Be More Chill (20 page)

“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.”

“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.

I
DIOTA
,
IDIOTA
,
IDIOTA
. T
ODO LO QUE USTED ES BUENO PARA ES SEXO DEL
I
NTERNET
.

All I’m good for is sex on the Internet. Shutdown.

“Jeremy, do you want some water?”

“Yes please,” I say, not knowing who I’m saying yes to, only that it’s a girl. And that I said please (like I’m supposed to). I turn around like a dolphin. My eyes
have been open on this couch, but I don’t know how long.

“Here,” the girl kneels in front of me. She hands me a cup. “People said you got bad E and you were freaking out.”

“Christine!” I say. I reach out to touch her hand. She doesn’t mind; she touches back. I sip water from her cup. “I don’t know if it was
bad
E,” I
mumble through wet lips. The water slides down my throat as if gravity just got doubled. “It
was
bad, though. I don’t know. I never did it before.”

Christine nods. “You don’t look like you’ve done much.”

“Yeah…at least it’s, uh, better now. The world stopped shaking.”
Hkkkk
, sputter; I drink more water. “You don’t look like you’ve been having
such a great time either.”

“No.” She shakes her head twice, very deliberately. Her eyes are red and streaked, but they’re still dense and brown and beautiful. Her hair is still shiny.

“Sorry,” I say, sitting up in one corner of the couch and scrunching my knees to my chest with the cup perched on top of them. The cup has Cupid on it. Maybe if I sit in one corner
she’ll sit in the other corner. “I’m sorry about Jake.”

“Oh,” she waves her hand, squatting on the floor. “That was like, way over. That was over two
days
ago. He can do whatever he wants with skanky girls in rooms while boys
watch. _ _ _ k _ _ _  a_ _ _ _ _ e.”

I’m tired of Christine not being next to me, so I pat the couch to my left. She sits down. “He totally just started acting really weird a week ago. Like, he had layers to him. On the
outside he seemed like a very confident high-school magnate, you know? You know what a magnate is?”

“Yes. Like a business guy.” I look around the living room—it looks like winos have been fighting in here with baseball bats. There are liquor bottles strewn around and dents in
the walls and ash and cigarette burns.

“Right. And then under that he had this whole other layer of sensitive, misunderstood wannabe-writer-type stuff, you know?”

“Jake’s a writer?”

“He writes journals.”

“Okay.”

“But then the third layer was like his underlying evil
dick
layer.”

“Ah.”

“I mean, I couldn’t believe it—you remember my system of stages?”

“Of course.”

“Well, we went from Going Out to Him Just Being an Evil Dick really fast.”

“Heh,” I huff. “I thought you
came
with him tonight.”

“No. I came by myself.”

“Really? I went to the Halloween Dance by myself.”

“You were there?” She inches closer. “I had no idea!”

“Yeah, for like forty minutes.” How long ago was the Halloween Dance? A month? It seems like a month. A proper month of activity. I don’t believe those people who say that
“time goes so fast” and “your life is short.” I’m bored enough that I always have a realistic sense of the actual, agonizing pace of a month. When you’re in a
room with no TV and just the Internet and not much homework and no friends, a month is a
month
. And this last month feels like a month, so full of unbelievable—

“Jeremy? Still with us?”

Right. “Sorry. I saw you dancing,” I say.

“At the dance?”

“Yeah. You had that hat on, remember?”

“Oh, yeah….That’s a traditional Sardinian princess hat. My mom made it out of linen. She’s a historian.”

“Oh.” It’s a good thing Christine didn’t ask me what linen was, because I really don’t know.

“What about you?” she continues. “I didn’t see
you
dancing.”

“I didn’t.”

Christine sighs. “You never do. Right?”

I nod.

“You nerdy boys, all the same.” She kicks her heel against the couch and turns her head away, then back. “You’re always so proud of what you
can’t
do.”

“That’s not true!” I stand up. How did things turn out like this? Christine is here—and Jake isn’t! This rocks. “I’m not happy I can’t dance! I
just can’t! It’s like a birth deficit! I mean defect!”

“That’s not true,” Christine says. “If you stopped thinking about yourself and just thought very academically about moving lightly so the girl could follow, you’d
be fine.”

“So come dance!” I beckon to her. I steady myself in the middle of the living room, shake my groin, close my eyes, bite my lip, put my hands on my hips and gyrate. Oh yeah.

“I’m tired,” she dismisses. “Maybe some other time. There’s no music.”

“Blukhuhuhuhuhuh—”
Laughter from across the room. “Shot
down
!” It’s Rich, lounging on his own couch watching an infomercial set to mute,
curiously without a girl on his stomach. There’s a glass ashtray next to him on the floor with a cigarette in it. He looks up at me. “You two are
so-o-o
cute.”

“Shut up, Rich.” I turn to him. He throws the ashtray at me; I duck. The cigarette tumbles out and lies on the carpet while the ashtray hits a piano across the room, sounding middle
C. (I used to take piano.) We all laugh.

I sit back on the couch with Christine, closer to her now. I like this—this late-party laid-back atmosphere, minus the music and the public sex and the angry jocks and the Spanish voice in
my head. Somehow, like coming out of a tunnel, I’ve ended up with one person I really like and another—I look over at Rich—who I’ve kind of come to tolerate. Bombs have
dropped and I’m happy in craters. I’m tired, though. I have to get home. I’ve got to start up—

H
ERE
.

“You! Back in English!” I yell, getting up from the couch. Then I instantly sit back down as if nothing happened.

N
ICE ONE
.

“What was that?” Christine asks, her eyes bugged.

“Rookie
mistake
!” Rich laughs, slapping his hand against his face. “Aw, you talked to your
squip
! Rookie mistake!”

Y
EAH
. G
OOD JOB
. A
ND WE NEED TO TALK
.

“Shut up,” I hiss, sitting with my arms crossed, though I’m not sure who I’m talking to.

“What’s yersquip?” Christine asks, looking at me.

“That’s…my…imaginary…friend,” I explain.

“Huh, yeah,” Rich keeps laughing. “It’s what he calls his p-penis.”

“Would you shut up?” I throw a cushion at Rich.

“You have a name for your penis?” Christine asks. “Boys really
do
that?”

Y
EAH
. R
ICH
’
S IS NAMED
L
I
’
L
’ C
HEESE
H
EAD
.

“Yeah. Rich’s is named Li’l’ Cheese Head,” I say. Christine laughs and laughs and smiles, so I smile back at her. Rich throws his heavy shoe at me.

W
E STILL NEED TO TALK
.

“Uh, excuse me.” I shinny out of the living room, duck the other shoe. “Back in a minute.”

“Going to play with your imaginary friend?” Rich yells. Then: “Freak!”

But he says it with love.

I walk upstairs to the only bathroom I’m familiar with, the one where I saw Stephanie. I peek inside to make sure she hasn’t returned. I close the door behind me and look at myself
in the mirror. I do this at home; it’s the easiest way to talk to the squip. Screw what it says—telepathy is hard on the brain.

“Okay, what do you want?” I stare at the mirror.

W
HAT DO
I
WANT
? W
HAT DO
YOU
WANT
? W
HY DON
’
T YOU TELL ME
?
I’
M JUST GETTING BACK UP TO SPEED AFTER A RUDE DRUG INTERRUPTION
.

“Yeah, I caught that. You weren’t too functional back there.”

I
TOLD YOU TO TURN ME OFF
.

“Whatever. You have too many rules.”

S
O WHAT
DO
YOU WANT
, J
EREMY
? C
LEARLY, IT
’
S NOT TO GET LAID
. I
WORKED
INCREDIBLY HARD TO GET YOU IN THE POSITION YOU WERE IN TONIGHT
. I
UTILIZED QUANTUM TELEPORTATION TO MINE OTHER SQUIPS FOR INFORMATION
; I
DELVED DEEP
INTO MY OWN HUMAN MODELING ENGINES
; I
PLANNED DRIVING ROUTES, VERBAL ONE-LINERS, AND POINTS OF ATTACK ON THE FEMALE BODY
; I
SET YOU UP WITH A GIRL TO
BRING YOU HERE AND A FEW BACKUPS IN CASE YOU MADE MISTAKES
,
AND
I
MADE SURE THEY WERE ALL
,
HANDS DOWN
,
THE MOST GORGEOUS
FEMALES IN YOUR LIMITED UNIVERSE
. A
ND YOU THREW IT ALL AWAY
. S
O WHAT
? W
HAT DO YOU WANT
? A
RE YOU
REALLY GAY
?

“No. I didn’t throw it away. Bad things happened.”

Y
OU COULD HAVE GOTTEN WITH
S
TEPHANIE
. A
ND
C
HLOE
…
YOU
SHOULDN
’
T HAVE TAKEN HER DRUGS
. I
F
I
HAD BEEN ON
I
WOULD HAVE TOLD YOU TO STAY OUT OF THAT BASEMENT
.
P
ROBABILITY AMPLITUDES WERE UNSTABLE IN THAT BASEMENT
.