It's Kind of a Funny Story (6 page)
Read It's Kind of a Funny Story Online
Authors: Ned Vizzini
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Media Tie-In, #Humorous Stories, #Social Issues, #Self-Esteem & Self-Reliance, #Suicide, #b_mobi
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.
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.
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.
