Be More Chill

by Ned Vizzini

  “Hey,” he actually says to me.

  I clench up inside my mask. What does he want? He stands with his back to the wall and keeps quiet, alternating sips of punch with sips from an old-timey hip flask stashed in one of his many pockets.

  “Want some?” he asks, shrugging his flask in my direction. What the hell is this? Does he not know who I am? I turn toward him in my mask and he smirks at it. I take his flask, slip it under my chin and suck down a big swig. Then another.

  “No way,” Rich says. “You’re like the alky ghost, dude.” I don’t know what’s in the flask, but it burns and cracks my throat as it goes down. “Bleccch, jeez,” I gargle through my mouth hole.

  “Scotch,” Rich says.

  “Yecch.”

  Rich looks down. “So it’s Jeremy Heere under that mask, right?”

  “Yeah.” Uh-oh.

  “Is it true what I heard, Jeremy? You keep sheets of paper and write down all the shit that happens to you, like a list?”

  “Yeah,” I gulp. The Humiliation Sheets are out.

  “Well,” Rich says. “I’m sure I’m on them a lot.” He looks at me with open eyes, with some kind of understanding and humanity. Then he turns back to the dance floor. “So which one would you get with?” He gestures to the Hot Girls.

  “Uh, Chloe,” I confide.

  “Bad choice, man. You gotta go with Katrina. I mean, she looks just like Barbie. I’ve wanted to fuck Barbie since I was born—”

  In the midst of this ridiculousness (Rich is drunk, I figure), I see Christine. Actually I see her head, shrouded by a Rapunzel-style red-and-gold princess hat, bobbing to the left of the Hot Girl entanglement. As she moves into full view, I see that she’s dressed like a Persian prostitute/angel, with a gold halter top, glitter all over her belly, and puffy pink pants like Jasmine in Aladdin (only Jasmine’s might not have been pink). The thing is, she has giant, golden wings affixed to her shoulders; they wreak havoc on her dancing. It’s such a mess, but cute somehow; I picture her dressing up in her room and thinking how it would impress Jake.

  “…Now, the problem with Chloe is that she has no idea about how panties are supposed to be worn—” Rich continues, but I’m actually ignoring him, because Jake Dillinger is on the floor with Christine. Damn. He’s not wearing any costume, just a tuxedo. He’s dancing the absolutely best way a white guy can, planting his feet and leaning back and letting the girl rub herself all over him. And Christine rubs herself expertly. She rubs herself on him like she was trying to get barnacles off the backs of her upper thighs. The wings make Jake flinch.

  “—And she had this threesome with the girls from Friends, but it wasn’t even a threesome, it was a foursome—” Rich explains.

  Now Christine bends over, putting her butt right on the place where Jake’s no-doubt-impressive penis hoists on a likely nightly basis—

  “Hey, you wanna talk to that girl?” Rich asks.

  “Uh, what?”

  “C’mon, Jeremy, you’re not even paying attention to me. You want that girl?”

  “Well…” Why lie? Just say it. “Sure. Yeah. Of course I do.”

  “You realize I could walk right up to her right now and get her to fuck me?” Rich smiles. “Anytime.”

  “Um, actually I wouldn’t doubt that. You seem to do okay with the girls in our school.”

  “‘Okay?’” Rich looks offended by my very presence, which is a look I’m used to. “Okay my ass. Watch this.”

  Rich walks across the dance floor and starts talking to another girl named Samartha, a pretty hot one with punch in her hand standing by the opposite wall. After chatting for about three minutes, he lounges on a nearby Ping-Pong table. Samartha comes over and kisses him. I watch intensely; Rich whispers in her ear and she begins to lick and suck his belly button with one high-heeled foot bent behind her so the heel touches her butt cheek, which is blue, with stars. (She’s Wonder Woman.) After a minute of that, Rich gets up, kisses her, and walks back to me.

  “You see?” he says. “That’s real pimpin’.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Real pimpin’, but not natural pimpin’. I had help.”

  “Uh…”

  “I got a squip, man.”

  “You’re quick?”

  “Not quick. A ‘squip.’”

  “Ohhh…” Flashes flash in my head. “The ‘script.’”

  “No, ‘squip.’”

  “I think I’ve heard of it—”

  “Not script. Squip.”

  “Wait. What?”

  “The squip,” Rich says, and the way he says it I kind of know that something is starting, something is happening, and I’m glad because anything would be better than me in this mask not dancing with any girls, watching Rich get his belly button licked. “And you need a squip, man. You need it more than, like, anyone I know. You’re almost hopeless. That’s why I’m telling you. You have to get squipped.”

  “Yeah, well, I think I heard about it from my friend,” I say carefully, not wanting to step on this and make it go away. “What is it?”

  “It’s a cool pill,” he says. “From Japan.”

  “Like, it makes you smarter I heard? I thought—”

  “You didn’t think nothing. Look.”

  Rich opens his fist and for the first time I realize what he’s dressed as—a giant weed leaf. Isn’t that great? I look down and there’s a gray oblong pill nestled like a wart in the light creases of his palm. It looks like the acidophilus supplements Mom used to give me as a kid.

  “What’s it do?” I ask. “Is it drugs?”

  “Heh, no, it’s not drugs,” Rich says, closing his fist. “It’s better than drugs. It’s a supercomputer, a quantum nanotechnology CPU that fits in a pill.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Like, they are way ahead of us with this stuff in Japan but it’s going to hit the American markets soon.” As Rich talks, rap blares, something heavily dependent on barking. Rich almost sounds like he’s doing a sales pitch: “You take it, you know, ingest it, and the quantum computer, which is inside the pill, travels through your bloodstream and up into you brain. Then it sits in your brain and assists you.”

  “How?”

  “It’s preprogrammed. Once it gets up there, it tells you how to be cool all the time. It interacts with your brain as if it were a voice talking to you.”

  “Are you for real?”

  “See, if you were squipped, you wouldn’t say that,” Rich smirks. “You wouldn’t use outdated terminology and clunky phrasing like that.”

  “Ah…”

  “And I gotta say, I’m personally sorry for treating you like a piece of garbage all the time.” Rich looks humble and reverent. “I only do it because my squip tells me to. It advised me that I’d have to be a dick to you for social reasons, but recently it started saying that you were a decent guy actually who might want a squip of your own.”

  “Uh…apology accepted,” I gurgle. The DJ has put on a slow song and Christine and Jake are kissing (hooking up) on the dance floor, but I don’t care. I’m rapt. “So this is like, a real thing. You aren’t BS-ing me.”

  “Once again, you wouldn’t say ‘BS-ing’ if you had one,” Rich says. “And yeah, it’s real. This one I have here was going to be bought by Ryu tonight, but he never showed.”

  “How long does it last?”

  “I think it’s permanent. I’ve had mine four months. Now, do you even remember me four months ago?”

  “It was summer.”

  “Right, but what about last year?”

  “Last year I didn’t see you much.”

  “Nobody saw me, because I was busy jerking off on the Internet, I was such a loser,” Rich explains. “My squip fixed that, okay?”

  “Huh.”

  “Squips are awesome. Mine is actually off right now, because I’m talking to you and not some hottie, but when it’s on, it’s great.…First thing it did was instruct me how to get consistent ass. It was very specific. Then it told
me to start doing sports to cut my muscles a little and make me appeal to girls more. Then it told me who to piss off and who to be friends with, of which you were a minor part. Then it got me with all three of the Hot Girls to solidify my social standing. It hasn’t let up.”

  “Damn. You’ve been with all three of them?” It might be the scotch or a contact high from Eric’s eyebrow, but I don’t think Rich is lying. I think there might have been a reason for me to be here tonight, besides Christine, who’s the real reason for everything. Somebody has made a pill for idiots like me and now all I need is—

  “Where do I get one?” I ask about ten times more eagerly than I would have liked. (Will my squip fix that?)

  “Why do you think I’m telling you all this?” Rich asks. “You get one through me. I got a supplier who exports leather down at the bowling alley in New Brunswick—”

  “The big bowling alley?”

  “Yeah. Now this guy’s from Ghana, so he’s not around all the time, but I can reserve a pill for you. I would need two hundred now, four hundred when it comes in.”

  “Um…” My brain struggles with 200 + 400 = ? “I don’t have six hundred bucks.”

  “You’re screwed, then!” Rich says gleefully. Then he puts a hand on my shoulder. “No, seriously, not really; maybe we could work something out. Talk to me or Keith back at school.”

  “Keith the football player? With the tattoos?”

  “God, you really need one, Jeremy. Yes, with the tattoos. He knows.”

  “Okay. Cool,” I say.

  “Most definitely. I mean we could all use a little thing in our brains getting us laid by high school girls all the time, right?”

  “I could.”

  “Yeah. So keep in touch. And in the meantime, you want me to talk to, ah, the Queen of Wherever over there?” Rich points at Christine. “Maybe I could get her to fuck you.” Christine has her arms around Jake’s neck, Rapunzel hat leaning off to the side, wings akimbo.

  “No,” I say lightly.

  “A’ight.” Rich shrugs and leaves. “Remember,” he says, pointing to his head as he goes back to Samartha. “Uh!” And he makes a little noise of triumph.

  Not knowing what else to do, forgetting my original plan (did I have one?), I walk out of the dance. The doorman is reading a pornographic Mexican comic book with a woman dressed as an armadillo having sex with a coat rack. He jerks up, surprised to see me go so early. I reach the road and turn left; I’ve got enough money for a car home, but I have to walk tonight, three miles along route 27, taking it all in. People must think I’m the world’s oldest, loneliest, most confused trick-or-treater, but cops and motorists leave me alone, and when I get back to my house at 2:17 A.M., Mom is worried, but Dad is happy. He figures I got with some girl at the dance—that must’ve been what took me so long. I don’t want to disappoint him, so I go into my room all smiling and lie down with my head buzzing around the word squip.

  The next morning (well, technically, I wake up at noon), I go to Google. Type in squip: 361 results. The first one takes me to a dinky Web fighting game where you’re a small alien who can battle an opposing alien with your gigantic nose. I play twice, learn how to win every time, and click back. The second link is more on-target, from Yahoo News.

  Sony Hints at Next Generation of Wearable Computers

  Just as the Segway Human Transport system was introduced to the world as clandestine, heavily-funded “IT” technology, digital designers and futurists are now buzzing about “SQUIP” as the next great leap forward in human lifestyle enhancement. SQUIP is being developed by Sony (SNE).

  “It’s a simple device that will redefine how computers operate within our society,” says Harvey Dinglesnort about SQUIP, which Sony refuses to comment on directly. Mr. Dinglesnort reviews high-end devices for a variety of publications including The Sharper Image (SHRP). “They’re keeping close tabs on it because it really will be a sensation when it is released.”

  What is known about SQUIP is that it involves microcomputers that can be implanted—or ingested—into the human body. Devices like the VeriChip, from Applied Digital Systems (ADSXE), already provide this functionality, but VeriChip implantation is a surgical procedure (albeit an outpatient one) involving a needle large enough to dose an elephant. SQUIP is said to be much smaller and easier to “install” due to the fact that it does not employ conventional microchip structure.

  “Sony is going consumer with quantum computing,” Mr. Dinglesnort explains. “Scientists have been researching for years the prospect of building a computer based not on the binary system, where a piece of information is either a one or a zero, but on a ‘qubit’ system, where a piece of information can be a one, a zero, or a sort of in-between state that collapses into a one or zero when it is observed closely.”

  The quantum computer is of interest to researchers because of its staggering data-processing capabilities, exponentially surpassing those of current CPUs. It has been discussed for projects ranging from large-scale materials fabrication to time travel. But Sony seems to have simpler plans.

  “What they have said is, ‘Let’s not worry about all the great things quantum computers can do. Let’s just make a simple one and take advantage of the fact that it can be tiny, and try to manufacture a sort of ingestible Palm Pilot,’” Mr. Dinglesnort says. Consumer models are a long way off. But the prospect of SQUIP has futurists drooling and investors lining up and…

  I hit CONTROL N on my computer, open a new window for porn, and jerk off as I read. It seems that every site has the same information about the squip (or SQUIP; capitalization doesn’t matter): Sony is working on it, but nobody knows what it is. It involves tiny computers that you eat. It’s not out and won’t be for a while. That means bootleggers must have escaped Japan with it and brought it to central New Jersey, where it took root among scotch-drinking high school kids. That isn’t so far-fetched.

  Unfortunately, there’s nowhere I can buy a squip. There are no sites that offer it with a little shopping cart next to it. There’s no way to determine if $600 is a fair price for one. And there’s no guarantee that it’s safe and won’t take over my brain and turn me into a…I dunno, something worse than I am now, there has to be something, a mongoloid or—

  “Jeremy!” Mom calls from the kitchen. “Phone!”

  I pick up, knowing it’s Michael before my spittle hits the receiver. “Hi.”

  “Are you feeling okay?!” Mom calls again. “It’s one o’clock!”

  “I’m on the phone!”

  “Can you talk?” Michael asks, testing.

  “Yeah.”

  “How was it?”

  “Dance was really weird,” I say. “Christine, whatever, uh…do you remember—” I stop.

  “Remember what?”

  “No. Forget it.” I think about things for a second. I don’t want to give Michael crucial information that’ll help him get his hands on a squip. He does all right with the Asian girls at Middle Borough; he ends up talking to ones you never noticed—but are actually pretty hot—and he dated one last year for more than a week. He doesn’t need a mechanical advantage the way I do. Let him find out on his own.

  “Um…okay. So what are you doing?”

  I’m masturbating still, watching a video, but it’s not like I’m masturbating to Michael. I’m multitasking masturbating. “Checking the Web for some stuff,” I say.

  “Cool. What are you up to the rest of today?”

  “I want to go down to the bowling alley in New Brunswick, ask around for some people, you know?”

  “‘Some people?’”

  “Yeah,” I chuckle. “I’ve got this project in mind. You wanna go?”

  “No.”

  “What are you doing today?”

  “Chilling out, listening to music.”

  “Michael, you do that every weekend.”

  “Yeah…” He stews a while. I click the mouse.

  “How about you do something different? Come with me down to the bowl
ing alley. It’ll be fun.”

  “Okay, see—” Michael has a lot of protests and it takes a while to convince him, but I do. Once we hang up, I finish with the porn and my garbage can and head out of the house and swing into Michael’s waiting car. I guess I have more influence on my friend than I thought. I look at his profile as we drive off: he should’ve been at the dance. Somebody would have dug him. If he had a squip, I’m sure, it wouldn’t just let him sit and listen to Weezer all the time. He might need one after I get mine.

  It’s 4 P.M. by the time we get to the B. Bowl-Town bowling alley; the place is clogged with matted, shrill children sending balls down lanes whose gutters have been filled with blue balloons to prevent failure. Even with these giant bowling prophylactics, kids mess up, aiming for the space between pins 7 and 10 and the unprotected back gutter or ricocheting their balls slowly off the barriers until they kiss the pins for zero points. The mothers, each of whom seems to be helming her own six-year-old birthday party, must then shelter and comfort the youngsters and explain that bowling is just a game and it doesn’t matter if Timmy Banana has thirty-seven points when you have twelve.

  I stand by the candy machine, one foot pressed against the bowling-alley off-white wall. I like this stance; now that I found it at the dance I’m sticking with it. I keep a lookout for Rich or, even better, the importer from Ghana who had the squips in the first place. Michael is on the other side of the vending machine.

  A textbook youth approaches us. The silver chain connecting his nose and ear shadows a chain of itchy-looking lumps in the same place.

  “Heard of the ‘squip’?” I whisper.

  The kid takes a quick look at me, makes a rodent face of confusion, and gets a bag of Cheez-Its.

  “Jeremy, why are we here?” Michael leans over. “Who are you waiting for?”

  “I’m not waiting for anybody. I’m looking for somebody.”