Be More Chill. Ned Vizzini

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       13

      Michael’s there, in the school parking lot. He managed to borrow the car from his parents and have it waiting for me the day I asked for it. I hug him.

      “What’s up?” Michael’s got a handball—he was probably playing for money while I was in rehearsal. He tosses it lazily against the mural in the back of school.

      “Same crap is up,” I say. “Christine, who I thought was at least available, is with Jake Dillinger.”

      “That’s messed,” Michael shakes his head. “But you gotta give other men credit, y’know?”

      “No. I don’t know.”

      Michael tosses the handball at me. I try to catch but it bounces off my fingers and chin. “C’mon,” he says. “Throw the ball at the wall. See the wall?”

      “Shut up.” I rear back and throw pretty hard; the ball rebounds and Michael lunges to hit it, seemingly with his wrist—there’s a pop. I look over but he’s grinning, not hurt, as the ball comes hurtling back toward me. It hits my skull and careens off under some school administrator’s car. Michael and I laugh.

      “C’mon,” he says. “We got like twenty minutes if you really want to go to Halloween Adventure.”

      “OK.” We head to Michael’s car.

      I’ve never been entirely sure what Michael’s driving status is; he probably has a learner’s permit that doesn’t allow him to drive by himself, but since you can’t violate any laws in a huge brown Buick going 25 mph, we stay out of trouble. I slip inside—it smells like burned peanut butter and ham.

      Michael puts some God-awful emo tape on. I look out the window as we roll away from school.

      “Oh, I forgot, you hate this, right?” Michael asks, pointing at the music. “I can play Pinkerton.”

      “It’s OK,” I say. Michael can put on whatever music he wants (except maybe Pinkerton) because I love driving. I’ve always loved it. I never understood how little kids can ask “Are we there yet?” or want to pee all the time—since I was two, when the family had the Volvo, I’ve been content to hang my head out the window and just watch the scenery. I used to like seeing houses and hills that I hadn’t seen before, but this is Jersey—that got old quick. So now I do this new thing: I look at the houses and guess about the people inside. Are they old? Are they pretty? Are they girls that like me?

      “So tell me,” Michael breaches. “How come you want Christine so bad?”

      I turn to him. “Um, I dig her.”

      “How come?”

      “She’s hot.” I catch myself: “She’s smart too.”

      “And you don’t want to just hook up with her? You want to date her and stuff?”

      “Yeah!”

      “Huh. Do you like your shirts?”

      I look down at what I’m wearing: a Star Wars Episode I T-shirt. “They’re OK, I guess.”

      “Well, if you like your shirts, you might not want to date any girls. Girls are like the arch-nemeses of shirts,” Michael says.

      “Really.”

      “Oh yeah. Shirts are their trophies. The last girl my brother went out with, she ended up with, like, three of his shirts. He used to come home wearing a jacket and no shirt. Don’t go dating girls unless you’re willing to lose shirts. You might just want to do whatever, and the girls will show up eventually and not take your shirts.”

      “Hey Michael.” I almost forgot. “What’s up with that thing your brother had? The pill that made him smart? How did that work again?”

      “I thought you didn’t believe in that.”

      “Well, it’s tough to imagine he got a 1530 on his SATs.”

      “Heh. Yeah. Well, I told you.”

      “He had electronic assistance or something? I mean, I heard about these guys at Columbia—”

      “No, man,” Michael says, gripping the wheel. “This is a totally different thing. I think it’s called a ‘script’.”

      I look at him carefully.

      “Like it scripts in your mind, so it’s a ‘script’, this computer that comes in a pill, y’know? Experimental junk the government is doing.”

      “OK. And he really had one?”

      “Yeah.” Michael pulls up to Halloween Adventure. “Go quick, they’re almost closed.”

      I go into the store thinking about the script but forgetting pretty quickly because I have to beg the attendant for a little extra time to track down and pay for a Scary Movie mask. It’s so dumb; it almost dares me to buy it. I figure with it on, no one’ll be able to recognise me and all I’ll have to do is wear black pants and a black shirt and if I get Christine alone and we have that amazing high-school romantic movie moment, with drinking and young lust and strawberry-flavoured lip gloss, I can rip the mask off and she can see me for who I really am and we’ll start having sex against a tree maybe and—

      “Jesus,” Michael says as I walk out of the store with the mask on. “You’re the one that needs the pill, man; that is stupid.”