Нед Виззини - It's Kind of a Funny Story

“Nia’s pretty hot, huh,” Aaron said, hanging up the phone.

“She’s okay.”

We sat watching the door like we were waiting for the mama bird to bring us food. She knocked.

“Heyyyy,” Aaron called, beating me.

“Hi!” I said. We rushed to the doorknob; Aaron gave a look, pulled it toward him, and there she was—in a green dress with a rainbow of fuzzy anklets on one leg. Her eyes were so big and dark that she seemed even more tiny and spindly, on high-heeled shoes that threw her forward at us and made her dress outline her little breasts.

“Boys,” she said. “I think someone has been smoking pah-aht.”

“No way,” Aaron said.

“My friends are coming. When’s the party starting?”

“Five minutes ago,” Aaron said. “You want to play Scrabble?”

“Scrabble!” Nia put her bag down—it was shaped like a hippo. “Who plays Scrabble?”

“Well, I do, duh, and Craig does, too”—I didn’t, actually—“and we’re some smart guys, seeing as we got in.”

“I heard ! ” Nia grabbed her hippo bag and hit Aaron with it. “I did too!” As an afterthought, she hit me. “Congratulations!”

“Group hug!” Aaron announced, and we got together, a tiered threesome—Nia’s head came up to my chin; my head came up to Aaron’s chin. I put my hand around Nia’s waist and felt her warmth and how narrow she was. Her palm curled around my shoulder. We pushed our torsos together in a sort of ballet. I could feel Nia’s breath between us. I turned to look—“Scrabble,” Aaron said. He went across the living room, took it out of one of the bookshelves. He put it on the floor and we sat, Aaron between me and Nia, the ashtray taking up the fourth spot.

“House rules,” Aaron said as he flipped over the tiles. “If you don’t have any words to put on the board, you can make a word up, as long as you have an actual definition for that word in your head. If your definition makes the other people laugh, you get the points, but otherwise, you lose that many points.”

“We can make up words?” I asked. This was brimming with possibilities. I could make up Niaed —what happens when Nia touches you, you get Niaed. That would make her laugh. Or not.

“What about Chinese words?” Nia asked.

“You have to know what they mean and be able to explain them.”

“Oh. That shouldn’t be a problem.” She smiled wickedly.

“Who’s going first?”

“Can we smoke?”

“So demanding.” Aaron gave her the metal cigarette—I said no this time; I’d had enough.

For her first word, Nia put down M-U-W-L-I.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Chinese word.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Uh, cat.”

“That’s ridiculous. How do we know if muwli is real?” I turned to Aaron.

He shrugged. “Benefit of the doubt?”

Nia stuck out her tongue at me and damn it was a cute tongue. Is that a ring? I thought. Can’t be. Wait—it’s gone.

“I swear.” she said. “‘Come here, little muwli!’ See?”

“I’m checking you on your next one,” I said.

“The Internet’s over there.” Aaron was like.

“But while you’re gone, we’re going to give you all consonants.” Nia smiled.

“Is it my go?” I put down M-O-P off M-U-W-L-I. Ten points.

Aaron put down S-M-A-P off M-O-P. “That’s a cross between a smack and a slap. Like, ‘I’m-a smap you.’”

Nia laughed and laughed. I chuckled even though I didn’t want to. Aaron got the points.

Nia put down T-R-I-I-L.

“What is that?” I asked.

“It’s a trill, you know, like a trill on the flute, except the first L is lowercase and the second is uppercase!”

“That’s not trill, that’s ‘tree-eel’!”

“Okay, fine.” She switched the letters. Now it said T-R-I-L-I.

“Trill-ee! What is a trilhee?”

“An unmentionable act.”

Aaron laughed so hard that he just had to ease his body into Nia’s, leaning on her shoulder. She pushed back, tilting her flank into him.

I saw where this was going. I made eye contact with Nia and here’s what her eyes said:

Craig, we’re all headed to the same school. I’m going to need a boyfriend going in, to give me some stability, a little bit of backup, you know? Nothing serious. You’re cool, but you’re not as cool as Aaron. He has pot and he’s so much more laid back than you; you spent the last year studying for this test; he didn’t lift a finger for it. That means he’s smarter than you. Not that you’re not smart, but intelligence is very important in a guy — it really is the most important thing, up there with sense of humor. And he has a better sense of humor than you, too. It doesn’t hurt that he’s taller. So I’ll be your friend, but right now let’s let this develop. And don’t be jealous. That would be a waste of everybody’s time.

We kept playing. Aaron and Nia moved closer until their knees touched, and I could only imagine the energy that was going through those knees. I thought maybe they were going to lean in for a first kiss (or a second? No, Aaron would have told me) right in front of me, when the buzzer rang again.

It was Nia’s friend Cookie. She had brought bottles of beer. We took ten minutes to open them, eventually hitting them against Aaron’s kitchen countertop edge, to work the tops off. Then Nia said Cookie should’ve gotten twist-offs, and she asked what twist-offs were, and we all laughed. Cookie had blond hair and glitter all over her neck. She hadn’t gotten into Executive Pre-Professional, but that was okay because she was going to high school in Canada. The guy down at the local bodega let her buy beer if she leaned over the counter—she had developed early and had the kind of massive alluring breasts that moved in reverse rhythm when she walked.

We put Scrabble away—nobody won. The rap music seemed to be hooked up to some sort of Internet-capable playlist and kept going, never repeating, as more and more guests arrived. There was Anna—she was on Ritalin and snorted it off her little cosmetic mirror before tests; Paul—he was nationally ranked in Halo 2 and trained five hours a day with his “team” in Seattle (he was going to put it on his college applications); Mika—his dad was a higher-up in the Taxi and Limousine Commission and he had some sort of badge that allowed him to get free cab rides anywhere, anytime. People started showing up who I had no idea who they were, like a stocky white kid in an Eight Ball jacket, which he announced, coming in, was so popular back in the ‘90s that you would get knived just for having it and nobody had vintage like him.

Inexplicably, someone came in a Batman mask. His name was Race.

A short, pugnacious, mustached kid named Ronny came with a backpack full of pot and set up shop in the living room.

A girl with hemp bracelets in different subtle shades proclaimed that we had to listen to Sublime’s 40oz to Freedom, and when Aaron refused to put it on, she started gyrating and put what she claimed was a Devil curse on him, saying, “Diablo Tantunka” and pointing her fingers in mock horns: “Fffffffft! Fffffffft!”

I smoked more pot. The party was like a movie—it should have been a movie. It was the best movie I’d ever seen—where else did you get shattering glasses, a kid trying to break-dance in the living room, a dictionary being thrown at a roach, a kid holding his head in the freezer and saying it could get you high, orange vomit spread out in a semicircle in the kitchen sink, people yelling out the windows that “school sucks,” rap music declaring “I want to drink beers and smoke some shit,” and one poor soul snorting a Pixie Stik, then hacking purple dust into the toilet. . . ? Nowhere.