Carrie Pilby
Teen Genius (and Hermit) Carrre Pilby’s To-Do List:1. List 10 things you love (and DO THEM! ) 2. Join a club (and TALK TO PEOPLE! ) 3. Go on a date (with someone you actually LIKE! ) 4. Tell someone you care (your therapist DOESN’T COUNT! ) 5. Celebrate New Year’s (with OTHER PEOPLE! )Seriously? Carrie would rather stay in bed than deal with the immoral, sex-obsessed hypocrites who seem to overrun her hometown, New York City. She’s sick of trying to be like everybody else. She isn’t! But when her own therapist gives her a five-point plan to change her social-outcast status, Carrie takes a hard look at herself—and agrees to try.Suddenly the world doesn’t seem so bad. But is prodigy Carrie really going to dumb things down just to fit in? How far should a teen genius go to fit in?
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My plan to fulfill #3 on my To-Do list, Go on a Date:
PRODIGY SEEKS GENIUS—SWF, 19, very smart, seeks nonsmoking, nondrugdoing very very smart SM 18-25 to talk about philosophy and life. No hypocrites, religious freaks, macho men or psychos.
I can’t wait to see the responses I get.
Praise for Carrie Pilby
“Smart, fresh and totally hilarious—you’ll be rooting for Carrie from start to finish.”
—Lauren Barnholdt, author of Two-Way Street
“If you’re looking for a comic commentary on school, parents, growing up and everything else, read this book.”
—Buffalo News
“[Carrie] is utterly charming and unique, and readers will eagerly turn the pages to find out how her search for happiness unfolds.”
—Booklist
“Woody Allen–hilarious, compulsively readable and unpretentiously smart.”
—Philadelphia Weekly
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Grocery stores always give me a bag when I don’t need one, when I’ve bought just a pack of gum or a banana or some potato chips that are in a bag already, and then I feel guilty about their wasting the plastic, but the bag is on before I’ve noticed them reaching for it so I don’t say anything. But in the video store, on the other hand, they always ask if I want a bag, and even though, theoretically, I should be able to carry my DVD without a bag, and the bag is another waste of plastic, I always need a bag at the video store because, for reasons that will soon be understood, I believe all DVDs should be sheathed.
The camouflage doesn’t work today. I’m only half a block out of the store when I see Ronald, the rice-haired Milquetoast who works at the coffee shop around the corner, approaching. “Hey, Carrie,” he says, looking down at my DVD. “What’d you get?”
Uh-oh. I have to give this speech again.
“I can’t tell you,” I say, “and there’s a reason I can’t. Someday, I might want to rent something embarrassing, and I don’t necessarily mean porn. It could be a movie that’s considered too childish for my age or something violent or maybe Nazi propaganda—for research purposes, of course—and even though the movie I have in my hand is considered a classic, and nothing to be ashamed of, if I show it to you this time but next time I can’t, then you’ll know for sure that I’m hiding something next time. But if I never tell you what I’ve rented, it puts enough doubt in your mind that I’m hiding something, so I can feel free to rent porn or cartoons or fascist propaganda or whatever I want without fear of having to reveal what I’ve rented. The same goes for what I’m reading. I want to be able to pick a mindless novel, as well as Dostoyevsky. And I also want to be able to choose something no one’s heard of. Most of the time, people say, ‘What are you reading?’ and if I tell them the name of the book and it’s not Moby Dick, they’ve never heard of it so I have to give an explanation, and if the book’s any good it’s not something I can explain in two seconds, so I’m stuck giving a twenty-five-page dissertation and by the time I’m done I have no time to finish reading. So books I read and movies I rent are off-limits for discussion. It’s nothing personal.”
Ronald stands there blinking for a second, then leaves.
My rules make perfect sense to me, but people find them strange. Still, I need them to survive. This world isn’t one I understand completely, and it doesn’t understand me completely, either. People think I’m odd for a nineteen-year-old girl—or woman, if you’re technical—that I neither act excessively young nor excessively “girlish.”
In truth, I feel asexual a lot of the time, like a walking brain with glasses and long dark hair and a mouth in good working order. If we were to talk about sex as in sex, as opposed to gender—as everyone seems to want to these days—I would say that my mind’s not on sex that much, and I was never boy-crazy when I was younger. Which makes me different from just about everyone. I did have crushes on two of my professors in college, one of which actually turned into something, but that’s a story for later on. That whole saga only confused me in the end. So much of the world is sex-obsessed that it takes someone practically asexual to realize just how extreme and pervasive it is. It’s the main motivator of people’s activities, the pith of their jokes and the driving force behind their art, and if you don’t have the same level of drive, you almost question whether you should exist. If it’s sex that makes the world go around, should the world stop for those of us who are asexual?
I graduated from college a year ago, three years ahead of my peers, and now I spend most of my time inside my apartment in the city. My father pays my rent. I could leave the house more, and I could even get a job, but I don’t have much motivation to. My father would like me to work, but he has no right to complain. I remind him that it was his idea to skip me three grades in grammar school, forever putting me at the top of my class academically, in the bottom fifth heightwise, and in the bottom twenty-second socially.
