by Matt Burns
The terrible advice Mr. Meyer had left me with came to me: “Be yourself.”
It’s a cliché the floats around like the flu, a meaningless idea that infects adults who think they’re being wise when they’re just repeating shit from TV shows. They think it’s a magic spell that’ll get angry teens to embrace their inner freaks, start sporting blue Mohawks and baggy black pants covered in chains, and now they’re smiling and alley-ooping basketballs with jocks, a whole school harmonizing into a utopia of self-actualized kids with no conflict or problems because everyone is being themselves so hard they forget to worry.
Being yourself isn’t the hard part. Figuring out who the hell you are when you’re morphing into a new brand of idiot every other week — that’s the hard part.
Meyer’s advice was just as annoying as Dad’s advice last fall to “do whatever makes you happy.” Sure thing, fellas! Comin’ right up! And let me throw in a third for free: I’ll live in the moment as well! Problem solved!
Why had I ever bought into Meyer’s desperate-to-be-interesting bullshit? I hated that I’d thought his stupid poetry lecture was cool — the one where he’d spent five minutes repeating “crisp crunch” over and over as some example of the power of repeated sounds. What an idiot. How dare he trick me into admiring that. He convinced me to write awful poetry that made no sense. Fuck Meyer for making me believe there was some nobility in being obscure, some prize to win for confusing people with nonsense.
As I fumed, I walked to the end of the green and went down the cart path, through the tunnel under the street, and came out at the start of the next hole. I stomped down a big grassy hill and looked up at the stars, searching for something, anything, to let me know that things would be okay. That I was wrong about everything in the world being the dumbest bullshit.
But there was no constellation that looked like me in the future giving current me a thumbs-up. There was no Doritos Dude in the sky. There was no —
Plsshh!
My foot had caught on a root and I’d toppled face-first into a pond.
I thrashed and reached forward in the mouth-warm brown water, touching the disgusting soft dirt at the bottom, knocking into debris and garbage all around me.
I crawled out, feeling like I’d escaped from a human stomach that stank exactly like the dump Luke’s brother had taken in that pond three years ago.
I pulled myself onto my knees, felt something stuck to my lip, reached up to pull it off, determined it was a chunk of goose shit, and instantaneously vomited.
The makeup had undoubtedly washed off my face — and the illusion that the year hadn’t happened had washed off with it. I lay back in the grass and looked up at the sky. I wished all the Accutane side effects would crawl out of the woodwork, all the different ones teaming up together to take me down. I wanted it all: Bring on the blurred vision and severe pain behind the eyes. Give me a hallucination and a seizure, too; the fast heart rate and spontaneous bruising; thick, bloody boogers; cracking and peeling skin — just let the whole epidermis fall off for good in one dry snakeskin piece. Give me some blisters and rashes, too; finger- and toenails turning to dust; bone fractures just for fun; and then bring on the good stuff, the stars of the show — I’m talking diarrhea; rectal bleeding; black, bloody, tarry stools — that’s right, everybody in the arena, all together now: black! bloody! tarry! stools! And then let’s put the cherry atop this pile of melted meat I’ve become with my favorite one of all, that classic from day one: dark urine, baby. Let it drip and drop and crawl out of my wilted dick like Dr Pepper syrup, black and sticky and thick.
I wanted to be pulled apart and melt and die out there, muscle and bones all turned to mush; to seep into the grass, spread out so thin the maintenance guys wouldn’t even notice when they ground up my eyeballs and teeth in their riding lawn mowers first thing in the morning.
I couldn’t tell how long I was out there, but it was enough time to conclude that, unfortunately, my body was not going to turn itself into a pot roast.
I picked myself up and walked all the way back to my house and opened the door, hoping my family had written me off and had gone to sleep.
No one was in the kitchen, thank god, and I rushed upstairs, desperate for a shower. I opened my door —
Shit. Mom, Dad, Kate, her friend Courtney, and the jazz-hating handyman were all crowded in Kate’s and my bathroom, watching a mechanical pump shaped like a trash can go to work on our toilet. It made a wretched squealing noise while it slurped up water, and a black plastic tube on the back end was aimed to shoot its catch into a large bucket.
I stood there, frozen. Kate sniffed the air and scrunched her nose. I couldn’t tell if she thought the heinous shit smell was me or the toilet.
The handyman said, “Pump’s still lookin’ for the culprit.”
Dad said to me, “It’s really backed up.”
I nodded, unsure if that was an insult or a compliment. I had no idea why everyone was gathered around the toilet like it was a giant radio broadcasting an FDR speech. What treasure did they expect the pump to find? Was Kate still eating coins?
I grabbed a change of clothes from my drawer and got in the shower in Dad’s office bathroom. When I was clean and dry, I was still just as pissed off as I had been before; clearly whatever was actually wrong with me couldn’t be rinsed off.
I stepped back in my room just in time to bear witness to the fruits of the pump’s labors. It grunted and coughed and then vomited out a massive wad of white pulp into the bucket. It slapped the plastic with a wet thud, and all five faces peered at it. It was like a white jellyfish.
The pump choked again, and then spat another wad, and then a third.
“Anyone been flushing anything other than TP in here?” the handyman said. “Tissues?”
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
No, no, no, no. Please, no.
Everyone’s heads turned to me in sync.
“I had a runny nose,” I mumbled to the wall. It was not technically a lie. One percent of the tissues being sucked from my toilet were the product of a runny nose.
The pump squealed and hocked another wet wad into the bucket.
I was muttering something about hay fever when my eyes locked with Courtney’s. Her foul little mouth twisted into a grin and she mimed jerking off. Kate saw it and screamed with laughter while my parents looked on, confused. The handyman winked at me, flashing a smile that was missing two teeth.
Fuck that. Fuck all that.
I needed to roll into an artillery cannon and blast my miserable body into any other situation; anything else would be preferable to the one I was in. “Mom, I need your car. Luke and the guys are doing a birthday thing for me tonight. They just texted me to come over. Okay?”
She sighed and told me I’d be grounded for the way I yelled at Kate, starting tomorrow, but I should go to the party. I stomped downstairs and took her car keys and got in the car with no clue where to actually go. It didn’t matter. I pulled out of the driveway, sped out of the cul-de-sac, rolled through the bullshit stop sign, and then drove out of the neighborhood, watching the trees smear together in the black night around me while I wondered why I was such a goddamned idiot.
Why had I tried to sing my way out of my rut while strumming a child’s guitar? No wonder Kate and Courtney had exploded in laughter. I must have sounded like a total fucking loser. And why was I putting myself through so much stress and pain for all these projects that didn’t add up to anything? The movie, the book, the stories, the poems. They were all failed attempts to be interesting. No matter how hard I was on myself, I still maintained these dumb delusions of being something I wasn’t. I was trying so hard to be unique, but I was just another spoiled kid from the suburbs with the misguided belief based on absolutely nothing that I was destined to be this great filmmaker, this writer, this storyteller. I couldn’t stand to look at my own face, but I was obsessed with myself. A Narcissus who doesn’t make eye contact is just a goddamned idiot st
aring at a lake accomplishing nothing.
The illuminated signs in the strip malls ahead of me smeared together, and I had a vision of big, shiny gold letters floating in front of my face: I’M AN AVERAGE, LAME FUCKING LOSER JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE. And underneath that, in rainbow bubble letters: STOP TRYING SO HARD, YOU JACKASS.
All the stress from all those projects last semester had probably shaved five years off my life. I’d gotten my hopes up and nothing had worked out. Why had I even liked Alex or Emma in the first place? I added up the total amount of time I’d actually spent interacting with each of them one-on-one. It was the most depressing math problem of all time. Each of my and Alex’s blood test appointments were, like, ten minutes tops. And apart from the night in the hotel, I’d only talked to Emma alone in little thirty-second chunks during class changes at school. All added up, it was like seventy minutes I’d actually spent, combined, with the two girls in my imaginary love triangle. I’d spent more quality time with Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. Was it possible I only liked them because they talked to me? The more I thought about it, the more it didn’t just seem possible — it seemed obvious! If a woman kidnapped me, I guarantee I’d fall in love with her just because she’d shown me so much attention. I was no better than a trout lusting after a shiny piece of metal, desperate to sink my dumb lips into any rusty hook that acknowledged my existence. I was enchanted by girls who didn’t care that I existed, no better than a fucking idiot in a bucket hat who’s obsessed with toucans, devoting his life to creatures who see no difference between him and a goddamned scarecrow.
Last fall I’d had all sorts of metaphors about how I’d grow into a better version of myself because of Accutane and Alex, like I was a plant or something. But the time-lapse film of my year wasn’t a flower blooming; it was roadkill decaying into bones.
I was pathetic and desperate and worthless, a plain guy who’d spent months trying to trick Alex into liking some made-up version of me. Thinking I was unique or interesting was a myth Alex unintentionally fueled when she’d accidentally let her eyeballs meet mine that first day back in the waiting room.
The car was almost out of gas and I didn’t want to deal with it, so I turned around in a shopping center parking lot and drove back toward my neighborhood, running through mistakes from this awful year: Forcing myself to watch pretentious French films. Pretending to read Russian novels. Trying to be outgoing at driver’s ed. Taking Meyer’s advice to quit the movie project. Writing the story about driver’s ed. Writing poetry. Writing anything.
So where did that leave me? I was a talentless, cliché-spouting, pretentious sixteen-year-old virgin loser with “severe recalcitrant nodular acne.” If the strongest medicine known to man couldn’t fix my face, what were the chances that there was anything in the world that could fix the rest of me?
I sped through the entrance to my neighborhood in a daze. Why was I even going back home? Did I really want to go to bed only to wake up and have to do this all over again, be me for another day, another week, another year? I wasn’t sure I could do it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
I kept driving toward home, passing that bullshit stop sign on my le —
Shit. Shit!
I wasn’t moving. My ears rang — an endless, high-pitched dial tone. My window was shattered, the windshield cracked into a spiderweb. I coughed up dust rising off the deflated airbag. It smelled awful — sour, burnt rubber. Everything was blurry. All this white dust in the air stung my eyes. The airbag sagged in my lap. My car had been pushed to the side of the road, two wheels over the curb opposite the stop sign the other car drove through. That car was crumpled beside mine like an accordion, and mine was smashed in on the front left side, beside my door.
I turned the car off and stumbled out. I wasn’t thinking about anything. My body was just moving. It was like watching a movie. My legs and arms felt jittery, like I’d been shot through with electricity. I stared at the other car. A guy was standing next to it under the streetlight. He said to me, “I didn’t see the sign. Are you okay?”
I couldn’t speak. I nodded.
“I’m okay over here,” he said. “I called the cops. Are you sure you’re okay? Should I call an ambulance?”
I stood there motionless. Staring at the smashed hoods of both our cars. All I heard was my own breathing. And then I stared into the ground and the police were there. I gave them my license. I told them I hadn’t seen the other guy drive through the stop sign. It was hard to talk. My responses came out jumbled, sentences missing half their words. They asked if I was okay and I kept saying, “I’m fine. I’m okay. Really I’m fine.”
Mom and Dad appeared. Dad talked to the police officers. Mom took the back seat of Dad’s car and gave me the front. I told her I was really sorry about her car. She said she didn’t care and kept asking if I needed to go to the hospital. Apart from the adrenaline coursing through me, I felt fine. My fingers tingled and my arms and legs bounced. My jaw quaked. I had to bite my lip to keep my teeth from clacking together. “Positive mental attitude,” I said to Mom, all nervous energy through clattering teeth. She put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed it.
Kate was standing in the kitchen when I walked in. I couldn’t stop smiling for some reason. I felt like I was on drugs. She stared at me like I was a ghost.
Mom led me to bed and told me that if there was anything at all I needed, I could just ask.
“Really, Mom, I’m fine.”
I lay in bed in the dark for hours. Breathed slowly, stared forward into my bookshelf. Rubbed my hands over my comforter back and forth to the rhythm of my breaths. I was so happy to be there, to not have a mouth full of airbag. The memory of the crash tried to replay itself, but I forced it away. I didn’t want to remember it. I didn’t want it to be real. I was back in my room, where I’d been an hour ago. I was fine and the other guy was fine. You could chop the wreck out from the time line of my life and I’d still be there in bed that night. The wreck was irrelevant.
I focused on breathing. My wrists were red and chafed from the airbag. My ears were still ringing. I was alone, in my bed. It was calm. I wasn’t dead. Everything was fine.
Mom made me stay home from school on Tuesday. I told her the crash wasn’t a big deal — some glass got smashed up. That was it. There was no tragedy — but she insisted, and I decided to stop arguing. Whatever. I was happy to take a day off from school.
All morning I lay in bed half-asleep, blissfully zoned out, watching movies. I got through three by lunchtime. It’s crazy how productive you can be when you start watching movies at seven a.m.
I fell asleep in the afternoon, and when I woke up, the sun was shining through my windows and I had four texts. Will asked what happened. Luke asked when I was coming back to school. Emma and Alex both asked if I was okay. God. Mom must have told Luke’s mom, and she’d probably exaggerated some absurd story about how I miraculously survived a forty-five-car pileup where everyone else died and all the other cars exploded into fireballs around me but her son was just so special he made it out. The texts annoyed me. This didn’t have to be a big deal. I was gone from school for one day. I hadn’t even broken a bone. There was no blood. I was unscathed and unchanged and there was nothing to talk about.
I didn’t respond to the texts. I put in disc three of the Clerks DVD and watched all the special features, thinking I should wreck cars all the time so I could have more days off.
Mom drove me to school Wednesday morning, and I made the mistake of closing my eyes. She kept asking me if I was okay, which was annoying because I was honestly just tired, so I forced my eyes open so she’d stop questioning me.
Patrick hugged me in the hallway in front of the guys in the morning, and I stood there with my arms at my sides, waiting for him to start pretending to have sex with me. But when he didn’t, I shrugged him off and told them all I was fine and there was no reason to even talk about it.
Alex and Emma sat with us at lunch. Alex asked if I was
okay. Everyone turned to stare at me.
“What? Yeah, I’m fine — I’m totally fine. It’s really not a big deal at all. It was like, really small.”
Emma tilted her head. “My mom heard from Luke’s mom that both cars got totaled. Like, completely destroyed.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, moms exaggerate.” I stared into the table, waiting for them to start talking about anything else. I didn’t want to think about it because there wasn’t anything to think about.
The rest of the girls came by to see if I was okay. It was weird. I couldn’t tell if they really cared about me or if I was just some freak show object for them to ogle at for the day. Someone told me Todd Lancaster was busy doing a project in the library but he’d said he was glad I was okay. Whatever.
“So, how did it, like, happen?” Sam said.
I shrugged. “I was driving through my neighborhood and the other guy went through a stop sign and hit me.”
“Damn,” Sam said. “It must have been terrifying. He drove straight at you?”
“Well, no. He, like, T-boned into me from the left. I didn’t see him coming. My car was fine one second and then it was wrecked and then I went home and went to sleep. That’s really all there is to it. Sorry this isn’t interesting at all.”
I kept telling them I was fine and after a while they finally started talking about other things.
By Thursday no one cared about the wreck anymore. Luckily some senior girl got arrested for shoplifting sports bras at the mall, so everyone was talking about that.
I knew I should have been studying for finals and figuring out something to turn in as my project for Meyer, but I wasn’t in the mood to do work. When I got home, I watched movies in my room and stayed awake until I couldn’t find any more websites to read.
Through my doorframe, I saw Kate creep out of her room at two fifteen a.m. My index finger automatically closed the browser window, even though the thread I’d been reading about symbolism in A.I. Artificial Intelligence was far from pornographic. “Why are you up?” I said.