It's Kind of a Funny Story: Chapters 7–16

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.

The day I got those test results, a cold, plaintive, late-fall New York day, was my last good day.

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.

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.

He opened a pungent bag and put a chunk of the contents of the bag in a very fascinating little device that looked like a cigarette but was made of metal.

At his stop, I bounded up the stairs into the gray streets, slipped into his building, nodded to the doorman to call up, and squished my thumb on the elevator button, giving it a twist and some flair.

At his stop, I bounded up the stairs into the gray streets, slipped into his building, nodded to the doorman to call up, and squished my thumb on the elevator button, giving it a twist and some flair.

Every day she came in with something different—a chain of SpongeBob Burger King toys strung around her neck; one asymmetrical, giant, red-plastic hoop earring; black clown circles on her cheeks. I think her accessories were a courtesy meant to distract from her small, lucrative body and baby-doll face.

"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.

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

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.

The guy down at the local bodega let her buy beer...

Inexplicably, someone came in a Batman mask.

A short, pugnacious, mustached kid named Ronny came with a backpack...

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! Ffffffft!”

Aaron and Nia talked on the couch. I took my thermos of scotch—just to have something in my hand; I didn’t open it—and watched how they moved, swaying toward and away from each other in increments that I doubt they even recognized.

I suddenly needed some discrete information to put in my brain, to push out what was there, so I pulled a record out.

We all took the elevator down; Eight-Ball jacket and Ronny went uptown; Donna and two others slid into a cab; me and Aaron, instinctively, started toward the shimmering Brooklyn Bridge, which carved its way through the night about three blocks from his house.

To our left were the other bridges of Manhattan, arrayed against each other like alternating sin and cos waves, carrying a smattering of late-night trucks whose tops trailed mist.

To our left were the other bridges of Manhattan, arrayed against each other like alternating sin and cos waves, carrying a smattering of late-night trucks whose tops trailed mist.

We came to the middle of the bridge. On either side of us the cars hissed past; red on the left and white on the right, the lanes encased by thin metal trussing that stretched out from the walkway.

I clambered onto one on the harbor side, the side crowned by the Verrazano, and grabbed the handrails and balanced my feet one in front of the other on a piece of metal about four inches wide.

The rest of junior high was a joke. I didn’t need to do anything except make sure I didn’t fail a class and get “rescinded” from Executive Pre-Professional, so I started hanging out with Aaron every day.

Mom actually read the letters that the school sent and told me that part of their mission was to make us well-rounded, liberally educated bearers of tomorrow’s vision, so I had better be ready to do English as well as math; but I found myself jealous of the people who wrote the books.

I wasn’t gifted. Mom was wrong. I was just smart and I worked hard. I had fooled myself into thinking that was something important to the rest of the world. Other people were complicit in this ruse. Nobody had told me I was common.

“I’ve got to be excused,” I told my parents, and I walked through the restaurant with that fast-walking gonna-throw-up gait—a run aching to get out—that I learned to perfect over the next year.

“What’s the problem?” He leaned back in his small gray chair. It sounded like a callous way to put things, but the way he phrased it, so soft and concerned, I liked him.

“All right,” he took shorthand on the pad on his desk.

Then he said, “You have a flat affect.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re not expressing a lot of emotion about these things.”

“It’s all about living a sustainable life. I don’t think I’m going to be able to have one.”
“A sustainable life.”
“That’s right, with a real job and a real house and everything.”

Dr. Barney was cuddly enough, but I was sure that if you gave him a straitjacket he’d be able to handle it just fine, coaxing you into it and leading you to a very comfortable room with soft walls and a bench where you could sit looking at a one-way mirror and telling people you were Scrooge McDuck.

“Now,” I kept on, “after the serotonin passes a message from one brain cell to the next, it gets sucked back into the first brain cell to be used again. But the problem is sometimes your brain cells do too much sucking”—I chuckled—“and they don’t leave enough serotonin in your system to carry the messages. So they have these drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors that keep your brain from taking too much serotonin back to get more of it in your system. So you feel better.”

It must have been a placebo effect, but it was a great placebo effect. If placebo effects were this good, they should just make placebos the way to treat depression—maybe that’s what they did; maybe Zoloft was cornstarch.

This was my first experience with a Fake Shift. Dastardly stuff—you do well on a test; you make a girl laugh...That just makes it worse when you wake up the next day and it’s back with a vengeance to show you who’s boss.

I knew too, but I didn’t like to think about that. Maybe it was stupid and solipsistic, but I liked to think about me. I didn’t want to be part of some trend.

I had found Dr. Minerva—the sixth one that Dr. Barney and I tried—and found her quiet, no-nonsense attitude amenable to my issues.

I feel my heart beating. It’s beating against the mattress, amplified, resounding not only in the bed but in my body.

“Every municipality has a suicide hotline, and they’re listed right in the government services section of the yellow pages,” it says.