INTO IT (a novel) Chapter 5: John
Adam and I were strangers and then we weren’t. We got grouped from several grades for being troubled. That means got caught.
My best guess is Adam and I met in that mobile building that was anchored in the high school parking lot, its sheet metal walls hot to the touch at the start of our special ninth grade.
My mom told me the trailer class was an experimental school for people like me, people not like the other kids. I was interesting.
It’s true that I was special, but in a downward direction. Still, I would find a friend.
We took my laptop home because Adam wanted me to take as test on HowInsane. I answered a long list of questions on my life and emotions and circled, “Worst Pain Imaginable.”
I used one of my mom’s hidden credit cards to order a bottle from India. The pills went to Adam’s house, his mother always at the computer, nodding out. I got forty milligrams of weird-smelling, Zip-Lock baggied pills per day.
They brought on the jeebs. I don’t know what a doctor would call it, Adam called it the jeebs. You need to have a word for the things that possess you. My fear of people’s stares came from my insides, or it infected me from the outside, like a virus, or swallowed in a pill. Anyone could be a ghost, or they could call me one. Anyone could check out the light in the attic, spy on whoever was home. The jeebs take a look at the end of everything. The hell of going to Lincoln High, my last memory. I re-enacted my death scenes on my bed, I saw my own death from multiple angles, like inside the movie. I spun around and I collapsed again and again, a looping clip. I saw myself lying dead on my back on a slab of concrete. I saw myself wearing glowing white clothes, walking out of a brilliant white light, free of the self-trashing thoughts that had been blasting over all the channels. I promised I would think only good thoughts. I would be perfect from now on.
If I did that right, if I maintained a perfection of thought, I would be the most important person in the world. I told Mrs. Blackerbee she should teach us stories about Jesus when he was a kid our own age.
She seemed annoyed, but she told me she’d think about it. After a week passed with my asking her every day if she’d thought about it yet, and her telling me no, not yet, I turned around in my first-row seat and told everyone that I was Christ and I was taking over the class.
I walked to the front of the room. It was all eyes on me. I spoke about my life as fourteen-year-old Jesus learning to want to fuck someone, because God was more hands-off at that point. I told the sheeple that they didn’t have to feel guilty about reading my mind, because I was special.
Mrs. Blackerbee took my wrist.
I said it was okay. Then I understood that she was shaking me. My teeth made a chattering sound.
The next day, Blackerbee was gone. That disposable trailer in the baking parking lot in the back lot of Lincoln Junior High got the new Mr. Mathis, a sub.
Mrs. Blackerbee’s breakdown was nothing compared to this. Beige partitions divided the classroom into cubicle walls that rose high enough to keep us from seeing each other. But they could see in. Adam’s behaviorist theory went that if we could only see the new Mr. Mathis, not each other, there would be no trouble.
The new Mr. Mathis knew how often I imagined him lying in a coffin at his flowery funeral. Every time I heard someone whisper in defiance of the new Mr. Mathis’s ban of talk, I knew they were saying something sick about me. Fat Adam knew that I’d gone to a hospital, instead of the fake family trip.
One morning, a shit smell wafted around the classroom’s single, closed window, but I knew the stench was coming from me. It was in my clothes, it was in my mouth, it was coming up from deep within me to the exhaust of my throat. I had to wash everything.
I’m sick, I said.
Go ahead, the new Mr. Mathis said.
I fled for the school building. A regular ninth grader came into the bathroom, Tyler Max, stunned, frightened, and like, amoral, just a body. In my underwear, I stood by the sinks, soaking the shit smell out of my clothes.
Instant home pass. Tyler had reported me.
My mother didn’t buy the Mathis story. She drove me home in a speeding rage, her jolts and swipes at the steering wheel, her yelps of complaint about being torn from her job doing the books for Dwayne’s in the middle of the season. I was being lazy. I had faked something. I wanted to get sent home and waste the rest of my day online.
It came out that the custodians had dug up a sewage system in the school’s back field that day. Score another one for reality.
Another day, Mr. Mathis arranged his laptop to project sentences onto the whiteboard. The words appeared and disappeared faster and faster, to test our reading agility. As the video accelerated, I became restless for the next words. I read them aloud. I read faster than the words appeared. I moved ahead of the words, they were my own words, my sentences. I shouted because it was the most exciting thing to do, what I wanted. Anyone could tell I was getting better.
But I saw only expressions set for low-level access, minimal betrayal of feeling. The new Mr. Mathis turned off the projector, but I kept going. He was compulsively making no sense, he later told my mom. The word “compulsively” sounded important to what he was saying. We sat in the new Mr. Mathis’s office in a nook at the rear of the trailer. My mom subtly cried. She promised the new Mr. Mathis that I would change.
But I felt fine. When I got a good jeeb going, my mind and body felt so close that my blood fizzed like clean, sparkling water.