This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Text copyright © 2004 by Ned Vizzini
Cover illustration by BLK/MRKT
Cover design by Number 17
Excerpt from It’s Kind of a Funny Story copyright © 2006 by Ned Vizzini.
All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.
ISBN 978-1-4231-4106-8
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PART 1: pre-squip
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
PART 2: squip
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Forty
Forty-one
Forty-two
Forty-three
Forty-four
Forty-five
Forty-six
Forty-seven
Forty-eight
PART 3: post-squip
Forty-nine
Preview of It’s Kind of a Funny Story
About the Author
TO:
Naomi (very much the most important: hi, babe), Samartha, Bridget, Kate, Carrie, Jessica, Samantha, Effy, Other Kate, That Girl I Hung Out with in Prospect Park, That Spanish Girl from Karaoke, Karla, Sarah, Claudia, Elyssa (Wilin’ Chick), Olga, Lai Sze, Nicole (Bracey), Katia, Vanessa, Heavenly, and Those Other Girls at New Year’s Eve 2001 (including Ursula), That Girl from Nice Guy Eddie’s, Caroline, Alina Who Ended up with a Guy Named Dogshit, Anna, Marnie, Other Caroline, Robyn, and Chelsea
The room is bright and alive at 8:45 A.M.—I can almost ignore Middle Borough High School’s zombie fluorescent lighting. Mr. Gretch is up at his desk, a tall bald head with wisps of hair and a beard. He’s accompanied by a newspaper and a cactus; in about twenty seconds he’s going to take attendance. To my left is Jenna Rolan, the Coolest girl in class.
Jenna is already talking: “She was like, ‘I’ll only do it if you beat me in pool!’ And then of course she intentionally lost in pool. What a slut!”
Jenna likes to talk about her friend Elizabeth, who is a “real” slut. In fact, when I think about it, Jenna never talks about her family, or TV, or when work is due, or the ins and outs of procuring concert tickets, like most girls. She just talks about how Elizabeth is a slut.
“You should’ve seen what she was wearing. It was like a garbage bag with a condom on top—”
“Bwer-her-her!” Anne laughs. Anne is the second-Coolest girl in the class, which is math. She sits in front of me so she’s always twisting back in her chair to talk to Jenna, which reinforces the fact that Jenna is Coolest and she is second-Coolest. Girls are very territorial.
“Ka-yur-uhhhh.” Mr. Gretch clears his throat from the front of the room. “Abbey.”
“Here.”
“Asu.”
“Here.”
“Atborough.”
“Here.”
“Azu, not-Asu.” Mr. Gretch absentmindedly cups his cactus. This never seems to hurt him.
“Here.”
“Caniglia.”
Christine raises her hand. I look over at her. She looks beautiful. “Here.” I look down.
“Duvoknovich.”
“Here.”
“Goranski.”
“Here.”
“Heere?”
Oh yeah.
Here comes the fun part, the part that has been stressing me since they started taking attendance (in fifth grade). I can’t say “here” in response to my name. It confuses teachers. I raise my hand quietly and say: “Present.” Somebody snickers up by the front of the room. Are they snickering at me? Are they? Can never be too sure. I pull out one of my preprinted Humiliation Sheets, write the date up top and put a tally mark next to the Snicker category. I cover the page tightly so Jenna can’t see. Then I retune my ears to listen for copycat snickering.
The Humiliation Sheets have developed a lot over the years, with a host of different categories, but the current model has Snicker, Laugh, Snotty Comment, Refusal to Return a Head Nod (the standard form of greeting at Middle Borough High), Refusal to Return a Verbal Greeting, Refusal to Touch Hands, Public Denial of Formerly Agreed-Upon Opinion, Refusal to Repeat a Joke, and Mortification Event (a catch-all). I use the Humiliation Sheets to keep track of my social status in a concrete, quantitative way. They are my secret, totally; I make sure no one sees them as I fill them up with tally marks every day. I hate tally marks.
Up in front, Mr. Gretch writes k on the board—k sucks in math; once you see it you might as well ignore everything and save yourself. Mr. Gretch can’t hear on account of he’s, well, old, so Jenna keeps talking and I keep listening.
“Okay and then Elizabeth was like, ‘Where can we go? I don’t have a car like you.’…And the guy says”—Jenna puts on a low voice—“‘Come and sit on this pipe, babe.’ And she went! Unbelievable.”
Anne eats it up—“Bwer-her-her”—craning her neck to suck in every word. It’s far enough into the school year—mid-October—for kids to have stopped talking about summer. (The big story was that Jake Dillinger had sex with this model from Czechoslovakia who was dating his dad, which I believe. Jake can do anything.) Mostly people are talking about the parties of the past weekend or the PSATs, which are coming up. There’s also scattered chatter about the Halloween Dance.
“I hear Brianna has, like, five boys lined up? Because with football players, you don’t know if one of them is going to sprain his ankle and not be able to dance?” Anne uptalks.
Jenna gives back cold silence. “That happened to me in junior high. My then-boyfriend broke his leg and I had to dance with him while he was on crutches and a cast and it was so horrible.”
I tune my ears from Jenna–Anne to other pockets of activity in the room. Mark Jackson and this other kid—his name is actually Jackson Marks—discuss video games. Rob works out a math problem, probably something post-calculus, while picking at his mouth, ear, and nose as if he has them on shuffle. Barbary explains how everyone has to call him “Dr. Barbary” now because he ordered a Ph.D. off the Internet. And Christine, quiet in her invisible pod up by the front of the room, just looks pretty.
“Ooh, I heard Christine Caniglia has a new stalker,” Jenna says.
Whoa!
“Jenna!” Anne whispers like she’s protecting something. “He’s right there!”
Double whoa. I sit quietly, stif
f. Calm. Calm. My head is turned so they must not think I’m listening, but I’m always listening. I’m wired. I peek at Jenna. She eyes me as if I’m a mildly interesting object between her and the clock. I turn back.
“Yeah, that’s him,” she says to Anne. “I heard he wrote her a letter.”
I never wrote any letter! I never even said anything to Christine, not once, except, “Don’t press C7, the Nutri-Grain bars get stuck in this machine,” that one time out by the Student Union office where the Nutri-Grain bars get stuck in the machine, because I can’t talk to Christine. I just look at her and think about her a lot because she’s beautiful, you know? I mean she’s intelligent and sweet and everything else that a girl is supposed to be to offset her beauty, but even if she were idiotic and mean, she’d still be beautiful and I’d still be contorted.
“He is weird,” Jenna says.
This is a bad day for me to start hearing this stuff. In my pocket is a Shakespeare made of chocolate, okay, like one of those Easter bunny chocolates, but in the shape of Shakespeare, and I was going to give it to Christine today at our first play rehearsal. I clutch it.
Jenna whispers something I can’t quite catch. I slide my elbow across my Humiliation Sheet and put a tally mark under Mortification Event, because I don’t have a specific category for people whispering about me. I should. Just then Mr. Gretch does the stupid classic high-school move and I can’t even believe it’s being done to me: “And Jeremy, can you tell us what that angle would be?”
My notebook isn’t open. It’s being used as a Humiliation Sheet shield. My neurons aren’t depolarizing. (I learned that in bio.)
Mortification Event number two.
At lunch I seek out my best friend Michael Mell. Michael sits in a different place in the cafeteria every day—sometimes the indoor part with the long Formica tables, sometimes the outdoor part with the scarred picnic benches and giant bees—but you can always spot him because he’s a tall white boy with a white-boy afro and huge headphones. They have a cord coming off them that’s spiraled like an old phone cord. The headphones let him plunk down anywhere, with the jocks or Warhammer nerds or at one of the girl tables (although Michael only sits with Asian girls). No one bothers him when he has them on because he’s obviously got important things on his mind.
“What’s up?” I say as I approach. Michael doesn’t listen to a thing in those headphones during lunch. He just likes how they feel on his head.
“Mmmmgph,” he says, wolfing down a fish-patty sandwich with cheese and chocolate milk. “’Sup?”
“Big problems,” I say.
I pull the chocolate Shakespeare out of my pocket (it’s wrapped in Victorian era–style foil), plop it on the table, and prop my elbows up to either side of it. “I don’t think I can give this to Christine.”
“Mmmmrrrr, yuh.”
“Michael.”
“Yuh.”
“You want to finish that?”
Michael smiles and lets chewed fish-cheese roll through the gap in his teeth. It plats onto the tray in front of him.
“Crackhead,” I laugh. “People are going to see you.”
“Uh-nuh,” Michael says; his Adam’s apple bobs up and down as his food slides away. “Yeah, so, ah,” he drinks milk, wipes his mouth on the back of his wrist. “What’s with Christine? You pussying out?”
“Yeah, well.” I haven’t touched my food. “It’s bad.”
“What’s bad? I totally know how it is. Did you say something dumb to her?”
“Well, no, but people think I did. Which is basically the same thing.”
“No,” Michael says, working on an orange ice cream bar now. “You doing something and people thinking that you did it are actually really different.”
“Well, people think I gave her a letter.”
Michael’s body rocks. He grins: “‘I’ve got your letter! / You’ve got my song—’” I punch him in the shoulder. “Ow!”
“No Weezer, okay?”
“I’ll try.” Michael folds his hands. “So who thinks you wrote Christine a letter?”
“Jenna Rolan. She also said I was her ‘new stalker.’”
“You’re such a girl.” Michael gets up and slides his tray into a nearby garbage can. “So what? Does Christine care? That’s who’s important, right?”
“Yeah, she’s who’s important, but she’s not the only thing that matters in this whole…situation,” I say, making circles with my hands to emphasize situation. “It’s like, do I still give this to her or not? Will it seem too stalkerish?”
“Jeremy.” Michael fixes buttons on his shirt. “That chocolate Shakespeare is genius. She’s gonna love chocolate, because everybody does, except for those weird people who only like chips”—Michael glances one table away at a red-headed girl eating chips—“and she’s in a Shakespeare play with you, so obviously she’s gonna like Shakespeare.”
“But what if she thinks I’m an obsessed loser?” I start in on the bean salad on my tray. It came cold but feels colder.
“Dude,” Michael says. “Think of how you’ll feel if you don’t give it to her. Think of how you’ll feel at home tonight, jerking off, having missed your chance.”
“Oh yeah. Well, duh, I’ll feel like…” Like I do all the time, like I feel whenever I can’t dial a phone number or dance at a dance or hold a hand right. Like I’m used to feeling. “Like shit.”
“Right, so give it to her—”
“Yo, tall-ass, could you maybe sit or move from the garbage can?” Rich says to Michael. Rich has come on the scene; that’s what he does best. He’s shorter than us but very built. He has blond hair with a streak of red in the back, like a rooster. Michael moves aside and Rich dumps his whole tray, including the actual tray, into the trash. He eyes us.
“What? Punks.”
At the end of the day I walk Middle Borough’s elongated and well-painted hall—my school has one giant hallway that you enter in the middle of, so the whole place is like the Great Wall of Metuchen, New Jersey, with the echoes of the swim team at one end and the sound of the theater door opening and closing at the other end, where I’m going.
So far, in high school (I too have an extensive middle-school career), I’ve been in The Tempest and You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown to rave reviews, both times, from my mom. I like everything about school plays—being at school after school, learning my lines in the bathroom, how the performance always seems totally screwed up a week before it goes on, but then comes together at the last minute, how the second show always manages to be better than the first, how everyone takes their bow at the end and the parents are standing, showing off their digital camcorders, and your costume is hot, but you figure, okay, that’s the price of my art and then—Bam! Cast party! I love cast parties. I’ve never been to one, actually, truthfully, but I’m sure they’re great.
“Hey, you’re in this play?” I ask Mark Jackson from math as I sit down next to him. Mark’s my friend, sort of.
“Yeah, I’m in this dilly deal,” he says. He’s playing Game Boy SP. “What’s it called again?”
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” I say. “You don’t even know the name of your own play?” Only I don’t say that.
“Midsummer Night’s Drizz-eem. Gotcha.”
I sit down two places from him in a seat that looks like it was stained with condom residue—not that I would know, except for that one time in my room when I was messing around with one to see what it would look like in the mirror—
“Hot. Hot to death,” Mark says.
“What?”
“I’m talking to the game, yo. Mind your beeswax.”
I look over at Mark’s game, or, uh, “beeswax,” as the case might be. It looks like he’s driving an SUV on underground train tracks shooting a high-powered rifle at homeless people.
“No peeking, dorkus malorkus,” Mark says, snatching his Game Boy away, imperiling his driving and shooting. “I’m the only one in the school with KAP Three; you gotta pay m
e five bucks to look at it.”
“What’s KAP Three?”
“Kill All People. Three.”
“Uh…”
“You never heard of Kill All People? What’s wrong with you?” Mark eyes me. I sit silent, keeping my head and mouth steady, staring ahead. After a few seconds, Marks slides down a seat, like I have herpes. (Or lupus, right? Lupus.) Then I move down a row.
“Fuck, Jeremy, you don’t have to be such a bitch,” he remarks as I take my new seat. Just then Christine, uncharacteristically late for something, walks down the aisle past us. She rolls her eyes at Mark and while she’s doing it, it is possible that they land on my person for a millisecond or two. Wow. When’s the teacher getting here?
“Aaaaaaaaaaaa!” Mr. Reyes shrieks from the entrance to the theater. “Mwaaaaaaaa! Greetings all! I’m not sure you realize it, but I have a very powerful falsetto voice! Baaaaaaaaaaa!”
“Damn, this dude is fruit-aliciously homo-rific,” Mark says behind me. Little digital homeless people groan as they die on his Game Boy SP.
“It is wonderful to see you here!” Mr. Reyes gets on stage behind a mic, which he does not need. “I am glad to have such a captive audience for my voice. Laaaaaaaaa! I am also very glad to have such a wonderful cast; we are going to have a great time in the play.” Mr. Reyes is tall and skinny with no facial hair; he wears a suit and tie. He teaches English for his day job.
“So let’s see who’s here, and I will give you all your parts. Jeremy Heere!”
“Yes.” I get up.
“There’s no need to stand. You must simply know that you have gotten the role of Lysander. This is a very demanding role that will take much of your time.”
“Thank you, Mr. Reyes.”
“Jake?”
Jake Dillinger is in this play too? Guess it isn’t enough to be on the football team and nail a Czechoslovakian model and be a leader in the SU. Down in front, he shifts in his seat slightly to acknowledge Mr. Reyes.
“You are going to be Demetrius, another tough role. Get ready to memorize much-ly.”
“Cool,” Jake says.
“Puck? Where is my Puck? Christine Caniglia?”
Christine is now down in front, near Jake; all I see is her blond hair.