Special topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl (3)

He was handsome, sure, but as Dad once said, there were people who'd completely missed their decade, were born at the wrong time - not in the intellectually gifted sense, but due to a certain look on their face more suitable to the Victorian Age then, say, the Me Decade. Well, this kid, was some twenty years to late. He was the on with thick brown hair that flyingsaucered over an eye, the one who inspired girls to make their own prom dress, the one from the country club. And maybe he had a secret diamond earring, maybe a sequin glove, maybe he even had a good song at the end with three helpings of keyboard synthesizer, but no one would know, because if you weren't born in your decade you never made it to the ending, you floated around in your middle, unresolved, in oblivion, confused and unrealized. (Pour some sugar on him and blame it on the rain.)

Special topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl (2)

"Humphrey Bogart wore platform shoes throughout the filming of Casablanca" someone said. I turned , expecting to see a mother circling Dad like a hooded Vulture eyeing carrion, but it wasn't. It was she, the woman from Fat Kat Foods. She was tall, wearing skintight jeans, a tailored tweed jacket, and large black sunglasses on her head. Her dark brown hair hung idly around her face.
"Though he wasn't Einstein or Truman," she said, "I don't think history would be the same without him. Especially if he had to look up at Ingrid Bergman and say, 'Here's looking at you, kid.' "

Special topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl (1)

[...] but then I did start to notice all kinds of unquestionable bleak things. For example, when Bethany brought people into her room for a Friday night Audrey Hepburn marathon, I was distinctly aware, at the end of Breakfast at Tiffany's, unlike the other girls sitting on pillows chain-smoking with tears in their eyes, I actually found myself hoping Holly didn't find Cat. No, if I was completely honest with myself, I realized I wanted Cat to stay lost and abandoned, mewing and shivering all by its Cat self in those splintery crates in that awful Tin Pan Alleyway, which from the rate of that Hollywood downpour would be submerged under the Pacific Ocean in less then an hour. (This I disguised, of course, smiling gaily when George Peppard feverishly grasped Audrey feverishly grasping Cat who no longer looked like a cat but a drowned squirrel. I believed I even uttered one of those girly, high-pitched, "Ewws," in perfect harmony with Bethany's sighs.