INTO IT (a novel) Chapter 4: Adam

“Here’s how you walk down the hall so no one fucks with you,” I say.

John and I are at the mall, looking at the video games and the books and the breasts behind the girls’ T-shirts.

“No, I feel that there’s …” he says, trying to get it out.

We are eating gyros at the food court. John describes people staring at him. The experience of it.

“Through me,” he says. “Into my head, my mind.”

“This is something that you know,” I say.

“I know it, so I believe it.”

“It sounds so weird,” I say. “But keep going.”

I think it’s nearly normal, this feeling of being stared at, given our circumstances. Outside the circles, you look bigger and meaner. John’s generally freakish look, my tremendous bulk—paranoia famously follows isolation. I say none of this to John. He needs me to be other ways.

“I walk down the halls, I feel like anyone can reach in and just pull shit out,” John says.

“It’s a simple trick that works,” I say. “Look at the tops of sheeples’ heads like they’re nothing. Pretend they’re nothing and look at their hairlines. Just at their hairlines. Do not make eye contact. Eye contact is the killer. Look at the tops of their heads. Never in their eyes. And then put one in.”

I’m the one who taught John to walk down the halls in that zoned-out way that says that you’re into it. I taught him how to look at people like they’re already ghosts.

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