by Ned Vizzini
“You want to walk across the bridge?” Aaron asked.
“Into Brooklyn?”
“Yeah. You can go home or we can take the subway back to my place.”
“When will it be light?”
“In three, four hours.”
“Let’s do it. I’ll walk home and get breakfast.”
“Cool.”
We walked in step. My feet weren’t cold at all. My head swam. I looked at bare trees and thought they were beautiful. The only way it could have been better was if it were snowing. Then I’d have flakes dripping down on me and I’d be able to catch them in my mouth. I wouldn’t be worried about Aaron seeing that.
“So, how do you feel?” I was like.
“About what?” he was like.
“You know,” I was like.
“Hold on a second.” Aaron spotted a Snapple bottle on the curb; it looked like it was filled with urine, which happens a lot in Manhattan—I don’t know why but homeless people fill up bottles with piss and then don’t even have the courtesy to throw them away—but then again it could be apple Snapple—did they have that? He lunged at it and sent it sailing across the street with a three-point kick; it landed on the opposite curb and shattered yellow under the streetlight.
“Rrnagh!” Aaron screamed. Then he looked around. “There aren’t any cops, right?”
I laughed. “No.” We came to the entrance to the bridge. “So seriously, what was it like?”
“She’s awesome. I mean, she likes everything— she really likes it. She likes. .. sex.”
“You had sex with her?”
“No, but I can tell. She likes everything else.”
“What’d you do?”
He told me.
“No way!” I pushed him as we climbed the bridge. Air from the frigid New York Harbor blew at us, and I put my hood up over my head and tightened the chewed cord. “What was it like?”
“It’s the craziest thing,” Aaron was like. “It feels just like the inside of your cheek.”
“No kidding?” I pulled one hand out of my pocket.
“Yeah.”
I stuck a finger in my mouth and pushed to the side. “That’s it?”
“Just like that,” Aaron said. He had his finger in his cheek too. “I’m serious. It’s hot.”
“Huh.”
We walked in silence with our fingers in our mouths.
“Did you hook up with anyone?” he asked.
“Nope. Julie wanted to, though.”
“Nice one. Did she slip you something?”
“What? No.”
“Because you crashed out pretty hard in the corner over there.”
“I was drinking my mom’s scotch and checking out your dad’s albums.”
“You’re a trip, Craig.”
“It’s cold out here.”
“Looks pretty cool, though.”
We weren’t even a tenth of the way up the bridge, but it did look cool. Behind us the walkway extended to City Hall, where the city had sprung for some spotlights to illuminate the dome of the building. It looked like a white pearl nestled between giants like the Woolworth building, which I learned in English class Ayn Rand had described as a “finger of God,” and that was about right—green and white at the top like the world’s most decorated mint. To our left were the other bridges of Manhattan, arrayed against each other like alternating sin and cos waves, carrying a smattering of late-night trucks whose tops trailed mist.
But to the right was the best view: New York Harbor. Mostly black. The Statue of Liberty was lit up, but it always struck me as a little cheesy, standing out there being all cute. The real action was on the sides: Manhattan had its no-nonsense downtown, where people made money, and on the other side was Brooklyn, sleepy and dark but with a trump card—the container cranes, lit up not for show or government pride but because there was work going on, even at this hour—ships unloading stuff that was famously unchecked for terrorist threats but somehow hadn’t blown us up yet. Brooklyn was a port. New York was a port. We got things done. I had gotten things done, too.
Between Brooklyn and Manhattan, miles across the water, we saw the final curtain of New York City—the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. It spanned the opening to the port, a steel-blue pair of upper lips greeting the blackness.
I could do anything anywhere, in all four directions.
“Craig?” Aaron was like.
“What’s up.”
“What’s up with you? You okay?”
“I’m happy,” I said.
“Why not?”
“No, I said I’m happy”
“I know. Why not be?”
We came up to the first tower of the bridge, with a plaque proclaiming who had built it; I stopped to read. John Roebling. Aided by his wife, and then his son. He died during construction. But hey, the Brooklyn Bridge might be here for eight hundred years. I wanted to leave something like that behind. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I felt like I had taken the first steps.
“The really cool thing about Nia …” Aaron was saying, and he started to go into anatomical details, things about her that I didn’t need to hear; I tuned him out; I knew he was talking to himself. This was what he was happy about. I was happy about different stuff. I was happy because someday I’d be walking across this bridge looking at this city, owning some piece of it, being valuable here.
“Her butt is like—I think her butt shape is where they got the heart logo. . . .”
We came to the middle of the bridge. On either side of us the cars hissed past; red on the left and white on the right, the lanes encased by thin metal trussing that stretched out from the walkway.
I had a sudden urge to walk out over the trussing and lean over the water, to declare myself to the world. Once it came into my head, I couldn’t push it away.
“I don’t know if it was real—” Aaron was saying.
“I want to stand out over the water,” I told him.
“What?”
“Come with me. You want to do it?”
He stopped.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I see where you’re coming from.”
There were pathways built onto the top of the trussing, places for the bridge workers to get out to the cables and repair them. I clambered onto one on the harbor side, the side crowned by the Verrazano, and grabbed the handrails and balanced my feet one in front of the other on a piece of metal about four inches wide. Below me cabs and SUVs hummed by. In front of me was the black of the water and the black of the sky and the cold.
“You’re crazy,” Aaron said.
I took steps forward. It was easy. Stuff like this always is. The stuff adults tell you not to do is the easiest.
Below me there were three lanes of traffic; I cleared the first, got halfway over the second; then Aaron yelled:
“What are you going to do out there?!”
“I’m just going to think!” I called back.
“About what?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t explain. “It’ll only take a minute!”
Aaron turned back.
I moved past the second lane and kept my eyes on the horizon. I didn’t move my eyes from it for the last lane, shifting my hands in front of one another in a tight rhythm. I came to the edge of the bridge and was sort of surprised how there wasn’t any fence. There wasn’t anything to keep you from falling off, just your hands and your will. I gripped the bars at either side—they were freezing—and then sprung my hands open and spread my arms wide and felt the wind whip and tug at me as I leaned myself over the water like . . . well, like Christ, I guess.
I closed my eyes and opened them, and the only difference was the feel of the wind on my eyeballs, because when I closed them I could still see the dotted lights perfectly. I threw back my head and yelled. When I was a kid I read these books, the Redwall books, fantasy books about a bunch of warrior mice, and the mice had this war cry that I always thought was cool: “Eulalia.”
And l
ike an idiot, that’s what I yelled off the Brooklyn Bridge:
Eulaliaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
And I could have died right then.
And considering how things went, I really should have.
eleven
Depression starts slow. After howling off the Brooklyn Bridge, I walked home and felt great. Aaron split and took a late-night subway back to Manhattan, where he had a hell of a time cleaning up his apartment and returning Nia to her parents; I went to a diner and got some eggs and wheat toast and came home at ten in the morning, telling Mom I had slept over at Aaron’s, and pouring myself into bed. When I got up in the afternoon there were some forms to sign about accepting my admission to Executive Pre-Professional and a physical to schedule—how glorious. For once I was looking forward to the doctor holding my balls and telling me to cough, which I still don’t understand why they do.
The rest of junior high was a joke. I didn’t need to do anything except make sure I didn’t fail a class and get “rescinded” from Executive Pre-Professional, so I started hanging out with Aaron every day. Now that we had the pot barrier broken, it became a magnificent haze of yelling back at the TV; we stopped calling it “watching movies"; we started calling it “chilling.”
“Want to chill?” Aaron would ask, and I would pop on over.
Ronny was never far behind. His insults never stopped, although they became more lovable, but that didn’t matter, because he grew into a reliable dealer. He wasn’t going to high school with us—for all we knew, he wasn’t going at all—but he was going to set up a jewelry shop, sell drugs, and make beats, that was for sure.
Nia was always around, too. She and Aaron spent about as much time apart as me and my right hand. I thought I was cool with it, but as I saw them—sitting with each other, sitting on each other, hugging each other, touching each other’s butt, smiling and kissing, in Aaron’s room or in public—I started to get more and more pissed off. It was like they were throwing it in my face, although I knew neither of them meant that, the way I had thrown my studying in people’s faces and not meant it. Why else would they tell each other how much they wanted each other in whispers in front of me? Why else would Aaron tell me, in great detail, about the first time they had sex? One day Aaron announced to me and Ronny as we watched MTV, “You know what, since I got with Nia, I’ve forgotten how to masturbate.”
“Me too, since I found your mom,” Ronny said.
“Huh,” I said. My stomach hitched.
“I’m serious, I don’t even know, anymore!” Aaron grinned.
Great, man. Wonderful. I learned how to masturbate the last few months of junior high, when I went on AOL and started talking to girls with names like “Little Luscious Lolita42.” I don’t know if they were really girls. I just knew that I was lonely, and I wanted to make it so that when I got with someone, I’d have some idea what to do.
Problem was, no matter what girl I was talking to online, when I came to the end of the whole process, I would run to the bathroom. And as I knelt down in front of the toilet, in the final few milliseconds, I would think about Nia.
I had homework for school even before school started. They gave me this insane reading list for the summer that included Under the Volcano and David Copperfield. I tried to read them; I really did, but it wasn’t like flash cards. It took days. Mom actually read the letters that the school sent and told me that part of their mission was to make us well-rounded, liberally educated bearers of tomorrow’s vision, so I had better be ready to do English as well as math; but I found myself jealous of the people who wrote the books. They were dead and they were still taking up my time. Who did they think they were? I would much rather chill at Aaron’s, sit in my room, run to the Internet and then to the bathroom, rinse, cycle, repeat. I ended up not finishing any of the summer-reading-list books.
That wasn’t good when it came time to start school. The first day, I was quizzed on what I was supposed to have read over the summer. I got a 70, something I’d never seen on a sheet of paper in my life. Where do you see the number 70? There are no $70 bills; there’s no reason to get a $70 check. I looked at the 70 as if it had stolen from me.
Aaron, who ended up in eight out of my nine classes, got a 100 on the start-of-school reading quiz. He had read the books in Europe, where he got to go over the summer because his dad’s books were popular there. He came back not just tan and full of knowledge and pictures, but ripe with stories of the European girls he had hooked up with. He said he and Nia had talked and she was totally cool with the other girls; he said he was busy turning her into a freak, someone who would be down for anything. When we hung out now, I didn’t say half as much as I did that first night; I just listened and stayed impressed, tried to control my lower half while Nia was there, pictured her in different freeze-frames for later in the evening.
Executive Pre-Professional High School was hard.
The teachers all told me I was going to have four hours of homework a night, but I didn’t believe it— plus I believed I could handle it. I had gotten into the school; I’d definitely be able to take anything it could dish out, right?
The first semester, in addition to the book list, I had this class called Intro to Wall Street that required me to pick up the New York Times and Wall Street Journal every day. It turned out I was supposed to have been picking them up over the summer as well—some kind of handout that I didn’t get in the mail. I needed to create a portfolio of current events articles and show how they related to stock prices, and to get the back issues. I couldn’t use the Internet; the teacher made me go to the library and use microfiche, which is like trying to read the U.S. Constitution off a postage stamp, and when I got two weeks behind on that, I had two more weeks of newspapers to pick up. The papers were so long; it was unbelievable how much news there was every day. And I was supposed to scan it all? How did anyone do it? The papers piled up in my room, and every day when I came home I looked at them and knew that I could handle them, that if I just opened that first one I’d be able to get through them all and get the assignment done.
Instead I lay in bed and waited for Aaron to call.
It was about this time that I started labeling things Tentacles. I had a lot of Tentacles. I needed to cut some of them. But I couldn’t; they were all too strong and they had me wrapped too tight; and to cut them I’d have to do something crazy like admit that I wasn’t equipped for school.
The other kids were geniuses. I thought I was a big deal for getting an 800 on the exam—like the entire entering class had gotten 800. It turned out the test had been “broken” in my year; they were tweaking it to make it less formulaic—i.e., less likely to let in people like me. There were kids from Uruguay and Korea who had just learned English but were doing extra credit for the current events stuff in Intro to Wall Street, reading Barron’s and Crain’s Business Daily. There were freshmen taking calculus, while I was stuck in the math that came after algebra, which the teacher announced on the first day was “ding-dong” math and there was no reason for us not to get a 100 in everything. I got an 85 on my first test and a small frowny face.
Plus there were extracurriculars. Other kids did everything: they were on student government; they played sports; they volunteered; they worked for the school newspaper; they had a film club; they had a literature club; they had a chess club; they entered nationwide competitions for building robots out of tongue depressors; they helped teachers out after school; they took classes at local colleges; they assisted on “orientation days.” I didn’t do anything but school and Tae Bo, where I hit a plateau. They humored me in class, letting me fake-fight and do my not-that-form-fitting pushups, but the teacher knew it was something that I didn’t really enjoy. I quit. That was the only Tentacle I ever cut.
Why were the other kids doing better than me? Because they were better, that’s why. That’s what I knew every time I sat down online or got on the subway to Aaron’s house. Other people weren’t smoking and jerking off, and those that were
were gifted—able to live and compete at the same time. I wasn’t gifted. Mom was wrong. I was just smart and I worked hard. I had fooled myself into thinking that was something important to the rest of the world. Other people were complicit in this ruse. Nobody had told me I was common.
That’s not to say I did terrible in high school—I got 93’s. That looked good to my parents. Problem is, in the real world, 93 is the crap grade; colleges know what it means—you do just well enough to stay in the 90’s. You’re average. There are a lot of you. You aren’t going over the top; if you’re not doing any extracurriculars you’re done. You can change things in later years, but with 93’s your freshman year, you’re going to have a lot of dead weight.
In December, three months into Executive Pre-Professional, I had stress vomiting for the first time. It happened with my parents at a restaurant; I was eating tuna steak with spinach. They had brought me out to celebrate the holidays and talk with me. They had no idea. I sat there looking at the food and thinking about the Tentacles waiting for me at home, and for the first time the man in my stomach appeared and said I wasn’t getting any of it; I had better back down, buddy, because otherwise this was going to get ugly.
“How’s biology class?” Mom asked.
Biology class was hell. I had to memorize these hormones and what they did and I hadn’t been able to make flash cards because I was too busy clipping newspaper articles.
“Fine.”
“How’s Intro to Wall Street?” Dad asked.
A guy from Bear Stearns had visited our class, thin and bald with a gold watch. He told us that if we were interested in getting into finance, we had better work hard and smart because a lot of machines were able to make investment decisions now, and in the future, computer programs would run everything. He asked the class how many of us were taking computer science, and everybody but me and this one girl who didn’t speak English raised their hands.