Be More Chill (24 page)

“So you heard?” I sit up. This girl calms me.

“Wait, first, why did you call my house so early?”

T
ELL THE TRUTH
.

“I…uh…I just wanted to talk to you about the whole fire thing.”

“That’s sweet. How did you find out about it? Who told you?”

M
ICHAEL
.

“Michael did. He saw it on the way, driving back to his house.” I feel bad about lying.

D
ON
’
T
. I
T
’
S NECESSARY
.

“Well,” she says. “We don’t get too many phone calls before nine
A
.
M
. on a Sunday.”

“Must’ve pissed your mom off.”

“She’ll live.”

“Yeah, maybe she thought it was one of her eight-
A
.
M
. booty calls.”

“Shut
up
!” Christine laughs. Then we both realize what we should be talking about.

“So, uh, the fire thing is super messed up,” I offer. “What did you hear about it?”

“Everything,” she says. “Too much. Let’s talk about something else.”

“Uh…”

E
MBARRASSING PARENTAL DETAILS
. B
ORING YET SAFE
.

“My Dad eats Peanut Butter Oreos
dipped in peanut butter
.”

“
Waa!
He must be kind of…ah…”

“Large? Yeah, he’s large. He’s gotten large lately.”

“My dad goes on business trips and comes back with all the peanuts from the airplanes, including other people’s peanuts, for me.”

“Why?”

“He remembers how much I used to like them when I was little. I don’t even eat them anymore.”

“Is he away a lot?”

“Great Adventure has these strategy meetings in Vegas. He goes there. And he has miles from his old job that he uses to visit family.”

“I’d miss my dad if he was away all the time,” I say, out of bed now, pacing.

S
TOP PACING
. I
T ADDS A TREMOR TO YOUR VOICE
. A
ND WHAT ARE YOU DOING
?

“Me too.” Christine says. “I do. But he sends letters, you know? Not e-mails, real letters with stamps that you have to actually buy.”

“Huh,” I laugh.

There’s a pause. I
NTERESTING
. W
E
’
RE LEARNING A LOT HERE
.

I know!

“You still there, Jeremy?”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“You know, you and I and Brock and Chloe and Michael are really lucky.” (I don’t say anything. I’m noticing how close I was to her in the sentence.) “We owe you a
lot, actually. You were the one that rushed us out of that house.”

“I was tired,” I say, putting boxers on, exceedingly careful not to hang up the phone as it nestles between my chin and shoulder. “I wanted to go home.”

“Isn’t it weird that that’s the kind of stuff that saves you from being hurt?” she asks. “Being tired?”

“Yeah. Life is very random.”

L
IKE A QUANTUM COMPUTER
.

“Like a quantum computer.”

“Like what?”

“Stupid,” I hiss at the squip. A
H
,
LEAVE ME ALONE
.

“Jeremy?” C
ALL HER
“
BEAUTIFUL GIRL
.” N
OW
.

“Yes, beautiful girl?”

“Stop it.” Christine blushes over the phone. I knew that could happen. Then she says, “I forgot what I was going to say.”

Y
OU WERE GOING TO SAY THAT WE SHOULD MEET UP TO GO OVER OUR LINES EVEN THOUGH
L
YSANDER NEVER TALKS TO
P
UCK AND
P
UCK NEVER TALKS TO
L
YSANDER
.

“You were going to say that we should meet up to go over lines even though Lysander never talks to Puck and Puck never talks to Lysander—you just throw dust at me.”

“Jeremy, don’t you think we could just talk on the phone a little while? Like, not so pushy. Remember what I asked you?”

“All right.” And with the help of the squip and my own quick thinking, Christine and I manage to have an actual conversation about movies and our friend(s) and how screwed up the
whole fire thing is and how hurt Rich is and what school is going to be like and the play and how Jake Dillinger is a dick anyway even if he’s in the hospital and Mr. Reyes and climate change
and parents and homework. N
O
,
NOT HOMEWORK
, the squip says when I get there. T
ALKING ABOUT HOMEWORK IS A FIRST STEP ON THE PATH TO
EUNUCH
-
HOOD
. I switch.

The conversation goes so well that I’m surprised, forty-five minutes in, to have the squip order an ending. B
E THE TERMINATOR
. S
HOW THAT YOUR
ESSENCES ARE PRIZED IN THIS WORLD
, it says. “I gotta go deal with my parents,” I say. “I assume they’ve heard everything by now.”

“They’re gonna be crazy,” Christine says. “Like mine.”

“Well, then, it’ll be fun.”

“Definitely. Bye, Jeremy.” She lilts her voice in an exceedingly pleasant manner.

“Have a good one,” I almost say. But the squip corrects me: A
NOTHER RUNG ON THE EUNUCH LADDER
. S
TICK WITH
“
PEACE
.”

“Peace,” I slur, and right on cue, Mom raps on my door. Maybe she was standing outside, waiting for me to end the call.

“Jeremy, we have to talk
right now
about where my car was last night and what happened to your aunt’s Beanie Babies!”

I crumble into a subordinate chair at the dining room table. Mom and Dad are centurions, in established positions. She’s at the head of the table and he’s behind
her, sitting on a radiator in a Godfather-type pose. (I’ve never seen
The Godfather
…I’ve seen the
Sopranos,
though—good enough?) He looks like he should be in
charge quietly from the background, but I know he’s probably just eating over there by the oval garbage can. This is Mom’s show. I look up at her.

“First things first,” she says. “We heard about the fire at the Finderman house last night. That’s where you were, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, are you okay?” Mom looks at me deeply.

“Yeah. I left before all that stuff happened. You know, whatever happened.”

“Okay,” Mom says. Then, as if they’ve been planning it all morning, she and Dad approach and hug me in sequence. I hug back, almost crying the way I did last night, into
Dad’s big body. “We’re happy you’re safe,” he says gruffly. The hug is long and tight.

My parents return to their positions. Mom has her hands on the back of the main dining room chair like a boat wheel. I notice that she’s wearing a very businesslike, nonweekend outfit. She
adopts a serious expression: “Now, I have some questions. Are you on drugs.”

N
O
. N
OT NOW
.

“No, not now.”

“Don’t be smart with me, Jeremy.” Mom approaches. “What happened at that party last night? What were you doing that kept you up until four in the morning?”

“Nothing.” N
O
. T
ELL THE TRUTH
. “Well…some stuff…”

“What? Likewhatstuff?” Mom leans forward. It’s easy to forget that your mother is a lawyer until it counts.

T
ELL HER EVERYTHING
.

What do you mean?

T
ELL HER EVERYTHING
. S
HE
’
S SMART
. I
T
’
S THE ONLY WAY TO GET OUT OF
THIS
.

But—

J
EREMY
,
AREN
’
T WE PAST ARGUING
?

“I did ecstasy.…” I mumble.

“Hu-aaaa!”
Mom grabs me. “You did? Did someone force you to?”

Dad laughs his ass off. “Did someone
force
him?” A sandwich quivers in his mouth. “Whoa, huh, yeah,
right
.”

“No, nobody forced me,” I stare ahead. Mom puts her hands tight around my cheeks, pulling my face up at her, and holds me there. “I just tried it. I’m young. I’m
stupid.”

“Jeremy, what is wrong with you?” She looks at me so deeply that I think my body might straighten up to accommodate her gaze, from eyes to toes. “What is this?” She holds
up a credit card bill, with the shirt I bought at Advanced Horizons highlighted (I have to stare close to see it). “Why are you abusing our credit card?”

“Mguph.”
I answer. Mom still holds my mouth shut.

“Why is my sister missing hundreds of dollars worth of Beanie Babies?”

“Yeah!” Dad seconds, hearing his cue. “I
saw
you looking at those gay things on the Internet. What have you been doing on the Internet?”

Mom looks back and sighs. “Why was my car parked differently in the driveway this morning than it was last night?” she asks. “Why are there sixteen more miles on it?”

Jeez—she checks that stuff?

Y
OUR
M
OM IS REALLY MENTAL
. T
ELL THE TRUTH
.

“Because I took it to the party.”

“You took my car to the party!
Why would you do that?
”

I’ve never seen my mother jump up and down before, but I’ve also never ever seen anything resembling the remotest, tiniest body of water create any kind of reflection in her
eyeballs. Until now.

“When did I lose my son?” Mom goes from jumping to kneeling. She’s below me now, tearing up. “When?” She touches my leg.

T
ELL HER ABOUT ME
.

What?

I
T
’
S THE ONLY WAY
.

She won’t—

T
ELL HER
.

“I, uh…” Mom looks at me plaintively. “I got a quantum computer that I ate and now it sits in my brain and tells me how to be cool. And it changed me.”

“Oh my gosh.”

I don’t say anything.

“He’s insane. Your son has gone insane.” Mom turns to Dad. “Now we have to get him a specialist and everything.”

“I’m
sane
!” I stand up. This isn’t something I ever thought I’d have to defend.

Y
OU
’
RE DOING FINE
.

“I’m really sane!”

“Jeremy, we don’t need to talk about this right now. I want you to go to your room and lie down and take some aspirin or…whatever you need to do to get those drugs out of your
system. Your father and I are going to have a discussion and come up with a game plan to get you the help you need.” Now Mom is crying, and I learn something I didn’t know about the
human body: if your mom cries, you cry. So there we are, her bawling and me with my auto-bawl feature activated, together at the dining room table; me trying to explain that I just did the ecstasy
once and I’m not lying about the squip and Mom holding my head and wondering out loud where she went wrong and telling me that she loves me so much, her only son, at least I wasn’t
burned in the fire.

I’m back in school on Monday. It’s not like you can ignore the fact that there was a tragedy and some people got put in the hospital and a member of the
community’s house burned, because right over the entrance, on a big banner put together to look like a quilt, the school administrators have written: W
E ARE
M
IDDLE
B
OROUGH
.

“We are Middle Borough?” Isn’t that what they wrote at Columbine after those two kids shot all those other kids?

T
HEY WROTE
“W
E ARE
C
OLUMBINE
.”

Well, duh. But weren’t we Middle Borough before?

A
PPARENTLY NOT
.

I walk through the doors. Since there’s no Rich standing outside, there’s no group for me to hang out with before class. I just head in the way I used to, alone and thinking about
school, instead of with a group of people, thinking about how I can please/use them. Inside, instead of walking purposefully, wearing their pastiche of name brands, students are standing in
medium-size circles by lockers of importance: Rich’s locker, close to the entrance, has a pile of flowers in front; Jake Dillinger’s hosts a larger pile, because Jake was cooler. People
are milling around, sad, as if they cared for these people and not just for what they symbolized; as if Jake were useful as a human being instead of just as a signifier that you had gotten into a
certain crowd. Like minutes before he got burned, he wasn’t _ _ _ _in_ Katrina in some room with somebody taking pictures. I wonder if those pictures are up yet?