Me Being Me Is Exactly as Insane as You Being You (31 page)

2
More Months That Have Passed

1.
 October

2.
 November, at least most of it

4
Regrettable Ways the Morning Greets Darren

1.
 His right leg is off the bed, with the attached foot fully touching the ground, something his right leg and foot have been doing in his sleep on and off for a couple of months now.

2.
 He has an erection, which he has been holding unconsciously, which wouldn't be so bad, except:

3.
 Sonny is sniffing it. Not licking it, just sniffing it, but still. Not to mention (and worst of all):

4.
 His dad's head is peeking through the door, a head that is saying, “Sonny, stop that, let him sleep!”

5
Physical Changes Darren Has Undergone since the End of September

1.
 Crept over five feet seven and a half inches

2.
 Crept below 180 pounds

3.
 Each foot now requires a size eleven

4.
 Has grown, depending on the quality of the lighting, between three and four new chest hairs, bringing the grand total to four or five

5.
 Could reasonably justify shaving his mustache region once a month or so

10
Lousy Aspects of Having Your Birthday on November 29, Both in General and Especially This Year and Last

1.
 It stinks having your birthday around the time of another holiday, even if Thanksgiving is a pretty good holiday in general. Because the holiday sort of sucks the attention and excitement away from your birthday. Sure, his parents would have a couple of days off to make all the arrangements for his party, but what good is that if half the kids you invited are going to be out of town? Plus, it wasn't that the laser tag party for his eleventh birthday was bad, it was that you could just tell that people were pretty distracted and kind of tired, since everyone had been going to bed super late the past couple of nights and had eaten about four hundred pounds of food over the previous seventy-two hours.

So then some years they would just push his party back a week or so to get it far away from Thanksgiving, but then it's not his birthday anymore. And don't even get Darren started on what happens at school, where all the stupid Thanksgiving excitement and assemblies also stand in the way of him getting the treatment other students get on their birthday. Too bad his birthday isn't in mid-February like Nate's.

2.
 And Nate is pretty likely to make Darren's sixteenth weird somehow. Overall it maybe hasn't been so great having him back home. He's high all the time, delivers pizza for La Luna's (excellent pizza, but still), and keeps finding these kind of gross and stupid girls to go out with and even sometimes bring home. Darren's pretty sure he has sex with most of them and then doesn't see them much after that.

Nate still fights with their mom a lot, mostly because she won't stop asking him to just please enroll at Oakton Community College and take a class or two. Nate's still extremely nice to Darren most of the time, but for some reasons it seems like he's chosen Darren as the person he's going to impart all sorts of supposed wisdom to, wisdom that doesn't seem much like wisdom to Darren.

So Darren just has this feeling that Nate is going to do something in honor of Darren's birthday, something that Nate will think is deep and meaningful and even revelatory (or at least undeniably awesome), but won't really be any of those things, but is going to require Darren to pretend that it is.

3.
 This isn't his first birthday since his parents split up—that was last year—but at least last year his mom was in California, which she apologized for about ninety-four times but which Darren was sort of grateful for. Since she was in California, he could just pretend that was the reason only his dad was at the dinner, even though he knew it wasn't. Which made last year's birthday kind of lame too, but probably not as lame as this one will be.

4.
 But this year he's not so lucky, partially because he almost was. His mom was supposed to get back from San Jose on Wednesday night, but there was a big storm in Denver, where she had a layover, and her flight got canceled. So she decided to stay in California a couple more days, since apparently computer people work pretty much all the time, including over Thanksgiving weekend. Now she's only getting in this afternoon.

This has, of course, totally screwed up all the arrangements and agreements his parents took forever to work out, like where Darren will sleep and who he's having dinner with and when they'll do the hand-off, arrangements and agreements that ultimately required Darren's involvement, since it's his birthday they're talking about here, and so a few times they just asked him, “What would you prefer, honey?” which was both considerate and totally stupid, because what he'd prefer is for his parents to be together and what he wouldn't prefer (in addition to the divorce) is for them to make him choose between them in any way, which they both sort of acknowledged right before asking him, “What would you prefer, honey?” but still, they asked him anyway.

So now, he can barely even keep it straight: He'll have lunch with his mom and dinner with his dad (instead of the other way around), but it's not clear if and when a movie and/or bowling might happen (and he can't even remember agreeing to maybe going bowling; he has a feeling this was Nate's suggestion, who's been bowling a lot, too, who knows why) or how the hand-off is going to happen.

5.
 Actually that last part is untrue. The hand-off isn't technically going to be a hand-off. Because you don't hand yourself off. Today is Darren's sixteenth birthday, after all. And in addition to all the other complicated things planned today, he and his dad are going down to the good old DMV right after breakfast to take his driving test. That's right, Darren gets to take a test on his birthday.

And everyone just assumes he's excited beyond belief about this. But he's not. He's more scared than excited. Scared and worried. Scared and worried and annoyed. Because he's got enough stuff on his plate, in terms of his messed-up family and girl issues and school just kind of sucking hard, so why has the world decided that the additional responsibility of operating a massive, expensive, complicated machine is something he should be looking forward to? The truth is, he'd be very happy if they bought him a really nice bike for his sixteenth birthday.

6.
 And sixteen in general is just way more pressure than Darren feels like dealing with right now. Because this birthday is definitely the most important birthday between thirteen and eighteen, whatever the hell that means. But Darren can just feel that he's not up to (or is not even capable of) enjoying himself enough today to meet the expectations of the sixteenth birthday as some kind of tradition, again, whatever the hell that means. In other words, he just feels that it's going to be a lousy birthday, and would be even if it was only his fifteenth or seventeenth. The fact that it's his sixteenth will only make it worse.

7.
 Not to mention, some years his birthday would be on the day right after Thanksgiving, which his mom and dad would for some reason act like is the greatest thing ever, since, they'd say, what can you be more thankful for than having such a wonderful son? But he wouldn't be thankful at all, because the rest of the world doesn't care one bit that it's your birthday, meaning basically no restaurants are open that day, except the ones offering Thanksgiving feasts, meaning you have to have dinner at home on your birthday, which maybe wouldn't be so bad if Darren wasn't a vegetarian, because it's not like everyone else is going to agree to give up turkey in his honor, which, even when he did eat meat he thought tasted horrible.

8.
 Darren is going to try really hard to not eat too much today, because even though his body has sort of stretched itself over the last few months, he still feels like an oaf most of the time. But there's no question that now that he spent the night at his dad's instead of his mom's, Ray is going to show up and make some insanely delicious breakfast for him. Which isn't the end of the world, obviously, but his dad also asked Darren the night before if (now that he'd be waking up at his dad's) it would be okay with Darren if Ray could come by early to honor Darren's birthday the way they do in Ray's family, which means singing to you and giving you your presents first thing in the morning while you're still in bed.

Darren doesn't mind the idea of getting presents first thing (he's less psyched about being sung to while still in bed), but still, does his lousy sixteenth birthday really have to start with his dad's now totally official boyfriend (who Darren somehow actually likes) singing to him first thing in the morning, all because Darren's parents got divorced and his dad is homosexual and met Ray and then it snowed ten inches in Denver?

9.
 Plus last year Nate came home for Thanksgiving, which was okay in general, only at dinner he started talking about colonialism and Native Americans and ethnic cleansing and how, in his words, “Thanksgiving is pretty much total bullshit when you stop and think about it.”

Their mom (it was just the three of them; they went to their dad's on Friday morning) listened to why he thought Thanksgiving was bullshit, and then she said, “Well, that may all be true, but I think we still have plenty of reasons to be thankful.”

Only Nate just said, “Yeah, I guess, like living in a society where it's okay not to give a shit about genocide.” And so then they had a big fight that Darren heard most of from the bathroom. It wasn't actually his birthday that day, but whatever, now he likes Thanksgiving even less, though he's not really sure if he should. Either way, he's pretty sure it's now going to make his birthday even lamer.

10.
 And the truth is none of this would matter so much if Zoey lived here and he knew she was his girlfriend. But she doesn't and he has no idea if she is. She's something, at least he hopes she is. Well, at least they're in touch, even if it is in their weird way. Things would be way simpler if it were all or nothing with her. Instead it's something in between. Way closer to nothing than all, but enough of something to be something.

Not to mention Rachel, his other long-distance love interest. They at least communicate with actual words, but is this even a good thing? Because Rachel is somehow okay with anything and everything, including him being honest with her about Zoey and continually postponing his visit to Minneapolis.

Maybe having the right girlfriend would make his life better or maybe it wouldn't. But he can't know that until he has the right girlfriend. Which he for some reason thinks Zoey would be and for some reason thinks Rachel isn't. But maybe he's wrong. Wrong about Zoey being right and wrong about Rachel being not right. Or, even worse, wrong about the whole right-girlfriend theory in general.

Whatever the case, there's no way in the world he's going to resolve any of this today, meaning the supposedly new stage of his life his sixteenth birthday is supposed to somehow usher in isn't really going to be a new stage at all. It's just going to be more of the pointless suckiness and confusion that seemed to jam-pack the year that came to an end yesterday at midnight.

9
Dates of Communications between Darren and People Who Have Been or Still Are in the General Vicinity of Belén, New Mexico

1.
 SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 27

Say what you will about Darren, but don't think he feels anything but right at home in the land of Google. Because the second Rachel left their house Saturday afternoon (turned out her parents weren't so crazy about the stay-at-some-boy's-house backup plan) Darren was knee-deep in the search engine. He started with “Belén New Mexico boarding school,” and it took him a while, but eventually he found it: Savilleta Ranch Academy, “a therapeutic boarding school for troubled teenagers,” which looked to be about nine miles from Belén.

Darren spent two straight hours reading basically every last word on their website. The overview, the clinical program, the academic stuff, et cetera. He even read about a dozen of these very long and pretty strange “letters” one of the therapists writes to parents and alumni on a majorly regular basis. Sample sentence: “The courage required to be weak, to be vulnerable, this is what we asked of them yesterday.”

Of course the site said absolutely nothing specific (or even vague) about any of the kids there, but that doesn't mean Darren was left without potential material for filling in his admittedly still fairly sketchy picture of Zoey. Drinking, drugs, addiction, mental illness, crime, suicide attempts, the list was long and there wasn't a single place to hide inside it. As Darren reluctantly put the list together and asked himself just how many of them fit Zoey, he couldn't quite convince himself the details didn't matter. Even worse, he couldn't help but notice this part of him saying, “Dude, turn off the computer and forget the whole damn thing already. And yes, that means Zoey, too.”

But Darren didn't. Or couldn't. Or just wouldn't. Because apparently there was some feeling in him for her that was bigger and/or prior to the contents of her disastrous list. Which was either a really good sign or a really bad one. Regardless, he started another search, which was way more complicated and desperate than the first, but he eventually struck gold with “spent challenging years Savilleta Ranch Academy.” There it was, a link to a blog belonging to some guy named Ben Zwiren. His blog's called
The Other Side
and showed a picture of Ben, who looked kind of scraggily and high and/or wise. More important, it included a few essays by Ben, one of which mentioned that he “spent two challenging years at Savilleta Ranch Academy.” Two years that ended in June.