It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini

just for having it and nobody had vintage like him.
    Inexplicably, someone came in a Batman mask. His name was Race.
    A short, pugnacious, mustached kid named Ronny came with a backpack full of pot and set up shop in the living room.
    A girl with hemp bracelets in different subtle shades proclaimed that we had to listen to Sublime’s 40oz to Freedom, and when Aaron refused to put it on, she started gyrating and put what she claimed was a Devil curse on him, saying, “Diablo Tantunka” and pointing her fingers in mock horns: “Fffffffft! Fffffffft!”
    I smoked more pot. The party was like a movie— it should have been a movie. It was the best movie I’d ever seen—where else did you get shattering glasses, a kid trying to break-dance in the living room, a dictionary being thrown at a roach, a kid holding his head in the freezer and saying it could get you high, orange vomit spread out in a semicircle in the kitchen sink, people yelling out the windows that “school sucks,” rap music declaring “I want to drink beers and smoke some shit,” and one poor soul snorting a Pixie Stik, then hacking purple dust into the toilet… ? Nowhere.

nine
     
    Aaron and Nia talked on the couch. I took my thermos of scotch—just to have something in my hand; I didn’t open it—and watched how they moved, swaying toward and away from each other in increments that I doubt they even recognized. They stopped becoming people in my eyes; they morphed right into male and female sex organs on a collision course.
    “What’s going on, son?” Ronny asked. Ronny hadn’t gotten his first piece of jewelry yet; he was in like a larval state. “You enjoying yourself?”
    I was enjoying everything but Aaron and Nia. And the scotch. I wanted him to think I was enjoying the scotch, at least.
    “Do you like this stuff?” I asked, opening my thermos.
    “What is it?” He sniffed. “Yeah, dude, that’s hard core. You gotta sip it.”
    I put it to my lips. I didn’t even take any in, just let it filter against me and felt how hot it was. It was cutting, evil, and bitter-smelling—
    Ronny shoved the thermos at my mouth.
    “Sip it!”
    “Dude!” I backed off as scotch splashed on my shirt; it felt lighter, slicker, and warmer than water. “You’re such a dick!”
    “Pause!” He ran across the room and punched this kid Asen, told him he’d had sex with his mom, and threw a pillow at Aaron and Nia, who were now attached by the lips on the couch.
    I wasn’t that mad that it was happening. I was just mad that I’d missed how it happened. I hadn’t seen him lean in, or her; I wanted to know for the future, for some girl who wasn’t as desirable. But now at least I got a show; I got to see how Aaron moved his hands. He put his right hand on her face over and over, gently, while his left slid around her side and gripped the small of her back more firmly. His hands were playing good-cop-bad-cop.
    There was still some scotch in the thermos. I drank from it. The taste didn’t bother me since Ronny’s shove.
    “I didn’t know you drank, Craig!” a voice was like behind me. Julie, who always wore sweatpants that said Nice Try in an arc on her butt cheeks, clanked a beer against my thermos.
    “I don’t, really,” I was like.
    “I thought you’d be busy studying. I heard you got into the school. What are you going to do now?”
    “Go there.”
    “No, I mean with your time.”
    I shrugged. “I’ll work hard at school, get good grades, go to a good college, get a good job.”
    “It was crazy how much you studied. You always had those cards.”
    I looked at the scotch. My esophagus was scorched, but I took more.
    “Did you see Aaron and Nia making out? They’re so cute!”
    “They’re making out?” I was shocked.
    “Yeah, haven’t you seen?”
    “I saw them hooking up,” I explained, looking out the kitchen at them. “I didn’t think they were having sex.”
    “They’re not!”
    “I thought making out was having