Read The Other Normals Page 1




  THE

  OTHER

  NORMALS

  NED VIZZINI

  Balzer + Bray

  An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  Dedication

  TO MY FATHER—

  who taught me that an adventure story must always “deliver the goods.”

  I love you.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  THE NORMAL WORLD

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  CAMP WASHISKA LAKE

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  THE WORLD OF THE OTHER NORMALS

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  SUBBENIA

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  CAMP WASHISKA LAKE

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  THE WORLD OF THE OTHER NORMALS

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  BENIA

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  WARBLEDASH RIVER

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  CAMP WASHISKA LAKE

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  THE

  NORMAL

  WORLD

  1

  THIS IS A STORY ABOUT BECOMING A MAN, so naturally it starts with me alone in a room playing with myself. Not that way—playing Creatures & Caverns, the popular role-playing game. Popular being a relative term. I guess if Creatures & Caverns were really popular, I would have other people to play with.

  “Perry!” my brother, Jake, calls, knocking on the door. “Are you ready to go to your stupid store?”

  “Hold on a second!” When my brother sees my gaming materials, his automatic response is to make fun of me, so I hide them in my backpack and put it on. My graph paper, manual, and mechanical pencils disappear quickly as he turns the knob and enters, smiling under his long hair, with his guitar slung over his shoulder.

  “C’mon, I’m gonna be late for practice.”

  We head down the hall. Jake walks like he’s carrying a tank in his pants and I try to imitate him, but my legs aren’t long enough. Mom is in the living room having a conversation with her boyfriend, Horace. You can tell she’s talking to Horace because her feet are up on the couch and she’s twirling her fingers in the air as if there were a phone cord when there isn’t. She’s in lazy Sunday-afternoon mode, like I was until a few minutes ago.

  “Perry? Oh, Perry’s doing fine, you know. He’s a late bloomer.”

  I squint at my mother. She doesn’t even notice me. I wonder how that bizarre notion could enter her head. Late bloomer? I’m an RPG enthusiast. I’m an intellectual.

  “Hey! You coming?” Jake calls. He’s already at the front door. I follow him out—intentionally not saying “Bye, Mom!” because maybe that’s what late bloomers say.

  Jake and I walk to the subway through New York streets piled high with recycling bags awaiting Monday-morning pickup. It’s a gorgeous spring day and the daffodils are out in small plots for trees, where dogs will be attracted to soil them. The late-ish bloomer-ish phrase bounces around in my head. As a fifteen-year-old you don’t want to be compared to a flower. By your mother. And then have the flower be faulty. The daffodils make it worse: they bloom on the same damn day every year.

  2

  MY BROTHER AND I SIT ON THE SUBWAY. Jake takes out a water bottle and sips it and turns his headphones so loud that I hear them next to me. I always hated people who did that, and now he does it—but I don’t hate him, I worry about his ears. He’s listening to his own band, The Just Because, which has a small reputation in New York for disrupting “battle of the bands” competitions but is otherwise rightfully unknown.

  We are the stoners (aah-ah!)

  We built America (aah-ah!)

  We built America (ah-ahhh)

  Yes we did

  “That’s a stupid song,” I tell Jake, even though it’s catchy. I wrinkle my nose. Somebody on this train smells like booze. I check the car—there’s a homeless guy lounging in the corner in rumpled, stained clothes, taking up two seats.

  “What?” My brother turns the music down.

  “Nobody wants to hear songs about you smoking pot and building America.”

  “I didn’t write it. The singer wrote it. I don’t smoke. Girls don’t like it.” He sips from his water bottle.

  “Jake, what are you drinking?”

  “Raspberry-infused vodka.”

  “What the—?” I pull out my phone. “It’s twelve!”

  “Exactly. Sunday-afternoon cocktail.”

  “Give me that!” I grab for the bottle. Jake uses his long arms to keep it out of reach. He stuffs it back into his guitar bag. “You can’t start drinking in the middle of the day!”

  He grabs my arm and squeezes, hard, like a mechanical claw. “Shut up, bro. Don’t embarrass me. There are girls on this train.”

  He nods across from us at a beautiful woman with short blond hair and earbuds. I don’t know how I missed her. I’m supposed to have laser focus for people like this. Maybe if I were blooming properly I would. She looks
up from the book she’s reading. Jane Eyre.

  “Don’t look at her,” my brother tells me.

  “I’m not.”

  “Then why are you looking at her?”

  I look down.

  “I’m a musician,” he whispers. Vodka and raspberries hit my face. “It’s my right and duty to stay buzzed whenever I can.”

  “No it’s not. You’re going to get in serious—”

  “You have bigger things to worry about anyway: I heard you’re going to summer camp.”

  “What?”

  “Heard Horace tell Kimberley.”

  “No! Why?” So far, in life, I’ve managed to avoid summer camp by excelling at math enough to qualify for a program called Summer Scholars in the city.

  “Dad wanted to send you to math camp, but Mom’s making you go to real camp with public-school kids.”

  “I am a public-school kid!”

  “You’re a specialized-school kid.”

  “Why now? I’m too old to go to camp. Wouldn’t I be a counselor?”

  “Inflation. Horace told Kimberley that Mom can’t afford to have you home all summer. You consume hundreds of dollars a week in food, although I don’t know where you put it. With camp, for a few grand she doesn’t have to feed you or do your laundry or anything. Maybe she’ll send you for three or four weeks, but if she really wants to save cash, she’ll send you for eight. She already gave you that bowl haircut; that’ll last until September.”

  I touch my hair. Our parents, after entering their divorce proceedings eight years ago, each began dating their divorce lawyers. Dad’s is named Kimberley; Mom dated a number of different lawyers until she found Horace. Due to their special relationships with my parents, Kimberley and Horace handle their cases pro bono.

  “Kimberley says that Mom read an article about how boys who go to summer camp become more ‘emotionally mature’ men.”

  I stay quiet.

  “And you’re already having issues in that department if you’re riding with me to buy Creatures and Caverns books.”

  “Like you’re going anywhere important.”

  “Legendary Just Because band practices are important. And I don’t understand why every time I give you a chance to go to one, you just want to play by yourself in your room. I don’t make up the rules, Perry. Creatures and Caverns is a waste of time! There are certain things that are so uncool they’re cool, but role-playing games isn’t one of them.”

  The train screeches to a halt. Jake drinks more vodka. The Jane Eyre girl gets out.

  “What’s the name of the camp?”

  “Some normal name. It’s very traditional, I think, with canoeing and log splitting and bears and counselors who molest children. In New Jersey. It’ll be good for you! What else you gonna do? You didn’t make Summer Scholars this year, right, because you’re a bitch?”

  I ignore him, but it’s true. It’s a permanent blot on my math career. A month ago, on a qualifying exam, I did what I call a mutant paradigm shift: I filled in the answer for problem 15 in the bubble for problem 14 and then shifted every subsequent answer up by one question. Even though it was possible to see that I completely understood the questions, my score had to be counted with the incorrect answers. Mr. Getter, the Summer Scholars coach, told me he couldn’t have such a sloppy performer on his squad. I tried to explain the situation to Mom and Dad directly and through their lawyers, but they wouldn’t hear it. I was about to try and get into college, they said, and hadn’t they told me that no matter how divorced they were, I had to get into a good college? Mistakes of inattention—human fallibility—were no longer to be coddled or explained away; that period of my life was over. I got the feeling that my parents wanted me to get a job this summer, but I didn’t know where—a bookstore? The zoo?

  “What were you going to do all summer? Play Creatures and Caverns by yourself?”

  I don’t say anything.

  “Jeez, Perry.”

  “I like looking at the books! Is that so bad? It’s perfectly normal to enjoy reading role-playing-game manuals and making up characters by yourself.”

  “It’s normal for some people, not for normal people.”

  3

  WE GET OFF AT EIGHTY-SIXTH STREET in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Jake heads to band practice while I go to Phantom Galaxy Comics, which is like a three-story nerd mother ship. The first floor has comics thumbtacked to the walls and ceiling in polystyrene bags; the third floor has Pokémon cards; the second floor is home base for me—warm, brown, and quiet like an English den. The role-playing-game floor.

  Alone, allowing the door to close behind me with the bing-bong of the electronic bell, I climb the steps. I always close my eyes and picture the RPG floor before I reach it. It has walls plastered with huge rich posters of fantasy creatures and landscapes: a beautiful woman with a dragon on a leash, an elf looking into a reflecting pool and seeing a human reflection, the album Led Zeppelin IV. It smells woodsy and solid, not glossy and cheap like the comics downstairs. As I reach it, though, I stop. I have the feeling I’m being watched.

  I’ve heard this feeling expressed before in movie scores through the use of rising violin noise. I’ve never experienced it, though. I’m stunned at how clear it feels. As if something hot is sitting on my neck.

  I whirl around. Nothing. Then a skritch, like a pencil taking down a note … but in front of me is just a smiling gnome on a poster and a security camera.

  4

  AT THE CASH REGISTER, A MAN SITS behind a glass case. Below him are cabinets full of pewter miniatures—small metal figures like toy soldiers. When you get really into Creatures & Caverns, you can buy them and paint them to be like your characters.

  “Interested in something?” the man asks. I’ve never seen him here before. He occupies his chair in the rough shape of a pyramid with a sweatshirt.

  “A new Creatures and Caverns expansion.”

  “Looks like you have some minis you’re interested in too. Want to see any?”

  I scan them. The small silver figures look ready to do battle for the fate of the world: knights, dwarfs, skeletons, pikemen, horsemen, wizards, and dragons pitched forward wielding swords, axes, spears, halberds, war hammers, staffs, and poisonous breath. An archer draws back a flaming arrow with a thin ribbon of metal curling up for the smoke.

  “Are you playing a campaign right now?” the guy asks.

  “No, I just make up characters by myself. I don’t have anybody to play with.”

  “Who’s your main character?”

  “I don’t have a main one.”

  “You don’t? Here’s mine.”

  He pulls one of the minis out of the glass case. The glass squeaks as he closes it. The figure is a tall, thin wizard with a staff, who looks like Gandalf … but to a degree, all wizards look like Gandalf. This one is younger, with a goatee.

  “That’s Roland of Cornwall. Twelfth-level illusionist in the Pax Pastorum expansion. Here’s his sheet.”

  He slips me a laminated sheet of paper. It has a colored-pencil drawing of “Roland of Cornwall” with his game stats: Strength 42, Speed 37, Health 38, Intelligence 99, Wisdom 99, Personality 99, Honor 2.

  “In the new edition of the game, they give you an Honor stat. Characters with low Honor are more inclined to steal things and lie and cheat. Characters with high Honor are more inclined to get killed.”

  “I know about the Honor stat. Why is your character named Roland of Cornwall?”

  “After me. I’m Roland.”

  “Are you … from England? Cornwall is in England.”

  “Of course. I’m into England.”

  “But you’re not from England.”

  “I’m into it. It’s an interest of mine.”

  I stifle a laugh.

  “What d’ya think is funny?” Roland snatches Roland of Cornwall away. “If you’re gonna laugh at me, you can get outta here. Go laugh with your friends. First you’ll have to find some.”

  “I’m sorry.”

>   “What do you name your characters, if you’re so smart?”

  “I’m never good with the names.” Names are a certain place my head doesn’t go. “I get stuck trying to think up different ones. Usually I just forget it and move on to create another character.”

  “That’s because a name has to mean something. What’s your name?”

  “Perry Eckert.”

  “What do people call you?”

  What a strange question, I think, considering that people do call me something different; am I the sort of person who everyone knows has a nickname? That only works for people in sports, or superheroes … I realize an Indian raga is playing through the sound system in the store, drifting around me and Roland like a waterfall.