Be More Chill

I’ll feel like…” Like I do all the time, like I feel whenever I can’t dial a phone number or dance at a dance or hold a hand right. Like I’m used to feeling. “Like shit.”

Ho pippity pum pum!” Dad says, shaking his penis—
“Jesus, what is wrong with you people?!”
“Jeremy?”
“Can you finish off in the second bathroom? Please?!” I plant my hands to either side of the sink and close my eyes.
“Jeremy?” Mom asks, cracking the door. Then, hissing at Dad: “Put a towel on!”

Dad is completely naked, as usual before 10.00 a.m, except for his black socks. “Um, could I, um, get a little privacy in here?”
“Son, you’re catching me midstream,” Dad says.
“Yeah, I can hear that.”
“Don’t be embarrassed. Pretend we’re in the army. No other heads available. Ten-hut.”
“Dad, you were never in the army.” I turn toward him, then regret it because his naked butt looks weird. It always looks like it’s pressed up against a sheet of glass.

My hair might be thick but it’s full of dandruff like a snowstorm. (Me and Michael used to have dandruff battles, actually, ruffling our heads violently in a sunbeam to see who had more glittering scalp waste.)

Mouth Breather, Waste of Sperm, Ingrate, Troll, Skank, Retard, Pus Head, Junkie, Foetal Alcohol Casualty, Yellow Teeth, Stinky, Preggers, Soon to be Featured on Worlds Scariest Police Chases, whack, whack, whack. I know them all so well.

Wherever Cool is, anyway, I missed it and now Im stuck observing these machinations of sex and status and dancing and parties and people sucking at each other under bleacher seating like some kind of freak, when Im not the freak. Rich is the freak. Clearly. When I grow up, that had better be understood and I had better be compensated or Im going to shoot myself in the head.

Tonight.

Oh.

Tonight, and then you should flush me. You know Vanilla Coke?

Yeah.

It’s the failsafe. If you dr

more, all I get is a little bit of the ceiling and the crotches, shrouded in pants, of the boys above me. I do hear lots, though: mostly Jake grunting, which sounds like the grunting he does with his football buddies, and little whimpery noises from Katrina, like the ones Brooke made when I kissed her, the ones that mean “keep going”, and then the occasionally responsive “whoa” from Jake. There’s also the constant murmur of the boys, making sure that everybody shuts up so Katrina doesn’t hear them and they can all make their witty comments. And there’s the underpinning bass rumble of rap.

“What the ****?” Stephanie screeches at me, whirling around with stringy spit on her chin. “What are you doing here? Who are you?! Get out!”

“I’m in trouble, right? I have to hide,” I explain quickly, putting my finger to my lips. I take one long look at her: she’s drunk and teary-eyed and streaked with barf, but she’s still one of the top three girls in school. She turns back to the toilet; I crawl under the bathroom sink and stuff myself next to the cold, curved pipe, which sweats clean-smelling water droplets. I shut the cabinet door with a clawed finger. I hear the bathroom door open.

“Yes! Get to it like a good boy. And behave yourself!” Aunt Linda shakes her pole at me—I think it used to be part of an outdoor clothes-hangin