It's Kind of a Funny Story

thirty-three

The next day is Monday and I should be at school.

I shouldn’t be eating with Humble and hearing about what his girlfriend used to do to him every time they passed a Burger King. I should be at school.

I shouldn’t be explaining to Ebony’s friend on the phone that what I drew was a map of a human brain and having her echo “He’s so good, Marlene, he’s so good.” I should be at school.

I shouldn’t be taking my Zoloft in line behind Bobby, who is dressed in my shirt for his interview. I should be at school.

I work up the courage to get to the phones at 11 A.M. and check the messages.

“Hey, Craig, it’s Aaron, listen, I’m really sorry, man. The truth is, I probably—well, I got in a big fight with Nia after you told me she was on pills and . . . I think I might have some of that depression stuff, too. Lately, I’ve been like, unable to get out of bed sometimes and I’m just . . . y’know, really sleepy and I lose my train of thought. So like, I probably called you the other night like that because I was projecting, that’s what Nia says, and I’m seriously interested in visiting you. Me and Nia are having problems.”

I call him back and leave a message for him. I tell him that if he feels depressed, he should go to his general physician first and get a referral to a psychopharmacologist and go through the process like I did. I tell him that it’s nothing to be ashamed of. I tell him I’m glad he called but I don’t know whether he should visit because I’m really sorting my stuff out here and I think I’d like to keep in here and the outside world as separate as possible. And I ask him what’s going on between him and Nia, whether they made up yet.

“Hello, Craig, this is Mr. Reynolds again—”

I call him back and leave a message that I’m in the hospital for personal reasons and that he’ll have his labs when I’m good and ready to do them. I tell him that I’ll provide any documentation from doctors—including psychopharmacologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, recreation directors, and President Armelio—that I am being cared for right now in a facility where the stresses of doing labs are not allowed. And I tell him that if he wants to talk to me again, he can call the number here, and don’t be alarmed if someone answers “Joe’s Pub.”

“Hey, Craig, this is Jenna, I’m one of Nia’s friends, and like . . . okay, this is really embarrassing, but do you want to hang out anytime soon? I heard about all this stuff you went through, like you’re in the hospital or whatever, and my last boyfriend was really insensitive about that stuff, because I kind of go through that stuff too? And so I thought you’d probably understand me, and I always thought you were cute—we met each other a couple times—but I always thought that you were so shy that you wouldn’t be fun to hang out with; I didn’t realize you were like, depressed. And I think that’s really brave of you to admit it and I just think we should hang out.”

Well. I call Jenna back and leave her a message that I can hang out with her next week maybe.

That’s it. The other messages are from Ronny and Scruggs and they’re about pot and I ignore them. I put the phone down without slamming it on my finger. Muqtada is right in front of me.

“I follow your advice. Come out of room.”

“Hey, good morning! How are you?”

He shrugs. “Okay. What is to do?”

“There’s lots of stuff to do. Do you like to draw?”

“Eh.”

“Do you like to play cards?”

“Eh.”

“Do you like to . . . listen to music?”

“Yes.”

“Great! Okay—”

“Only Egypt music.”

“Huh.” I try to think of where I can get Egyptian music, or even what it’s called, when suddenly Solomon flops past in his sandals.

“Excuse me if you please I am trying to rest!” he yells at us. Muqtada takes one look at him and curls his face into a laugh, his glasses rising above his nose.

“What is the problem?” Solomon asks.

“Seventeen days!” Muqtada says. “Seventeen days the Jew will not talk to me! And now he does. I am honored.”

“I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to him,” Solomon points at me.

“Have you guys met?” I ask.

Muqtada and Solomon shake hands—Solomon’s pants fall down a little but he bows his legs to hold them up. Then he takes his hand back and stalks off. Muqtada turns to me: “This I think is enough for one day.” And he goes back into our room.

I shake my head.

The phone rings next to me. I call for Armelio. He scoots up, grabs the receiver, says “Joe’s Pub,” and hands the phone to me.

“Me?”

“Yeah, buddy.”

I take the phone. “I’m looking for Craig Gilner,” an authoritative voice says through the line.

“Ah, speaking. Who is this?”

“This is Mr. Alfred Janowitz, Craig. I’m your principal at Executive Pre-Professional High?”

“Holy crap!” I say, and I hang up.

The phone starts ringing again. I stand by it and ignore it, explaining to Armelio and everyone else who passes that it’s for me but that I can’t answer. They understand completely. It’s the principal. I was right. I’ve seen this guy before; he’s the one who greeted us on that first day when I was high with Aaron, and told us that only the best had been accepted and only the best would be rewarded. He’s the one who drops by classes and looks us over as we take tests and gives out chocolates as if that makes up for it. He’s the one who says “your school day shouldn’t end until five o’clock” and is always in the newspapers as the most no-nonsense principal around and now he’s on my ass because he knows I’m crazy and knows I haven’t been doing my homework. I never should have left that message for Mr. Reynolds. This is it. I’m being expelled. I’m out of school. I’m never going to go to high school again. I’m never going to go to college.

When the phone finally dies, I start pacing.

I was right all along. What was I thinking? You add up your little victories in here and think they count for something. You get lulled into thinking Six North is the real world. You make friends and have a pithy little conversation with a girl, and you think you’ve succeeded, Craig? You haven’t succeeded in the slightest. You haven’t won anything. You haven’t proven anything. You haven’t gotten better. You haven’t gotten a job. You aren’t making any money. You’re in here costing the state money, taking the same pills you took before. You’re wasting your parents’ money and the taxpayers’ money. You don’t have anything really wrong with you.

This was all an excuse, I think. I was doing fine. I had a 93 average and I was holding my head above water. I had good friends and a loving family. And because I needed to be the center of attention, because I needed something more, I ended up here, wallowing in myself, trying to convince everybody around me that I have some kind of . . . disease.

I don’t have any disease. I keep pacing. Depression isn’t a disease. It’s a pretext for being a prima donna. Everybody knows that. My friends know it; my principal knows it. The sweating has started again. I can feel the Cycling roaring up in my brain. I haven’t done anything right. What have I done, made a bunch of little pictures? That doesn’t count as anything. I’m finished. My principal just called me and I hung up on him and didn’t call back. I’m finished. I’m expelled. I’m finished.

The man is back in my stomach and I rush to my bathroom, but something about me won’t let it go. I hunch over the toilet moaning and hacking, but it won’t come so I wash my mouth out and get into bed.

“What happened?” Muqtada asks. “You never sleep during the day.”

“I’m in big trouble,” I say, and I lie there, getting up only to munch through lunch, until Dr. Minerva comes by at three o’clock and pokes her head into my room.

“Craig? I’m here to talk.”

thirty-four

“I’m really glad to see you.” We’re back in the room that Nurse Monica checks me out in. Dr. Minerva seems very familiar with it.

“I’m glad to see you, too. I’m glad to see you well,” she says.

“Yeah, it’s really been a roller coaster, I have to say.”

“An emotional roller coaster.”

“Yes.”

“Where is that roller coaster right now, Craig?”

“Down. Way down.”

“What’s got you down?”

“I got a phone call from my school principal.”

“And what did he want?”

“I don’t know. I hung up.”

“What do you think he wanted, Craig?”

“To expel me.”

“And why would he want to do that?”

“Hello? Because I’m here? Because I’m not in school?”

“Craig, your principal can’t expel you for being in a psychiatric hospital.”

“Well, you know all my other problems.”

“What are those?”

“Hanging out with my friends all the time, getting depressed, not doing homework . . .”

“Uh-huh. Let’s hold off on that for a moment, Craig. I haven’t seen you since Friday. Can you talk a little bit about how you came to be here?”

I give her the rap. There’s much more to add to it now, about being on Six North. About Noelle and the eating and the not throwing up and the sleeping, where I’m one for two.

“What’s it like compared to Friday, Craig?”

“Better. Much, much better. But the question is, am I really better, or am I just lulled into a false sense of security by this fake environment? I mean, it’s not normal here.”

“Nowhere is normal, Craig.”

“I guess not. What’s been the news since I’ve been in here?”

“Someone tried to gas the Four Seasons in Manhattan.”

“Jeez!”

“I know.” Dr. Minerva smirks. Then she leans in. “Craig, there’s one thing you didn’t mention that your recreation director did. She said you’ve been doing art while you’ve been here.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s nothing, really. Just yesterday.”

“What is it like?”

“Well, remember how I told you last time that I liked to draw maps when I was a little kid? It sort of came from that.”

“How so?”

“When they gave me a pencil and paper in arts and crafts, I remembered—well, I didn’t remember, I was actually prompted by Noelle—”

“That’s the girl you met?”

“Right.”

“From the way you describe her I can see a real friendship developing.”

“Oh, forget a friendship. We are totally going to be going out when I leave, I think.”

“You think you’re ready for that, Craig?”

“Absolutely.”

“All right.” She takes a note. “So how did Noelle help you?”

“She suggested that I draw something from my childhood, and that made me remember the maps.”

“I see.”

“And I started drawing one, but then Ebony came over—”

“You’re on a first-name basis with all these people.”

“Of course.”

“Have you ever considered yourself good at making friends, Craig?”

“No.”

“But you can make friends here.”

“Right. Well, here is different.”

“How is it different?”

“It’s, I dunno . . . there’s no pressure.”

“No pressure to make friends?”

“No, no pressure to work hard.”

“As there is in the outside world.”

“Right.”

“Tremendous pressure out there. Your Tentacles.”

“Yeah.”

“Are there Tentacles in here, Craig?”

I stop and think. The way they run things on Six North has become clear to me: it’s all about keeping people occupied and passing the time. You wake up and you’ve immediately got a blood pressure gauge around your arm and somebody taking your pulse. Then it’s breakfast. Then you get your meds and then there’s a smoking break, and then maybe you have fifteen minutes to yourself before there’s some kind of activity. That leads to lunch which leads to more meds and more smoking and more activities, and then all of a sudden the day is over; it’s time for dinner, and everyone’s trading salt and desserts, and then it’s the 10 P.M. cigarette break and bedtime.

“No, there aren’t any Tentacles in here,” I say. “The opposite of a Tentacle is a simple task, something that’s placed before you and that you do without question. That’s what they have in here.”

“Right. Your only Tentacles in here are your phone calls, which are what got you so down just now.”

“Correct.”

Dr. Minerva takes notes. “Now, here’s an important question, Craig. Are there any Anchors in here?”

“Huh.”

“Anything you can hold on to.”

I think about it. If an Anchor is a constant, there are lots of those. There’s the constant lite FM, which occasionally borders on dangerously funky, coming out of the nurses’ station whether Smitty or Howard is behind it. There’s the constant schedule: the food coming and going, the meds being dished out, the announcements of Armelio. There’s the constant of Armelio himself, always ready to play cards. And Jimmy is always around going, “It’ll come to ya!”

“The people are Anchors,” I say.

“People don’t make good Anchors, though, Craig. They change. The people here are going to change. The patients are going to leave. You can’t rely on them.”

“When will they leave?”

“I can’t know that.”

“What about the staff?”

“They change too, just on a different time scale. People always come and go.”

“Noelle. She’s beautiful and smart and I really like her. She could be an Anchor.”

“You don’t want any of your Anchors being members of the opposite sex you’re attracted to,” Dr. Minerva says. “Relationships change even more than people. It’s like two people changing. It’s exponentially more volatile. Especially two teenagers.”

“But Romeo and Juliet were teenagers,” I point out.

“And what happened to Romeo and Juliet?”

“Oh,” I mumble. “Right.”

“And have we gone beyond that, Craig? Have we gone beyond thinking those thoughts?”

“Yes,” I nod.

“Because if you have those thoughts again you know you have to come back here.”

“I know. I won’t.”

“Why not?”

“It’s just . . . It would suck to kill myself. I’d hurt a lot of people and . . . it would suck.”

“That’s right,” Dr. Minerva leans across the table. “It would suck. And not just for other people. For you.”

“It’s not noble or anything,” I say. “Like this guy Muqtada who’s my roommate, he’s practically dead. He doesn’t do anything. He just lies in bed all day.”

“Right.”

“And I don’t want to ever be like him. I don’t want to live that way. And if I were dead, I’d basically be living that way.”

“Excellent, Craig.”

She stops. Like I say, the good shrinks know when to throw in a dramatic pause.

I tap my feet. The fluorescent lights hum.

“I want to pick back up on your Anchors,” Dr. Minerva says. “Can you think of anything else you’ve found in here that could occupy your time when you leave?”

I think. I know there’s something. It’s at the tip of my brain-tongue. But it won’t come.

“No.”

“Okay, not a problem. You’ve made a lot of progress today. There’s only one more thing we have to do: call your principal.”

“No!” I tell her, but she’s already at it, pulling out her cell phone, which is apparently allowed up here. “Yes, I’d like the number for Executive Pre-Professional High School in Manhattan.”

“You can’t you can’t you can’t,” I say, leaning across the table, grabbing at the phone. Luckily the blinds are drawn so no one can see in here; if they did they’d probably have me sedated. She gets up and walks to the door, points outside. Do I want security in here? I sit back down.

“Yes,” she says. “I need to speak with the principal. I’m returning a call of his to one of your students regarding a health and legal matter. I’m the mother.”

A pause.

“Great.” She cups the phone. “I’m being connected.”

“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” I say.

“I can’t believe you’d be worried about me doing this . . . yes, hello? Is this Mr. . . .” she looks at me.

“Janowitz,” I mouth.

“Janowitz?”

I hear an affirmative mumph through the line.

“I’m Dr. Minerva, calling for your student Craig Gilner. You called him before at Argenon Hospital psychiatric facility in Brooklyn. I’m Craig’s licensed therapist and I’m right here with him; would you like to speak with him?”

She nods. “Here you go, Craig.”

I take the cell phone—it’s smaller than mine, more buzzy. “Um, hello?”

“Craig, why’d you hang up on me?” His booming voice is light and gentle, almost laughing.

“Ah . . . I thought I was in trouble. I thought I was being expelled. You called me, you know, in the hospital.”

“Craig, I called you because I got a message from one of our teachers. I just wanted to tell you that you have the school’s full support in everything you’re going through and that we’re more than willing to have your semester repeated, or given over the summer, or for work to be provided for you where you are now, if you should miss enough days to warrant that.”

“Oh.”

“We don’t pass judgment on our students for being in the hospital, my goodness, Craig.”

“No? But it’s, like, a psychiatric—”

“I know what kind of hospital it is. You think we don’t have other kids in these situations? It’s a very common problem among young people.”

“Oh. Uh, thanks.”

“Are you doing okay?”

“I’m doing better.”

“Do you know when you’ll be leaving?”

I don’t want to tell him Thursday and then have it be Friday. Or next Thursday. Or next year.

“Soon,” I say.

“Okay. You just hang in there, and whenever you come back, we’ll be waiting for you at Executive Pre-Professional.”

“Thanks, Mr. Janowitz.” And I picture it in my mind: me going back to school. My little group of friends—only they’re not even my friends anymore—buffered by this new collection of girls who like me because I’m depressed and teachers who are sympathizing and the suddenly nice principal. It’s something I want to get excited about. But I can’t.

“See, was that so bad?” Dr. Minerva asks. And I have to admit that it wasn’t. But it was kind of like getting told that the prison is happy that you’ve been granted a temporary reprieve but we’ll be right here with open arms to take you in when you come back.

“The plan right now is to discharge you Thursday, Craig, and I’ll be here to talk to you on Wednesday, all right?” Dr. Minerva asks. I shake her hand and thank her. I tell her what I tell her when I feel really good about talking to her, which is that she knows how to do her job. Then I go back to my room and draw some brain maps. I’m excited for tonight, for Armelio’s big card tournament.

thirty-five

“O’kay!” says Armelio. “Everybody here?”

We’re back in the activities lounge. Johnny, Humble, Ebony, and the Professor are here. Everyone shaved today—it turns out that the shaving rule is only enforced on weekdays—and they look ten times better. Even Rolling Pin Robert, pacing the halls outside, looks serviceable. I’ll have to remember that: shaving can make even a psych patient look good.

“Huh.” Johnny exhales. “Bobby’s still at his interview.”

“Yeah,” Ebony says. “Craig lent him a shirt. You’re so nice, Craig.”

“Thanks.”

“When are you going to do more of your art?”

“Maybe tonight, after cards.”

“That’s right, buddy, cards is what we need to focus on,” Armelio announces. He stands at the head of the table, which is covered with paint drops, crayon marks, and ink smears over uneven wood. In the middle is a plastic container with the buttons, separated into four even partitions. It looks like at some point the buttons were ordered by size or color, but now they’re all mixed up—every conceivable hue, shape, and ornamentation. They look like jewels.

“I don’t want any of my buttons missing at the end!” Joanie says from the back. She’s at the other table, reading a romance novel and supervising.

“That’s right, we’re still looking for the Blue Button Bandit,” Humble says. “Anybody who can suddenly keep their pants up, we’re going to be very suspicious. Watch out for Solomon, that means. And Ebony.”

“I told you once, stupid, to stop talking about my pants.”

“Okay, everybody ready?” Armelio asks. “Take your buttons!”

Our hands dive into the middle of the table, grabbing fistfuls. We pour the buttons in front of us and use our fingertips to spread them into a one-button-thick layer. Armelio gets to judge whether we have an equal amount.

“Humble, put back six buttons. Ebony, put back ten. Johnny, what’s going on, buddy? You have like two hundred buttons too many!”

“I got a button bonus,” Johnny says, and just then Bobby comes into the activity room.

He moves with his normal loping gait, leaning back with my shirt on. He stops at the end of our table, makes sure he has our attention, raises his right hand, shakes it in the air like he’s doing a magic trick, and then slams both his fists down on the table so his arms make a ‘V’ shape, as if he were Chairman of the Board. He grins:

“I got it.”

Silence holds the room.

Joanie starts the clapping from the back, slowly, but with reverence and purpose. Then Armelio joins in and the tempo starts to spiral.

“All right!”

“Congratulations!”

“Hooray for Brooklyn scumbags!”

“Bob-by! Bob-by!”

In a small room, eight people clapping can be a lot. The posters seem to shake with the applause. As it gets louder there’s howling and hooting and cheering. Tommy gets up and gives Bobby a bear hug, the kind that you can see between two men who’ve known one another for twenty years, who’ve been Fiend One and Fiend Two, for whom one’s victory counts just as much for the other.

“Bobby, buddy, you the man!” Armelio walks over to the hugging pair and smacks Bobby’s back, nearly toppling Bobby and Johnny.

“Wait a minute,” Bobby says. He extracts himself from the hug and holds up his right hand. “Before we get too crazy, ‘cause I see the buttons are out, I gotta thank this young man over here.” He walks toward me. “This kid literally gave me the shirt off his back—this blue one right here—and he didn’t know me from Adam, and there ain’t no question, without him, I wouldn’t have gotten this home. This new home.”

I stand up and Bobby hugs me, his big bony hands wrapping around my back, and I feel the smooth old skin of his cheek and the well-knit fabric of my shirt doing a better job on him than it ever did on me. I think about how much this means to this guy, about how much more important it is than going to any high school or getting with any girl or being friends with anybody. This guy just got a place to live. Me? I have one. I’ll always have one. I don’t have any reason to worry about it. My stupid fantasies about ending up homeless are just that—the fact is that my parents will take me in anytime, anywhere. But some people have to get lucky just to live. And I never knew I could make anybody lucky.

If Bobby can get a place to live, I think, then I can get a life worth living.

“Thank you, kid,” Bobby says.

“It’s nothing,” I mumble. “Thanks for the tour.”

“All right, guys, we gonna play cards or what?” Armelio asks, but Bobby stops him.

“One more thing: I’m really sorry, Craig, but I accidentally fell in something on my way back from the interview.” He turns around. There’s a . . . wait a minute . . .

There’s a giant piece of dog shit ground into the back of my shirt, right above his belt.

“Ah . . .” I can’t believe I didn’t smell it. Did I touch it when I hugged him? “Ah, Bobby . . . it’s okay . . . my mom can wash it out—”

“It ain’t real!” Bobby reaches back and pulls it off, throws it at me. It bounces off my shirt (a tie-dye T-shirt that everyone on Six North likes) and lands on the table in the buttons.

“It’s plastic! I’ve had it since the eighties! Ha! I love it!”

Armelio cracks up. “Holy crap! Look at that! It looks like something my mom would leave in my bedroom!”

Everyone stops, turns.

“President Armelio, we did not need to know that,” says Humble.

“Your mother would defecate in your bedroom?” the Professor asks.

“Who said that?” Armelio asks. “I was talking about plastic—what’sthematter with you?”

“Everybody just cool it a little,” says Joanie, standing up with her book at her side. “Let’s have fun, but keep calm.”

“All right, who gets the doodie button?” Humble holds up the poop. “I think it counts for two.”

Bobby sits down and we ante up. The game is poker, seven-card stud. I’m no good at it. The hands start and people begin betting crazy, throwing in three or four buttons right at the beginning. I can’t match them. I have a limited number. And I don’t seem to be getting any good hands. So I fold. I fold three times in a row. The third time, Johnny says, “You might as well bet. It’s just buttons.”

“Yeah,” Humble says. “Let me show you a secret.” He reaches into the button container and takes out a handful. “See?”

“I see,” Armelio says, looking over his cards. “Don’t think that’s not cheating, Humble. Any more and you’re out.”

I laugh and bet six buttons.

“What am I out of, exactly?” Humble asks Armelio. “The button jackpot?”

“Be nice,” the Professor says.

“Oh, listen to her,” Humble jerks his thumb. “Trying to be the mediator.” He leans in to me. “Don’t let her grandma look fool you. She’s a real hustler.”

“Excuse me?” The Professor puts down her cards. “What do you mean, ‘grandma?’”

“Nothing, you just have that little old granny look about you, to lull people into your trap of playing good cards!” Humble gestures at himself disbelievingly.

“You’re saying I’m old.”

“I’m not! I’m saying you’re a grandma!”

“Humble, apologize,” Joanie says from the back.

“Why? Grandmas are wonderful things.”

“For your information I’ll have you know,” the Professor says, “that unlike certain people around here I act my age.”

“Oh, so now I’m a liar?” Humble asks, standing up.

“We all know that’s what you are,” says the Professor.

“Peo-ple . . .” Joanie warns.

“If I’m a liar, you know what you are?”

“What? You better not call me old because I’ll take this cane and whack you in the head right in front of everybody.”

“You ain’t taking nothing of mine!” Ebony holds her cane close. Quietly, she has far and away the most buttons.

“You’re a yuppie!” Humble yells, and he picks up the dog doo and throws it at her head. “A stupid yuppie with no respect for anybody!”

“Aaaagh!” The Professor holds her face. “He broke it! He broke my nose!” The dog doo has bounced all the way across the room and Joanie jumps over it lightly as she beats a hasty retreat.

“Uh-oh,” Armelio says. “Now you guys did it. We were having such a good card game.”

Harold comes into the room with two big guys in light blue jumpsuits, Joanie behind them. Humble raises his hands. “What? I didn’t do it!”

“C’mon, Mr. Koper,” Harold says.

“I can’t believe it!” Humble says. “She insulted me! It wasn’t even my dog poop! I didn’t have the weapon!” He starts pointing at Bobby. “He’s an accomplice. If I’m going, he’s going.”

“Humble, you have three seconds to get over here.”

“All right, all right.” Humble throws down his cards. “You guys have fun with your buttons.” He’s escorted out by Harold and the security guards, getting a resounding slap on the butt from the Professor. She still has one hand on her face, claiming that she’s bleeding, but when she removes her hand there isn’t any kind of mark. Joanie sits back down at her table.

“You all saw what happened. He attacked me,” the Professor says.

“Yeah yeah, we saw, Doomba,” says Armelio.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re the Doomba; we all know you are.”

“What’s a Doomba?” I ask.

“If you asking, maybe you’re a Doomba, too!” Armelio looks mad. This is the first time I’ve seen it.

“Huh,” Johnny breathes.

“Craig ain’t no Doomba,” Bobby says. “He’s on the level.”

“Aren’t I the winner yet?” asks Ebony.

“How can you have so many buttons?” asks Armelio. “You’re not winning any hands!”

“It’s cuz I don’t over-bet,” Ebony says, leaning over, and a stream of buttons comes roaring out of her top.

“Whoops!”

They keep coming—a mountain spilling over the ante pile. She starts laughing and laughing, showing us her very neat and clean gums while she howls: “Ooooooh, I got you! I got alla you!”

“That’s it,” Armelio says, throwing down his cards. “Every Monday the card tournament always gets messed up! I quit!”

“Do you resign your position as President?” Bobby asks him.

“Forget you, buddy!”

My tongue hurts from so much biting. It might not have been a regulation game, but it definitely had as many emotional ups-and-downs as the poker on TV. I clean up with Bobby and Joanie. Tonight, when I get in bed, I’m too busy wondering about what a Doomba is, and when Ebony stuck the buttons in her breasts, and what that even feels like, and Noelle and the fact that I get to see her tomorrow, to do anything but sleep.