Be More Chill

by Ned Vizzini

  “Mmm,” Chloe mmms from my lap. I keep going. I’m on a dirty-talking roll, like the kind I get into on Internet chat. The words flow: “And then I’m gonna b_ _ _ on your _ _ _ _ and _ _ _ _ your shoulders and _ _ _ your knee, right? And then I’m gonna _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ your tail—”

  “Jeremy! I don’t have a tail!” Chloe laughs.

  “Yeah, but I really wish you did, right? Like I would paste a tail right on you. Like a little monkey tail. I had dreams about you and in them, you always had a tail, you know?”

  “Jeremy.” Chloe gets up, pushes me down on the mattress. “You’re so weird.” She’s perched over me now, hands to either side of my shoulders and knees to either side of my waist.

  “Are you ‘straddling’ me?” I ask, wide-eyed. “Is this called ‘straddling?’”

  Sweat rolls into my eye. Chloe’s impossible gorgeous elfin face shudders. “Have you ever rolled before?”

  I shake my head extravagantly. “I’ve never done anything before,” I say. “My sq—, uh, my special friend won’t let me.” Phew.

  “You are weird…my little rolling virgin,” Chloe says, coming in to kiss more. She lets me take off her shirt, but her bra, which I couldn’t handle in a normal mind state, is out of the question. (It seems to have holes in it too—how did she put holes in the bra?) She rears up, unleashes it herself, and I aim right for them (they’re so beautiful, bigger than Brooke’s) in a state of deathless shock—

  “Wait, Jeremy, let me show you something,” Chloe says, and she’s about to show me this something, whatever it is (it must be amazing), when there’s a horrible crash as the tiny window above the washing machine shatters and a huge fist emerges, bloody.

  “Chloe!”

  “Omigod!” Chloe grabs her shirt, which she knew was at the foot of the mattress, and clutches it over her breasts.

  “You _ _ _k_ _ _ slut!” the fist says, and I see that it’s not bloody; it’s tattooed in this weird way that makes it look like ink is spilling out between each knuckle. “You whore!”

  Now an eye appears at the window, like a whale eye, except I realize that it’s not a whale, that some belligerent person has punched through from outside and that we’re below ground level and he’s up on the lawn. And as I’m putting this together, not really acknowledging my own role in the situation, the eye moves in the window and is replaced by a mouth, and the mouth says: “Jeremy Heere. I am going to knock your teeth down your throat.”

  “Watch out, Jeremy; it’s my boyfriend!” Chloe yells, dressing as quickly as she undressed. She unlatches the door and is suddenly gone, blowing me a kiss like this is a French movie and I’m the unlikely hero. I’m alone in the laundry room. The eye and the mouth are gone. Where is he? Who is he? I grab my magic water and drink it all. Oh God, the whole room is shaking…undulating…vacillating. It’s so hot. Who is Chloe’s boyfriend? I have to have kept track of him from earlier in the year. It’s some jock guy. I thought they broke up. His name is…

  The squip! How could I forget? Startup.

  TU ESTÁS EN UN SITUACIÓN MUY PELIGROSO.

  What the—?

  TU ESTÁS EN EL PELIGRO GRAVE, JEREMY. ¡SALGA DEL CUARTO!

  Spanish?

  SÍ, ESPAÑOL, ESTÚPIDO. ÉSTE ES QUÉ SUCEDE CUANDO INTENTO COMUNICARME MIENTRAS QUE USTED ESTÁ EN ECSTASY.

  But I suck at Spanish! All I know are the colors—

  ¡ROJO!

  Red!

  ¡ALARMA ROJA!

  Something red?

  ¡ALARMA ROJA, JEREMY! ¡ALARMA ROJA!

  Red alarm?

  ¡ALARMA ROJA!

  Red alert! Right, this guy’s coming to beat my ass. I gotta get out of here. I drop everything, which is nothing, and run from the laundry room.

  “Yo,” the jock says. He’s in the hall, at the bottom of the stairs. I don’t remember coming down any stairs to get in here, but I do remember this guy’s name finally; it’s one of the toughest names in school to forget: Brock.

  “I’m gonna _ u_ _ _ _ _ kill you,” Brock says.

  ¡PATO Y JAB, JEREMY! ¡GOLPÉELO CON EL PIE EN LAS BOLAS!

  Shutdown. Jesus, I don’t have time for this.

  Brock runs toward me with alarming speed for someone so big. Like those what’s-their-faces, crocodiles. But I’m better evolved than a crocodile. I turn and sprint down the hall. There’s a door up ahead, but it looks like a tricky double door, like one wood door that opens toward me and behind that, a screen door that opens away, and behind that, concrete stairs leading up to the lawn. As long as I can get myself out those doors and into the cold air, I’ll be okay. At least I won’t be so hot. I don’t want to get beat up when it’s so hot.

  “Ugggghh,” Brock says as he reaches for me while I duck, shoot my hand up, twist the doorknob and pull it toward me. “Ngaaa!” Brock hits his face on the side of the door! Awesome! Just like I planned! I’m crouched between the door and the wall, like we were playing hide-and-go-seek and this was the only spot available at the last second. Brock is stumbling around, dazed, holding his nose.

  I kick open the screen door and run into the night air, vaulting up the concrete stairs three at a time to the lawn. Brock has recovered and is after me. Out on the grass, kids are setting off lame fire-related works and making out. I almost step on Ryu’s head as I screech through the human traffic and back around to the front of the house, the start of the party. What’s-his-name, Carl, the door guard, starts to say something at me, but I hold out my arm and clip him as I run headlong into his place. F_ _ _ everybody! Ecstasy is not a loving drug!

  Where is Brock, huh? Was it that easy? I slink carefully through the partygoers and their limbs, sure I’ve lost him. I’m too fast. I’m too good and I’m too cool and you can’t stop me. Never. I’m Jeremy Heere. But just to be safe I decide to get to the second floor and hide in whatever bedroom I can find. So I wind up the stairs, make a big left turn at the top and jiggle the first doorknob I come across. I push it open hard.

  It’s not a bedroom; it’s a bathroom. The door was jammed shut with a female shoe, but that wasn’t enough. I stomp inside and Stephanie the Hot Girl is there, black hair making quite a contrast with the toilet, retching in the bowl.

  “What the _ _ _ _?” Stephanie screeches at me, whirling around with stringy spit on her chin. “What are you doing here? Who are you?! Get out!”

  “I’m in trouble, right? I have to hide,” I explain quickly, putting my finger to my lips. I take one long look at her: she’s drunk and teary-eyed and streaked with barf, but she’s still one of the top three girls in school. She turns back to the toilet; I crawl under the bathroom sink and stuff myself next to the cold, curved pipe, which sweats clean-smelling water droplets. I shut the cabinet door with a clawed finger. I hear the bathroom door open.

  “What the _ _ _ _?” Stephanie repeats.

  “Wuh?” Brock’s voice answers. “Oh, sorry, I’m just looking for somebody—”

  “Well, I’m just drunk, okay? Would you leave?!”

  The door closes. After a minute or so in the black under the sink (I stay very quiet) an irregular drip starts to drive me crazy. Not that it’s dripping on me; I can just hear it and it’s really gross, human-sounding. After a while I realize it’s Stephanie letting excess, watery, pre-vomity spit trickle out of her mouth and into the toilet.

  “Tough night, huh?” I put the words together with effort, making them loud enough for her to hear.

  “Yeah.”

  “That kid who came in, he wants to kill me. So thanks for helping out.”

  “I don’t know if I meant to help out,” Stephanie giggles (of all things). “I mean, I just totally forgot you were under there—bwaaaaark!”

  “Jeez, are you okay?”

  “Never.”

  “That’s, um, too bad.” I hear her get up; she takes three steps across the bathroom floor and sends a soft rush of water down the pipe at me as she washes her hands. Her palms squeak against each other. “I’m rolling,” I ventu
re from my inferior, interior position.

  “Really?” Stephanie opens the cabinet door, her pretty white face blocking the light. “Do you have more?”

  “Nope,” I shake my head.

  “Well, screw you, then.” She closes the door, a grin in her voice. “You’re no use.”

  “Heh, yeah. Never. Not to anybody.” I’m back in darkness. “Do you have gum?”

  “Sure.” The cabinet door opens a crack, hesitantly, as if Stephanie were using her foot. A stick of gum is ushered in at me. I take it with my teeth.

  “Thanks,” I say, chewing in the dark. “I figured since you were throwing up you’d have gum.”

  “I wasn’t throwing up.”

  “What were you doing, then? Clearing your sinuses?” I chew.

  “I was having dry heaves,” Stephanie explains. “I threw up before.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I cut myself,” Stephanie says. “I cut myself and the guilt makes me throw up.”

  “That’s too bad,” I say. “Can you open this door and let me hold your leg?”

  “What?”

  “Just your leg. Anything warm. Anything but this pipe.”

  With a sigh, the cabinet door opens. Bathroom light makes me keep my head low as I crawl out from under the sink and grip Stephanie’s left leg. Then I look up at her. She looks interested in me only as an anthropological specimen. She wears a black Goth semidress that’s less like human clothing and more like one of those choker vines that destroys its host tree and leaves its dead shell clinging to thin air. Her neck is encircled by a collar with chrome studs.

  “You’re that guy Chloe likes!” she says above me, a stud sticking out parallel to her nose, her breasts giant mountains. “Jeremy!”

  “Yes,” I squeeze.

  “Wow, you’re rolling hard.” Stephanie bends down and cups my chin. “Chloe was right; you’re not that cute. You’re supposed to be really cool, though.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. You’re supposed to be, like, you kinda keep to yourself and don’t say much, but you’re really good at something, or something.”

  “I’m good at everything!” I smile. I let go of the leg, stand up, pull my shirt to my chin and show off my pecs. “I have a toned body. See?”

  “What are those?” Stephanie points at the tops of my fake sartorius muscles.

  “Uh, birthmarks.”

  “Er, excuse me?” says someone outside the bathroom.

  “Shhh,” Stephanie and I both shhh. “I have a cute butt!” I say, bending over the sink to show her. “I know about TV. I like the same things that you like! I have no dandruff—”

  “You’re really funny,” Stephanie smiles, putting her hand on my back. “Do you want to see my extra-gorgeous new tattoo?”

  “Sure.”

  She slowly pulls up the bottom of her dress, revealing the leg that I held a second ago. “See, it’s not a tattoo in the modern sense,” she explains. “The Polynesians used tattoo in very basic, geometric-type patterns. Like lines and stuff?”

  Now her skirt is up to her knee. She twists; I see the scabbed-over cut marks that divide her calf into very precise half-centimeters. They stretch like railroad tracks all the way from her ankle up to where her rumpled dress ends—I bet they go up farther than that. They’re neat, razorlike, laserlike, potent, shallow, and thin.

  “Ugg…”

  “Aren’t they pretty? That’s why I do them. They’re so pretty; they’re like the only beauty in my world.” She knocks her knees together as if she’s a little girl incredibly pleased with herself.

  “Oh man,” I say, backing away. I choke out one word, and it’s not the word I mean to say: “—weird.”

  “I know,” Stephanie says, opening her eyes wide. “I’m tragically weird.” She swishes out of the bathroom. “Bye, Jeremy!” She leaves me by the sink, holding on to nothing. Two drunk kids pile in after her and do a double-decker vomit attack on the toilet. They don’t notice me.

  “Michael!”

  I stumble down the hall on the second floor, sucking in my frame to squeeze by people leaning against walls, making out with each other and holding each other’s hair. This really sucks. I want to lie down somewhere and hold a pillow or a body or something, but there are no pillows and no bodies and no beds and no rooms and no friends! All my friends are downstairs; up here it’s a lot of loser kids who didn’t want to be friends with me before the squip and who I don’t need now. It’s mostly the losers who are hooking up. Or playing video games.

  “Michael!”

  Who else am I supposed to ask for? Christine would be good to see but she’s probably not alone in some room anymore—she’s probably been snapped up by Jake Dillinger.

  “Yo, Jeremy!”

  Brock! No, wait, it’s Rich, calling from the stairs. I walk a few paces back and look down at him. He’s halfway between the first and second floor, his sweaty blond hair in his eyes. The red streak has come around to the front.

  “What?”

  “You _ _ _ _ _d up or something?” he asks. Loud.

  “Well, kind of—”

  “Then come downstairs! You gotta see this!” Rich doesn’t bother going up the rest of the way; he just turns and bumps down, banking from banister to banister. I follow more slowly. At the bottom of the steps, in the main living room, Rich makes a right turn. We skirt the couches and go down a green hall. At the end of the hall is a door. The door could be open or it could be closed; I can’t tell because it’s teeming with teenage male life. Guys are crammed around it so tightly that some of them have piled on top of each other, in a sort of cheerleading pyramid, to see inside. (So the door must be open.) The guys are murmuring to one another, concentrating. They’re surprisingly quiet.

  “It’s the only way,” Rich says. “You gotta see this. Duck down.” He crawls on his belly toward the door and I follow, shimmying up to the bottom of the pyramid. I can just barely peek through someone’s calves into the room. There’s thick carpeting. A pair of sneakers stand by what looks like a bed.

  “What is it?”

  “Man, c’mon, are you stupid or what? Jake Dillinger has Katrina in there and we’re watching.”

  “Oh, wow—Jake?” I mumble. “Those are Jake’s feet?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow.” I stare at the cool feet. “Hey, where does that leave Christine?”

  “Shut up and watch!”

  Jake’s feet aren’t moving much and Katrina’s feet aren’t visible at all—they must be spread out and up. If I look up to try and see more, all I get is a little bit of the ceiling and the crotches, shrouded in pants, of the boys above me. I do hear lots, though: mostly Jake grunting, which sounds like the grunting he does with his football buddies, and little whimpery noises from Katrina, like the ones Brooke made when I kissed her, the ones that mean “keep going,” and then the occasionally responsive “Whoa” from Jake. There’s also the constant murmur of the boys, making sure that everybody shuts up so Katrina doesn’t hear them and they can all make their witty comments. And there’s the underpinning bass rumble of rap.

  It’s sad that I get turned on by this. It’s very similar to the sex I enjoy on my own—voyeur sex, cybersex, looking at movies and pictures, seeing other people and wondering what it would be like if they were me. I feel that glow in my crotch and I smile and I’m ashamed.

  “This sucks,” Rich says next to me, like a snake. “You could see everything before. I guess we’re going to have to depend on Carlton.”

  “Carlton Hafer-Mules?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dyed-his-neck-hair-Carlton? Is he up there?” I nod at the guys above me.

  “Yeah.” Rich seems to think that’s the most obvious thing in the world. “He has a great digital camera. He puts up pictures of the Hot Girls all the time. Lots of Stephanie and Chloe, but mostly Katrina.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Course not. Try KatrinaStephanieChloe.com.”

&nbs
p; “Jeez…You know I saw Stephanie and Chloe earlier tonight?”

  “Yeah, man! I heard you went to the basement with Chloe! What happened?”

  “Nothing. Nothing good.”

  “Jeremy, what’s wrong with you? Even with a squip you can’t get laid? What—”

  “Oh, man…” Jake mumbles from his room of sex. Then, unbelievably, there’s some kind of farting noise. The whole libido pyramid above me shudders with laughter.

  “Whoa!”

  “I didn’t even know that could happen.…”

  “Get it on tape! Did someone get it on tape?”

  “Guys, don’t let me fall!”

  My whole leg goes dead as someone teeters off the mountain and lands on my calf.

  “Aggh,” I hear a moan behind me. “My spine…”

  I wriggle backward and turn over. My leg hurts like it got pegged with a girder, but the other guy landed on his back; you can really mess yourself up landing on your back. “Are you all right?” I ask. He’s rolled off me and is sitting by the wall.

  “Yeah, of course,” he shrugs. It’s Eric, the guy with the one eyebrow.

  “Eric.”

  “Yeah, hey, Jeremy, right? Thanks for breaking my fall. I heard you stopped doing those sheet things.” Eric scrambles back up the pile to watch more of Katrina and Jake. Screw him. Screw this.

  “Where are you going?” Rich asks from the floor as I limp down the hall to the living room. I say nothing. When I get to the room, one make-out couple has graciously moved from a couch to the floor so I have a place to hibernate. I get on the couch and remove the cushions and hold one of them to my chest and roll into the crook of the furniture and try to control myself as the world shimmers around me with a pleasure that’s so empty. Right? I think about Christine; she must be sad that the guy she’s dating is banging some other girl down the hall and getting photographed for a Web site.

  Stupid and alone and on drugs, I activate the squip.

  IDIOTA, IDIOTA, IDIOTA. TODO LO QUE USTED ES BUENO PARA ES SEXO DEL INTERNET.