by K. J. Reilly
I mean, come on, the teachers don’t have to drive.
TEXT FROM JOEL TO ANDY 10:47 p.m.
Homework sucks. This is what I’m supposed to be working on:
If 3x - y = 12 what is the value of 8x/2y?
A. 212
B. 44
C. 82
D. The value cannot be determined from the information given.
There is no way I will ever be able to answer that question.
So I’m playing NBA 2K18 instead.
The simulated NBA Finals match between the Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers.
TEXT FROM JOEL TO ELI 2:27 a.m.
Mrs. Wilson, the school psychologist, said that making so many lists could just mean that someone is super organized but it might be OCD.
I don’t want to scare you but I looked it up. That means obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Mrs. Wilson said that making lists might give the person a sense of calm when they are worried they might forget stuff or it could be a form of mental illness.
Either way she’s not sure.
I was thinking that since your lists have such big things on them, then maybe they give you a feeling of structure in a messy world. I was thinking that we should probably just clean up the messy world. That way you wouldn’t have to make lists.
Or you could make lists. Either way, I’m good with both.
TEXT FROM JOEL TO ELI 2:43 a.m.
I didn’t tell Mrs. Wilson that you make lists. I said I was asking for a friend so she basically thinks that it’s me. I saw her writing in my file. She probably wrote here’s one more thing wrong with Joel. Now he’s making lists. He’s a mess. And unfixable.
TEXT FROM JOEL TO ELI 2:54 a.m.
I didn’t mean you were a mess and unfixable because you’re perfect. I meant me. I’m a mess.
TEXT FROM JOEL TO ELI 3:15 a.m.
Don’t feel bad. I’m probably wrong about the whole OCD thing. I think everyone has something bad wrong with them. I told my mom she has tuberculosis and my dad has mesothelioma and Jacey has Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
And that’s just this week.
My mom says she’s perfectly healthy and so is my dad and Jacey just has eczema, but she’s basically wrong. I googled it.
TEXT FROM JOEL TO ELI 3:22 a.m.
I tried making a list of everything that I needed to do. It didn’t fix anything or help my bad thoughts. But you should still do it. If it makes you feel better.
TEXT FROM JOEL TO ELI 3:46 a.m.
If you want to see Mrs. Wilson I could go with you. Either way. I’m okay with going or not going.
TEXT FROM JOEL TO ELI 3:51 a.m.
I have a gun in my garage. Sometimes when I feel bad I take it out and think about what would happen if I pulled the trigger.
It doesn’t make me feel any better, but I still do it.
when I was standing at my locker and said, “Joel, do you want to come with me to my church group after school today?”
“Will God be there?” I asked as I looked at her. “Like actually show up?”
Eli leaned back against the lockers and sighed. “Since God is everywhere, yes, He—or She—will be at my church group.”
“If He—or She—is everywhere then He—or She—is here, too,” I said. “So that means there’s no point in actually going to your church group.”
Eli looked at me and I could tell that she was frustrated. “Are you going to keep doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Being really annoying and acting like you don’t want to come.”
“Probably. Plus I’m not acting. I don’t believe in God. And you know why.”
I slammed my locker shut. I knew Eli wasn’t asking me on a date. She was always asking everyone to go to church group with her and she was just trying to make me feel better. I was pretty much something that was broken and needed to be fixed and she was a fixer.
“So you’re not coming with me, then?” she asked.
“I didn’t say that.”
“So you are, then?” Eli was starting to look pissed off. I decided I better stop.
“After school today, right?”
“Yes, and we can take the bus.”
“It would be better if I drove us in my Camaro.”
“Joel, you don’t have a Camaro. Or a driver’s license.”
“I might soon.”
“But not by three fifteen today.”
“No. Not by three fifteen today.”
“So you’ll meet me by the buses?”
“I’ll meet you by the buses.”
“Just so you know, Benj is coming, too.”
“What? No. How come?”
“Because I asked him to.”
“That proves it, then.”
“Proves what?”
“That there is no God.”
“Joel!”
“If there was a God, there wouldn’t be forty-one point two million hungry people in America and Benj would not be coming with us to your church group.” I was going to add something else but ReThought and stopped myself.
“Joel, that’s not how it works. God does not work solely on your behalf.”
“That, Eli, is the crux of the whole problem with Him—or Her.”
When I said that, Eli went from annoyed and pissed off to slightly amused. And then she laughed. I wanted to kiss her right then, I really did.
Almost did, actually.
But then Alex B. Renner walked by and slapped me on the back and said, “Go for it, Higgins, what’s the worst that could happen?” And I turned bright red and just walked away.
Two hours later when I got to the front of the school where the buses lined up, Eli was waiting on the sidewalk with Benj. When I walked over he said, “Burning Man is in a hundred and thirty-three days,” and Eli said, “If we can make seven hundred sandwiches, seven hundred people won’t be hungry tonight.” Then Eli, who was now looking at her phone, said, “In the US, 35,092 people die in car crashes each year. That’s 96.14 a day,” and Benj said, “That’s 4.006 people dying every hour,” and I said, “How did you know that? And you can’t have .006 of a person.” Then Eli said, “We should all say a prayer for the 4.006 people who just died,” and I said, “No fucking way, I don’t believe in God.” Just without the “fucking” part and without the “no” part and without the “God” part, which basically means that I said, “That sounds like a lovely idea,” but then the bus we were supposed to take pulled up and none of us had time to pray because we had to get on fast if we wanted a seat.
Everyone at the church group except Eli basically sucked.
The leader was this skinny, weaselly, wimpy guy who had a runny nose and the pale blue, almost white, glow-in-the-dark eyes of an alien and he shook your hand too long if you were new to the group like he thought love and healing were flowing out of his fingertips, or if he held on to you long enough he could suck out any ungodly marrow or maybe transport you to the mother ship and harvest your organs. The way I figured it, he was probably not a priest or minister but more like a brother or a monk or maybe an extraterrestrial emissary sent by a higher power to foster the spiritual evolution of young earthlings. Either that or maybe he was a child molester who was hired to lead the church group and drive the van with the sandwiches into the city.
That basically sums up Ted.
And, in a nutshell, the kids in the group were all pretty much whiney, sniveling, ass-kissing do-gooders, too.
Okay, that’s not true at all. They were all nice.
Much nicer than me.
Even Ted, the church group leader and van driver who may have been a priest or minister or a monk but probably not an alien, child-molesting space brother was pretty nice.
They were all helping people because they believed in God and service and I pretty much thought the world sucked and I didn’t believe in anything good. I mean, come on, it’s pretty hard to have a positive attitude with so much bad shit going on around us. I
guess I just had a different perspective than they did, and sometimes I knew I was wrong, but mostly not, mainly because sometimes even when you’re doing and thinking something even if it’s wrong it can feel right to you at the time—and comfortable. But to me church group was just one of those weird, incomprehensible things in the universe like french fries without ketchup, meatless Mondays, and cold fusion.
On a positive note, there was no praying or church mumbo jumbo and luckily Benj was really good at making sandwiches. I mean, he got the whole peanut-butter-spreading thing right off the bat, which was good because I had been hoping Eli would continue to be my private peanut butter tutor for life. Then, just as I tempted her to come running over by fabricating a peanut butter emergency—by putting almost half a jar of Jif on a single piece of bread—she got distracted because some girl named Becky with red hair and freckles who was not from our school said that we shouldn’t be putting jelly on the sandwiches because jelly has too much sugar and sugar causes diabetes and heart disease and Eli said maybe jelly is nice when you are hungry and have no food and besides it tastes good and Becky said we’re killing people with these sandwiches and she went all middle school on us and started to cry and then Ted, the priest or minister or brother or monk or alien child molester with glow-in-the-dark irises and marrow-sucking tentacle hands, had to take Becky outside to calm her down.
So now I had to not only make sure that I spread the peanut butter thinly, but I also had to make sure to spread the jelly real thin because I didn’t want to kill anyone. Then Eli took out her phone and I said, “What are you doing?” as I basically scraped two pounds of peanut butter off of a single slice of bread and put it back in the jar myself because she was unavailable to assist me and she said, “Googling sugar in jelly,” and Benj said, “Oh no, here we go.” Then Eli said, “Becky’s right, there’s a ton of sugar in jelly. Three tablespoons of jelly has the same amount of sugar as a twelve-ounce soda, which is almost ten teaspoons.” And then she looked like she was going to cry. Then the whole church group got upset because no one knew what to do because basically we were giving diabetes and heart disease to the homeless people in New York City.
And that sucked.
Plus as one kid pointed out, God probably wouldn’t be happy with that, which sent everyone into a tailspin.
So we sat in a circle and sang “Kumbaya.”
Clearly God didn’t show up.
Not even for a minute.
The way I figured it, He—or She—was probably just too busy planning earthquakes and plagues and giving kids cancer to be worried about grape jelly and homeless people getting diabetes.
That pretty much summed up church group. I mean, it could not have gone any worse.
all these gay books?”
That’s what Benj Kutchner asked Mr. Morgan, our English teacher, the day after the jelly incident in the church basement, but not until after he followed proper protocol and raised his hand and got called on, on account of the Auto F policy.
Mr. Morgan asked, “What makes you say they’re gay books?” and Benj looked like he had just asked him why he wasn’t wearing pants and then everyone in the entire class began looking at Benj like he wasn’t wearing pants ’cause nobody would have made the gay book comment even though most of us were thinking about it because every single book we read this year had some gay people in it, so it seemed like it was the overarching theme for eleventh-grade English that nobody happened to bring up. Like Mr. Morgan had decided that we should hurry up and read all the gay books ever written but not mention it to us so it was like there was a big gay elephant in the classroom that nobody would bring up. And then Benj became all unglued ’cause he wasn’t expecting that response from Mr. Morgan and he said, “Um, I don’t know, but it seems that…”
Then Benj looked at the floor like he was really interested in the pattern of scratches where the desk chair had dug into the linoleum and said, “I mean, it’s just that in the last book we read there was the…” and his sentence just trailed off probably because he didn’t want to actually say what the “the” was. And then he said, “Well, and then in the book before that, there were the two girls who…”
He was digging a hole so fast and for some reason he wasn’t smart enough to stop.
A couple of guys in the back of the classroom made a noise probably because they were thinking about “the two girls who…” but then Benj kept digging himself deeper like he was oblivious to where he was headed, adding “…well, it’s just that I was wondering if, I mean, why we are reading books that…”
Holy shit. He was dying and Mr. Morgan just let him struggle along. You could hear a pin drop in the classroom but there were some kids making noise out in the hall, so Mr. Morgan walked over and closed the door. Then Kutchner began bumbling even more on account of the fact that he was probably now worried that the books we were reading weren’t even gay books in the first place or that nobody else noticed anything gay about them and he was probably just reading too much into things or maybe he read too fast and got it wrong and maybe he should go back and reread them and now he made things way worse for himself ’cause he was the new kid who nobody liked and now he would be known as the new kid who thinks regular books are gay books. And that’s the kind of thing that’s hard to recover from.
“Who else thinks we are reading gay books?”
A few hands started to go up slowly and then more followed. A lot more.
Which made me feel better about the other kids ’cause it was like throwing a lifeline to the new kid who basically everyone hated. I mean, they didn’t really hate him, it’s just that they didn’t really notice him either. And when they did he usually just said something off or weird or Kutchner-like and someone would roll their eyes and someone else would make a face and walk away and then it would be all awkward ’cause no one who was left wanted to be there and then someone else would do something stupid like kick a locker and someone else would laugh and then a girl would walk by and we would all pretty much forget about Benj and whatever stupid thing he said.
Then Mr. Morgan asked, “What makes something ‘a gay book’?” as he looked around the classroom and then called on Steven Watts, who always had his hand up even when he had no clue what the answer was.
“If there are gay characters?” he asked and a whole bunch of heads nodded in agreement.
“So by that formula, if there’s a female character in a book then it’s a ‘women’s book’? Or if there’s a Chinese character it’s a ‘Chinese book’? Or if there’s a heterosexual couple it’s a ‘straight book’?”
Everyone just looked confused.
“More than half of you had your hands up when I asked if you thought that these books we are reading are ‘gay books,’ yet every one of these books is really about something else, like self-identity or self-harm or romance or suicide or bullying or abuse.”
Nobody moved or talked.
“They’re not gay books, Mr. Kutchner. They’re just books.”
More silence. The kind that makes it uncomfortable to breathe.
“But perhaps a better question is, why do you think they are gay books?”
Eli put her hand up and Mr. Morgan called on her.
“Because we’ve read hundreds of books and very few, if any, of them have had gay characters in them. So maybe when we read about a gay character it jumps out at us as a gay book?”
“Great, Eli. So perhaps what Mr. Kutchner really meant to ask was, Why are we reading so many books with gay characters in them this year? Does anyone want to take a shot at answering that question?”
Mr. Morgan looked around the classroom and everyone had their eyes riveted on him but no hands went up.
“It’s really simple. It’s because we can.”
He looked around at us slowly. Almost one by one as if he was memorizing our faces but no one said anything probably because we were all just thinking about what he said and then I started wondering if Kutchner was gay or if Mr. Morgan
was gay or if the other kids thought I was gay and I was busy thinking about who was gay and who wasn’t until I heard Mr. Morgan say, “Anyone want to know why this is particularly important?”
Nobody put a hand up.
“The reason that it’s so important that you read these books is because you and I are lucky enough to live in a country—and a school district—where we can read books with gay themes and gay characters and that’s not true today in most of the world.”
Mr. Morgan turned around and started writing some names of countries on the blackboard:
Syria, Russia
Then he turned back to face the class and said, “Do you know what would happen in these countries if you got caught reading any of the books we’ve read this year?”
No one raised a hand this time either.
“You could be arrested and put to death.”
He picked up the book we were reading from his desk, “Just for reading this book.” He picked up the last book we had read. “Or this one.” Then another. “Or this one.”
Then Mr. Morgan turned around and started erasing the blackboard and Eli leaned over to me and said, “There are a lot more countries than that where you could get killed or put in prison for reading a book with a gay or lesbian or transgender or bigender or gender fluid or any sexually dissident character.” Then she started reading from her phone, whispering,
“Algeria
Angola
Botswana
Burundi…”
I whispered back, “Stand up and read them to the class.”
“I’ll get an Auto F.”
“So what?”
“…Cameroon
Comoros
Egypt
Eritrea…”
I called out, “Eli has something to say.”
Mr. Morgan turned around and didn’t yell at me or give me an Auto F for not raising my hand and Eli slowly stood up and she still had her phone out, which would qualify for an Auto F, too, and she started reading the list of countries where you could be arrested or get the death penalty for reading a book with a gay character.