It's Kind of a Funny Story

“I told you.” She drops almost to a whisper. “I broke up with him.”

“You broke up with him?” I want it clarified.

“It was mutual. Is that important?”

“Permanently broke up?”

“Looks like it.”

“Don’t you think it’s a little soon for you to be coming in here and, like, touching me?”

She shakes her head and purses her lower lip.

“I’ve been thinking about you since we talked on the phone Friday night. And now I know you so much better. You’ve told me all this stuff about you and you’re really . . . I don’t know . . . you’re mature. You’re not like all these other people with their stupid little problems. You’re like, really screwed up.” She giggles. “In the good way. The way that gives experience.”

“Huh.” I’m not sure what to say. No, wait, I know what to say: Go away, leave, I don’t need you; I finished with you on the phone before; I met a girl here who’s cooler and smarter; but when you’ve got a really gorgeous girl in front of you and she’s biting her lip and talking low and smiling—and you’re hard—what are you going to do?

“Huh . . . uh . . . well. . .” I’m back to stuttering. Maybe it was Nia that made me stutter. I’m sweating too.

“Do you want to show me your room?” she asks.

That’s a bad idea. It’s a bad idea just as much as it’s a bad idea to skip meals or stay awake in bed in the morning or stop taking your Zoloft, but there’s no hope for me now. I cede control to my lower half, which is actually pointing toward my room, and lead Nia to it.

forty

Muqtada isn’t in the room. I can’t believe it—it’s like the first time since I’ve been here. I look at his rumpled sheets and try to make out a human form, but there isn’t enough bulk to account for him. I peek in the bathroom—nothing.

“You have a roommate?” Nia asks.

“Yeah, uh, he’s usually here . . .”

“Ewwww . . .” She waves in front of her nose. “Something smells.”

“The roommate’s Egyptian; I don’t think he wears deodorant.”

“Me either.”

I make like I’m cleaning up my stuff near my bed, but really I’m just taking my brain maps and flipping them over.

“You don’t get a TV?”

“No.”

“Do you read in here?”

“I like to read out in the hall with other people. My sister gave me a Star magazine, but the nurses took it away to read themselves.”

She walks toward me, looking up idly glib and innocent. “Do you get lonely here?”

“Actually, no,” I tell her. I move hair that is stuck to my forehead. I’m really sweating now. “It’s very social here. I made friends.”

“Who?”

“That lady you were talking to outside.”

“Her? She’s so rude. She totally horned in on our conversation.”

“She thinks someone sprayed insecticide in her apartment, Nia. She gets paranoid.”

“Really? That’s crazy. That’s really crazy.”

“I dunno. She might be right.” Nia is a few feet away from me now. Her shoulders are tilted up at me. I could pick her up and throw her on my unmade bed just like Aaron has done for the past two years. These words we’re saying are just a front. “She’s a college professor. There might be something to it.”

“Craig . . .” She’s right in front of me now. “Do you remember when you called me”—she touches my forehead—“oh, you’re sweating!”

“Yeah, I do that. When I get nervous.”

“Are you okay? You’re really sweating.”

“I’m all right.” I wipe it away.

“Seriously, Craig, that is gross.” She scowls, then gets back to where she was. “When you called me, you remember how you asked what I would do if you came over and grabbed me and kissed me?”

“Yeah.” My stomach is tight. The man is down there pulling on the rope. I thought I had him beat. I’d been eating so well.

“I’d let you,” she says. “You know I would.”

Now she’s got her glossy, sparkly lips turned up at me, and I feel this amazing dichotomy going on. It’s almost like before I came in here, when I was in my mom’s bed, when my brain wanted to die but my heart wanted to live. Now, quite literally, everything from my stomach up wants to run to the bathroom, to throw up, to talk to Armelio or Bobby or Smitty, to kick Nia out, to get ready for my second date with Noelle. But the bottom half has been denied too long. It’s been ready for this for two years, and it knows what it wants. It says that the real cause of all my problems is that I haven’t been satisfying it.

And these aren’t any lips, either, that I’m presented with to rectify my lack of play. These are lips that I’ve had access to for years in my mind. I’ve done terrible, horrible things to these lips in the privacy of my bathroom. So screw it. You’ve gotta try sometime.

I lean down and grab Nia and push her back on Muqtada’s bed.