It's Kind of a Funny Story: Chapters 29–42

I want to get more sleep, but once you’ve been stuck you’re inclined to get up, so I move out of bed and take a shower with the hospital-provided towels and my parent-provided shampoo and the generic soap that I pump out of the wall.

A caravan of my fellow bleary mental patients—or wait, I think we’re called in-patient psychiatric treatment recipients, technically—emerge from their compartments, rubbing their eyes and staggering as if they have a job to get to and they just need that first cup of coffee.

I look at her feet ending in simple black sneakers and her small ankles and her pale lower legs and the indentation in the Capri pants where the pants start, under her knee, and up her body to her small waist and then the sharp bulge of her breasts and then her neck, coming through the uneven, distended neckline of her wife-beater, and her small chin and lips.

I wanted the comfort of preschool, not the ambience.

I bet you didn’t think you’d come in here and find a fine filly like that.
Well, she’s not a filly.

“‘Craig and Noelle, sitting in a tree—’” He gets up and puts his hands on his hips, sashaying.

“Johnny,” Joanie admonishes. “We do not draw pills.”

“She wants you to draw it, but she sure as hell can’t eat it,” Humble guffaws.

Ebony, who’s been sitting over there, goes through the arduous process of getting up with her cane and walks toward me.

You make friends and have a pithy little conversation with a girl, and you think you’ve succeeded, Craig?

And because I needed to be the center of attention, because I needed something more, I ended up here, wallowing in myself, trying to convince everybody around me that I have some kind of...disease.

Depression isn’t a disease. It’s a pretext for being a prima donna.

Depression isn’t a disease. It’s a pretext for being a prima donna.

“Better. Much, much better. But the question is, am I really better, or am I just lulled into a false sense of security by this fake environment? I mean, it’s not normal here.”

“Relationships change even more than people. It’s like two people changing. It’s exponentially more volatile. Especially two teenagers.”

“Craig, I called you because I got a message from one of our teachers. I just wanted to tell you that you have the school’s full support in everything you’re going through and that we’re more than willing to have your semester repeated, or given over the summer, or for work to be provided for you where you are now, if you should miss enough days to warrant that.”

And I picture it in my mind: me going back to school. My little group of friends—only they’re not even my friends anymore—buffered by this new collection of girls who like me because I’m depressed and teachers who are sympathizing and the suddenly nice principal.

But it was kind of like getting told that the prison is happy that you’ve been granted a temporary reprieve but we’ll be right here with open arms to take you in when you come back.

It looks like at some point the buttons were ordered by size or color, but now they’re all mixed up—every conceivable hue, shape, and ornamentation.

Joanie starts the clapping from the back, slowly, but with reverence and purpose.

Bobby sits down and we ante up. The game is poker, seven-card stud.

“Be nice,” the Professor says.
“Oh, listen to her,” Humble jerks his thumb. “Trying to be the mediator.”

I wave as lightly as I can, so people think maybe I have a spasmodic twitch.

“I’m fifteen,” I interject.

“At eleven the guitar guy is coming. Johnny here’ll play.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Huh, if the inclination hits.”

Joanie lent me some high-quality pencils and glossy paper since I helped her out with clean-up after the card tournament debacle, so I can draw whenever I want.

“I’m gonna work on my art,” I tell the guys.
“If I had half your initiative, things woulda turned out different,” says Bobby.

We have visitors today, nursing students who are learning what it’s like to work in a psych hospital, and they wade in with us and take seats and mediate disputes over who gets the bongo drums, the conga drums, the two sticks you bang together, the washboard, and the coveted seat by the electric keyboard.

Once the music starts he goes right into the Jimmy-verse, banging against his washboard and letting it all hang out in a piercing falsetto that’s surprisingly on key.

Jimmy may have only a few sentences in his repertoire, but he knows to keep going when pretty girls pay attention to him.

She turns red and grins, and when she sits down, it’s Bobby’s turn—he moves like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, shaking his hips with a laconic tilt, turning his feet more than his body.

She walks toward me, looking up idly glib and innocent.

She walks toward me, looking up idly glib and innocent.

Now she’s got her glossy, sparkly lips turned up at me, and I feel this amazing dichotomy going on.

And these aren’t any lips, either, that I’m presented with to rectify my lack of play.

He runs over to us; I jump off Nia and hold my hands up, thinking he’s going to hit me, but he grabs me and holds me close to his square smelly body and carries me like a girder to the corner of the room.

I wonder what else has happened in this chair—people have probably peed on it, licked it, drummed their heads against it, and writhed around in it spouting gibberish.

And we tend to assume therefore that the world was built for us, and that we’re, you know, the culmination of everything that came before us.

They’re the most elaborate ones I’ve done yet: divided thoroughfares, alleys, cul de sacs, tunnels, toll plazas, and traffic circles.

Her tears went right into my shirt; they cool and chafe now on my shoulder.