Retch, what's up with your taste in men? That guy was fugly."

Lu was staring at her apprehensively, her green Bellmondo prom dress sagging open at the neck in a permanent yawn. "I don't think it's a good idea."

Jade made a face. "Why not?"

"I don't want her to see us," Lu said.

Jade yanked on her seatbelt. "We'll take another car. Jefferson's boyfriend's. His heinous Toyota's in our driveway."

"What's going on?" I asked.

"We'll probably bump into Charles," Jade said, ignoring me, glancing at Lu as she jammed the key in the ignition and started the car. "He'll be wearing camouflage and those night-vision goggle things."

Lu shook her head. "He's with Black on a double date. Sophomores."

Jade turned around to see if I'd overheard this (a triumphantly sympathetic look on her face), then accelerated out of the parking lot, merging onto the highway and heading toward Stockton. It was a cold night, with thin, greasy clouds streaking the sky. I pulled the gold lamé tight over my knees, staring at the passing cars and Lu's fancy parenthesis profile, the taillights signaling her cheekbones. Neither of them spoke. Their silence was one of those tired adult silences, that of a married couple driving home from a dinner party, not wanting to talk about someone's husband getting too drunk or how they secretly didn't want to go home with each other but someone new, someone whose freckles they didn't know.

Forty minutes later, Jade had disappeared inside her house for the car keys—"Only be a sec"—and when she emerged, still in her rickety red sandals and firebird dress (it looked like she'd gone through the garbage at a rich kid's birthday, removed the most exotic scraps of wrapping paper and taped them to herself), she carried a six-pack of Heineken, two giant bags of potato chips and a pack of spaghetti licorice, one piece dangling from her mouth. Looped around her shoulder was a giant pair of binoculars.

"We're going to Hannah's house?" I asked, still confused, but Jade only ignored me again, dumping the food into the backseat of the beat-up white Toyota parked by the garage. Leulah looked furious (her lips were pulled tightly together like a fabric change purse), but without a word, she walked across the driveway, climbed into the front seat and slammed the door.

"Fuck." Jade squinted at her watch. "We don't have much time."

Minutes later, we were in the Toyota, merging onto the highway again, this time heading north, the opposite direction of Hannah's house. I knew it was pointless to ask where we were going; both of them had fallen into that trench-silence again, a silence so deep it was difficult and tiring to heave oneself out. Leulah stared at the road, the sputtering white lines, the drifting red

sequins of the cars. Jade was more or less her usual self, though as she chewed a strand of licorice