It's Kind of a Funny Story (5 page)

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 bookshelves, 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.”

“I’m not going to remember this; hold on,” I said, taking an index card from Aaron’s coffee table. I was numbering it with a Sharpie, from one, when the weed hit me.

“Whoa. Wow.”

“Uh-oh,” Aaron said. He looked up.

“Whoa.”
“You feeling it?”

Is my brain falling out of my head? I thought.

I looked down at the index card that said
1)get seltzer,
and
1) get seltzer
twisted back, as if it had decided to fall off the card. I looked up at Aaron’s bookshelves and they looked the same, but as I turned, they moved in frames. It wasn’t like the slowness that came from being underwater; it was like I was under air—thick and heavy air that had decided to follow me. For being
high,
it felt pretty heavy.

“You feeling it?” Aaron repeated.

I looked at his stand-up ashtray, filled with crumpled cigarettes and the one clear, shining metal cigarette.

“It’s like the king of the cigarette butts!” I said.

“Oh, boy,” Aaron was like. “Craig. Are you going to be able to do the stuff for the party?”

Was I? I was able to do
anything.
Here I was making clever statements like “king of the cigarette butts"; if I went outside, there was no
telling
what I would be capable of.

“What’s first?” I asked.

Aaron gave me a few bucks to get the seltzer, but just as I was opening the door to go out into the world, his buzzer rang.

“It’s Nia,” Aaron said, leaping to the closed-circuit phone in his kitchen, which was full of grapefruits and dark wood cabinets.

“She’s
coming?” I asked.

Nia was in our class; she was half Chinese and half Jewish; she dressed well. Every day she came in with something different—a chain of SpongeBob Burger King toys strung around her neck; one asymmetrical, giant, red-plastic hoop earring; black clown circles on her cheeks. I think her accessories were a courtesy meant to distract from her small, lucrative body and baby-doll face. If she let it all go natural, if she just let her hair swing down the way it would have if she’d grown up in a field with the wind, she’d make all us boys explode.

“Nia’s pretty hot, huh,” Aaron said, hanging up the phone.

“She’s okay.”

We sat watching the door like we were waiting for the mama bird to bring us food. She knocked.

“Heyyyy,”
Aaron called, beating me.

“Hi!” I said. We rushed to the doorknob; Aaron gave a look, pulled it toward him, and there she was—in a green dress with a rainbow of fuzzy anklets on one leg. Her eyes were so big and dark that she seemed even more tiny and spindly, on high-heeled shoes that threw her forward at us and made her dress outline her little breasts.

“Boys,” she said. “I think someone has been smoking pah-aht.”

“No way,” Aaron said.

“My friends are coming. When’s the party start-ing?”

“Five minutes ago,” Aaron said. “You want to play Scrabble?”

“Scrabble!” Nia put her bag down—it was shaped like a hippo. “Who plays Scrabble?”

“Well, I do, duh, and Craig does, too"—I didn’t, actually—"and we’re some smart guys, seeing as we got in.”

“I
heard
!
”
Nia grabbed her hippo bag and hit Aaron with it. “I did too!” As an afterthought, she hit me. “Congratulations!”

“Group hug!” Aaron announced, and we got together, a tiered threesome—Nia’s head came up to my chin; my head came up to Aaron’s chin. I put my hand around Nia’s waist and felt her warmth and how narrow she was. Her palm curled around my shoulder. We pushed our torsos together in a sort of ballet. I could feel Nia’s breath between us. I turned to look—

“Scrabble,” Aaron said. He went across the living room, took it out of one of the bookshelves. He put it on the floor and we sat, Aaron between me and Nia, the ashtray taking up the fourth spot.

“House rules,” Aaron said as he flipped over the tiles. “If you don’t have any words to put on the board, you can make a word up, as long as you have an actual definition for that word in your head. If your definition makes the other people laugh, you get the points, but otherwise, you
lose
that many points.”

“We can make up words?” I asked. This was brimming with possibilities. I could make up
Niaed
—what happens when Nia touches you, you get
Niaed.
That would make her laugh. Or not.

“What about Chinese words?” Nia asked.

“You have to know what they mean and be able to explain them.”

“Oh.
That
shouldn’t be a problem.” She smiled wickedly.

“Who’s going first?”

“Can we smoke?”

“So demanding.” Aaron gave her the metal cigarette—I said no this time; I’d had enough.

For her first word, Nia put down M-U-W-L-I.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Chinese word.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Uh, cat.”

“That’s ridiculous. How do we know if
muwli
is real?” I turned to Aaron.

He shrugged. “Benefit of the doubt?”

Nia stuck out her tongue at me and
damn
it was a cute tongue. Is that a ring? I thought. Can’t be. Wait—it’s gone.

“I
swear.”
she said. ‘"Come here, little
muwli!’
See?”

“I’m checking you on your next one,” I said.

“The Internet’s over there.” Aaron was like.

“But while you’re gone, we’re going to give you all consonants.” Nia smiled.

“Is it my go?” I put down M-O-P off M-U-W-L-I. Ten points.

Aaron put down S-M-A-P off M-O-P. “That’s a cross between a smack and a slap. Like, ‘I’m-a
smap
you.’”

Nia laughed and laughed. I chuckled even though I didn’t want to. Aaron got the points.

Nia put down T-R-I-I-L.

“What is that?” I asked.

“It’s a trill, you know, like a trill on the flute, except the first L is lowercase and the second is uppercase!”

“That’s not trill, that’s ‘tree-eel’!”

“Okay, fine.” She switched the letters. Now it said T-R-I-L-I.

“Trill-ee! What is a trilhee?”

“An unmentionable act.”

Aaron laughed so hard that he just
had
to ease his body into Nia’s, leaning on her shoulder. She pushed back, tilting her flank into him.

I saw where this was going. I made eye contact with Nia and here’s what her eyes said:

Craig, we’re all headed to the same school. I’m going to need a boyfriend going in, to give me some stability, a little bit of backup, you know? Nothing serious. You’re cool, but you’re not as cool as Aaron. He has pot and he’s so much more laid back than you; you spent the last year studying for this test; he didn’t lift a finger for it. That means he’s smarter than you. Not that you’re not smart, but intelligence is very important in a guy
—
it really is the most important thing, up there with sense of humor. And he has a better sense of humor than you, too. It doesn’t hurt that he’s taller. So I’ll be your friend, but right now let’s let this develop. And don’t be jealous. That would be a waste of everybody’s time.