Black River Falls by Jeff Hirsch(23)
The girl tilted her head as if he were speaking Arabic.
“Can you describe how to play Quarters?”
She shook her head.
“How about beer pong? Flip cup? T-Rex arms?”
“Those are games?”
“If you wanted to buy beer and didn’t know anyone over twenty-one, would you go to Black River Beverages, Quik Stop, or Harry’s Gas?”
“I don’t think I like beer.”
Greer draped one arm over the back of his chair. “That’s a hard no on cheerleader, party girl, and athlete.”
I made a note. “Got it.”
Greer did pop culture next. Not much help there. Beyond things that pretty much any teenager in America would know, she was kind of a blank slate. So not a huge movie or TV fan. As for physical abilities—she couldn’t draw, sculpt, juggle, tie a trucker’s hitch, or start a fire using two sticks and a length of shoelace. When Greer had her sing the Happy Birthday song, she was enthusiastic, but painfully out of tune.
After about an hour of this she started to get restless.
“Is this getting us anywhere?” she asked. “I mean besides establishing the fact that I don’t know anything about anything.”
“Finding out what you don’t know is just as important as finding out what you do,” Greer said. “Which means you’re giving us a ton to go on.”
She scowled at him. He grinned and held up another three-by-five note card.
“What does this say? Come on! Time’s a’wasting.”
The girl sighed, then sat up and squinted at the card. “E equals MC squared.”
“Hey, you got one! And what does E equals MC squared mean?”
She gave him the same look she gave me when I asked about Superman. “Energy equals mass times the speed of light, squared.”
“And what’s the speed of light?”
“One hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second,” she said. “In a vacuum.”
Greer looked back at me, impressed. He held up another card. The girl got it instantly.
“The Pythagorean theorem.”
He held up another.
“Pi.”
Another.
“Deoxyribonucleic acid.”
Another.
“The War of 1812.”
She got ten more right without a single miss. The girl wasn’t bored anymore. She was teetering on the edge of her chair, practically trembling. Greer was too. He shuffled through his cards with unsteady hands.
“Quick, Greer! Give me another!”
“Uh . . . Okay! Literature. Finish this quote: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family . . .’”
“‘Is unhappy in its own way.’”
“‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune . . .’”
“‘Must be in want of a wife!’ Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice. Oh! Give me another one!”
“What book includes the characters Ponyboy, Sodapop, and Cherry?”
“The Outsiders!”
“Merricat, Constance, and Julian?”
“We Have Always Lived in the Castle.”
“Aslan and Mr. Tumnus?”
“The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe!”
“Who killed James and Lily Potter?”
The girl shot to her feet, her arms raised in triumph. “Tom Marvolo Riddle, also known as Lord Voldemort!”
Greer and I broke into rowdy applause. The girl’s cheeks reddened as she bowed grandly.
“So did that help?” she asked. “Do you guys know who I am now?”
Greer laughed. “Oh yeah,” he said. “You, my friend, are what they call a big ol’ nerd.”
Minutes later Greer was sitting on the ground by his chair, sorting through towers of hardback books while the girl watched.
“You thinking St. Edwards?” I asked from my place a short distance away.
“Gotta be, right?”
“What are you guys talking about?” the girl asked.
Greer placed a hand on top of one of the stacks of books. “These are the yearbooks from every school in the area.”
“Greer, uh, liberated them from the local library,” I said.
“Anyone who went to a school anywhere near Black River is in one of these,” Greer went on. “St. Edwards is the closest private school.”
“Why do you think I went there?”
He gave a casual shrug. It was another part of his showmanship. Acting like the whole thing was a snap.
“Solid dental work, general physical health, what looks like professionally dyed hair. That probably means money. No piercings, tattoos, or jewelry says a fairly conservative family. Around here that generally means private school.”
“That,” I added, “and it definitely sounds like you studied a lot.”
The girl sifted through the note cards in front of her. “So that’s why I knew all this stuff? From studying?”
Greer tossed a book aside and grabbed another.
“If you drill facts into your head hard enough over a long enough period of time, they can move into your semantic memory, which you still have most of. Usually it happens with common-knowledge things, like the president’s name or the fact that we live on Earth in the United States, but it can be other things too.”