Special Topics in Calamity Physics (57 page)

"Huh-uh." "Barely looks up from the page. And when she's taking an essay test she mouths what she's writing the whole time. My grandmother in Florida, who my mom says is totally going senile, does the same thing while watching
Wheel of Fortune
or writing checks."

"Well,"
said Donnamara Chase, leaning forward in her seat, "Cindy Willard told me this morning that Leulah Maloney announced to her
entire
Spanish class that. . ."

For some reason, it perpetually slipped both Lucille and Donnamara's meager minds that my assigned seat in Ms. Simpson's AP English class was, and always had been, immediately behind Donnamara's. The girl handed me
The Brothers Karamazov
handouts still warm from the Faculty Lounge copier and seeing me, nervously bared her long and pointy teeth (see "Venus Flytrap,"
North American Flora,
Starnes, 1989).

"Wonder if she'll leave school," mused Angel Ospfrey, four seats away.

"Absolutely," whispered Beth Price. "Expect some announcement in the next few weeks that her dad, Account Executive for Whatever Corp, was recently promoted to Regional Manager of the Charlotte branch."

"Wonder what her last words were," said Angel. "Hannah's, I mean."

"From what I hear Blue doesn't have too long to say hers," said Macon Campins. "Milton
detests
her. He said, and I quote, that if he ever meets her in a dark alley, he'll 'Jack-the-Ripper her ass.' "

"Ever heard that old wives' tale," asked Krista Jibsen in AP Physics, "that it's okay never to be wealthy or famous or whatever because if you never had it, you won't miss it? Well—and I bet this is how Blue feels—if you've tasted fame, then lost it, that's like, extreme torture. You end up with a cocaine addiction. You have to spend time in rehab. And when you come out you make vampire movies that go straight to video."

"You got that off the Corey Feldman
True Hollywood
Story"
said Luke "Trucker" Bass.

"Well, I heard Radley's mom is over the moon," said Peter "Nostradamus" Clark. "She's throwing a Return-to-Power party for Radley because after undergoing such an ordeal, the girl won't be able to hold onto Valedictorian."

"I heard from a very reliable source—wait. No. I feel bad spreading it around."

"What?"

"She's a
full-scale
lesbian," sang Lonny Felix that Wednesday during Physics Lab 23, "Symmetry in Physical Laws: Is Your Right Hand Really Your Right Hand?" "The
Ellen
kind, by the way. Not the Anne Heche kind, when you can go either way." Lonny pony-tossed her hair (long, blond, the texture of Wheaties) and glanced toward the front of the room where I was standing with my lab partner, Laura Elms. She hunched closer to Sandy Quince-Wood. "Guess Schneider was one, too. That's why they went off together in the middle of the night. How two women get it on is beyond my comprehension but what I
do
know is that something went fatally wrong during the sex act. That's what the police are trying to figure out. That's why it's taking so long for them to have a verdict."

"That same thing was on
CSI: Miami
last night/' said Sandy distractedly as she wrote in her lab manual. "Little did we know what's going on on
CSI: Miami
is happening right here in our physics class."

"For gosh sakes," said Zach Soderberg, turning around to look at them. "Would you guys keep it down? Some of us are trying to figure out these laws of reflection symmetry."

"Sorry, Romeo," said Lonny with a smirk.

"Yes, let's try to keep things quiet, shall we?" said our substitute teacher, a bald man named Mr. Pine. Pine smiled, yawned and stretched his arms high over his head revealing sweat stains the size of pancakes. He resumed his scrutiny of a magazine,
Country Life Wall&Windows.

"Jade's trying to get the Blue girl kicked out of school," whispered Dee during second period Study Hall.

Dum scowled. "For what?"

"Not murder, but like, coercion or brute force or something. I heard her pleading her case in Spanish. I guess Hannah was all
bueno.
Then she goes off with this Blue person and five minutes later ends up
muerto.
It's all
not
going to hold up in court. They're going to declare a mistrial. And no one can use a race card to get her off."

"Stop acting like you're all Greta van Susteren with an eyelift because here's a breaking headline for you. You're not. Neither are you Wolf Blitzer."

"What's
that
supposed to mean?"

Dum shrugged, tossing her crumpled copy of
Startainment
on the library table. "It's like so, obvious. Schneider pulled a Sylvia Plath." Dee nodded. "Not a terrible assumption actually. Think about my last Intro to Film class."

"What about it?"

"I
told
you. The woman was supposed to give us an essay test on the Italians,
Divorce Italiano Style, L'Avventura, Eight and a
Friggin'
Half—"
"Oh, yeah— " "But when we showed up, all prepared and everything, yet again she was all flailin' and flappin'. It'd totally slipped her mind. She played it off, said not having the test was our surprise, but ev
eryone was creeped out-it was ob
vious she was blowin' those excuses out the wazoo. She plain old-fashioned forgot. So she hastily puts in
Reds,
which isn't even
Italian,
right?
Plus
we'd already seen it nine times because three days in a row she forgot to bring in
La Dolce
Friggin'
Vita.
The woman had no teach cred, was hopelessly ding-headed, suffered epizootics of the blowhole and was full of booty-cheddar. But what kind of teacher forgets their own
essay
test?"

"A bugged-out teacher," whispered Dum. "One who's mentally unstable."

"Damn straight."

Unfortunately, my instinctive response to overhearing campus-wide chitchat of the aforementioned kind was not The Pacino (godfather-styled vengeance), The Pesci (urges to stick a ballpoint pen in someone's throat), The Costner (flat, frontierlike amusement), The Spacey (scathing verbal retaliation accompanied by a blank facial expression) nor The Penn (blue
-
collared bellows and moans).

I can only compare how I felt to being inside an austere clothing store when one of the workers silently follows you around to make sure you don't steal anything. Though you have no
intention
of stealing anything, though you've never come close to stealing anything in your life, knowing they see you as a potential shoplifter unexpectedly turns you into a potential shoplifter. You try not to peer suspiciously over your shoulder. You peer suspiciously over your shoulder. You try not to look at people sideways or sigh artificially or whistle or shoot people nervous smiles. You look sideways, sigh, whistle, shoot nervous smiles and put your extremely sweaty hands in and then out of your pockets over and over again.

Not to complain
all
of St. Gallway was hashing me over like this, and certainly not to whimper about such abysmal treatment or feel sorry for myself. There were some extraordinary kindnesses, those first few days back at school, such as the moment my old lab partner, Laura Elms, who at four-feet-nine and approximately ninety to ninety-five pounds typically exuded the personality of rice (white, easy on the stomach, went well with every kid), suddenly snatched my left hand as it was copying down F = qv x B from the dry-erase board: "I totally know what you're going through. One of my best friends found her father dead last year. He was outside on their driveway washing their Lexus when he just collapsed. She ran outside and she totally didn't recognize him. He was this really weird blueberry color. She went crazy for a while. All I'm saying is if you ever want to talk I'm here for you." (Laura, I never took you up on your offer, but please accept my thanks. I apologize for the rice comment.)

And there was Zach. If velocity affected the mass of all objects, it wouldn't affect Zach Soderberg. Zach would be the Amendment, the Correction, the Tweak. He was a lesson in durable materials, a success story of sustainable good moods. He was c, the constant.

On Thursday, in AP Physics, I returned from the bathroom to find a mysterious folded piece of notebook paper sitting on my chair. I didn't open it until class was over. I stood very still, right in the middle of the hallway with all those kids gushing past me with backpacks, sagging hair and lumpy jackets, staring at the words, at his schoolgirl's handwriting. I was refuse in a river.

HOW ARE YOU

I'M AROUND

IF YOU WANT TO TALK

ZACH

I kept the note folded in my backpack for the rest of the day and surprised myself by deciding I
did
want to chat with him. (Dad said it never hurt to glean as many perspectives and opinions as possible, even those one suspects will be unsophisticated and Calibanesque.) Throughout AP World History, I found myself fantasizing about going home not with Dad, but with Patsy and Roge, having a supper not of spaghetti, lecture notes, a one-sided debate of J. Hutchinson's
The Aesthetic Emancipation of the Human Race
(1924), but roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, a discussion of Bethany Louise's softball tryouts or Zach's recent paper on The American Dream (the most ho-hum of paper topics). And Patsy would smile and squeeze my hand while Roge embarked on an impromptu sermon —if I was lucky, "The Fourteen Hopes."

As soon as the bell rang, I hurried out of Hanover along the sidewalk to Barrow, up the stairs to the second floor where I'd heard Zach had his locker. I stood just inside the doorway and watched him in khaki pants and a blueand-white striped shirt talking to that Rebecca girl, the one with prehistoric carnivore eyeteeth. She was tall, propping a stack of spiral notebooks against her jutted-out hip, her other bony arm hooked on the top of the lockers so she resembled an angular Egyptian character scrawled on papyrus. And something about the way Zach gave her his full attention (aware of no one else in the hall), the way he smiled and ran that giant hand through his hair made me realize he was in love with her, that they were doubtlessly both Kinko's employees always shoulder-to-shoulder and engaged in tons of color-copying, and now I'd stand there trying to talk to him about Death with that Hieroglyph breathing down my neck, her eyes sticking to my face like smashed figs, bushy black hair flooding her shoulders like the River Nile —I couldn't do it. I spun around, darted back into the stairwell, shoved open the door and raced outside.

I also can't overlook the Good Samaritan Kindness of another occasion, that Friday in Beginning Drawing, when I, exhausted from the sleepless nights, dozed off in the middle of class, forgetting about my Line Drawing of Tim "Raging" Waters, who'd been chosen to sit at the center of this week's Life Drawing Circle.

"What on earth is
wrong with Miss Van Meer?"
roared Mr. Moats, glaring down at me. "She's green as El Greco's ghost! Tell us what you ate for breakfast and we'll make a point of avoiding it."

Mr. Victor Moats was, for the most part, a gentle man, but at times, for no rhyme or reason (perhaps it was moon phases) he relished degrading a student in front of the class. He snatched my Strathmore drawing pad from the easel and held it high over his seal-slick head. Immediately, I saw the tiny disaster: there was nothing, nothing at all in the Pacific Ocean of the white page, except way down in the lower right-hand corner, I'd drawn Raging the size of Guam. I'd also drawn his leg over his muddled face, which would have been fine if Mr. Moats hadn't spent ten minutes at the beginning of class detailing the essentials of life drawing and proportion.

"She is not concentrating! She must be dreaming about Will Smith or Brad Pitt or any number of brawny heartthrobs, when what she should be doing is—
what? Can someone please inform us what Miss Van Meer should be doing instead of wasting our time?"

I gazed up at Mr. Moats. If it'd been any Friday
before
Hannah's death, I'd have turned red and apologized, perhaps even sprinted to the bathroom, locked myself in the handicapped stall and wept over the toilet seat, but now, I didn't feel anything. I was impassive as a blank sheet of Strathmore drawing paper. I stared up at him, as if he wasn't talking about me but about some other wayward kid named Blue. I felt all the embarrassment of a desert cactus.

I
did
notice, however, that the entire class was nervously glancing around at each other, carrying out some impressive routine of alarm like tree-dwelling Guenon monkeys alerting each other to the presence of a Crowned Eagle. Fran "Juicy" Smithson widened her eyes at Henderson Shoal and Henderson Shoal, in response, widened his eyes in the direction of Howard "Beirut" Stevens. Amy Hempshaw bit her lip and removed her caramel hair from behind her ears and lowered her head so it swiftly covered half of her face like a trap door.

What they were signaling to each other, of course, was that Mr. Moats, notorious for preferring the works of Velazquez, Ribera, El Greco and Herrera the Elder to the company of his clam-faced Gallway coworkers (who neither dreamt about, nor were overly eager to wax poetic on, the genius of the Spanish Masters) had also apparently thrown out, unopened, all recent interoffice mail delivered daily to his Mailbox in the Faculty Lounge.