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 pro ducer 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 some one 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 boo
kshelves, 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.”