Be More Chill

To:

Naomi (very much the most important: hi, babe),

Samartha, Bridget, Kate, Carrie, Jessica, Samantha, Effy, Other Kate, That Girl I

Hung Out with in Prospect Park, That Spanish Girl from Karaoke, Karla, Sarah,

Claudia, Elyssa (Wilin’ Chick), Olga, Lai Sze, Nicole (Bracey), Katia, Vanessa,

Heavenly and Those Other Girls at New Year’s Eve 2001 (including Ursula), That

Girl from Nice Guy Eddie’s, Caroline, Alina Who Ended up with a

Guy Named Dogshit, Anna, Marnie, Other Caroline, Robyn and Chelsea.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

PART 1—PRE-SQUIP

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

PART 2—SQUIP

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

PART 3—POST-SQUIP

49

Praise for Ned Vizzini

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

The room is bright and alive at 8:45 a.m.—I can almost ignore Middle Borough High School’s zombie fluorescent lighting. Mr Gretch is up at his desk, a tall bald head with wisps of hair and a beard. He’s accompanied by a newspaper and a cactus; in about twenty seconds he’s going to take attendance. To my left is Jenna Rolan, the coolest girl in class.

Jenna is already talking: “She was like, ‘I’ll only do it if you beat me in pool!’ And then of course she intentionally lost in pool. What a slut!”

Jenna likes to talk about her friend Elizabeth, who is a “real” slut. In fact, when I think about it, Jenna never talks about her family, or TV, or when work is due, or the ins and outs of procuring concert tickets, like most girls. She just talks about how Elizabeth is a slut.

“You should’ve seen what she was wearing. It was like a garbage bag with a condom on top—”

“Bwer-her-her!” Anne laughs. Anne is the second-coolest girl in the class, which is math. She sits in front of me so she’s always twisting back in her chair to talk to Jenna, which reinforces the fact that Jenna is coolest and she is second-coolest. Girls are very territorial.

“Ka-yur-uhhhh.” Mr Gretch clears his throat from the front of the room. “Abbey.”

“Here.”

“Asu.”

“Here.”

“Atborough.”

“Here.”

“Azu, not-Asu.” Mr Gretch absent-mindedly cups the top of his cactus. This never seems to hurt him.

“Here.”

“Caniglia.”

Christine raises her hand. I look over at her. She looks beautiful. “Here.” I look down.

“Duvoknovich.”

“Here.”

“Goranski.”

“Here.”

“Heere?”

Oh yeah.

Here comes the fun part, the part that has been stressing me since they started taking attendance (in fifth grade). I can’t say “here” in response to my name. It confuses teachers. I raise my hand quietly and say: “Present.” Somebody snickers up by the front of the room. Are they snickering at me? Are they? Can never be too sure. I pull out one of my preprinted Humiliation Sheets, write the date up top and put a tally mark next to the Snicker category. I cover the page tightly so Jenna can’t see. Then I retune my ears to listen for copycat snickering.

2

The Humiliation Sheets have developed a lot over the years, with a host of different categories, but the current model has Snicker, Laugh, Snotty Comment, Refusal to Return a Head Nod (the standard form of greeting at Middle Borough High), Refusal to Return a Verbal Greeting, Refusal to Touch Hands, Public Denial of Formerly Agreed-upon Opinion, Refusal to Repeat a Joke and Mortification Event (a catch-all). I use the Humiliation Sheets to keep track of my social status in a concrete, quantitative way. They are my secret, totally; I make sure no one sees them as I fill them up with tally marks every day. I hate tally marks.

Up in front, Mr Gretch writes k on the board—k sucks in math; once you see it you might as well ignore everything and save yourself. Mr Gretch can’t hear on account of he’s…well, old, so Jenna keeps talking and I keep listening.

“OK and then Elizabeth was like, ‘Where can we go? I don’t have a car like you…And the guy says,”—Jenna puts on a low voice—“‘Come and sit on this pipe, babe.’ And she went! Unbelievable.”

Anne eats it up—“Bwer-her-her”—craning her neck to suck in every word. It’s far enough into the school year—mid-October—for kids to have stopped talking about summer. (The big story was that Jake Dillinger had sex with this model from Czechoslovakia who was dating his dad, which I believe. Jake can do anything.) Mostly people are talking about the parties of the past weekend or the PSATs, which are coming up. There’s also scattered chatter about the Halloween Dance.

“I hear Brianna has, like, five boys lined up? Because with football players, you don’t know if one of them is going to sprain his ankle and not be able to dance?” Anne uptalks.

Jenna gives back cold silence. “That happened to me in junior high. My then-boyfriend broke his leg and I had to dance with him while he was in crutches and a cast and it was so horrible.”

I tune my ears from Jenna/Anne to other pockets of activity in the room. Mark Jackson and this other kid—his name is actually Jackson Marks—discuss video games. Rob works out a math problem, probably something postcalculus, while picking at his mouth, ear and nose as if he has them on shuffle. Barbary explains how everyone has to call him “Dr Barbary” now because he ordered a PhD off the Internet. And Christine, quiet in her invisible pod up by the front of the room, just looks pretty.

“Ooh, I heard Christine Caniglia has a new stalker,” Jenna says.

Whoa!

“Jenna!” Anne whispers like she’s protecting something. “He’s right there!”

Double whoa. I sit quietly, stiff. Calm. Calm. My head is turned so they must not think I’m listening, but I’m always listening. I’m wired. I peek at Jenna. She eyes me as if I’m a mildly interesting object between her and the clock. I turn back.

“Yeah, that’s him,” she says to Anne. “I heard he wrote her a letter.”

I never wrote any letter! I never even said anything to Christine, not once, except, “Don’t press C7, the Nutri-Grain bars get stuck in this machine,” that one time out by the Student Union office where the Nutri-Grain bars get stuck in the machine, because I can’t talk to Christine. I just look at her and think about her a lot because she’s beautiful, you know? I mean she’s intelligent and sweet and everything else that a girl is supposed to be to offset her beauty, but even if she were idiotic and mean, she’d still be beautiful and I’d still be contorted.

“He is weird,” Jenna continues.

This is a bad day for me to start hearing this stuff. In my pocket is a Shakespeare made of chocolate, OK, like one of those Easter bunny chocolates but in the shape of Shakespeare, and I was going to give it to Christine today at our first play rehearsal. I clutch it.

Jenna whispers something I can’t quite catch. I slide my elbow across my Humiliation Sheet and put a tally mark under Mortification Event because I don’t have a specific category for people whispering about me. I should. Just then Mr Gretch does the stupid classic high school move and I can’t believe it’s being done to me: “And Jeremy, can you tell us what that angle would be?”

My notebook isn’t open. It’s being used as a Humiliation Sheet shield. My neurons aren’t depolarising. (I learned that in bio.)

Mortification Event number two.

3

At lunch I seek out my best friend Michael Mell. Michael sits in a different place in the cafeteria every day—sometimes the indoor part with the long formica tables, sometimes the outdoor part with the scarred picnic benches and giant bees—but you can always spot him because he’s a tall white boy with a white-boy Afro and huge headphones. They have a cord coming off them that’s spiralled like an old phone cord. The headphones let him plunk down anywhere, with the jocks or Warhammer nerds or at one of the girl tables (although Michael only sits with Asian girls). No one bothers him when he has them on because he’s obviously got important things on his mind.

“What’s up?” I say as I approach. Michael doesn’t listen to a thing in those headphones during lunch. He just likes how they feel on his head.

“Mmmmgph,” he says, wolfing down a fish patty sandwich with cheese and chocolate milk. “‘Sup?”

“Big problems,” I say.

I pull the chocolate Shakespeare out of my pocket (it’s wrapped in Victorian era style foil), plop it on the table and prop my elbows up to either side of it. “I don’t think I can give this to Christine.”

“Mmmmrrrr, yuh.”

“Michael.”

“Yuh.”

“You want to finish that?”

Michael smiles and lets chewed fish-cheese roll through the gap in his teeth. It plats on to the tray in front of him.

“Crackhead,” I laugh. “People are going to see you.”

“Uh-nuh,” Michael says; his Adam’s apple bobs up and down as his food slides away. “Yeah, so, ah,” he drinks milk, wipes his mouth on the back of his wrist. “What’s with Christine? You pussying out?”

“Yeah, well.” I haven’t touched my food. “It’s bad.”

“What’s bad? I totally know how it is. Did you say something dumb to her?”

“Well, no, but people think I did. Which is basically the same thing.”

“No,” Michael says, working on an orange cream icecream bar now. “You doing something and people thinking that you did it are actually really different.”

“Well, people think I gave her a letter.”

Michael’s body rocks. He grins: “‘I’ve got your letter! / You’ve got my song—’” I punch him in the shoulder. “Ow!”

“No Weezer, OK?”

“I’ll try. Michael folds his hands. “So who thinks you wrote Christine a letter?”

“Jenna Rolan. She also said I was her ‘new stalker’.”

“You’re such a girl.” Michael gets up and slides his tray into a nearby garbage can. “So what? Does Christine care? That’s who’s important, right?”

“Yeah, she’s who’s important, but she’s not the only thing that matters in this whole…situation,” I say, making circles with my hands to emphasise “situation”. “It’s like, do I still give this to her or not? Will it seem too stalkerish?”

“Jeremy.” Michael fixes buttons on his shirt. “That chocolate Shakespeare is genius. She’s gonna love chocolate, because everybody does, except for those weird people who only like chips”—Michael glances one table away at a redheaded girl eating chips—“and she’s in a Shakespeare play with you, so obviously she’s gonna like Shakespeare.”

“But what if she thinks I’m an obsessed loser?” I start in on the bean salad in my tray. It came cold but feels colder.

“Dude,” Michael says, “think of how you’ll feel if you don’t give it to her. Think of how you’ll feel at home tonight, jerking off, having missed your chance.”

“Oh yeah. Well, duh, I’ll feel like…” Like I do all the time, like I feel whenever I can’t dial a phone number or dance at a dance or hold a hand right. Like I’m used to feeling. “Like shit.”

“Right, so give it to her—”

“Yo, tall-ass, could you maybe sit or move from the garbage can?” Rich says to Michael. Rich has come on the scene; that’s what he does best. He’s shorter than us but very built. He has blond hair with a streak of red in the back, like a rooster. Michael moves aside and Rich dumps his whole tray, including the actual tray, into the trash. He eyes us.

“What? Punks.”

4

At the end of the day I walk Middle Borough’s elongated and well-painted hall—my school has one giant hallway that you enter in the middle of, so it looks like the Great Wall of Metuchen, NJ. At one end you get the echoes of the swim team; at the other you get the sound of the theatre door opening and closing as people file in for the first play rehearsal, where I’m going.

So far, in high school (I too have an extensive middle school career), I’ve been in The Tempest and You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown to rave reviews, both times, from my mom. I like everything about school plays—being at school after school, learning my lines in the bathroom, how the performance always seems totally screwed up a week before it goes on but then comes together at the last minute, how the second show always manages to be better than the first, how everyone takes their bow at the end and the parents are standing, showing off their digital camcorders and your costume is hot but you figure, OK, that’s the price of my art and then…Bam! Cast party! I love cast parties. I’ve never been to one, actually, truthfully, but I’m sure they’re great.

“Hey, you’re in this play?” I ask Mark Jackson from math as I sit down next to him. Mark’s my friend, sort of.

“Yeah, I’m in this dilly deal,” he says. He’s playing Game Boy SP. “What’s it called again?”

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” I say. “You don’t even know the name of your own play?” Only I don’t say that.

“Midsummer Night’s Drizz-eem. Gotcha.”

I sit down two places from him in a seat that looks like it was stained with condom residue—not that I would know, except for that one time in my room when I was messing around with one to see what it would look like in the mirror—

“Hot. Hot to death,” Mark says.

“What?”

“I’m talking to the game, yo. Mind your beeswax.”

I look over at Mark’s game, or, uh, “beeswax”, as the case might be. It looks he’s driving an SUV on underground train tracks shooting a high-powered rifle at homeless people.

“No peeking, dorkus malorkus,” Mark says, snatching his Game Boy away, imperilling his driving and shooting. “I’m the only one in the school with KAP Three; you gotta pay me five bucks to look at it.”

“What’s KAP Three?”

“Kill All People. Three.”

“Uh…”

“You never heard of Kill All People? What’s wrong with you?” Mark eyes me. I sit silent, keeping my head and mouth steady, staring ahead. After a few seconds, Mark slides down a seat like I have herpes (or lupus, right? Lupus); then I move down a row.

“Fuck, Jeremy, you don’t have to be such a bitch,” he remarks as I take my seat. Just then Christine, uncharacteristically late for something, walks down the aisle past us. She rolls her eyes at Mark and while she’s doing it, it is possible that they land on my person for a millisecond or two. Wow. When’s the teacher getting here?

“Aaaaaaaaaaaa!” Mr Reyes shrieks from the entrance to the theatre. “Mwaaaaaaaa! Greetings all! I’m not sure you realise it, but I have a very powerful falsetto voice! Baaaaaaaaaaa!”

“Damn, this dude is fruitaliciously homorific,” Mark says behind me. Little digital homeless people groan as they die on his Game Boy SP.

“It is wonderful to see you here!” Mr Reyes gets on stage behind a mic, which he does not need. “I am glad to have such a captive audience for my voice. Laaaaaaaaa! I am also very glad to have such a wonderful cast; we are going to have a great time in the play.” Mr Reyes is tall and skinny with no facial hair; he wears a suit and tie. He teaches English for his day job.

“So let’s see who’s here, and I will give you all your parts. Jeremy Heere!”

“Yes,” I get up.

“There’s no need to stand. You simply must know that you have gotten the role of Lysander. This is a very demanding role that will take much of your time.”

“Thank you, Mr Reyes.”

“Jake?”

Jake Dillinger is in this play too? Guess it isn’t enough to be on the football team and nail a Czechoslovakian model and be a leader in the SU. Down in front, he shifts in his seat slightly to acknowledge Mr Reyes.

“You are going to be Demetrius, another tough role. Get ready to memorise muchly.”

“Cool,” Jake says.

“Puck? Where is my Puck? Christine Caniglia?”

Christine is now down in front, near Jake; all I see is her blonde hair.

“You’re kidding!” she squirts. “I’m Puck?”

“You, young lady, are Puck.”

“Yes!” Christine jumps out of her seat pumping her fist. Everyone eyes her with respect and swelled-up cutesy pride, or maybe that’s just me; when girls get happy and jump out of their seats, like on The Price Is Right, it’s sweet to watch.

“Don’t get too excited, Christine; it’s a disgusting number of lines. Maaaaaaah!” Mr Reyes moves on through Hermia, Helena, Titania, Bottom and about a dozen other people. Mark, behind me with his Game Boy, gets to be some kind of cross-dressing elf. That’s comforting.

“OK, those are the roles; now we must have the read-through. Ladies, fetch two metal chairs each and bring them on stage.”

“Wuh?” The girls down in front look confused. (It’s funny how they look confused from behind, with their shoulders bunched up.) Christine is the only one I hear: “How come we have to get the chairs?”

“Come come, it’s a trade-off each time,” Mr Reyes says. “The men will be on chair-fetching tomorrow. Speaking of which, men! Pick a representative to go to the Teachers’ Lounge and have them microwave my Hot Pocket!”

“For the whole play?” I ask. I don’t want to get stuck with that job.

“No, Jeremy, just for today. Next time the girls will pick someone to go.”

“I don’t understand,” Mark says behind me, actually pausing KAP Three. “Could you explain that again, please?”

“Hugggggh,” Mr Reyes says. “On day one the girls will set up the chairs and the guys will pick a representative to get my Hot Pocket; on day two the guys will set up the chairs and the girls will pick a representative to get my Hot Pocket; then it repeats…does anyone have a question about this?”

Yes, of course: someone up front has one, and another, and another. When we finally get it all sorted out, this kid Jonah with a lisp fetches the Hot Pocket as the girls lug furniture and then Mr Reyes brings us all on stage, where we sit in a circle of chairs (the girls made it a bit small) as if it were time for Duck-Duck-Goose, but really it’s a read-through of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and really I’m not a little kid; I’m in high school. I have to remember that.

5

I grab the seat next to Christine’s in the circle.

“So, uh, congratulations,” I say quietly, speaking to the air in front of me and hoping she’ll notice, “on Puck.”

“What is this crap?” she turns, fierce. Christine has brown eyes with her blonde hair. Up close she looks like all the cutest movie starlets, all those ones that haven’t really been in any movies but you see them in Stuff magazine or wherever, all combined in Photoshop, except someone checked the “constrain proportions” box so nothing got distorted. “I can’t believe he’s making us fetch him chairs—isn’t that illegal?”

“Uh, I don’t think so, actually, but it’s very bad—”

“Oh yeah, whatever. We don’t have any rights under the constitution about discrimination?”

“We don’t have any rights under the constitution at all, because we’re students—”

“That is such crap!”

“Yeah…” I drum the head of Shakespeare in my pocket. “I’m Jeremy, by the way.” I reach out to shake her hand, then pull back—I don’t want people seeing.

“I know who you are,” Christine says. “You’re in my math, right?”

“Oh yeah.” I pretend I wasn’t aware of that fact. “But you know, you can be in a class with someone for a long time and never really—”

“Lysander!” Mr Reyes snaps. “Speak!”

“Uh…” I’m Lysander, right?

“I’m Lysander, right?”

Mr Reyes: “Yes.”

“Yes. OK, um…‘You have her father’s love, Demetrius, Let me have Hermia’s: do you marry him.’”

Mr Reyes: “Thank you, Jeremy.” He sucks in his lips in the angry/disappointed adult way. “Really excellent.”

Me: “Uh, ‘I am, my Lord, as well derived as he, as well possessed—’”

Christine: “I hate him. His English classes are awful. He can’t teach—”

Me: “‘And, which is more than all these boasts can be, I am beloved of beauteous—’”

Christine: “I’m seriously thinking about writing a letter about him to the Metuchen Home News/Tribune—”

I can’t tell if Christine likes me or she just hates Mr Reyes, but one way or another she’s talking, and you can’t beat that. I keep going, and every time I come to a sweet line in the read-through (and you know Shakespeare—the sweet lines are really sweet), I direct it at her, tilting my head so my sound waves ruffle some molecules on her cheek and she reacts in some imperceptible way that I might be imagining.

See, when I’m talking to girls, I develop an out-of-body consciousness, or unconsciousness. Everything means so much more. My posture, which is hopeless, gets a temporary lift as I arch my back. I can feel all my organs stacked in place and eyeball with pinpoint accuracy how far Christine’s leg is from mine, and when they touch just for a second I wonder if it’s her doing or my doing or chance. How can she not notice if our legs touch? How can she not notice my extremely unslick peripheral vision? How can she not notice my white socks, showing between my pants and shoes? (I have to fix that.)

“Lysander!” Mr Reyes snaps again halfway through some scene with fairies. I scramble with the script. Christine smiles, which doesn’t help me, and I try to smile back even though she might not be smiling at me, or she might be smiling at me in the wrong way, the eunuch way.

This is good. This is a step.

6

“‘Give me your hands, if we be friends, And Robin shall restore amends’,” Christine reads. The end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is empty without applause. It’s 5:30 and I’m sweaty in bad places.

“Reagggggh…” The cast collectively stretches, inching our chairs back. Some people have left during the reading but there’s still a dozen of us in the circle, including a napping Mr Reyes.