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BUT SHE HAD A LOT TO TALK ABOUT 
...and I couldn't believe he was wearing *that*, god it's so tacky, «tsk-haww!», and I told him, 'No, you're not wearing that to Shakers,' I mean to some fast food place I can understand, who cares, right, but to Shakers, where *real* people are gonna see us, together, «ughffhh!», no way, I mean, no way, and he just didn't get it, it's such an ugly sweater, god, so ugly, can you *believe* he was actually gonna wear that sweater out in public? Even when under time constraints and sundry high-stress circumstances, Elizabeth's memory retention/recall was superb. Beyond superb, really, was the consensus, her reputation for superbness, Elizabeth's, from those who 'saw' her mind 'in action' firsthand. Because Elizabeth could remember the minutest of details in the tensest of situations. Because she could recall large chunks of information under extreme mental duress. She was amazing. Elizabeth showed signs of giftedness early on, a precocity first made manifest as a young girl's curious aptitude for trivia (like cast and crew names from the end credits of various Saturday morning cartoons, you know, or like video Game Genie cheat codes, etc.) in the midst of potential distraction (like when her maladjusted older brother hurled obscenities at her for touching his toys without his express permission, or the time he assailed her with rotten vegetables for no apparent reason at all). From there, i.e., throughout childhood and into late adolescence, Elizabeth's faculties of memory and concentration improved and then continued to improve and eventually blossomed into fantastic ability, the fruits of which were first seen at the San Diego Zoo when, on a dare from her friends, she recited the Pledge of Allegiance backwards, during which recitation she was trampled underfoot by a fugitive gazelle, and yet managed to finish ("...the to allegiance pledge I"). When Elizabeth was a young adult said faculties improved still more, somehow, until such time as they bordered on the unreal—yes, the supernatural stuff of fantasy and horror fiction, they all came to realize. The consensus was that no one had 'seen' anything like 'this' before—really, beyond superb, remember. Elizabeth was virtually immune to forgetfulness and diversion of any kind. Her flawless recollection and total mental uninterruptability was (albeit in the words of her spiteful and less accomplished older brother, "freakish," "highly disturbing," and "downright scary") a gift par excellence, they said. She could remember damn near anything. And in case my foregoing remarks were unclear: Elizabeth was that special girl who could, e.g., read a story just once and recall it word-for-word a month down the line. She was that special girl who could (again, e.g.) memorize the Heidelberg Catechism while standing next to the ground speakers at a crowded rock show, drunk, and at gunpoint. She was that special girl who could (you know) speed-read a novel, under a street lamp, naked, with a T-bone steak affixed to her ankle and a pack of Doberman Pinschers leashed to warped and perilously unsturdy picket fencing a few yards away. That special girl Elizabeth, with her mind of steel and a will of the same, of talent just short of sublime and nigh unto incredible. ...uh no, «khaww!», like, I told him not to, but you know, yeah, he never listens to me anyway, and anyway, uh, no-no, no-no, I *told* him, I said, 'If she shows up tonight I'm outta here,' and he was like, 'Well what business is it of yours?' and I was like, 'What?!?' and I almost flipped out at him right in front of everyone, I mean, can you blame me for thinking that, I mean, they were only together for like *two years*, yeah almost, seriously, but who cares about her, and no, «ahummf!», no, she didn't show up... Accordingly, Elizabeth's performance in and out of the classroom and on certain types of tests was exceptional. Her high school exam grades were generally all terrific, with perfect scores in Biology, [portions of the] U.S. and World History [finals], and PE. And she knew some shit too. Her extracurricular studies (all carried out impulsively, whimsically, at odd times and places and on dares from friends and rivals and family members and school officials who regardless of their personal feelings were astonished and more than a little curious at Elizabeth's seemingly infallible brain, and through these random or capricious feats of memorization of miscellany Elizabeth had developed quite a name for herself, let me tell you) had afforded her [her extracurricular studies had afforded her] a knowledge of certain subjects—[subjects] as disparate as Computational Fluid Dynamics; obscure Shakespeare, Foucault, Chomsky, and Augustine reference/quotations; binomial nomenclature; and state capitals (to name a few)—that was [her knowledge of these subjects was] far and away the most impressive in town, to put it lightly. Ergo by the time Elizabeth started college, she had achieved per the harnessing of talents of singular excellence a comprehensive/encyclopedic grasp of any and all topics she bothered (on impulse, whim, etc.) to study in depth. Basically any subject that happened to interest her that she could read or hear about at length 'became hers'; she up-and-down pwned it. This girl Elizabeth was damn near unstoppable. Now the preceding narrative is all by way of introduction, and so then at the time when the events of the present story unfolded Elizabeth was a sophomore at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Elizabeth had wanted to harness her 'superpowers' for good, and had decided—after months of debating and over her quarrelsome older brother's taunts and jeers that she was entering into a "joke major that no one, not even gas jockeys and janitors, took seriously"—to channel her unique psychological semidivinity into the professionally sort of unacclaimed but growing field of Kinesiology and Recreation, and after applying to the appropriate department at JMU had began her studies in earnest, working toward her B.Sc. in Kinesiology with an Exercise Science and Leadership Concentration. Also important to know for the story at present: Elizabeth had aced all eight of the last eight weekly pop quizzes in KIN 421 Principles of Exercise Testing and Prescription after having skimmed through and largely committed to memory hundreds of pages of assigned readings in only a matter of minutes. Elizabeth studied, on average, between a tenth and a twentieth as hard as her KIN 421 classmates, usually racing through the entire reading assignment in one sitting in the legislatively quiet JMU Students' Lounge in the fifteen minutes to half an hour before 09:30, when class began. So on these quizzes in this class at least, Elizabeth was invincible. (This is not to say that her scholastic abilities were well-rounded and complete; they weren't. Elizabeth couldn't write a paper to save her life—the girl was mortal, after all. But she had the mind of a juggernaut and could cram for KIN 421 like a motherfucker.) ...but seriously, yeah, «doyiie!», ha-ha, so we went to down to Shakers, and yes, he wore that sweater, and «uhh!!» it was *so* embarrassing, god, I almost made him change it right there, in the bathroom, and do you know how packed that place is now, like, I could barely find a place to stand, and I said to the bouncer, 'Uh is it gonna be this busy all night cuz if it is we might as well go somewhere else,' you know, but it was cool, if you're «hahhff!», yeah, *seriously*... Today was different. She couldn't cram at all. It was 09:12 in the legislatively quiet JMU Students' Lounge and there, seated twenty feet or so away from Elizabeth and Elizabeth's textbook/photocopy/stationary-strewn weekly faux oak study table and book bag, was a fashionably dressed and well-manicured very pretty young woman talking loudly, unashamedly, continuously on a cellular telephone. The young woman, who had entered the Lounge only moments before and whose immediate presence was announced not with trumpets but nonstop gab, was a girl and she wore a form-fitting designer pink top and faded hip-hugging blue jeans and had long coquettish black hair and a smile of the ambiguously sexy kind that drew backward glances from men and quiet scowls of short-term malice and sometimes envy from the girlfriends of those same men. She was Filipino or Polynesian or what-have-you, this girl, and was seated with her back to Elizabeth in a chair adjoined to another table. She was not obscenely loud, at least not in volume, but she had a lot to talk about (or not really: it may have been just that she was inordinately, exorbitantly, inappropriately verbose—meaning I'm suggesting it was primarily a self-restraint issue of hers, the girl's, though probably in conjunction with self-image and -esteem and propriety problems, too), and innumerable words were tossed from her sparkly lip glossed mouth like jettison, or perhaps it was that they [the words] were fleeing that mouth as though from a murderer who wished them violent harm, that Asian/Pacific Islander mezzo-soprano local-Junior-Miss-Beauty-Pageant-winner-type mouth whose in some ways volcanic manner of speaking was inflected, by the way, with a mega-obviously unsophisticated Valley Girl drawl which appeared to Elizabeth to be conspicuously out of place for Virginia and was surely too exaggerated to be natural. And Elizabeth, who as I established way above was undistractable even when under time constraints and sundry high-stress circumstances, whose memory retention/recall was beyond superb, really, remember, was the consensus, was in this comparatively low-stress circumstance very distractable indeed, and all because of the talking of this pretty young woman (like this one time—and this here's an anecdote I'll deliver mostly for the sake of comparison, mostly—after the big school dance on Prom Night 2005, Elizabeth's, at the point when everyone's finished dancing and is headed either home or to a non-school sanctioned kegger of some sort, Elizabeth's prom date Jerry Rossback—who was the son of local multimillionaire businessman Norman Rossback—had Elizabeth all alone in the back of his daddy's stretch limousine, and Jerry offered Elizabeth $8,000 for her virginity right then and there provided that she could name all the Governors of Rhode Island, in one long list, ordered by their years of birth in reverse-chronogical order, including party affiliations except where unknown or inapplicable, in a monotone vocal delivery and without pause, and from memory, of course, and the clincher was that this whole prostitution-/sexual trial by fire-/defrocking-/harlotry-trivia game show was to occur mid-coitus; and in Jerry's right hand he held the hefty if flimsily bound brown volume "The Governors of Rhode Island: For Life and Liberty," which he tossed onto Elizabeth's lap and motioned to, saying, "Get to work, Lizzie, if you're game enough," which Elizabeth was, game enough; and Jerry gave her ten minutes with the book, of which she needed only five, after which minutes Elizabeth kicked off her shoes and let her hair down and wriggled out of her frilly salmon pink-colored prom dress and undergarments and supplementary formal attire, and Jerry had likewise unclothed; and he drew close to and caressed the heretofore thoroughly unsexed Elizabeth, and while Jerry descended upon and drew himself into her she began to speak, deadpan, "Donald Carcieri; [short pause]; Lincoln C. Almond; [short pause]; Edward D. DiPrete; [short pause]; Philip W. Noel; [short pause]; [and so on]" and vocalized thusly, sans arręt, until Jerry, red-faced and at the height of climax, gasped out, "Shut up and enjoy the moment, already—you'll get your damn money!" which Elizabeth did, with pleasure, shut up, especially since she was already in the throes of orgasm herself, and the experience was wonderful from start to finish, ah! so very wonderful, she later decided, and plus Jerry paid her the $8,000 before he dropped her off at home for the night, which all goes to show just how intense her concentration really was, Elizabeth's, way more than intense enough for her to study her Kinesiology homework amidst the talking of one pesky young woman, you know?); and this chatty hot little thing was nothing that Elizabeth hadn't speed-memorized nearby the likes of a thousand times before, though for reasons inexplicable this time was different and Elizabeth had blasted her way to an A+ in all eight of the last eight weekly pop quizzes and she had considerable notoriety now, in this class, and a reputation to live up to before her friends and rivals and family members and school officials and classmates and particularly her aggrieved and surly older brother (who was incarcerated months ago on related DUI and Vehicular Manslaughter charges for crimes committed Prom Night 2005, which charges he bargained and pled guilty to gladly—he had been booked on First Degree Murder for the death of Jerry Rossback) and KIN 421 Principles of Exercise Testing and Prescription began momentarily but Elizabeth for the life of her simply could not concentrate—not one iota!—on her nearly-always-lightning-fast last-minute approaching-pop-quiz preparations while forced by a combination of proximity and simple acoustics to listen unremittingly to some gabby Pinoyish knockout who's a fucking nuisance and garrulous and would she please get out of my life so I can fucking get on with it? ...like *where* did she think she gets the right to say that to me, that's where I'm coming from, ha-ha yeah, «fffhhuh!», uh huh, and he was *still* wearing that sweater today, I know, I don't think he'll *ever* take it off, but he knows, yeah he knows I hate her, «ahummf!», and I swear if she woulda been at Shakers last night I don't care I'd stare her right in the face, you know, I'd say 'Bitch! excuse me, just who do you think you're talking— "Excuse me, excuse me..." —to,' I mean *seriously*, and she— "Excuse me..." —couldn't say anything, like, «tsk-haww!», *no way!*, uh wait, hold on a sec, no way, there's some, uh hold on, hold on a sec... [to Elizabeth] Yeah what? "Hi, I have class in a few minutes and I'm using this room to study. This is the JMU Students' Lounge and it's a quiet room, legislatively. A quiet room—I mean technically I shouldn't even be talking to you right now." [still to Elizabeth] «ughffhh!» "So would you go somewhere else?" 
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