Be More Chill (25 page)

T
HEY ARE
.

I would never look at them. I hate everyone.

C
ALM DOWN
. P
EOPLE ARE SAD
. W
HY WON
’
T YOU LET THEM BE SAD
?

Because I hate them. I still do.

O
H
,
GET OVER IT
. L
OOK HOW DISTRESSED THEY ARE
.

I check out people’s faces, not just their positions and the way they arrange themselves into social strata, which is what I’m used to doing. Everyone has pregnant eyes like Mom had
yesterday, and they’re bent over and heavy in a way that’s different from the heaviness that comes with their backpacks.

D
ON
’
T YOU THINK IT
’
D BE HARD TO DEAL WITH THIS IF YOU DIDN
’
T HAVE ME
?
R
EMEMBER HOW YOU FELT
S
ATURDAY NIGHT
?

I guess.

T
HAT
’
S HOW THEY ALL FEEL
. L
OOK
.

I look, but I don’t think I see what the squip intended. I look and see how the people who aren’t crying or standing in circles chatting—the people like me—are peering
around inquisitively in the exact same way that I am. For the first time, I have a feeling for who has a squip and who doesn’t: Nora from chemistry seems thoughtful. Jarrod from gym is
looking at people’s feet as if there were clues there. Nguyen, also from gym, mumbles to himself—maybe he hasn’t gotten used to it yet. About a dozen of us are just standing
aside, like herbivorous dinosaurs checking out other herbivorous dinosaurs, with the calm that can only come from having a voice in your head, from hearing the news early, from always having
someone to talk to. None of us are crying. Maybe we really are evolving.

“Jeremy!” Christine touches my arm from behind. S
HE
’
S SO DEMONSTRATIVE
. “Hi.”

“Oh,” I turn around. She’s in black, to show her respect for what happened. I glance at the halls again and notice plenty of others in black—it’s why the usual
mosaic effect is diminished. Then I look back at her; it’s a better view.

“So sad,” Christine mutters, putting herself next to me like we’re king and queen of the grieving teens. We hug. As the first bell approaches, human traffic streams in the door
thicker and thicker; we stand like worn rocks. As kids pass us, they whisper to one another.

“It’s crazy,” I say, wondering if I can tell her everything I think, about how none of these people cared about Jake or Rich and they’re all being dinosaurish.
S
URE YOU CAN
. “I don’t think these people cared about Jake or Rich,” I say.

“Of course not,” Christine shrugs. “It’s just tragedy. It’s what happens.”

“What do you mean?”

“People think about their lives and how it could have been them and the only way to get those thoughts out is to focus on the people who actually got hurt.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I’m gonna be a psych major, you know.”

“‘Psych?’” Y
OU IDIOT
. I
T MEANS PSYCHOLOGY
. “Oh, like ‘-ology’?”

“What?”

“Like psych-
ology
?”

“Yes.” Christine looks at me. “You’re so weird.”

“Yeah…but in a good way, right?” I smile.

Christine sighs. “I can’t validate you, Jeremy.”

“What’s ‘validate’?”

“That’s when you make someone feel real and accepted by talking to them.”

“Oh. Well, fine.” I cross my arms. “I don’t need vali-dali-dation.” Christine giggles.

T
HIS FEMALE
’
S GREAT
. W
HAT AN IDEA.
I’
M NOT GOING TO VALIDATE YOU EITHER
.

You shut up.

“It’s okay,” Christine says, and then she scans the students. “We’re lucky, you know.”

“I know.”

“No, I mean we were lucky we weren’t there when it burned. I hear Rich started it on purpose.”

“Serious?”

“Yeah. He started lighting stuff on fire, random stuff like plants and the entertainment center and the rugs. People saw what was happening and got out. I don’t know why Jake
didn’t get out.”

“Huh. Are you sad about Jake?”

“Not so much. He might’ve started it too, they’re saying. People go nuts, you know.”

“Yeah. Nuts.” I think about Rich’s squip. Is it dead?

Then, without any of the hallmarks of a natural bell—no overtones, no undertones, no hammer banging anything—the Martian sound that passes for a bell in our school rings. The warning
bell. Everybody leaves their positions by the flowered lockers, wipes their eyes and moves quickly to class, with that keep-on-the-right shuffling gait that I’ve seen since I was six. It
comforts me. Christine and I shuffle too, silent but not uncomfortable, keeping to our own right. When we get to math, I let her go in first and then we crystallize in our normal positions: her in
front and me in back. Mr. Gretch is at his desk rummaging through his newspaper.

“It’s very sad that I have to read about students I knew, even a little bit, in my own paper,” he grumbles. For once nobody makes fun of him, even though he can’t hear.
“But things like this happen because of ignorance, and the only way I know how to handle ignorance is to teach. So does anybody have anything they want to say?”

Everyone either stares out a window or breathes into their palm.

“Then let’s start math.” It takes me halfway through the day to realize that the squip is off; I turn it back on for rehearsal.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
was going to have two performances, but because Jake Dillinger is recovering, and his understudy, Ron, is unavailable for the second show
since he got cast in
Junior Real World
, and Mr. Reyes is spending time on a fund to help the Findermans, and there’s so much local media attention (TV stations will cover New Jersey
teenager party debauchery for about five days), we have only one show, on the second-to-last Friday in the term. The soft anticipation is there from first period for us actors—we have to
suffer through class as though there weren’t something bigger to worry about—but the real nausea, which is what yields a quality play, doesn’t start until 3
P
.
M
. That’s when the normal kids go home and we gather in our catacombs backstage to mess around with costumes and do a final run-through and reassure each
other and freak out and pretend like this is just a play and not the first big school event after the fire.

“You ready?” Mark Jackson keeps asking as I pace up and down the backstage hallway in costume, pressing my hand against every other beige tile on the wall, doing jump kicks.
(It’s what I do to relax.) He’s warmed up to me since the Game Boy incident. Which the squip predicted.

“Yeah,” I tell him. “You?”

Mark looks down at Game Boy SP. “Born ready, son.”

That’s good for him. I do another jump kick. I’m preparing for a lot more than the play. The play is easy when you have a squip—I’ve got it off now but that’s just
to give myself a rest; I’ll turn it on when I get on stage. I’m preparing to make my move on Christine.

See, the squip finally revealed its plan this week: I’m supposed to stop the play in the middle (when she sprinkles dust on me), give a little speech about how hard it has been for us
Middle Borough students in the past week and how she has inspired me to be my best, then kiss her under the lights. That’s it! So simple. And the squip says that the drama and the lights and
the surprise of it…girls can’t resist that.

“Jeremy! Into makeup!
Aaaaaaaa!
” Mr. Reyes snaps. He’s increasing the frequency of his falsetto outbursts now that it’s crunch time. I stride down the hall to the
oversize janitor’s closet that serves as a makeup room for every play.

“All right,” Sandy the Makeup Lady says. I sit in a plastic cafeteria chair front of her. It strikes me that someone as unattractive as Sandy the Makeup Lady would have a job
beautifying others. “Lysander, huh?”

“Yep,” I smile.

“You looking forward to it?”

“Oh, definitely.”

Sandy smears powder on me the way they always do, with total disregard for your face as anything but a surface that holds powder. When she’s done, as I leave the room, I note the ring on
her finger. Somebody loves her. It’s not hard.

I plunk myself down in my chair in the hallway—these days people respect me enough that if I leave some stuff in a chair, no one will sit on it—and watch the fairies; there are
plenty of girls in
Midsummer
who are just stock fairies with no lines. I watch their wings as they line up to visit Sandy the Makeup Lady: paper-and-silver glittery wings that look thinner
than a soap bubble. I wonder why I love them so much, why I’m not happy with girls as they are, why I always want them to have wings or tails or…additions. Am I a freak?

That reminds me: the therapy thing. Mom has gotten me a therapist for the squip. She found some guy easily, because the divorce lawyers get referrals from the marriage therapists, and she told
him what the situation was—her son is having delusions; he’s been doing drugs; he’s taken her car—and I went in for the first time on Wednesday. It turned out that the
therapist had a squip too. He just got one. So instead of asking about my problems, he asked about the squip. Was it always right? Was it addictive? How did it find its information so fast? I told
him what I had learned, which wasn’t much; he appreciated it and bought me some coffee. He says that when some of his patients drone on, he sets his squip to the sexy female voice and thinks
dirty to it, but I told him to watch out; that could get pretty addictive. Then I wondered why I hadn’t tried it. But I couldn’t. My squip is such a guy.

Christine makes a few appearances backstage, but she’s Puck—the star—so she’s never without an entourage. At first her parents are with her, a funny-looking dad and mom,
both with glasses; you’d never imagine they would produce such a beauty. Then, once she’s in costume, she’s ringed with fairies who give her advice and fix her outfit. She looks
at me once, sitting in my chair, just a normal guy turning his squip on every so often to check the time. She’s giddy about being on stage, and she smiles.

At 5
P
.
M
. the crew gets active, running up and down the halls barking at us actors as if we had nothing to do with the play. At 6
P
.
M
. I tune my ears to hear the dull adult crawl of parents moving to their seats. I wonder if they’re as disgusted with the seats as I always was, but you
can’t tell that from the murmurs—soft at first, then deeper and louder, like a jet engine set to low and shoved in the theater. There’s the sound of paper programs being read out
of boredom and I’m reminded how, if you’re filming a movie and you want to get a party scene, you can make crowd noise by saying “rhubarb” over and over. The people in the
audience sound like they’re saying “Rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb.”

Then Mr. Reyes slaps me on the back the way he does all his actors, and I do a final few jump kicks and walk purposefully down the beige hall to backstage, where everyone gets deadly silent.
From now on all communication will be in gestures and smiles and pantomime. Mark Jackson actually turns his Game Boy off and we stand in costume, in darkness, ready for the first scene.

I turn the squip on.

Y
OU READY
,
MAN
?

Born ready, son.

There isn’t really one curtain in a play—there are two, one in front of the other, like the lips of a clam ready to open. I peer between them from backstage as the
lights go on and then they bunch toward me for the start of act one, scene one. The audience doesn’t clap.

Eugene and Lai Sze (Theseus and Hippolyta) stand on stage. They make good profiles, but when they start talking, the audience continues to put away their heavy coats and programs instead of
paying attention—I think Mr. Reyes cast them intentionally, knowing that my appearance, along with Matt (Egeus), Ellen (Hermia), and Ron (Demetrius—he’s Jake’s understudy),
would mark the real beginning of the play. Ron stands next to me with morbid posture from morbid pressure; he’s got to fill the shoes of a guy who was impressive and loved even
before
he got put in the hospital.