It's Kind of a Funny Story

“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.

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