Нед Виззини: It's Kind of a Funny Story

“Are you okay?”

“One second,” I say.

I lose.

My stomach hitches as I leave the table.

What were you trying to do, soldier?

I was trying to eat, sir!

And what happened?

I got caught thinking about some crap, sir!

What kind of crap?

How I want to live less than my parents’ dog.

Are you still concentrated on the enemy, soldier?

I don’t think so.

Do you even know who the enemy is?

I think. . . it’s me.

That’s right.

I have to concentrate on myself.

Yes. But not right now, because now you’re going to the bathroom to throw up! It’s tough to fight when you’re throwing up!

I stumble into the bathroom, turn off the light, close the door. The horrible thing is that I like this part, because when it’s over I know I’ll be warm; I’ll have the warmth in me of a body having just been through a trauma. I bear down on the toilet in the dark—I know just where to go—and my stomach hitches again and slams up at me, and I open up and groan. It comes out, and I hear my mother outside, sniffling, and my dad muttering, probably holding her. I grip the handle and flush a few times, alternating filling the toilet and flushing it. When I’m done I’ll go to sleep, and I won’t do any homework; I’m not up to it tonight.

And I think as I’m down there:

The Shift is coming. The Shift has to be coming. Because if you keep on living like this you’ll die.

So why am I depressed? That’s the million-dollar question, baby, the Tootsie Roll question; not even the owl knows the answer to that one. I don’t know either. All I know is the chronology.

Two years ago I got into one of the best high schools in Manhattan: Executive Pre-Professional High School. It’s a new school set up to create the leaders of tomorrow; corporate internships are mandatory; the higher-ups of Merrill Lynch come and speak to classes and distribute travel mugs and stuff. This billionaire philanthropist named Bernard Lutz set it up in conjunction with the public school system, like a school within a school—all you have to do to get in is pass a test. Then your whole high school is paid for and you have access to 800 of the smartest, most interesting students in the world—not to mention the teachers and visiting dignitaries. You can come out of Executive Pre-Professional High School and go right to Wall Street, although that’s not what you should do; what you should do is come out and go to Harvard and then law school. That’s how you end up being, like, President.

I’ll admit it: I kind of want to be President.

So this test—they named it the Bernard Lutz Philanthropic Exam, in honor of his philanthrop-icness—became fairly important in my life. It became more important than, uh, food, for instance. I bought the book for it—Bernard Lutz puts out his own line of test-prep books for his own test—and started studying three hours a day.

I was in seventh grade, and I got comfortable with my room for the first time—I’d come home with my heavy backpack and toss it on the bed and watch it bounce toward the pillows as I sat down in my chair and pulled out my test-prep book. On my cell phone, I would go to TOOLS: ALARM and set myself up for a two-hour practice exam. There were five practice exams in the book, and after I did them all, I was thrilled to discover an ad at the back for twelve more Bernard Lutz test-prep books. I went to Barnes & Noble; they didn’t have all of them in stock—they’d never had anyone ask for all of them—so they had to put in an order for me. But then it was game on. I started taking a practice exam every day. The questions covered the standard junk that they test you on to determine if you’re not an idiot:

Reading comprehension. Ooh. Can you read this selection and tell what kind of tree they’re trying to save?

Vocabulary. Did you buy a book full of weird words and learn them?

Math. Are you able to turn off your mind to the world and fill it with symbols that follow rules?

I made that test my bitch. I mauled the practice exams and slept with the books under my pillow and turned my brain into a fierce machine, a buzz saw that could handle anything. I could feel myself getting smarter, under the light at my desk. I could feel me filling myself.

Now, I stopped hanging out with a lot of friends when I got into Executive Pre-Professional mode. I didn’t have many friends to begin with—I had the kids who I sat with during lunch, the bare minimum—but once I started carrying flash cards around they sort of avoided me. I don’t know what their problem was; I just wanted to maximize my time. When all of my test-prep books were done, I got a personal tutor to shore me up for the exam. She told me halfway through the sessions that I didn’t need her, but kept my mom’s $700.

I got an 800 on the test, out of 800.

The day I got those test results, a cold, plaintive, late-fall New York day, was my last good day. I’ve had good moments scattered since then, times when I thought I was better, but that was the last day I felt triumphant . The letter from Executive Pre-Professional High School came in the mail, and Mom had saved it on the kitchen table for me when I got home from Tae Bo class after school, which was something I intended to keep doing in high school, to have on my extracurricular activity sheet when I applied for college, which would be the next hurdle, the next step.

“Craig, guess what’s here?”

I threw down my backpack and ran past the Vampire Mirror to the kitchen. There it was: a manila envelope. The good kind of envelope. If you failed the test, you got a small envelope; if you got in, you got a big one.

“Yeesssss!” I screamed. I tore it open. I took out the purple-and-gold welcome packet and held it up like the holy grail. I could have used it to start my own religion. I could have made, y’know, love to it. I kissed it and hugged it until Mom said, “Craig, stop that. That’s very sick. How about you call your friends?”

She didn’t know, because I never told her, that my friends were a bit estranged. They’re sort of ancillary anyway, friends. I mean, they’re important —everybody knows that; the TV tells you so—but they come and go. You lose one friend, you pick up another. All you have to do is talk to people, and this was back when I could talk to anybody. My friends, when I had them, pretty much just ragged on me and took my seat when I left the room anyway. Why did I need to call them up?

Except Aaron. Aaron was a real friend; I guess I’d call him my best friend. He was one of the oldest guys in my class, born on that cusp where you can be the youngest person in an older class or the oldest in a younger class, and his parents did the right thing and went with the latter. He was smart and fearless, with a flop of brown curly hair and the sort of glasses that made girls like him, square black ones. He had freckles and he talked a lot. When we got together we would start projects: an alarm clock torn apart and distributed over a wall, a stop-motion video of Lego people having sex, a Web site for pictures of toilets.

I had met him by wandering over to the table during lunch with my head buried in flash cards, sitting down, having one of his friends ask me what I was doing there, and having him come by, flush with tacos, to rescue me, ask what I was studying. It turned out that he and I were taking the same exam, but he wasn’t studying at all—didn’t believe in it. He introduced me to the table conversation about what Princess Zelda would be like in bed—I said she’d be terrible, because she’d been locked up in dungeons since puberty, but Aaron said that’d make her super hot.