It's Kind of a Funny Story

To my mom

You knew you’d get one sooner or later, and seeing as they’re so hard to do, I figured we’d better make it sooner. I love you.

one

It’s so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That’s above and beyond everything else, and it’s not a mental complaint—it’s a physical thing, like it’s physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don’t come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people’s words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.

“Have you ever noticed how on all the ads on TV, people are watching TV?” my friend is like.

“Pass it, son,” my other friend is like.

“No, yo, that’s true,” my other other friend is like. “There’s always somebody on a couch, unless it’s an allergy ad and they’re in a field—”

“Or on a horse on the beach.”

“Those ads are always for herpes.”

Laughter.

“How do you even tell someone you have that?” That’s Aaron. It’s his house. “That must be such a weird conversation: ‘Hey, before we do this, you should know . . .’”

“Your moms didn’t mind last night.”

“Ohhhh!”

“Son!”

Aaron lobs a punch at Ronny, the antagonist. Ronny is small and wears jewelry; he once told me, Craig, when a man puts on his first piece of jewelry, there’s no turning back. He punches back with his hand with the big limp gold bracelet on it; it hits Aaron’s watch, clanging.

“Son, what you tryin’ to do with my gold, yo?” Ronny shakes his wrist and turns his attention to the pot.

There’s always pot at Aaron’s house; he has a room with an entirely separate ventilation system and lockable door that his parents could rent out as another apartment. Resin streaks outline his light switch, and his bedsheet is pockmarked with black circles. There are stains on there, too, shimmery stains which indicate certain activities that take place between Aaron and his girlfriend. I look at them (the stains, then the couple). I’m jealous. But then again, I’m beyond jealous.

“Craig? You want?”

It’s passed to me, wrapped up in a concise delivery system, but I pass it on. I’m doing an experiment with my brain. I’m seeing if maybe pot is the problem; maybe that’s what has come in and robbed me. I do this every so often, for a few weeks, and then I smoke a lot of pot, just to test if maybe the lack of it is what has robbed me.

“You all right, man?”

This should be my name. I could be like a superhero: You All Right Man.

“Ah. . .” I stumble.

“Don’t bug Craig,” Ronny is like. “He’s in the Craig zone. He’s Craig-ing out.”

“Yeah.” I move the muscles that make me smile. “I’m just. . . kinda . . . you know . . .”

You see how the words work? They betray your mouth and walk away.

“Are you okay?” Nia asks. Nia is Aaron’s girlfriend. She’s in physical contact with Aaron at all times. Right now she’s on the floor next to his leg. She has big eyes.

“I’m fine,” I tell her. The blue glow of the flat-screen TV in front of us ricochets off her eyes as she turns back to it. We’re watching a nature special on the deep ocean.

“Holy shit, look at that, son!” Ronny is like, blowing smoke—I don’t know how it got back to him already. There’s an octopus on the screen with giant ears, translucent, flapping through the water in the cold light of a submersible.

“Scientists have playfully named this specimen Dumbo,” the TV narrator says.

I smile to myself. I have a secret: I wish I was Dumbo the Octopus. Adapted to freezing deep-ocean temperatures, I’d flop around down there at peace. The big concerns of my life would be what sort of bottom-coating slime to feed off of—that’s not so different from now—plus I wouldn’t have any natural predators; then again, I don’t have any now, and that hasn’t done me a whole lot of good. But it suddenly makes sense: I’d like to be under the sea, as an octopus.

“I’ll be back,” I say, getting up from my spot on the couch, which Scruggs, a friend who was relegated to the floor, immediately claims, slinking up in one fluid motion.

“You didn’t call one-five,” he’s like.

“One-five?” I try.

“Too late.”

I shrug and climb over clothes and people’s legs to the beige, apartment-front-door-style door; I move through that, to the right: Aaron’s warm bathroom.