It's Kind of a Funny Story

seven

So why am I depressed? That’s the million-dollar question, baby, the Tootsie Roll question; not even the owl knows the answer to that one. I don’t know either. All I know is the chronology.

Two years ago I got into one of the best high schools in Manhattan: Executive Pre-Professional High School. It’s a new school set up to create the leaders of tomorrow; corporate internships are mandatory; the higher-ups of Merrill Lynch come and speak to classes and distribute travel mugs and stuff. This billionaire philanthropist named Bernard Lutz set it up in conjunction with the public school system, like a school within a school—all you have to do to get in is pass a test. Then your whole high school is paid for and you have access to 800 of the smartest, most interesting students in the world—not to mention the teachers and visiting dignitaries. You can come out of Executive Pre-Professional High School and go right to Wall Street, although that’s not what you should do; what you should do is come out and go to Harvard and then law school. That’s how you end up being, like, President.

I’ll admit it: I kind of want to be President.

So this test—they named it the Bernard Lutz Philanthropic Exam, in honor of his philanthrop-icness—became fairly important in my life. It became more important than, uh, food, for instance. I bought the book for it—Bernard Lutz puts out his own line of test-prep books for his own test—and started studying three hours a day.

I was in seventh grade, and I got comfortable with my room for the first time—I’d come home with my heavy backpack and toss it on the bed and watch it bounce toward the pillows as I sat down in my chair and pulled out my test-prep book. On my cell phone, I would go to TOOLS: ALARM and set myself up for a two-hour practice exam. There were five practice exams in the book, and after I did them all, I was thrilled to discover an ad at the back for twelve more Bernard Lutz test-prep books. I went to Barnes & Noble; they didn’t have all of them in stock—they’d never had anyone ask for all of them—so they had to put in an order for me. But then it was game on. I started taking a practice exam every day. The questions covered the standard junk that they test you on to determine if you’re not an idiot:

Reading comprehension. Ooh. Can you read this selection and tell what kind of tree they’re trying to save?

Vocabulary. Did you buy a book full of weird words and learn them?

Math. Are you able to turn off your mind to the world and fill it with symbols that follow rules?

I made that test my bitch. I mauled the practice exams and slept with the books under my pillow and turned my brain into a fierce machine, a buzz saw that could handle anything. I could feel myself getting smarter, under the light at my desk. I could feel me filling myself.

Now, I stopped hanging out with a lot of friends when I got into Executive Pre-Professional mode. I didn’t have many friends to begin with—I had the kids who I sat with during lunch, the bare minimum—but once I started carrying flash cards around they sort of avoided me. I don’t know what their problem was; I just wanted to maximize my time. When all of my test-prep books were done, I got a personal tutor to shore me up for the exam. She told me halfway through the sessions that I didn’t need her, but kept my mom’s $700.

I got an 800 on the test, out of 800.

The day I got those test results, a cold, plaintive, late-fall New York day, was my last good day. I’ve had good moments scattered since then, times when I thought I was better, but that was the last day I felt triumphant. The letter from Executive Pre-Professional High School came in the mail, and Mom had saved it on the kitchen table for me when I got home from Tae Bo class after school, which was something I intended to keep doing in high school, to have on my extracurricular activity sheet when I applied for college, which would be the next hurdle, the next step.

“Craig, guess what’s here?”

I threw down my backpack and ran past the Vampire Mirror to the kitchen. There it was: a manila envelope. The good kind of envelope. If you failed the test, you got a small envelope; if you got in, you got a big one.

“Yeesssss!” I screamed. I tore it open. I took out the purple-and-gold welcome packet and held it up like the holy grail. I could have used it to start my own religion. I could have made, y’know, love to it. I kissed it and hugged it until Mom said, “Craig, stop that. That’s very sick. How about you call your friends?”

She didn’t know, because I never told her, that my friends were a bit estranged. They’re sort of ancillary anyway, friends. I mean, they’re important—everybody knows that; the TV tells you so—but they come and go. You lose one friend, you pick up another. All you have to do is talk to people, and this was back when I could talk to anybody. My friends, when I had them, pretty much just ragged on me and took my seat when I left the room anyway. Why did I need to call them up?

Except Aaron. Aaron was a real friend; I guess I’d call him my best friend. He was one of the oldest guys in my class, born on that cusp where you can be the youngest person in an older class or the oldest in a younger class, and his parents did the right thing and went with the latter. He was smart and fearless, with a flop of brown curly hair and the sort of glasses that made girls like him, square black ones. He had freckles and he talked a lot. When we got together we would start projects: an alarm clock torn apart and distributed over a wall, a stop-motion video of Lego people having sex, a Web site for pictures of toilets.

I had met him by wandering over to the table during lunch with my head buried in flash cards, sitting down, having one of his friends ask me what I was doing there, and having him come by, flush with tacos, to rescue me, ask what I was studying. It turned out that he and I were taking the same exam, but he wasn’t studying at all—didn’t believe in it. He introduced me to the table conversation about what Princess Zelda would be like in bed—I said she’d be terrible, because she’d been locked up in dungeons since puberty, but Aaron said that’d make her super hot.

Aaron called me that Friday night.

“Want to come over and watch movies?”

“Sure.” I was done with my practice test for the day.

Aaron lived in a small apartment in a big building in downtown Manhattan by City Hall. I took the subway in (my mom had to okay it with Aaron’s mom, which was horrifying), identified myself to Aaron’s paunchy doorman, and took the elevator up to his floor. Aaron’s mom greeted me and brought me into his ventilated chamber (past his dad, who wrote in a room that resembled a prison cell, occasionally beating his head against his desk, while Aaron’s mom brought him tea) and flopped on his bed, which wasn’t yet covered with the sort of stains that would define it in the future. I’m good at flopping on things.

“Hey,” Aaron was like. “You want to smoke some pot?”

Oh. So this was what watching movies meant. Quick recap of what I knew about drugs: my mom told me never to do them; my dad told me not to do them until after the SATs. Mom trumped Dad, so I vowed to never do them—but what if someone made me? I thought drugs might be something people did to you, like jabbing you with a needle while you were trying to mind your business.

“What if someone makes me, Mom?” I had asked her; we were having the drug conversation in a playground. I was ten. “What if they hold a gun to my head and force me to take the drugs?”

“That’s not really how it works, honey,” she answered. “People take drugs because they want to. You just have to not want to.”

And now here I was with Aaron, wanting to. His room smelled like certain areas of Central Park, down by the lake, where white guys with dreadlocks played bongos.

My mom hovered in my head.

“Nah,” I was like.

“No problem.” He opened a pungent bag and put a chunk of the contents of the bag in a very fascinating little device that looked like a cigarette but was made of metal. He lit it up with a butane lighter that made a flame approximately as large as my middle finger. He puffed right up against his wall.

“Don’t you have to open a window?”

“Nah, it’s my room; I can do what I want.”

“Doesn’t your mom care?”

“She has her hands full with Dad.”

The section of wall he smoked against would get discolored over the next two years. Eventually, like the rest of the room, it would get covered up with posters of rappers with gold teeth.

Aaron took three or four breaths of his metal cigarette and made the room smell musty and hot, then announced:

“Let’s motivate, son! What do you want to get?”

“Action.” Duh. I was in seventh grade.

“All right! You know what I want?” Aaron’s eyes lit up. “I want a movie with a cliff.”

“A mountain-climbing one?”

“Doesn’t have to be about mountain climbing. Just needs at least one scene where some dudes are fighting and somebody gets thrown off a cliff.”

“Did you hear about Paul Stojanovich?”

“Who’s that?”

“He’s the producer who invented World’s Scariest Police Chases and Cops.”

“No kidding? The host?”

“No, the producer. The host kicks ass, though.”

Aaron led the way out of his room and past his father—typing away, wiping sweat, for all intents and purposes a part of the computer—to his front door, where his mom, who had long dirty-blond hair and wore overalls, stopped us and gave us cookies and our coats.

“I love my life,” Aaron said. “Bye, Mom.” We entered the elevator with our mouths full of cookies.

“Okay, so what were you saying? I love World’s Scariest Police Chases.” Aaron swallowed. “I love it when the guy is like”—Aaron put on a stern over-annunciated brogue—“These two-bit bandits thought they could turn a blind eye to the law, but the Broward County Sherrif’s office showed them the light—and it led them straight to jail.’”

I cracked up, spitting cookie bits everywhere.

“I’m good at voices. You want to hear Jay Leno blowing the devil? I got it from this comedian Bill Hicks.”

“You never let me finish about Paul Stojanovich!” I said.

“Who?”

The elevator arrived in Aaron’s lobby. “The producer of World’s Scariest Police Chases.”

“Oh, right.” Aaron threw open the glass lobby door. I followed him into the street, tossed up my hood, and bundled myself in it.

“He was posing with his fiancée, for like a wedding picture? And they were doing it in Oregon, right next to this big cliff. And the photographer was like ‘Move back, move a little to the left.’ And they moved, and he fell off the cliff.”

“Oh my God!” Aaron shook his head. “How do you learn this stuff?”

“The Internet.” I smiled.

“That is too good. What happened to the girl?”

“She was fine.”

“She should sue the photographer. Did they sue him?”

“I don’t know.”

“They better. I would sue. You know, Craig”—Aaron looked at me steadily, his eyes red but so alive and bright—“I’m going to be a lawyer.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. Screw my dad. He doesn’t make any money. He’s miserable. The only reason we even live where we do is because my mom’s brother is a lawyer and they got the apartment way back when. It used to be my uncle’s apartment. Now he does work for the building, so they cut Mom a deal. Everything good I have is due to lawyers.”

“I think I might want to be one too,” I said.

“Why not? You make money!”

“Yeah.” I looked up. We were on a bright, cold, gray Manhattan sidewalk. Everything cost so much money. I looked at the hot dog man, the cheapest thing around—you wouldn’t get away from him without forking over three or four bucks.

“We should be lawyers together,” Aaron said. “Pardis and . . . what’s your last name?”

“Gilner.”

“Pardis and Gilner.”

“Okay.”

We shook hands, maintaining our stride, nearly clothesline-ing a frilled-up little girl walking in the other direction. Then we turned up Church Street and rented this reality DVD, Life Against Death, which had a lot of cliffs, as well as fires, animal attacks, and skydiving accidents. I sat propped in Aaron’s bed, him smoking pot and me refusing, feeding off him, telling him that I thought I was getting a contact high when really I was just feeling like I had stepped into a new groove. At cool parts of Life Against Death we paused and zoomed in: on the hearts of explosions, spinning wheels after truck crashes, and one guy freaking out in a gorilla cage and getting a rock thrown at him. We talked about making our own movie someday.

I didn’t go to sleep until four, but I was in someone else’s house, so I woke up early—at eight—with that crazy sleeping-at-someone-else’s-house energy. I passed Aaron’s father at his computer and grabbed a book off their shelf in the living room—Latin Roots. I studied Latin Roots all morning, for the test.

We kept doing it. It became a regular thing. We never formalized it, never named it . . . but on Fridays Aaron would call and ask me to watch movies. I think he was lonely. Whatever he was, he became the one person I wanted to stay in touch with after junior high. And now, a year later, I was in my kitchen holding my acceptance letter and wondering if he had one too.

“I’ll call Aaron,” I told Mom.

eight

“What up, son? Did you get in?!”

“Yeah.”

“Allriiiiiiiight!”

“Hoooooooo—ee!”

“Biyatch!”

“That’s right!”

“But you studied. I didn’t study at all,” he was like.

“True. I should feel lucky to talk to you. You’re kind of like Hercules.”

“Yeah, cleaning the stables. I’m having a party.”

“When? Tonight?”

“Yup. My parents are away. I have the whole house. You’re coming, right?”

“A real party? Without a cake?”

“Absolutely.”

“Sure!” I was in eighth grade and I had gotten into high school and I was going to a party? I was set for life!

“Can you bring any booze?”

“Like drinks?”

“Craig, c’mon. Yes. Can you bring?”

“I don’t have ID.”

“Craig, none of us have ID! I mean, can you take some off your parents?”

“I don’t think they have any . . .” But I knew that wasn’t true.

“They have something.”

I held my hand over my cell so Mom wouldn’t hear. “Scotch. They have a bottle of scotch.”

“What kind?”

“Jeez, dude, I don’t know.”

“Well, bring it. Can you call any girls?”

I had been in my room studying for a year. “No.”

“That’s all right, I’ll bring the girls. You want to at least help me set up?”

“Sure!”

“Get over here.”

“I’m going to Aaron’s house!” I announced to Mom, flipping my phone shut. I still had the welcome packet in my hand; I gave it to her to put in my room.

“What are you going to do over there?” she asked, beaming at the packet, then at me.

“Um . . . sleep over.”

“Are you going to celebrate? Because you should celebrate.”

“Heh. Yeah.”

“Craig, I’m being honest, I’ve never seen someone work as hard as you did getting into this school. You deserve a little break and you deserve to feel proud of yourself. You’re gifted, and the world is taking notice. This is the first step in an amazing journey—”

“Okay, Mom, please.” I hugged her.

I grabbed my coat and sat at the kitchen table, pretending to text on the phone. When Mom left the room, I invaded the cabinet above the sink, took out the one bottle of scotch (Glenlivet), and fetched from the back of the cupboard the thermos that I used to use for grade-school lunches. That would seem really cool at the party. I poured some scotch in and I put a little water back in the scotch, in case they checked levels, and stuffed the thermos in my big jacket pocket before leaving the house and calling back to Mom that I would call her later.

I took the subway to Aaron’s without a book to study on my lap—first time in a year. At his stop, I bounded up the stairs into the gray streets, slipped into his building, nodded to the doorman to call up, and squished my thumb on the elevator button, giving it a twist and some flair. At the sixteenth floor was Aaron, holding his front door open, rap music about killing people on in the background, holding his metal cigarette out for me.

“Smoke. Celebrate.”

I stopped.

“If anytime’s the time, it’s now.”

I nodded.

“Come in, I’ll show you.” Aaron brought me into his house and sat me on his couch and demonstrated how to hold the cigarette so the metal wouldn’t burn me. He explained how you have to take the smoke into your lungs, not your stomach—“Don’t swallow it, Craig, that’s how hits get lost”—and how to let it go as slowly as you could through your mouth or nose. The key was to hold it in as long as possible. But you didn’t want to hold it too long. Then you coughed.

“How do I light it?” I asked.

“I’ll light it for you,” Aaron was like. He knelt in front of me on the couch—I took a look at his living room, fenced in with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, filled up with a coffee table, a tall fluted ash tray, a porcelain dog, and a small electric piano—trying to remember how it all looked in case it changed later. The only thing I had done that people said was kind of like smoking pot was go really hard on the swings, and Aaron had told me that anyone who said that was probably high when they were on the swings.

The butane flame went up.

I sucked in on the metal cigarette as if a doctor were telling me to.

My mouth filled up with the taste that I knew so well from Aaron’s room—a chemical taste, buzzy and light. I looked him in the eyes with my cheeks puffed out. He clipped the flame, smiling.

“Not in your cheeks!” he said. “You look like Dizzy Gillespie! In your lungs! Put it in your lungs.”

I worked with new muscles. The smoke in me felt like a blob of clay.

“That’s it, hold it, hold it. . .”

My eyes started watering, getting hot.

“Hold it. Hold it. You want more?”

I shook my head, terrified. Aaron laughed.

“Okay. Dude, you’re good. You’re good, dude!”

Pfffffffffflt. I blew it all in Aaron’s face.

“Jesus! Man, that was big!” Aaron swatted at the cloud that came out of me. “You sure you haven’t done this before?”

I panted, breathing in air that still had the smoke in it. “What’s going to happen?” I asked.

“Probably nothing.” Aaron stood up, took his cigarette back, put it in the stand-up ash tray. Then he reached down with his hand out—I expected a handshake, but he pulled me off the couch. “Congratulations.”

We hugged, mouth to ear. It was a guy hug, complete with slapping. I leaned back and smiled at him as I clasped his arms.

“You too, man. It’s going to be great.”

“I’m-a tell you what’s going to be great: this party,” Aaron said, and he began pacing, counting on his fingers. “I need for you to go and get some seltzer, for spritzers. Also we gotta put away all of my dad’s books and writing so it doesn’t get damaged. Also, call this girl; her dad threatened to call the cops if I called again; say you’re with Greenpeace.”

“I’m not going to remember this; hold on,” I said, taking an index card from Aaron’s coffee table. I was numbering it with a Sharpie, from one, when the weed hit me.

“Whoa. Wow.”

“Uh-oh,” Aaron said. He looked up.

“Whoa.”

“You feeling it?”

Is my brain falling out of my head? I thought.

I looked down at the index card that said 1)get seltzer, and 1) get seltzer twisted back, as if it had decided to fall off the card. I looked up at Aaron’s bookshelves and they looked the same, but as I turned, they moved in frames. It wasn’t like the slowness that came from being underwater; it was like I was under air—thick and heavy air that had decided to follow me. For being high, it felt pretty heavy.

“You feeling it?” Aaron repeated.

I looked at his stand-up ashtray, filled with crumpled cigarettes and the one clear, shining metal cigarette.

“It’s like the king of the cigarette butts!” I said.

“Oh, boy,” Aaron was like. “Craig. Are you going to be able to do the stuff for the party?”

Was I? I was able to do anything. Here I was making clever statements like “king of the cigarette butts”; if I went outside, there was no telling what I would be capable of.

“What’s first?” I asked.

Aaron gave me a few bucks to get the seltzer, but just as I was opening the door to go out into the world, his buzzer rang.

“It’s Nia,” Aaron said, leaping to the closed-circuit phone in his kitchen, which was full of grapefruits and dark wood cabinets.

“She’s coming?” I asked.

Nia was in our class; she was half Chinese and half Jewish; she dressed well. Every day she came in with something different—a chain of SpongeBob Burger King toys strung around her neck; one asymmetrical, giant, red-plastic hoop earring; black clown circles on her cheeks. I think her accessories were a courtesy meant to distract from her small, lucrative body and baby-doll face. If she let it all go natural, if she just let her hair swing down the way it would have if she’d grown up in a field with the wind, she’d make all us boys explode.

“Nia’s pretty hot, huh,” Aaron said, hanging up the phone.

“She’s okay.”

We sat watching the door like we were waiting for the mama bird to bring us food. She knocked.

“Heyyyy,” Aaron called, beating me.

“Hi!” I said. We rushed to the doorknob; Aaron gave a look, pulled it toward him, and there she was—in a green dress with a rainbow of fuzzy anklets on one leg. Her eyes were so big and dark that she seemed even more tiny and spindly, on high-heeled shoes that threw her forward at us and made her dress outline her little breasts.

“Boys,” she said. “I think someone has been smoking pah-aht.”

“No way,” Aaron said.

“My friends are coming. When’s the party starting?”

“Five minutes ago,” Aaron said. “You want to play Scrabble?”

“Scrabble!” Nia put her bag down—it was shaped like a hippo. “Who plays Scrabble?”

“Well, I do, duh, and Craig does, too”—I didn’t, actually—“and we’re some smart guys, seeing as we got in.”

“I heard!” Nia grabbed her hippo bag and hit Aaron with it. “I did too!” As an afterthought, she hit me. “Congratulations!”

“Group hug!” Aaron announced, and we got together, a tiered threesome—Nia’s head came up to my chin; my head came up to Aaron’s chin. I put my hand around Nia’s waist and felt her warmth and how narrow she was. Her palm curled around my shoulder. We pushed our torsos together in a sort of ballet. I could feel Nia’s breath between us. I turned to look—“Scrabble,” Aaron said. He went across the living room, took it out of one of the bookshelves. He put it on the floor and we sat, Aaron between me and Nia, the ashtray taking up the fourth spot.

“House rules,” Aaron said as he flipped over the tiles. “If you don’t have any words to put on the board, you can make a word up, as long as you have an actual definition for that word in your head. If your definition makes the other people laugh, you get the points, but otherwise, you lose that many points.”

“We can make up words?” I asked. This was brimming with possibilities. I could make up Niaed—what happens when Nia touches you, you get Niaed. That would make her laugh. Or not.

“What about Chinese words?” Nia asked.

“You have to know what they mean and be able to explain them.”

“Oh. That shouldn’t be a problem.” She smiled wickedly.

“Who’s going first?”

“Can we smoke?”

“So demanding.” Aaron gave her the metal cigarette—I said no this time; I’d had enough.

For her first word, Nia put down M-U-W-L-I.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Chinese word.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Uh, cat.”

“That’s ridiculous. How do we know if muwli is real?” I turned to Aaron.

He shrugged. “Benefit of the doubt?”

Nia stuck out her tongue at me and damn it was a cute tongue. Is that a ring? I thought. Can’t be. Wait—it’s gone.

“I swear.” she said. “‘Come here, little muwli!’ See?”

“I’m checking you on your next one,” I said.

“The Internet’s over there.” Aaron was like.

“But while you’re gone, we’re going to give you all consonants.” Nia smiled.

“Is it my go?” I put down M-O-P off M-U-W-L-I. Ten points.

Aaron put down S-M-A-P off M-O-P. “That’s a cross between a smack and a slap. Like, ‘I’m-a smap you.’”

Nia laughed and laughed. I chuckled even though I didn’t want to. Aaron got the points.

Nia put down T-R-I-I-L.

“What is that?” I asked.

“It’s a trill, you know, like a trill on the flute, except the first L is lowercase and the second is uppercase!”

“That’s not trill, that’s ‘tree-eel’!”

“Okay, fine.” She switched the letters. Now it said T-R-I-L-I.

“Trill-ee! What is a trilhee?”

“An unmentionable act.”

Aaron laughed so hard that he just had to ease his body into Nia’s, leaning on her shoulder. She pushed back, tilting her flank into him.

I saw where this was going. I made eye contact with Nia and here’s what her eyes said:

Craig, we’re all headed to the same school. I’m going to need a boyfriend going in, to give me some stability, a little bit of backup, you know? Nothing serious. You’re cool, but you’re not as cool as Aaron. He has pot and he’s so much more laid back than you; you spent the last year studying for this test; he didn’t lift a finger for it. That means he’s smarter than you. Not that you’re not smart, but intelligence is very important in a guy—it really is the most important thing, up there with sense of humor. And he has a better sense of humor than you, too. It doesn’t hurt that he’s taller. So I’ll be your friend, but right now let’s let this develop. And don’t be jealous. That would be a waste of everybody’s time.

We kept playing. Aaron and Nia moved closer until their knees touched, and I could only imagine the energy that was going through those knees. I thought maybe they were going to lean in for a first kiss (or a second? No, Aaron would have told me) right in front of me, when the buzzer rang again.

It was Nia’s friend Cookie. She had brought bottles of beer. We took ten minutes to open them, eventually hitting them against Aaron’s kitchen countertop edge, to work the tops off. Then Nia said Cookie should’ve gotten twist-offs, and she asked what twist-offs were, and we all laughed. Cookie had blond hair and glitter all over her neck. She hadn’t gotten into Executive Pre-Professional, but that was okay because she was going to high school in Canada. The guy down at the local bodega let her buy beer if she leaned over the counter—she had developed early and had the kind of massive alluring breasts that moved in reverse rhythm when she walked.

We put Scrabble away—nobody won. The rap music seemed to be hooked up to some sort of Internet-capable playlist and kept going, never repeating, as more and more guests arrived. There was Anna—she was on Ritalin and snorted it off her little cosmetic mirror before tests; Paul—he was nationally ranked in Halo 2 and trained five hours a day with his “team” in Seattle (he was going to put it on his college applications); Mika—his dad was a higher-up in the Taxi and Limousine Commission and he had some sort of badge that allowed him to get free cab rides anywhere, anytime. People started showing up who I had no idea who they were, like a stocky white kid in an Eight Ball jacket, which he announced, coming in, was so popular back in the ‘90s that you would get knived just for having it and nobody had vintage like him.

Inexplicably, someone came in a Batman mask. His name was Race.

A short, pugnacious, mustached kid named Ronny came with a backpack full of pot and set up shop in the living room.

A girl with hemp bracelets in different subtle shades proclaimed that we had to listen to Sublime’s 40oz to Freedom, and when Aaron refused to put it on, she started gyrating and put what she claimed was a Devil curse on him, saying, “Diablo Tantunka” and pointing her fingers in mock horns: “Fffffffft! Fffffffft!”

I smoked more pot. The party was like a movie—it should have been a movie. It was the best movie I’d ever seen—where else did you get shattering glasses, a kid trying to break-dance in the living room, a dictionary being thrown at a roach, a kid holding his head in the freezer and saying it could get you high, orange vomit spread out in a semicircle in the kitchen sink, people yelling out the windows that “school sucks,” rap music declaring “I want to drink beers and smoke some shit,” and one poor soul snorting a Pixie Stik, then hacking purple dust into the toilet. . . ? Nowhere.

nine

Aaron and Nia talked on the couch. I took my thermos of scotch—just to have something in my hand; I didn’t open it—and watched how they moved, swaying toward and away from each other in increments that I doubt they even recognized. They stopped becoming people in my eyes; they morphed right into male and female sex organs on a collision course.

“What’s going on, son?” Ronny asked. Ronny hadn’t gotten his first piece of jewelry yet; he was in like a larval state. “You enjoying yourself?”

I was enjoying everything but Aaron and Nia. And the scotch. I wanted him to think I was enjoying the scotch, at least.

“Do you like this stuff?” I asked, opening my thermos.

“What is it?” He sniffed. “Yeah, dude, that’s hard core. You gotta sip it.”

I put it to my lips. I didn’t even take any in, just let it filter against me and felt how hot it was. It was cutting, evil, and bitter-smelling—

Ronny shoved the thermos at my mouth.

“Sip it!”

“Dude!” I backed off as scotch splashed on my shirt; it felt lighter, slicker, and warmer than water. “You’re such a dick!”

“Pause!” He ran across the room and punched this kid Asen, told him he’d had sex with his mom, and threw a pillow at Aaron and Nia, who were now attached by the lips on the couch.

I wasn’t that mad that it was happening. I was just mad that I’d missed how it happened. I hadn’t seen him lean in, or her; I wanted to know for the future, for some girl who wasn’t as desirable. But now at least I got a show; I got to see how Aaron moved his hands. He put his right hand on her face over and over, gently, while his left slid around her side and gripped the small of her back more firmly. His hands were playing good-cop-bad-cop.

There was still some scotch in the thermos. I drank from it. The taste didn’t bother me since Ronny’s shove.

“I didn’t know you drank, Craig!” a voice was like behind me. Julie, who always wore sweatpants that said Nice Try in an arc on her butt cheeks, clanked a beer against my thermos.

“I don’t, really,” I was like.

“I thought you’d be busy studying. I heard you got into the school. What are you going to do now?”

“Go there.”

“No, I mean with your time.”

I shrugged. “I’ll work hard at school, get good grades, go to a good college, get a good job.”

“It was crazy how much you studied. You always had those cards.”

I looked at the scotch. My esophagus was scorched, but I took more.

“Did you see Aaron and Nia making out? They’re so cute!”

“They’re making out?” I was shocked.

“Yeah, haven’t you seen?”

“I saw them hooking up,” I explained, looking out the kitchen at them. “I didn’t think they were having sex.”

“They’re not!”

“I thought making out was having sex.”

“Jeez, Craig, no. Making out is making out.”

“Is that the same as hooking up?”

“Well, hooking up can mean having sex. You got confused.”

Aaron and Nia were fully occupied now. One of his hands was hidden, exploring magical beige places.

“You should put it on one of your cards.”

“Heh.” I smiled.

Julie took a step toward me. “I really want to make out with somebody right now.”

“Oh, cool.”

“I’ve been looking and looking for someone.”

“Um. . .” I eyed her. Her short blond hair framed a face that was a little wide at the bottom, and toothy, and somewhat red all around. I didn’t want to hook up with her or make out with her or whatever. The person I wanted was ten feet away. This would be my first kiss, if she were offering me. Girls loved to say that they wanted to hook up with “someone” when it was anyone but you. Julie tilted her head up, though, with her eyes closed. I looked at her lips, trying to make myself kiss them, but stopped. For my first kiss, I didn’t want to settle. Julie opened her eyes.

“Are you okay, man?”

“Yeah, yeah, I just. . .” Whew. I’m drunk and stoned, Julie. Give me a break.

“It’s okay.” She left the room, and soon after, the party. I had hurt her feelings, I found out later; I didn’t know I had that power.

I wandered over to the laptop that was supplying the music to the stereo. Next to it was Aaron’s father’s record collection, shelved in the bookshelf, of old vinyl records. I suddenly needed some discrete information to put in my brain, to push out what was there, so I pulled a record out.

Led Zeppelin III.

It was big—as big as the laptop—and the cover was a spiral of images: male heads with lots of hair, rainbows, blimps (I guessed those were the Zeppelins), flowers, teeth. The edge of the record stuck out a bit, like a tab on a five-subject notebook, and I grabbed it experimentally. It turned, and when it turned, the whole circle turned inside, and the images that showed through the little holes changed: rainbows into stars, blimps into planes, flowers into dragonflies. It was frickin’ awesome. One of the symbols that popped up looked just like the levels of Q-Bert, one of the best old video games—I didn’t realize Led Zeppelin had invented Q-Bert!

I looked up—Aaron and Nia were still at it. Now he had his hand in her hair and he was pulling her toward him like a gas mask. I held the album up to hide their heads. Heh.

I dropped the album. Aaron and Nia. I held it up. More images. It was like they were part of it.

The house filled up. People began getting in line to go into one of Aaron’s book-filled closets. They weren’t making out or anything—a kid named John had announced that he had sprayed pepper spray in there and people were going in to see if they could handle it. Boys and a few girls stumbled out going “Aggg, my eyes!” and tearing, and running for water, but that didn’t stop the ones lined up after them. It seemed like everyone at the party went except me.

I looked at more albums, like the Beatles’ White Album, which I never knew was actually white, and each time I looked up, Aaron and Nia were in a deeper state of entanglement. Suddenly I got really sleepy and warm, from the scotch I guess, and leaned against the album stack, just trying to rest my eyes for a minute. When I woke up I looked instinctively for Aaron and Nia; they had disappeared. I craned from behind my resting spot and looked at the clock above the TV; somehow it was 2:07 A.M.

ten

The house had thinned out.

Jeez. I got up. The laptop playlist had stopped. My night was over. All I had done was look at records and almost hook up with a girl, but somehow I felt accomplished.

“Uh, Ronny?” I asked.

Ronny was playing PlayStation on Aaron’s couch. The PlayStation cord stretched across the room. He looked up.

“What?”

“Where is everybody?”

“Having sex with your mom.”

Next to Ronny, a girl named Donna was balled up in a lump on one end of the couch. The guy with the Eight Ball jacket occupied a chair. Someone yelled to put on more music; Ronny yelled to Shut up, son. The house was full of cups—mugs and glasses everywhere, like they had been multiplying during the party.

“Does anyone know where Aaron is?”

“Pause,” was all Ronny could manage.

“Aaron!”

“Shut up, man! He’s with his chick.”

“I’m here, I’m here!” Aaron strode out from his room, adjusting his pants. “Jeez.” He surveyed the damage. “What’s up? You have a good rest?”

“Shoot, yeah. Where’s Nia?”

“Asleep.”

“You did her good, huh?” Ronny asked. “Asian invasion.”

“Shut up, Ronny.”

“Asian contagion.”

“Shut up.”

“Asian persuasion.”

Aaron yanked his controller out of the PlayStation.

“Suh-uhn!” Ronny scrambled for it.

“You want to go for a walk?” Aaron asked.

“Sure!” I got my jacket.

Aaron woke up Eight Ball jacket and Donna and got them out; he forced Ronny to leave too, over many protests. We all took the elevator down; Eight-Ball jacket and Ronny went uptown; Donna and two others slid into a cab; me and Aaron, instinctively, started toward the shimmering Brooklyn Bridge, which carved its way through the night about three blocks from his house.

“You want to walk across the bridge?” Aaron asked.

“Into Brooklyn?”

“Yeah. You can go home or we can take the subway back to my place.”

“When will it be light?”

“In three, four hours.”

“Let’s do it. I’ll walk home and get breakfast.”

“Cool.”

We walked in step. My feet weren’t cold at all. My head swam. I looked at bare trees and thought they were beautiful. The only way it could have been better was if it were snowing. Then I’d have flakes dripping down on me and I’d be able to catch them in my mouth. I wouldn’t be worried about Aaron seeing that.

“So, how do you feel?” I was like.

“About what?” he was like.

“You know,” I was like.

“Hold on a second.” Aaron spotted a Snapple bottle on the curb; it looked like it was filled with urine, which happens a lot in Manhattan—I don’t know why but homeless people fill up bottles with piss and then don’t even have the courtesy to throw them away—but then again it could be apple Snapple—did they have that? He lunged at it and sent it sailing across the street with a three-point kick; it landed on the opposite curb and shattered yellow under the streetlight.

“Rrnagh!” Aaron screamed. Then he looked around. “There aren’t any cops, right?”

I laughed. “No.” We came to the entrance to the bridge. “So seriously, what was it like?”

“She’s awesome. I mean, she likes everything—she really likes it. She likes. . . sex.”

“You had sex with her?”

“No, but I can tell. She likes everything else.”

“What’d you do?”

He told me.

“No way!” I pushed him as we climbed the bridge. Air from the frigid New York Harbor blew at us, and I put my hood up over my head and tightened the chewed cord. “What was it like?”

“It’s the craziest thing,” Aaron was like. “It feels just like the inside of your cheek.”

“No kidding?” I pulled one hand out of my pocket.

“Yeah.”

I stuck a finger in my mouth and pushed to the side. “That’s it?”

“Just like that,” Aaron said. He had his finger in his cheek too. “I’m serious. It’s hot.”

“Huh.”

We walked in silence with our fingers in our mouths.

“Did you hook up with anyone?” he asked.

“Nope. Julie wanted to, though.”

“Nice one. Did she slip you something?”

“What? No.”

“Because you crashed out pretty hard in the corner over there.”

“I was drinking my mom’s scotch and checking out your dad’s albums.”

“You’re a trip, Craig.”

“It’s cold out here.”

“Looks pretty cool, though.”

We weren’t even a tenth of the way up the bridge, but it did look cool. Behind us the walkway extended to City Hall, where the city had sprung for some spotlights to illuminate the dome of the building. It looked like a white pearl nestled between giants like the Woolworth building, which I learned in English class Ayn Rand had described as a “finger of God,” and that was about right—green and white at the top like the world’s most decorated mint. To our left were the other bridges of Manhattan, arrayed against each other like alternating sin and cos waves, carrying a smattering of late-night trucks whose tops trailed mist.

But to the right was the best view: New York Harbor. Mostly black. The Statue of Liberty was lit up, but it always struck me as a little cheesy, standing out there being all cute. The real action was on the sides: Manhattan had its no-nonsense downtown, where people made money, and on the other side was Brooklyn, sleepy and dark but with a trump card—the container cranes, lit up not for show or government pride but because there was work going on, even at this hour—ships unloading stuff that was famously unchecked for terrorist threats but somehow hadn’t blown us up yet. Brooklyn was a port. New York was a port. We got things done. I had gotten things done, too.

Between Brooklyn and Manhattan, miles across the water, we saw the final curtain of New York City—the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. It spanned the opening to the port, a steel-blue pair of upper lips greeting the blackness.

I could do anything anywhere, in all four directions.

“Craig?” Aaron was like.

“What’s up.”

“What’s up with you? You okay?”

“I’m happy,” I said.

“Why not?”

“No, I said I’m happy.”

“I know. Why not be?”

We came up to the first tower of the bridge, with a plaque proclaiming who had built it; I stopped to read. John Roebling. Aided by his wife, and then his son. He died during construction. But hey, the Brooklyn Bridge might be here for eight hundred years. I wanted to leave something like that behind. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I felt like I had taken the first steps.

“The really cool thing about Nia . . .” Aaron was saying, and he started to go into anatomical details, things about her that I didn’t need to hear; I tuned him out; I knew he was talking to himself. This was what he was happy about. I was happy about different stuff. I was happy because someday I’d be walking across this bridge looking at this city, owning some piece of it, being valuable here.

“Her butt is like—I think her butt shape is where they got the heart logo. . . .”

We came to the middle of the bridge. On either side of us the cars hissed past; red on the left and white on the right, the lanes encased by thin metal trussing that stretched out from the walkway.

I had a sudden urge to walk out over the trussing and lean over the water, to declare myself to the world. Once it came into my head, I couldn’t push it away.

“I don’t know if it was real—” Aaron was saying.

“I want to stand out over the water,” I told him.

“What?”

“Come with me. You want to do it?”

He stopped.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I see where you’re coming from.”

There were pathways built onto the top of the trussing, places for the bridge workers to get out to the cables and repair them. I clambered onto one on the harbor side, the side crowned by the Verrazano, and grabbed the handrails and balanced my feet one in front of the other on a piece of metal about four inches wide. Below me cabs and SUVs hummed by. In front of me was the black of the water and the black of the sky and the cold.

“You’re crazy,” Aaron said.

I took steps forward. It was easy. Stuff like this always is. The stuff adults tell you not to do is the easiest.

Below me there were three lanes of traffic; I cleared the first, got halfway over the second; then Aaron yelled:

“What are you going to do out there?!”

“I’m just going to think!” I called back.

“About what?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t explain. “It’ll only take a minute!”

Aaron turned back.

I moved past the second lane and kept my eyes on the horizon. I didn’t move my eyes from it for the last lane, shifting my hands in front of one another in a tight rhythm. I came to the edge of the bridge and was sort of surprised how there wasn’t any fence. There wasn’t anything to keep you from falling off, just your hands and your will. I gripped the bars at either side—they were freezing—and then sprung my hands open and spread my arms wide and felt the wind whip and tug at me as I leaned myself over the water like . . . well, like Christ, I guess.

I closed my eyes and opened them, and the only difference was the feel of the wind on my eyeballs, because when I closed them I could still see the dotted lights perfectly. I threw back my head and yelled. When I was a kid I read these books, the Redwall books, fantasy books about a bunch of warrior mice, and the mice had this war cry that I always thought was cool: “Eulalia.”

And like an idiot, that’s what I yelled off the Brooklyn Bridge:

Eulaliaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

And I could have died right then.

And considering how things went, I really should have.

eleven

Depression starts slow. After howling off the Brooklyn Bridge, I walked home and felt great. Aaron split and took a late-night subway back to Manhattan, where he had a hell of a time cleaning up his apartment and returning Nia to her parents; I went to a diner and got some eggs and wheat toast and came home at ten in the morning, telling Mom I had slept over at Aaron’s, and pouring myself into bed. When I got up in the afternoon there were some forms to sign about accepting my admission to Executive Pre-Professional and a physical to schedule—how glorious. For once I was looking forward to the doctor holding my balls and telling me to cough, which I still don’t understand why they do.

The rest of junior high was a joke. I didn’t need to do anything except make sure I didn’t fail a class and get “rescinded” from Executive Pre-Professional, so I started hanging out with Aaron every day. Now that we had the pot barrier broken, it became a magnificent haze of yelling back at the TV; we stopped calling it “watching movies”; we started calling it “chilling.”

“Want to chill?” Aaron would ask, and I would pop on over.

Ronny was never far behind. His insults never stopped, although they became more lovable, but that didn’t matter, because he grew into a reliable dealer. He wasn’t going to high school with us—for all we knew, he wasn’t going at all—but he was going to set up a jewelry shop, sell drugs, and make beats, that was for sure.

Nia was always around, too. She and Aaron spent about as much time apart as me and my right hand. I thought I was cool with it, but as I saw them—sitting with each other, sitting on each other, hugging each other, touching each other’s butt, smiling and kissing, in Aaron’s room or in public—I started to get more and more pissed off. It was like they were throwing it in my face, although I knew neither of them meant that, the way I had thrown my studying in people’s faces and not meant it. Why else would they tell each other how much they wanted each other in whispers in front of me? Why else would Aaron tell me, in great detail, about the first time they had sex? One day Aaron announced to me and Ronny as we watched MTV, “You know what, since I got with Nia, I’ve forgotten how to masturbate.”

“Me too, since I found your mom,” Ronny said.

“Huh,” I said. My stomach hitched.

“I’m serious, I don’t even know, anymore!” Aaron grinned.

Great, man. Wonderful. I learned how to masturbate the last few months of junior high, when I went on AOL and started talking to girls with names like “Little Luscious Lolita 42.” I don’t know if they were really girls. I just knew that I was lonely, and I wanted to make it so that when I got with someone, I’d have some idea what to do.

Problem was, no matter what girl I was talking to online, when I came to the end of the whole process, I would run to the bathroom. And as I knelt down in front of the toilet, in the final few milliseconds, I would think about Nia.

I had homework for school even before school started. They gave me this insane reading list for the summer that included Under the Volcano and David Copperfield. I tried to read them; I really did, but it wasn’t like flash cards. It took days. Mom actually read the letters that the school sent and told me that part of their mission was to make us well-rounded, liberally educated bearers of tomorrow’s vision, so I had better be ready to do English as well as math; but I found myself jealous of the people who wrote the books. They were dead and they were still taking up my time. Who did they think they were? I would much rather chill at Aaron’s, sit in my room, run to the Internet and then to the bathroom, rinse, cycle, repeat. I ended up not finishing any of the summer-reading-list books.

That wasn’t good when it came time to start school. The first day, I was quizzed on what I was supposed to have read over the summer. I got a 70, something I’d never seen on a sheet of paper in my life. Where do you see the number 70? There are no $70 bills; there’s no reason to get a $70 check. I looked at the 70 as if it had stolen from me.

Aaron, who ended up in eight out of my nine classes, got a 100 on the start-of-school reading quiz. He had read the books in Europe, where he got to go over the summer because his dad’s books were popular there. He came back not just tan and full of knowledge and pictures, but ripe with stories of the European girls he had hooked up with. He said he and Nia had talked and she was totally cool with the other girls; he said he was busy turning her into a freak, someone who would be down for anything. When we hung out now, I didn’t say half as much as I did that first night; I just listened and stayed impressed, tried to control my lower half while Nia was there, pictured her in different freeze-frames for later in the evening.

Executive Pre-Professional High School was hard.

The teachers all told me I was going to have four hours of homework a night, but I didn’t believe it—plus I believed I could handle it. I had gotten into the school; I’d definitely be able to take anything it could dish out, right?

The first semester, in addition to the book list, I had this class called Intro to Wall Street that required me to pick up the New York Times and Wall Street Journal every day. It turned out I was supposed to have been picking them up over the summer as well—some kind of handout that I didn’t get in the mail. I needed to create a portfolio of current events articles and show how they related to stock prices, and to get the back issues. I couldn’t use the Internet; the teacher made me go to the library and use microfiche, which is like trying to read the U.S. Constitution off a postage stamp, and when I got two weeks behind on that, I had two more weeks of newspapers to pick up. The papers were so long; it was unbelievable how much news there was every day. And I was supposed to scan it all? How did anyone do it? The papers piled up in my room, and every day when I came home I looked at them and knew that I could handle them, that if I just opened that first one I’d be able to get through them all and get the assignment done.

Instead I lay in bed and waited for Aaron to call.

It was about this time that I started labeling things Tentacles. I had a lot of Tentacles. I needed to cut some of them. But I couldn’t; they were all too strong and they had me wrapped too tight; and to cut them I’d have to do something crazy like admit that I wasn’t equipped for school.

The other kids were geniuses. I thought I was a big deal for getting an 800 on the exam—like the entire entering class had gotten 800. It turned out the test had been “broken” in my year; they were tweaking it to make it less formulaic—i.e., less likely to let in people like me. There were kids from Uruguay and Korea who had just learned English but were doing extra credit for the current events stuff in Intro to Wall Street, reading Barron’s and Crain’s Business Daily. There were freshmen taking calculus, while I was stuck in the math that came after algebra, which the teacher announced on the first day was “ding-dong” math and there was no reason for us not to get a 100 in everything. I got an 85 on my first test and a small frowny face.

Plus there were extracurriculars. Other kids did everything: they were on student government; they played sports; they volunteered; they worked for the school newspaper; they had a film club; they had a literature club; they had a chess club; they entered nationwide competitions for building robots out of tongue depressors; they helped teachers out after school; they took classes at local colleges; they assisted on “orientation days.” I didn’t do anything but school and Tae Bo, where I hit a plateau. They humored me in class, letting me fake-fight and do my not-that-form-fitting pushups, but the teacher knew it was something that I didn’t really enjoy. I quit. That was the only Tentacle I ever cut.

Why were the other kids doing better than me? Because they were better, that’s why. That’s what I knew every time I sat down online or got on the subway to Aaron’s house. Other people weren’t smoking and jerking off, and those that were were gifted—able to live and compete at the same time. I wasn’t gifted. Mom was wrong. I was just smart and I worked hard. I had fooled myself into thinking that was something important to the rest of the world. Other people were complicit in this ruse. Nobody had told me I was common.

That’s not to say I did terrible in high school—I got 93’s. That looked good to my parents. Problem is, in the real world, 93 is the crap grade; colleges know what it means—you do just well enough to stay in the 90’s. You’re average. There are a lot of you. You aren’t going over the top; if you’re not doing any extracurriculars you’re done. You can change things in later years, but with 93’s your freshman year, you’re going to have a lot of dead weight.

In December, three months into Executive Pre-Professional, I had stress vomiting for the first time. It happened with my parents at a restaurant; I was eating tuna steak with spinach. They had brought me out to celebrate the holidays and talk with me. They had no idea. I sat there looking at the food and thinking about the Tentacles waiting for me at home, and for the first time the man in my stomach appeared and said I wasn’t getting any of it; I had better back down, buddy, because otherwise this was going to get ugly.

“How’s biology class?” Mom asked.

Biology class was hell. I had to memorize these hormones and what they did and I hadn’t been able to make flash cards because I was too busy clipping newspaper articles.

“Fine.”

“How’s Intro to Wall Street?” Dad asked.

A guy from Bear Stearns had visited our class, thin and bald with a gold watch. He told us that if we were interested in getting into finance, we had better work hard and smart because a lot of machines were able to make investment decisions now, and in the future, computer programs would run everything. He asked the class how many of us were taking computer science, and everybody but me and this one girl who didn’t speak English raised their hands.

“Great, excellent,” the guy had said. “You other people are out of a job! Heh heh. Learn comp sci.”

Please die right now, I mumbled in my head, where more and more activity was taking place. The Cycling had begun to develop, although it hadn’t hit hard, and I didn’t know quite what it was yet.

“Wall Street is fine,” I told Dad across the table. The restaurant we were at was one of the ones in Brooklyn that was featured in a Times article I had yet to read for current events. I didn’t think we could really afford it, so I didn’t get an appetizer.

The spinach and tuna mulled in my stomach. My whole body was tight. Why was I here? Why wasn’t I off somewhere studying?

Soldier, what is the problem?

I can’t eat this. I know I should be able to.

Get over it. Eat it.

I can’t.

You know why that is?

Why?

Because you’re wasting your time, soldier! There’s a reason the U.S. Army isn’t made up of potheads! You’re spending all your time at your little horn-dog friend’s house and when you get home you can’t do what you have to do!

I know. I don’t know how I can be so ambitious and so lazy at the same time.

I’ll tell you how, soldier. It’s because you’re not ambitious. You’re just lazy.

“I’ve got to be excused,” I told my parents, and I walked through the restaurant with that fast-walking gonna-throw-up gait—a run aching to get out—that I learned to perfect over the next year. I came to the chrome bathroom and let it go in the toilet. Afterward I sat, turned the light off, and pissed. I didn’t want to get up. What was wrong with me? Where did I lose it? I had to stop smoking pot. I had to stop hanging out with Aaron. I had to be a machine.

I didn’t get out of the bathroom until someone came and knocked.

When I went back to my parents, I told them: “I think I might be, y’know, depressed.”

twelve

The first doctor was Dr. Barney. He was fat and short and had a puckered and expressionless face like a very serious gnome.

“What’s the problem?” He leaned back in his small gray chair. It sounded like a callous way to put things, but the way he phrased it, so soft and concerned, I liked him.

“I think I have a serious depression.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It started last fall.”

“All right,” he took shorthand on the pad on his desk. Next to the pad was a cup that read Zyprexa, which I thought was the craziest-sounding medical name I’d ever heard. (It turned out to be a drug for psychotics, I wondered if maybe a psychotic person had called a doctor a “zyprexa” and that’s how they came up with the name.) Everything in Dr. Barney’s office was branded—the Post-it notes said Paxil on them; his pens were all for Prozac; the desk calendar had Zoloft on each page.

“I got into this high school, and I had every reason to be the happiest guy in the world,” I continued. “But I just started freaking out and feeling worse and worse.”

“Uh-huh. You completed your sheet, I see.”

“Yes.” I held up the sheet that they had given me in the waiting room. It was a standard sheet, apparently, that they gave all the new recruits at the Anthem Mental Health Center, the building in downtown Brooklyn where this brain evaluation was taking place. The sheet had a bunch of questions about emotions you had felt over the past two weeks and four checkboxes for each one. For example, Feelings of hopelessness and failure. Feeling difficulty with your appetite. Feeling that you are unable to cope with daily life. For each one, you could check 1) Never, 2) Some days, 3) Nearly every day, or 4) All the time.

I had run down the list, checking mostly threes and fours.

“They like to collect these sheets every time you come in, to see how you’re doing,” Dr. Barney continued, “but on yours right now there’s one item of concern that we should discuss.”

“Uh-huh?”

“‘Feeling suicidal or that you want to hurt yourself.’ You checked ‘3) Nearly every day.’”

“Right, well, not trying to hurt myself. I wouldn’t cut myself or anything stupid. If I wanted to do it, I would just do it.”

“Suicide.”

It felt strange to hear. “Right.”

“Do you have a plan?”

“Brooklyn Bridge.”

“You’d jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.”

I nodded. “I’m familiar with it.”

“How long have you had feelings like that, Craig?”

“Since last year, mostly.”

“What about before then?”

“Well . . . I’ve had them for years. Just less intense. I thought they were, you know, just part of growing up.”

“Suicidal feelings.”

I nodded.

Dr. Barney stared at me, his lips puckered. What was he so serious about? Who hasn’t thought about killing themselves, as a kid? How can you grow up in this world and not think about it? It’s an option taken by a lot of successful people: Ernest Hemingway, Socrates, Jesus. Even before high school, I thought that it would be a cool thing to do if I ever got really famous. If I kept making my maps, for instance, and some art collector came across them and decided to make them worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if I killed myself at the height of that, they’d be worth millions of dollars, and I wouldn’t be responsible for them anymore. I’d have left behind something that spoke for itself, like the Brooklyn Bridge.

“I thought . . . you haven’t really lived until you’ve contemplated suicide,” I said. “I thought like it would be good to have a reset switch, like on the video games, to start again and see if you could go a different way.”

Dr. Barney said, “It sounds as if you’ve been battling this depression for a long time.”

I stopped. No I hadn’t. . . Yes I had.

Dr. Barney said nothing.

Then he said, “You have a flat affect.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re not expressing a lot of emotion about these things.”

“Oh. Well. They’re too big.”

“I see. Let’s talk a little about your family.”

“Mom designs postcards; Dad works in health insurance,” I said.

“They’re together?”

“Yes.”

“Any brothers or sisters?”

“One sister. Younger. Sarah. She’s worried about me.”

“How so?”

“She’s always asking me whether I’m good or bad, and when I tell her I’m bad she says, ‘Craig, please get better, everyone is trying.’ Things like that. It breaks my heart.”

“But she cares.”

“Yeah.”

“Your family supports you coming here?”

“When I told them about it they didn’t waste any time. They say it’s a chemical imbalance, and if I get the right drugs for it, I’ll be fine.” I looked around the office at the names of the right drugs. If I got prescribed every drug that Dr. Barney repped, I’d be like an old man counting out pills every morning.

“You’re in high school, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And your sister?”

“Fourth grade.”

“You realize there are a lot of parental consent forms that need to be filled out for us to help you—”

“They’ll sign everything. They want me to get better.”

“Supportive family environment,” Dr. Booth scratched on his pad. He turned and gave his version of a smile, which was a slight affirmative, the lips barely curled, the lower lip out in front.

“We’re going to get through this, Craig. Now, from a personal standpoint, why do you think you have this depression?”

“I can’t compete at school,” I said. “All the other kids are too much smarter.”

“What’s the name of your high school?”

“Executive Pre-Professional High School.”

“Right. I’ve heard of it. Lots of homework.”

“Yeah. When I come home from school, I know I have all this work to do, but then my head starts the Cycling.”

“The Cycling.’”

“Going over the same thoughts over and over. When my thoughts race against each other in a circle.”

“Suicidal thoughts?”

“No, just thoughts of what I have to do. Homework. And it comes up to my brain and I look at it and think ‘I’m not going to be able to do that’ and then it cycles back down and the next one comes up. And then things come up like ‘You should be doing more extracurricular activities’ because I should, I don’t do near enough, and that gets pushed down and it’s replaced with the big one: ‘What college are you going to, Craig?’ which is like the doomsday question because I’m not going to get into a good one.”

“What would a good one be?”

“Harvard. Yale. Duh.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And then the thoughts keep turning and I lie down on my bed and think them. And I used to not be able to lie down anywhere; I used to always be up doing something, but once the Cycling starts I can waste hours, just lying and looking at the ceiling, and time goes slowly and really fast at the same time—and then it’s midnight and I have to go to sleep because no matter what I do, I have to be at school the next day. I can’t let them know what’s happening to me.”

“Do you have difficulty sleeping?”

“Sometimes not. When I do it’s bad, though. I lie there thinking about how everything I’ve done is a failure, death and failure, and there’s no hope for me except being homeless, because I’m never going to be able to hold a job because everyone else is so much smarter.”

“But they’re not all, are they, Craig? Some of them have to be not as smart as you.”

“Well, those are the ones who I don’t have to worry about! But plenty of people are, and they’re going to kick my ass everywhere. Like my friend Aaron—”

“Who’s that?”

“My best friend. He has a girlfriend too, who I’m friends with.”

“How do you feel about her?”

“Not so much . . . one way or the other.”

“Uh-huh.” Dr. Barney wrote on his pad.

“Anyway . . .” I tried to sum up. I was lying to this guy; that meant we really knew each other. “It’s all about living a sustainable life. I don’t think I’m going to be able to have one.”

“A sustainable life.”

“That’s right, with a real job and a real house and everything.”

“And a family?”

“Of course! You have to have that. What kind of success are you if you don’t have that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So to have that I have to start shaping up now, but I can’t because of this crap that’s going on in my head. And I know that these things I’m thinking don’t make sense and I think ‘Stop!’”

“But you can’t stop.”

“I can’t stop.”

“Well.” He tapped his Prozac pen. “You know that your thoughts aren’t thoughts you want to have. That’s a good thing.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you ever hear voices?”

Uh-oh. Now we were getting into the real meat. Dr. Barney was cuddly enough, but I was sure that if you gave him a straitjacket he’d be able to handle it just fine, coaxing you into it and leading you to a very comfortable room with soft walls and a bench where you could sit looking at a one-way mirror and telling people you were Scrooge McDuck. (How did they make one-way mirrors, anyway?) I knew I had problems, but I also knew I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t schizo. I didn’t hear voices. Well, I heard that one voice, the army guy, but that was my voice, just me trying to motivate myself. I was not going to get thrown in the loony bin.

“No voices,” I said. Lied, technically. Lied again.

“Craig, do you know about brain chemistry?”

I nodded. I’d skipped ahead in the bio textbook.

“Do you know how depression works?”

“Yeah.” It was a simple explanation. “You have these chemicals in your brain that carry messages from each brain cell to the next brain cell. They’re called neurotransmitters. And one of them is serotonin.”

“Excellent.”

“Which scientists think is the neurotransmitter related to depression . . . If you have a lack of this chemical in your system, you can start to get depressed.”

Dr. Barney nodded.

“Now,” I kept on, “after the serotonin passes a message from one brain cell to the next, it gets sucked back into the first brain cell to be used again. But the problem is sometimes your brain cells do too much sucking”—I chuckled—“and they don’t leave enough serotonin in your system to carry the messages. So they have these drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors that keep your brain from taking too much serotonin back to get more of it in your system. So you feel better.”

“Craig, excellent! You know a lot. We’re going to put you on medication that is going to do just that.”

“Great.”

“Before I write a prescription, do you have any questions for me?”

Sure I did. Dr. Barney looked happy. He had a nice gold ring and shiny glasses.

“How’d you get started in this?” I asked. “I’m always interested to know how people got started.”

He leaned forward, his paunch disappearing in his shadow. He had huge gray eyebrows and a somber face.

“After college, I went through my own shit and decided that all the physical suffering in the world couldn’t compare to mental anguish,” he said. “And when I got myself cleared up, I decided to help other people.”

“You got yours cleared up?”

“I did.”

“What did you have?”

He sighed. “What you have.”

“Yeah?”

“To a tee.”

I leaned forward—our faces were two feet away from one another. “How did you fix it?” I begged.

He tilted the side of his mouth up. “Same way you will. On my own.”

What? What kind of answer was that? I scowled at him. I was here for help; I wasn’t here to figure this out on my own; if I wanted to figure it out on my own I’d be taking a bus tour of Mexico—

“We’re going to start you on Zoloft,” Dr. Barney said.

O-ho?

“It’s a great medication; helps a lot of people. It’s an SSRI, it’s going to affect the serotonin in your brain like you said, but you can’t expect an instant effect because it takes weeks to get into your system.”

“Weeks?”

“Three to four weeks.”

“Isn’t there a fast-acting version?”

“You take the Zoloft with food, once a day. We’ll start you on fifty milligrams. The pills make you feel dizzy, but that’s the only side effect, except for sexual side effects.” Dr. Barney looked up from his pad. “Are you sexually active?”

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. “No.”

“All right. Also, Craig: I think that you would benefit from seeing someone.”

“I know! Don’t think I haven’t tried. I’m not really good at talking to girls.”

“Girls? No. I meant therapists. You should start seeing a therapist.”

“What about you?”

“I’m a psychopharmacologist. I refer you to the therapists.”

What a racket. “Okay.”

“Let’s take a look for one.” He opened up what looked like the white pages on his desk and started rattling off names and addresses to me as if they made a difference. Dr. Abrams in Brooklyn, Dr. Fieldstone in Manhattan, Dr. Bok in Manhattan . . . I thought Dr. Bok was a cool name, so we set up an appointment with him—I missed it, though, because later in the week I was doing a history assignment, and I was so embarrassed that I didn’t call to cancel with Dr. Bok that I never went to see him again. The next time with Dr. Barney we had to pick another shrink, and then another, and then another, among them the little old lady who asked if I had been sexually abused and the beautiful redhead who asked why I had so many problems with women and the man with the handlebar mustache who suggested hypnosis. It was like I was dating, except I didn’t get to make out with any of the girls—and I was also bi because I met up with guys.

“I like talking to you,” I told Dr. Barney.

“Well, you’ll be seeing me in a month, to check up on how the medication is treating you.”

“You don’t do therapy?”

“The other doctors are great, Craig; they’ll help.”

Dr. Barney stood up—he was about five-foot-five—and shook my hand with a soft, meaty grip. He handed me the Zoloft prescription and instructed me to get it right away, which I did, even before taking the subway home.

thirteen

The Zoloft worked, and it didn’t take weeks—it worked as soon as I took it that first day. I don’t know how, but suddenly I felt good about my life—what the hell? I was a kid; I had plenty more to do; I’d been through some crap but I was learning from it. These pills were going to bring me back to my old self, able to tackle everything, functional and efficient. I’d be talking to girls in school and telling them that I was messed up, that I had had problems but that I’d dealt with them, and they’d think I was brave and sexy and ask me to call them.

It must have been a placebo effect, but it was a great placebo effect. If placebo effects were this good, they should just make placebos the way to treat depression—maybe that’s what they did; maybe Zoloft was cornstarch. My brain said yes I am back and I thought the whole thing was over.

This was my first experience with a Fake Shift. Dastardly stuff—you do well on a test; you make a girl laugh; you have a particularly lower-body-simmering experience after talking online and rushing to the bathroom; you think it’s all over. That just makes it worse when you wake up the next day and it’s back with a vengeance to show you who’s boss.

“I feel great!” I told Mom when I got home.

“What did the doctor say?”

“I’m on Zoloft!” I showed her the bottle.

“Huh. A lot of people at my office take this.”

“I think it’s working!”

“It can’t be working already, honey. Calm down.”

I took my Zoloft every day. Some days I woke up and got out of bed and brushed my teeth like any normal human being; some days I woke up and lay in bed and looked at the ceiling and wondered what the hell the point was of getting out of bed and brushing my teeth like any normal human being. But I always managed to take it. I never tried to take more than one, either; it wasn’t that kind of drug. It didn’t make you feel anything, but then after a month, just like they said, I started to feel that there was a buoy keeping me upright when I got bad. If the Cycling started there was a panic button attached to my good thoughts; I could click it and think about my family, my sister, my friends, my time online; the good teachers at school—the Anchors.

I even spent time with Sarah. She was so smart, smarter than me for sure. She’d be able to handle what I was going through without seeing any doctors. Her homework bordered on algebra even though it was only fourth grade, and I helped her with it, sometimes doodling spirals or patterns on the side of the pages while she worked. I didn’t do maps anymore.

“Those are cool, Craig,” she would say.

“Thanks.”

“Why don’t you do art more?”

“I don’t have time.”

“Silly. You always have time.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Yes. Time is a person-made concept.”

“Really? Where’d you hear that?”

“I made it up.”

“I don’t know if that’s true. We all live within time. It rules us.”

“I use my time how I want, so I rule it.”

“You should be a philosopher, Sarah.”

“Uggg, no. What’s that? Interior design.”

My eating came back around: first coffee yogurt, then bagels, then chicken. Sleeping, meanwhile, was two-steps-forward, one-step-back. (That’s one of the golden rules of psychology: the shrinks say that everything in our lives is two-steps-forward, one-step-back, to justify that time you, say, drank paint thinner and tried to throw yourself off a roof. That was just taking a step back.) Some nights I wouldn’t sleep, but then for the next two I slept great. I even dreamed: flying dreams, dreams of meeting Nia on a bus and talking with her, looking at her, seeing her off a few stops down the line. (Never having sex with her, unfortunately.) Dreams that I was I jumping off a bridge and landing on giant fuzzy dice, bouncing across the Hudson River from Manhattan to New Jersey, laughing and looking back at which numbers I had landed on.

When I couldn’t sleep, though, it sucked. I’d think about the fact that my parents weren’t going to leave me much money and they might not have enough to send my sister to college and I had a history assignment to do and how come I didn’t go to the library today and I hadn’t checked my e-mail in days—what was I missing in there? Why did I fret so much about e-mail? Why was I sweating into the pillow? It wasn’t hot. How come I had smoked pot and jerked off today?—I had developed a rule: on the days you jerk off you don’t smoke pot and on the days you smoke pot you don’t jerk off, because the days you do both are the ones that become truly wasted days, days where you take three steps back.

I started to work in phases a little bit. For three weeks I’d be cool, fine, functional. Even at my most functional, I wasn’t someone you’d pay a lot of attention to; you wouldn’t see me in the halls at school and go “There he goes, Craig Gilner—I wonder what he’s up to.” You’d see me and go, “What does that poster say behind that guy—is the anime club meeting today?” But I was there, that was the important thing. I was at school as opposed to home in my bed.

Then I’d get bad. Usually it happened after a chill session at Aaron’s house, one of those glorious times when we got really high and watched a really bad movie, something with Will Smith where we could point out all the product placements and plot holes. I’d wake up on the couch in Aaron’s living room (I would sleep there while he slept with Nia in the back) and I’d want to die. I’d feel wasted and burnt, having wasted my time and my body and my energy and my words and my soul. I’d feel like I had to get home right now to do work but didn’t have the ability to get to the subway. I’d just lie here for five more minutes. Now five more. Now five more. Aaron would eventually get up and I’d pee and force myself to interact with him, to get breakfast and hold down a few bites. Nia would ask me “You all right, man?” and one Saturday morning, while Aaron was out getting coffee, I told her no.

“What’s wrong?”

I sighed. “I got really depressed this year. I’m on medication.”

“Craig. Oh my gosh. I’m so sorry.” She came over and hugged me with her little body. “I know what it’s like.”

“You do?” I hugged back. I’m not a crier; I just look it; I’m a hugger. Cheesy, I know. I held the hug as long as I could before it got awkward.

“Yeah. I’m on Prozac.”

“No way!” I pulled back from her. “You should have told me!”

“You should have told me! We’re like partners in illness!”

“We’re the illest!” I got up.

“What are you on?” she asked.

“Zoloft.”

“That’s for wimps.” She stuck her tongue out. She had a ring. “The really messed-up people are on Prozac.”

“Do you see a therapist?” I wanted to say “shrink,” but it sounded funny out loud.

“Twice a week!” She smiled.

“Jesus. What is wrong with us?”

“I don’t know.” She started dancing. There wasn’t any music on, but when Nia wanted to dance, she danced. “We’re just part of that messed-up generation of American kids who are on drugs all the time.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think we’re any more messed up than anybody before.”

“Craig, like eighty percent of the people I know are on medication. For ADD or whatever.”

I knew too, but I didn’t like to think about that. Maybe it was stupid and solipsistic, but I liked to think about me. I didn’t want to be part of some trend. I wasn’t doing this for a fashion statement.

“I don’t know if they really need it,” I said. “I really need it.”

“You think you’re the only one?”

“Not that I’m the only one . . . just that it’s a personal thing.”

“Okay, fine, Craig.” She stopped dancing. “I won’t mention it, then.”

“What?”

“Jesus. You know why you’re messed up? It’s because you don’t have a connection with other people.”

“That’s not true.”

“Here I am, I just told you I have the same problem as you—”

“It might not be the same.” I had no idea what Nia had; she might have manic-depression. Manic-depression was much cooler than actual depression, because you got the manic parts. I read that they rocked. It was so unfair.

“See? This is what I mean. You put these walls up.”

“What walls?”

“How many people have you told that you’re depressed?”

“My mom. My dad. My sisters. Doctors.”

“What about Aaron?”

“He doesn’t need to know. How many people have you told?”

“Of course Aaron needs to know! He’s your best friend!”

I looked at her.

“I think Aaron has a lot of problems too, Craig.” Nia sat down next to me. “I think he could really benefit from going on some medication, but he’d never admit it. Maybe if you told him, he would.”

“Have you told him?”

“No.”

“See? Anyway, we know each other too well.”

“Who? Me and you? Or you and Aaron?”

“Maybe all of us.”

“I don’t think so. I’m glad I know you, and I’m glad I know him. You can call me, you know, if you’re feeling down.”

“Thanks. I actually don’t have your new number.”

“Here.”

And she gave it to me, a magical number: I put it with her name in all caps on my phone. This is a girl who can save me, I thought. The therapists told you that you needed to find happiness within yourself before you got it from another person, but I had a feeling that if Aaron were off the face of the earth and I was the one holding Nia at night and breathing on her, I’d be pretty happy. We both would be.

At home I got through the bad episodes by lying on the couch and drinking water brought from my parents, turning the electric blanket on to get warm and sweating it out. I wanted to tell people, “My depression is acting up today” as an excuse for not seeing them, but I never managed to pull it off. It would have been hilarious. After a few days I’d get up off the couch and return to the Craig who didn’t need to make excuses for himself. Around those times, I would call Nia to tell her I was feeling better and she would tell me she was feeling good too; maybe we were in synch. And I told her not to tease me. And she would smile over the phone and say, “But I’m so good at it.”

In March, as I had eight pills left of my final refill, I started thinking that I didn’t need the Zoloft anymore.

I was better. Okay, maybe I wasn’t better, but I was okay—it was a weird feeling, a lack of weight in my head. I had caught up in my classes. I had found Dr. Minerva—the sixth one that Dr. Barney and I tried—and found her quiet, no-nonsense attitude amenable to my issues. I was still getting 93’s, but what the hell, someone had to get them.

What was I doing taking pills? I had just had a little problem and freaked out and needed some time to adjust. Anyone could have a problem starting a new school. I probably never needed to go to a doctor in the first place. What, because I threw up? I wasn’t throwing up anymore. Some days I wouldn’t eat, but back in Biblical times people did that all the time—fasting was a big part of religion, Mom told me. We were already so fat in America; did I need to be part of the problem?

So when I ran out of the final bottle of Zoloft, I didn’t take any more. I didn’t call Dr. Barney either. I just threw the bottle away and said Okay, if I ever feel bad again, I’ll remember how good I felt that night on the Brooklyn Bridge. Pills were for wimps, and this was over; I was done; I was back to me.

But things come full circle, baby, and two months later I was back in my bathroom, bowing to the toilet in the dark.