Struck by Lightning: The Carson Phillips Journal

by Colfer, Chris

  I thought I was gay for about a week once (I think everyone does at one point). But I think it was just the girls around me that I found repulsive. Like really, who am I supposed to hook up with in the backseat of my car? Remy? Malerie? Ms. Sharpton? (I have to stop listing; I’m making myself sick thinking about it.)

  And do I really want to experience something like intercourse for the first time with someone in Clover? Whom I’ll awkwardly be connected to for the rest of my life? Why would I want to put in all that work and stress when I can ultimately get the same results by myself?

  Then again, I don’t necessarily consider myself a virgin, probably because I have such a penetrating personality.

  Do you want to know who I have a crush on? Rachel Maddow. I know I’m too young for her and she doesn’t play for my team, but do you want to know why she’s my pinup girl? Because intelligence is sexy. There’s something about being with someone who’s mentally conscious that turns me on.

  Honestly, after watching my parents fight for the majority of my life, I’m not sure if I even believe in relationships at all. I like being independent in all aspects of my life.…I take that back, now I sound like I’m asexual or a chronic masturbator. Maybe growing up with all of that fucked me up much more deeply than I thought.

  Oh well, I’m sure I’ll figure it out one day. I’ve put all that on my life’s back burner; I have bigger fish to fry this year. And now that I have Nicholas and Scott on the Chronicle, things are looking up! (No pun intended.)

  Shit, I still have to pee. I’ll hold it until I get home—definitely not using that bathroom ever again.

  10/10

  I talked my way out of detention today. It wasn’t the first time and it won’t be the last.

  I was sitting in government class when my teacher asked, “Does anyone know which administration was referred to as Camelot?”

  “Clinton?” asked Justin Walker, who sits next to me.

  “Nope, that was Came-a-lot,” I said, and laughed hysterically to myself.

  Let me explain why I made a bad situation for myself. First off, no one else got the joke except my teacher. Second, he teaches government; therefore he has no sense of humor.

  “See me after class, Mr. Phillips,” he said.

  So after he was done lecturing about the importance of the branch system and made half a dozen horrible jokes trying to validate his existence by connecting with the teenagers, I approached his desk.

  “Yeah?” I said. My tone could have been nicer.

  “Do you think that joke was appropriate, Mr. Phillips?” he asked me.

  “No,” I said. “It probably would have been better received in American history.” Once again, no sense of humor.

  “Mr. Phillips, how many times do I have to tell you outbursts like that are completely inappropriate…” He kept going. I just stopped listening.

  “Look, you’re the one who sat Justin Walker next to me,” I said. “Since elementary school, teachers have pulled this crap on me and I’ve never complained. Everyone thinks if you mix the idiots with the bright students the intelligence will rub off, but instead, every day I can feel my own IQ points fall out of my head.”

  “So what are you saying?” he asked.

  “I’m saying if the entire education system is gonna focus on the children who should be left behind, exceptions should be made for students like me too!” I explained. “And that’s how I learn, with crass sarcasm.”

  “Mr. Phillips…” He sighed and rubbed his eyes. If this guy retires early I may be responsible for it.

  “How was my joke worse than the one you made comparing the three branches of government to the Three Stooges?” I asked. “At least my joke had valid historical facts to back it up.”

  “Just go, Carson,” he said, and shooed me toward the door.

  I figured my constant battle with the world would continue in English, but when I got there I found a note on my desk. It was written on a heart-shaped Post-it note and said:

  Hey, smart guy, I heard back from Northwestern. Come see me in the counseling center when you can. Huggles, Ms. Sharpton.

  Naturally, I ran straight there—I didn’t even tell my English teacher I was leaving. I didn’t think it was necessary; I’m willing to bet we weren’t going to discuss anything about Hamlet that hasn’t already been covered in the last four hundred years.

  I burst into Ms. Sharpton’s office. I felt l like I was finding out the results of a pregnancy test.

  “You heard from Northwestern?!” I shouted.

  Ms. Sharpton practically fell out of her seat. “You scared the crap out of me!” she said. She was having lunch and was consuming a sandwich twice the size of her body. She happily pointed to a huge green cup with a large CCC on it.

  “I got the juice cup!” she told me excitedly. “It’s limited edition, too!”

  I didn’t give a rat’s ass and I think my face made it clear.

  “Okay, yes, I heard back,” she said. “That is a fancy-schmancy school you’re looking at up there; they actually put me on hold when I called.”

  “And?” I said, begging her with my eyes to get to the point.

  “Well, I didn’t find out whether you’ve been accepted or denied,” she said casually. “But the person I talked to said that high school newspapers and clubs aren’t cutting it anymore.”

  Shit. “If you want to impress them, you’ll have to submit something else,” Ms. Sharpton said.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Um, I wrote it down.…” she said, and gave me a dirty look, upset I was interrupting her lunch.

  I gave her a look that said, Bitch, this is my future we’re talking about. Your sandwich can wait.

  “Okay, let’s see,” she said, flipping through a folder by her side. She found a tiny note she had scribbled it down on. “You could submit a novel, a book of poems.…I can’t read the rest of my handwriting.”

  “I’m not a novelist and I’m not a poet. I’m a journalist,” I reminded her.

  “I know, I know,” she said in a mocking tone. “You’re a journalist. Well, what about a literary magazine?”

  “A literary magazine?” I asked.

  “Yeah, apparently it’s not as common as a high school newspaper. But a magazine filled with your work and the work of other students would show you can inspire other students to write while writing yourself,” she said in a very chipper tone.

  Fuuuuck, I thought. But, like a captain discovering he had been following the wrong North Star, I immediately set sail on a new route. If doing this would help my chances just one eighth of a percentage, I had no choice but to do it. And since the Northwestern Early Decision deadline is November 15’ I’d have to do it fast.

  “Okay, I’ll do it,” I said out loud. “But how?”

  “I don’t know how to start a literary magazine.” Ms. Sharpton shrugged, her mouth full of sandwich. “But get permission from the principal first, because he can be such an asshole.…” She turned red, which didn’t match all the pink. “Um, I didn’t mean to say that.…”

  I ignored her. My head was already in full motion planning a new course of action.

  “Okay,” I said, and headed to the door. I had one last thing I wanted to say to Ms. Sharpton, but I was having trouble figuring out what it was. “Thank you,” I said when I remembered. It’d been a long time since I had used those words.

  I ran as fast as I could to the front office.

  “You need a hall pass!” said a freshman hall monitor.

  “Fuck off,” I said, and continued running.

  How was I going to get permission from the principal? He’s a tough man to pitch to.

  Principal Gifford is the tallest man I’ve ever met—a former American Gladiator, in fact—and you can tell he deeply regrets becoming a high school principal.

  When you look into his eyes you know he’s constantly practicing the mental exercises he learned in anger management. It must be exhausting having a voic
e in your head tell you to “breathe in…breathe out…count to ten,” all day long.

  Things have been rocky between us ever since junior year, when I tried convincing him to make reading the Chronicle a requirement for all the students and faculty. It was a two-month-long conversation and I sent him 1,893 e-mails during that time. I lost, but I still stand by the suggestion.

  I ran into his office, which consists of one desk and several dumbbells, but the only person there was Ms. Hastings, his secretary.

  Ms. Hastings is very young and pretty, almost too pretty to be working as a high school secretary. I get a weird vibe from her; a vibe that tells me she witnessed her boyfriend kill someone in a big city and now she’s hiding from him in a small town.…Maybe it’s just me.

  “Where’s Mr. Gifford?” I asked.

  “You just missed him,” Ms. Hastings said. “He has an appointment with his urologist.”

  Both our eyes widened.

  “I mean, dentist,” she said, and blushed.

  “When is he supposed to be back?” I asked desperately.

  “He’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “This is an emergency. My future is on the line,” I told her.

  She looked at me, a little afraid. “Well, you might still catch him before he leaves. He could be in the parking lot—”

  Before she could finish, I was out the door.

  I raced to the faculty parking lot. At first I didn’t see him anywhere and my heart dropped into my stomach. Then suddenly, up ahead, I saw movement. I had mistaken him for a tree.

  “Principal Gifford!” I called out.

  He stopped and glanced over his shoulder. He started walking faster to his car when he realized it was me.

  “Principal Gifford! I have to talk to you!” I called out, and ran after him. “I know you can see me!”

  “I’m tired. What is it, Mr. Phillips?” he said with a heavy sigh. “I already told you I can’t make the English teachers pass out the Chronicle or any biased publications.”

  “I have absolutely no inquiries or requests about the Chronicle,” I said, catching up with him. “I want to start a school literary magazine.”

  He started chuckling under his breath.

  “Why are you laughing?” I asked.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “You can start your literary magazine. You can start a hunting magazine for all I care. But don’t ask me for funding. The school is broke.”

  I hadn’t even thought about that yet. I usually just raid the teachers’ room when no one is looking for the extra paper needed to print the Chronicle for journalism, but this would require much more than that, especially if I wanted to make an impression with Northwestern. I may actually have to go to Kinko’s.

  I would also need some kind of advertising, some kind of press release to let the school know this was happening.…

  “Great,” I said. “I’d also like to announce it at the assembly tomorrow.” I thought that’d be a good start.

  He began to shake his head.

  “It’d take three seconds!” I said.

  “Fine,” Gifford grunted. “For my own amusement if nothing else.”

  “Cool. Thank you,” I said, and bowed awkwardly. I’m really not good at this whole “being thankful” thing.

  I was beyond excited to let the journalism team know.

  “Good news, guys,” I told them in class. “On top of the Chronicle and the Writers’ Club, I’m also starting a school literary magazine! Awesome, right?”

  The silence was deafening. They looked at me like I had just told them I had leprosy.

  “Whoa,” Dwayne said. “You really like embarrassment.”

  “And I thought I was a masochist,” Vicki mumbled.

  “America is most beautiful,” Emilio declared.

  “Thanks, I’m very excited,” I said. “It’ll give the other people in school a chance to showcase their literary work. So, if any of you have something non-journalistic to submit, you know where to find me.”

  “Can I submit my short stories about savage children living on an island without any adults?” Malerie asked enthusiastically.

  “No, Malerie,” I said. “Because that’s Lord of the Flies.”

  She slumped in her seat, and my spirits slumped with her. That’s the moment I realized I was drowning in denial. This was going to be difficult.

  On my drive home, in between the thoughts of doubt, I brainstormed how I was going to ask my mother for the money to start the magazine (only a couple hundred bucks, nothing too serious). I considered hiding her pills and then selling them back to her, but our house is too small to hide anything. I decided asking the genuine way might be my only option.

  When I got home I was taken aback by what I saw. Everything was clean. All the counters were wiped off, the carpets were vacuumed, and the pile of dirty dishes had disappeared from the sink.

  To my even bigger surprise, Mom was cleaned up as well. She appeared to have showered and put on real clothes for a change.

  Of course, she was wasted and half passed out on the couch, so I knew I was in the correct house, but she had put herself together before that.

  “Mom, what happened in here?” I asked her. “Did the city health regulators finally come or something?”

  “Your father was here,” she said sadly. “We’re officially divorced now. Apparently a couple of years ago I forgot to mail back the divorce papers. He brought me new ones to sign.”

  “What?!” I said, having difficultly processing the information.

  “Stupid me, I thought he just wanted to see how we were,” she said, but I wasn’t paying attention to her. “What’s your problem?” she asked.

  “All this time I’ve complained about coming from a broken home, when in reality, I was just a part of a dysfunctional family,” I said disappointedly.

  “Don’t worry,” Mom said. “You’re still a bastard.”

  I shrugged. I suppose she was right.

  I can’t believe it took a visit from my father to get my mother to act like a real human being. Clearly she’s in a mood; I’ll ask her for money after dinner.

  10/10 after dinner

  I may have just experienced the most abnormal dinner in the history of the Phillips house.

  Normally dinner between Mom and me goes something like this: I make a joke about the food, Mom tells me I’m rude and becoming my father, I make a joke about her hygiene, Mom tells me she’s doing the best with what life has given her, I ask her if life is the one hiding her shampoo, and then we do dishes.

  Perfectly normal, right? Well, tonight’s dinner didn’t follow that format at all.

  It started when Mom randomly exclaimed, “You need to be on antidepressants!”

  I looked up at her cautiously from my corn. Even though I was the only other person in the room, I wasn’t sure she was talking to me.

  “No way. You’re medicated enough for both of us,” I told her.

  “Aren’t you depressed?” she asked me.

  “Currently, while having this conversation? Yeah,” I said. “Everyone gets depressed—it’s an emotion. People turn to pills before they turn to their problems these days.”

  “Sometimes pills are the only solution,” Mom said, trying to validate herself.

  “You’re depressing me right now. Are you saying if I take a pill you’ll disappear?” I asked.

  “That was uncalled for!” Mom sent a dirty look across the table.

  “And so are most prescription drugs!” I said. “We’re living in a medicated society. We start drugging kids with ADD, which they all have, and it doesn’t stop until death.”

  “You were on ADD medication as a kid and you turned out somewhat decent.”

  “No, I wasn’t.” I knew she had to be mistaken; I have absolutely no memory of ever taking anything growing up, even vitamins.

  “I hid it in your food.”

  I almost choked, hearing this confession. She was kidding, right?

  “
I thought I was just really calm and mature for my age,” I said.

  “Nope, you were drugged,” Mom said nonchalantly. “When your father and I began our divorce you started asking so many questions we found it easier to roofie you than to answer you.”

  I almost choked again even though I didn’t have any food in my mouth. It must have been true; Mom forgot how to joke after Dad left.

  All those early years of judging my peers for playing tag on the playground, for digging up worms and eating them, for coloring outside the lines in coloring books—it was all medically induced, not because I was superior to them.

  “Well, it isn’t dinner unless some form of my childhood foundation is shattered,” I said.

  I figured at that point I really had nothing else to lose. What could possibly shake up dinner more than discovering you were drugged your entire childhood? So I asked for the money.

  “I need money,” I blurted out.

  “I give you an allowance,” Mom shot back at me quickly.

  “I need more money, like three hundred dollars,” I said, and continued before she could interject. “I want to start a literary magazine at school and need money to print the first hundred copies or so.”

  “No,” Mom said. She didn’t even pause for a beat to consider.

  “Oh, come on!” I said. “I know you’re rolling in it. Grandpa died and left us everything.”

  “Wrong,” Mom said, and made a game-show-like buzzing sound. “He left me everything and you his car.”

  “What about my college fund?” I asked.

  “Key word college!” Mom said. She wasn’t going to budge.

  I really wanted to run outside at that moment and scream, WHY IS EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD AGAINST ME?! I JUST WANT TO GO TO COLLEGE, I’M NOT TRYING TO GO TO THE FRIGGIN’ MOON! But I remained seated.

  I must get my stubbornness from Mom. The only way to deal with people like us is to play a game of give-and-take; I had to negotiate with her.

  “Okay,” I said, my stomach tightening from what I was about to propose. “If I start taking antidepressants, will you give me the money I need to start my literary magazine?”