It's Kind of a Funny Story

“Hold on.” Noelle lifts her butt off the bed and inserts her hands, flat, palms-down, below herself. Now she’s got no hands. She wasn’t doing anything with them anyway, but it’s weird.

“Keep going,” she says.

“Okay,” I slide my fingers, still outside her bra, around her nipple. I decide to try something. I get the nipple right between the knuckles on my index and middle finger, and I squeeze.

You can’t get much of a squeeze on through a bra, but the noises are immediate.

“Unhh.”

“Um?” I look up.

“Mmmmmmn.”

Oh, this is awesome.

“Shh,” I whisper. “Smitty will come.”

“How much time do we have?” she asks.

“I don’t know. A little while.”

“You’re going to call me, right? When you’re out? And we’re going to hang out?”

“I want to go out with you,” I say. “I really do.”

“That’s what I mean. We will.” She smiles. “Where will I tell people I met you?”

“In the psych hospital. Then they won’t ask any questions.”

She giggles—yup, a real giggle. Now we’ve sort of lost the sexual nature of things. Can I get it back just by squeezing? It’s worth a shot.

“Mmmmmm.”

All right, cool, only now there’s one more voice that wants me to do one more thing. It’s the same voice that got me hooking up with Nia; it’s the voice of the lower half of me, but it feels truer now, and it knows it can’t get away with everything it wants to do, but it insists that we try something.

We need to test out that claim of Aaron’s.

My hand moves down Noelle’s body, down the seam of the frilly white shirt to the skirt, which has a slightly different grain to the fabric. I move down to its end, by her knees, shocked that I don’t get any resistance or hesitancy or punches in the face. I roll the skirt up—I’m really in danger of putting a hole through this bed at this point—and there I find underwear. Not underwear. Panties. Real panties!

Holy crap, I’m actually going to figure this out!

“Wow!”

Noelle gasps.

“It is like the inside of a cheek!”

“What?”

Noelle pushes me off her. The distended seam of the shirt is repositioned; the panties are jerked back in place; the skirt is down and the girl is up at the head of the bed, staring at me.

“What did you say about my cheeks?!”

“No, no, shhhhh,” I tell her. “Not your cheeks, um . . . your . . . your other cheeks.”

“My butt cheeks?” She pulls her hair over her real cheeks, holding it there, eyes wide and angry in the moonlight.

“No,” I whisper. Then sigh. “Let me explain. Do you want me to explain?”

“Yes!”

“All right, but this is like privileged boy information. I’m only telling you because we’re going to be hanging out when we get out of here.”

“Maybe we’re not even. What did you say about my cheeks?”

“No, listen, it doesn’t have anything to do with your cheeks and your cuts, all right?”

“What does it have to do with?”

I tell her.

When I’m done, there’s a terrible pregnant pause, a pause that could hold all the hatred and yelling and screaming in the world as well as the possibility of me getting discovered as having another girl in my room (how did I get two? Am I a “player”?) and having to stay here for another week, never talking to Noelle again, going back to the Cycling, to being unable to eat, to move, to wake up, ending up like Muqtada. Single moments contain the potential for complete failure, always. But they also contain potential for a pretty girl to say—

“That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

—and to put her own finger in her mouth to test it out.

I hug her.

“What?” she asks, mouth clogged. “I don’t get it. It doesn’t feel the same at all.”

I pull back. “You’re so cool.” I look at her. “How did you get so cool?”

“Please,” she says. “We should go. The movie’s almost over.”

I hug her one more time and pull her down to the bed. And in my mind, I rise up from the bed and look down on us, and look down at everybody else in this hospital who might have the good fortune of holding a pretty girl right now, and then at the entire Brooklyn block, and then the neighborhood, and then Brooklyn, and then New York City, and then the whole Tri-State Area, and then this little corner of America—with laser eyes I can see into every house—and then the whole country and the hemisphere and now the whole stupid world, everyone in every bed, couch, futon, chair, hammock, love seat, and tent, everyone kissing or touching each other . . . and I know that I’m the happiest of all of them.

fifty

Mom and Dad are dressed up to bring me out; I’m wearing what I wore all the time in here—some khaki pants and my tie-dyed T-shirt and my dressy shoes, my Rockports, the ones that people complimented me on every so often, that made me feel like a professional patient. Mom never brought a change of clothes.