Teen Angst? Naaah ...

by Ned Vizzini

  ALSO BY NED VIZZINI

  Be More Chill

  It’s Kind of a Funny Story

  Copyright © 2000 by Ned Vizzini

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Free Spirit Publishing, Inc., Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2000. Subsequently published in paperback in the United States by Laurel-Leaf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2002.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/teens Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81554-5

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  To Margaret, for helping raise me.

  Thanks to my editors, in reverse chronological order: Elizabeth Verdick, Wendy Lestina, Adam Moss, Andrey Slivka, John Strausbaugh, Sam Sifton, and Mom.

  Thanks to Judy Galbraith for telling me to do this book, and then dealing with me as I did it.

  Thanks to everybody who shows up in the essays, even if we’ve since drifted or we no longer speak.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  INTRODUCTION

  JUNIOR HIGH

  Nintendo Saved Me

  The Test

  Highway to Hell

  Are We Alternative Now?

  FRESHMAN YEAR

  Stuy High

  Fifteen Minutes

  Parental Approval

  Horrible Mention

  Moxy Music

  Postmark: Blancheville

  SOPHOMORE YEAR

  Cable Access Says No

  Roll With It

  Here Comes Trouble

  No Big Deal

  Back Car

  Let’s Buy Beer

  Marathon Macho

  JUNIOR YEAR

  Magic Moments

  Goofy Foot Forward

  Everybody Loves a Wheelchair

  The View

  Good-bye, Old Painter

  Getting Sloppy with Poppy

  MetroCarded

  SENIOR YEAR

  Forced March

  Fun in the Sun

  Interlude

  Prom, Prom, Promises

  Hooters

  POST-HIGH SCHOOL

  INTRODUCTION

  I started writing this book because of my backpack. I took a bright teal, super-dorky backpack to high school, a backpack my mother had ordered years earlier from L.L. Bean. It worked so great throughout junior high that I figured it had a year or two left in it.

  My backpack got some looks. People would stare at it, wondering, “What kind of idiot wears an accessory like that?” Then they would see me. “Oh.”

  One day, I was going down one of my high school’s escalators.* I was tired. I took off my backpack and put it next to me on an escalator step. For whatever reason, the backpack flipped over and started rolling down the escalator like a Slinky.

  Many steps below stood a girl. She had one hand to her face, as if she were on a cell phone, but she had no actual cell phone. We were the only people on the escalator. The backpack kept tumbling (I watched it sort of helplessly) and whapped her in the back of the calves.

  The girl stopped talking on her fake cell phone and turned to look at me. She had to take that look: I could’ve been a cute guy who’d flung my backpack at her to break the ice. She sized me up, cocked her head, and kicked my backpack as hard as she could the rest of the way down the escalator.

  When I reached the bottom, I picked up my backpack and thought about the incident for the rest of the day. On the subway ride home, I pulled out a wrinkled piece of paper and wrote about the cellphone girl and my stupid bag. I wrote angrily; I used a lot of curses. Afterward, I felt a lot better, and when I read my words the next day, I thought they were pretty good.

  So I went from writing profanity-ridden rants to slightly less profanity-ridden essays. I was able to get some of them published in a local newspaper, New York Press. Soon I was writing on a regular basis, taking my boring, scary, embarrassing high school moments and turning them into something people could read about. It was a real comfort—if something weird or horrible happened to me, I’d write about it, and then somehow I’d be in control. A little.

  A few years later, I got a piece published in The New York Times Magazine. That got me in touch with Free Spirit Publishing, who gave me this book contract, which I signed, and now somehow I’m here, writing this introduction after polishing most of what I wrote in high school and organizing it chronologically.

  I threw out that backpack when I was a junior and replaced it with a bag from the army surplus store.

  I never did learn the name of the girl.

  Ned Vizzini

  Brooklyn, New York*

  *My school had seven sets of escalators. It was a high school specializing in math and science, so I guess they figured we deserved escalators.

  *If you want to write to me about my book, you can reach me at www.nedvizzini.com.

  JUNIOR HIGH

  NINTENDO SAVED ME

  Yesterday, on a strange, sudden urge, I hooked up my old Nintendo.* Not the Super NES. The original, spawn-of-the-eighties, from-Japan-with-love, eight-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. It had been lying in a closet for years and was dusty and tough to get working. But when I plugged it in and hit that power button, I was back to being nine years old on the day we bought it.

  We went on a Saturday morning after Christmas—my parents always waited for the January sales. Around 8:00 A.M., Dad loaded my six-year-old brother Daniel and me into our van. Our family never had a car, always a van, with two backseats so Daniel and I could space out and not kill each other.

  Dad was convinced that Nintendos would be cheaper in New Jersey. He thought everything was cheaper and better in New Jersey, probably because he was born there, in Trenton, which he called “God’s Country.” We drove to Child World, one of those industrial-sized Toys ’R’ Us look-alikes—silent and frigid as a hospital. We headed to the electronics aisle, pulled a Nintendo off the shelf, paid the pimply cashier one hundred dollars (exactly what we would have paid in Manhattan), and drove back to Brooklyn.*

  We triumphantly stomped through the front door, shaking snow off our boots. Mom was in the kitchen having breakfast with my sister, Nora. Nora was almost three. She sat on Mom’s lap, drank juice from a cup, and scribbled all over The New York Times while Mom did the crossword puzzle. Mom loves the Times crossword puzzles, especially the ones on Saturday, which are always hardest.** Whenever she finishes one, she writes, “100% Yea Mom” in the margins. It’s her thing.

  “Daddy’s home!” Nora said, jumping out of Mom’s lap and hugging Dad’s legs. “What is it?” she asked, eagerly looking at the Nintendo box. I held it over my head so she couldn’t touch it.

  “Jim?” Mom asked from the kitchen, not looking up from her crossword. “You might know this. Ah, Russian river …”

  “Ob? Volga?”

  “Volga looks good.” Mom penciled in the word. (Later on, when she got even better at crosswords, she’d do them in pen.) “It might not be right, though … we’ll see. Nora, come back here and finish your juice!”

  But now Nora was intrigued.
She wanted to know what was in that shiny box. I carried the Nintendo to the living room, sat on the floor, and ravenously tore off all the packaging. Daniel helped. Nora tried to help, but we pushed her away, so she sat on the couch with her stuffed animals.*

  Even before she was two, my sister had invented an entire universe of stuffed animals. There were dozens—penguins, dolphins, rabbits—and they all had names that ended in ee: Pinky, Yellowy, Mazie, Popsy. They sat on the couch in silent witness as Dad came in, took off his shoes, and announced that he would now assemble the Nintendo.

  This required his full concentration, so he told Daniel and me to go play. Hopeful and extremely obedient, for once, we sat on the couch with Nora as Dad connected wires. Within ten minutes, he had the thing working. Dad was a wizard back then.

  “I got first game!” Daniel and I yelled simultaneously. I got it, of course. I was the oldest, and the oldest brothers get everything—that’s why we’re racked with guilt. For half an hour, Daniel watched, and then he started crying, which prompted a visit from Mom.

  “What’s this machine for? To make you cry?!”

  “No, Mom,” I moaned.

  Daniel shrieked, “Mom, Ned won’t let me play! He won’t even let me have one game!”

  “My goodness, Jim, how could you buy this? It’s like having another TV!” Mom threw up her hands.

  “Well, Emma,” Dad said from his chair, “it keeps them quiet. They’ll sit and gape at it all day.”

  Now Daniel was playing. That made me mad. I grabbed the controller; he grabbed it back. I hit him and accidentally toppled the Nintendo. It slid behind the TV.

  “Aaa! Dad! Get it out! Get it out!” I screamed. “What if it’s broken?” I sobbed.

  Dad pulled out the Nintendo and hit the switch. It worked.

  “Don’t ever do that again,” I told Daniel.

  “Don’t you ever tell your brother what to do!” Mom roared from the kitchen.

  Nora scampered off the couch. “My stuffed animals don’t like fighting, and they’re having a tea party!” She picked up Pinky, Whitey, Posey, and whoever and ran to her room.

  “Okay, shhh,” Dad said to me, putting his hand on my shoulder. “Let’s not fight over the Nintendo. We don’t need to make Mom mad, and we don’t need to scare Nora, do we? Go on, just gape at that screen and be happy.”

  So I did. For the next five years.

  • • •

  I first witnessed a Nintendo upstairs at my neighbor Todd’s apartment. Todd, a Cool Kid, was a couple of years older than me. He always got the good toys first. I was instantly awestruck by his Nintendo; like television, it had the power to make you happy. Todd could plunk down in front of it anytime, play for a few hours, and be giddy when he stopped. He told me, “Nintendo’s even better than TV, ’cause you can win.”

  Todd was right. Nobody wins at television. If you waste your life watching it, you’ll end up on a nursing home couch, glued to a talk show, wondering, “What’s it all worth?” But if you waste your life playing video games, you can stand up at the end and yell, “Yes! 500,000 points in Tetris!”* Video games give you purpose.

  And I was a smart, purposeful kid. When adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, “A cartographer or a civil engineer.” Those professions were specific enough to sound smart but vague enough to conceal my real career goal: playing video games.

  From ages nine to fourteen, Nintendo was my sole ambition, my prime motivation, and my best friend. I adopted a grueling schedule:

  7:30—Wake up and sneak in a game before school.

  8:15–3:00—Trudge through school, mumbling, “Boring, boring, boring” while walking the halls.*

  3:20—Run home, place my bony butt on the living room floor, and indulge for a few hours.

  6:30—Mom gets home. Do my homework, rewarding each finished assignment with a few games.

  9:30—Climb into bed and discuss game strategy with Daniel. Fall asleep.

  I even dreamed Nintendo. Sometimes I was Mega Man, clad in a blue jumpsuit, with a spherical helmet and a gun for a right arm. Other times, I was in Final Fantasy, the video role-playing game, slaying and getting slain by ogres. I was never Mario: Rebecca, the prettiest girl in my class, had told me that Mario was “stubby,” and I learned early on that this was a bad thing.

  Mario, of course, was the short, fat Italian guy who starred in countless Nintendo games. His mission was always to save The Princess, a blond girl with a pink dress and large breasts. She looked kind of like Rebecca. In fourth grade, I picked The Princess as “the girl I would go on a date with if I absolutely had to ’cause everyone else in the world was dead.” I spent hundreds of hours saving The Princess. All that time, head aching, palms sweating, butt falling asleep—I’m a little ashamed of it now.

  But only a little. You see, childhood sucks. I’m young enough to remember that. Starting in first grade, there’s pressure from all sides: to be smart, to make friends, to get teachers to like you. Kids develop different ways of coping with that pressure. Some find solace in books. Some play-act or play large and expensive musical instruments.* Others draw, or sing, or do math. Some watch TV or sit and stare. I coped with childhood by playing Nintendo.

  Now, it’s been a few years since I’ve curled up with a jumbo toy catalog and drooled over the video games. When Nintendo 64 (the big next-generation system) was released, I didn’t even care. Still, I have this future scene all worked out: me, age forty-plus, fat,* and balding, waiting at a bus stop or some other nondescript place. I start daydreaming and humming, and soon I’m whistling the theme to Super Mario Brothers. And the guy next to me, a lanky guy with a beard—he whistles, too.

  *I had to do that whole Nintendo player’s ritual: I blew in the machine until I hyperventilated. I snapped in the game cartridges. I even cleaned the games with Q-tips and alcohol. It took an hour to finish the job.

  *I lived in an apartment building in Brooklyn from ages seven to eighteen. It was a nice place, but in those eleven years, our family demolished everything: the walls had holes, the beds fell apart, and an electric pencil sharpener in the kitchen somehow became controlled by a dimmer switch in the hall.

  **Early in the week, the Times crossword puzzles are easy, probably because the editors figure that no one wants to strain themselves on a Monday morning. By Saturday, however, those things are brutal. I can’t do one-twentieth of one.

  *As she got older, Nora became extremely protective of her stuffed animals. If you sat on one, she’d make you go to “jail,” which meant you had to stand in a corner while she counted to thirty.

  *Invented by Alexey Pajitnov, Tetris remains the best-loved video game of all time. It’s a puzzle game; you arrange falling blocks to score points. Dad loves it as much as Mom loves crosswords. There’s actually a whole interesting story behind the game, involving a licensing rip-off and the Soviet government. To learn more, check out: http:atarihq.com/tsr/special/tetrishist.html.

  *I was bored with school from third grade on. What I heard in class was just too far behind what Dad taught me in our one-on-one tutoring sessions. He used to sit me down at the dining room table every evening: “Tonight, son, we’re going to learn about atoms.… ”

  *I played saxophone for three years, until I left the thing on the subway. I played piano for a year, until I realized I hated it. I’ve played bass guitar for nine years—and counting—because it looks cool.

  *I’m skinny now, but over 50 percent of American men end up overweight, so I’ll probably be fat later on.

  THE TEST

  There’s a window of time, after you’ve shed the pathetic dreams of childhood but before the hormones kick in, when you really can do anything. The summer I was thirteen, I wasn’t worried about sex or status or pimples. I was worried about the Specialized Science High School Admissions Test.

  The test (SSHSAT for short) is a New York City* phenomenon. Here’s how it works: the NYC public school system has three “special” high scho
ols for mathematically gifted students—Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and, in Manhattan, Stuyvesant. Parents and students alike covet admission to these schools, because they’re free and they don’t suck. To separate the gifted kids from the not-so-gifted, the school system issues the SSHSAT, a sort of mini SAT multiple-choice test, scored from 200 to 800. Each school has a different cutoff grade. If you score above the cutoff, you’re in. Since Stuyvesant always has the highest cutoff, it’s the most desirable school. So the thousands of kids who take the SSHSAT each year call it “The Stuy Test.”

  Anyway, in late May of seventh grade, my class gathered in the math room to hear an announcement from our principal, Mary. (It was a small private school. We called our teachers and administrators by their first names.)

  “Now, everybody,” Mary addressed us. I was slouched at a table chewing a pencil; I liked the way it tasted. “Your seventh grade is almost over. It’s time to start thinking about eighth grade. And when you think about eighth grade, you have to think about high school.”

  High school. Geez. I chewed vigorously. I never thought I’d get to high school, but now that it was in sight, I started planning. I wanted to conquer high school the way I had conquered elementary school. I wanted to be the smartest student and get the highest grades, because I needed something to feel good about.

  Mary continued. “High school is an important step in your life. You’ll all be going to different schools, schools that reflect your interests.”

  I chewed harder, flattening the eraser. Interests, whatever—I wanted to go to the best school.

  “Getting into these schools is a complicated process. What you have to do over the summer is think about where you’d like to go, why you’d like to go there, and how you can get yourself admitted. Yes, Josh?”

  The questions began. Every kid had some request: where should I go if I like acting? art? movies? law? I had only one question. After class, I caught up with Mary in the hall.