Be More Chill
One boy’s exploration of what it takes to be “cool”, how to get a girl and what (not) to do when you’ve got one…What do you do if you’re not cool?If girls are just an impossible (wet) dream?Simple.Take a pill containing a supercomputer that travels to your brain and tells you how to be cool – all the time! In the voice of your choice!Then, it’s goodbye porn and geekdom, and hello hot chicks, parties and a whole new perspective on life.Meet Jeremy – the guy with a heart, who exchanges the **** in his hand for a squip in his head.
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Be More Chill
Ned Vizzini
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
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.
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.
