Teen Angst? Naaah ...

Be More Chill

It's Kind of a Funny Story

Thanks to my editors, in reverse chronological order: Elizabeth Verdick, Wendy Lestina, Adam Moss, Andrey Slivka, John Strausbaugh, Sam Sifton, and Mom.

Thanks to Judy Galbraith for telling me to do this book, and then dealing with me as I did it.

Thanks to everybody who shows up in the essays, even if we've since drifted or we no longer speak.

I
started writing this book because of my backpack. I took a bright teal, super-dorky backpack to high school, a backpack my mother had ordered years earlier from L.L. Bean. It worked so great throughout junior high that I figured it had a year or two left in it.

My backpack got some looks. People would stare at it, wondering, “What kind of idiot wears an accessory like that?” Then they would see me. “Oh.”

One day, I was going down one of my high school's escalators.
^*
I was tired. I took off my backpack and put it next to me on an escalator step. For whatever reason, the backpack flipped over and started rolling down the escalator like a Slinky.

Many steps below stood a girl. She had one hand to her face, as if she were on a cell phone, but she had no actual cell phone. We were the only people on the escalator. The backpack kept tumbling (I watched it sort of helplessly) and whapped her in the back of the calves.

The girl stopped talking on her fake cell phone
and turned to look at me. She had to take that look: I could've been a cute guy who'd flung my backpack at her to break the ice. She sized me up, cocked her head, and kicked my backpack as hard as she could the rest of the way down the escalator.

When I reached the bottom, I picked up my backpack and thought about the incident for the rest of the day. On the subway ride home, I pulled out a wrinkled piece of paper and wrote about the cellphone girl and my stupid bag. I wrote angrily; I used a lot of curses. Afterward, I felt a lot better, and when I read my words the next day, I thought they were pretty good.

So I went from writing profanity-ridden rants to slightly less profanity-ridden essays. I was able to get some of them published in a local newspaper,
New York Press
. Soon I was writing on a regular basis, taking my boring, scary, embarrassing high school moments and turning them into something people could read about. It was a real comfort—if something weird or horrible happened to me, I'd write about it, and then somehow I'd be in control. A little.

A few years later, I got a piece published in
The New York Times Magazine
. That got me in touch with Free Spirit Publishing, who gave me this book contract, which I signed, and now somehow I'm here, writing this introduction after polishing most of what
I wrote in high school and organizing it chronologically.

I threw out that backpack when I was a junior and replaced it with a bag from the army surplus store.

I never did learn the name of the girl.

Y
esterday, on a strange, sudden urge, I hooked up my old Nintendo.
^*
Not the Super NES. The original, spawn-of-the-eighties, from-Japan-with-love, eight-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. It had been lying in a closet for years and was dusty and tough to get working. But when I plugged it in and hit that power button, I was back to being nine years old on the day we bought it.

We went on a Saturday morning after Christmas—my parents always waited for the January sales. Around 8:00
A.M.
, Dad loaded my six-year-old brother Daniel and me into our van. Our family never had a car, always a van, with two backseats so Daniel and I could space out and not kill each other.

Dad was convinced that Nintendos would be cheaper in New Jersey. He thought everything was cheaper and better in New Jersey, probably because he was born there, in Trenton, which he called “God's Country.” We drove to Child World, one of those industrial-sized Toys 'R' Us look-alikes—silent
and frigid as a hospital. We headed to the electronics aisle, pulled a Nintendo off the shelf, paid the pimply cashier one hundred dollars (exactly what we would have paid in Manhattan), and drove back to Brooklyn.
^*

We triumphantly stomped through the front door, shaking snow off our boots. Mom was in the kitchen having breakfast with my sister, Nora. Nora was almost three. She sat on Mom's lap, drank juice from a cup, and scribbled all over
The New York Times
while Mom did the crossword puzzle. Mom loves the
Times
crossword puzzles, especially the ones on Saturday, which are always hardest.
^**
Whenever she finishes one, she writes, “100% Yea Mom” in the margins. It's her thing.

“Daddy's home!” Nora said, jumping out of Mom's lap and hugging Dad's legs. “What is it?” she asked, eagerly looking at the Nintendo box. I held it over my head so she couldn't touch it.

“Jim?” Mom asked from the kitchen, not looking up from her crossword. “You might know this. Ah, Russian river …”

“Ob? Volga?”

“Volga looks good.” Mom penciled in the word. (Later on, when she got even better at crosswords, she'd do them in pen.) “It might not be right, though … we'll see. Nora, come back here and finish your juice!”

But now Nora was intrigued. She wanted to know what was in that shiny box. I carried the Nintendo to the living room, sat on the floor, and ravenously tore off all the packaging. Daniel helped. Nora tried to help, but we pushed her away, so she sat on the couch with her stuffed animals.
^*

Even before she was two, my sister had invented an entire universe of stuffed animals. There were dozens—penguins, dolphins, rabbits—and they all had names that ended in
ee:
Pinky, Yellowy, Mazie, Popsy. They sat on the couch in silent witness as Dad came in, took off his shoes, and announced that he would now assemble the Nintendo.

This required his full concentration, so he told Daniel and me to go play. Hopeful and extremely obedient, for once, we sat on the couch with Nora as Dad connected wires. Within ten minutes, he had the thing working. Dad was a wizard back then.

“I got first game!” Daniel and I yelled simultaneously.
I got it, of course. I was the oldest, and the oldest brothers get everything—that's why we're racked with guilt. For half an hour, Daniel watched, and then he started crying, which prompted a visit from Mom.

“What's this machine for? To make you cry?!”

“No, Mom,” I moaned.

Daniel shrieked, “Mom, Ned won't let me play! He won't even let me have
one game!
”

“My goodness, Jim,
how
could you buy this? It's like having another TV!” Mom threw up her hands.

“Well, Emma,” Dad said from his chair, “it keeps them quiet. They'll sit and gape at it all day.”

Now Daniel was playing. That made me mad. I grabbed the controller; he grabbed it back. I hit him and accidentally toppled the Nintendo. It slid behind the TV.

“
Aaa!
Dad! Get it out!
Get it out!
” I screamed. “What if it's broken?” I sobbed.

Dad pulled out the Nintendo and hit the switch. It worked.

“Don't ever do that again,” I told Daniel.

“Don't you
ever
tell your brother what to do!” Mom roared from the kitchen.

Nora scampered off the couch. “My stuffed animals don't like fighting, and they're having a
tea
party!
” She picked up Pinky, Whitey, Posey, and whoever and ran to her room.

“Okay,
shhh
,” Dad said to me, putting his hand on my shoulder. “Let's not fight over the Nintendo. We don't need to make Mom mad, and we don't need to scare Nora, do we? Go on, just gape at that screen and be happy.”

So I did. For the next five years.

• • •

I first witnessed a Nintendo upstairs at my neighbor Todd's apartment. Todd, a Cool Kid, was a couple of years older than me. He always got the good toys first. I was instantly awestruck by his Nintendo; like television, it had the power to make you
happy
. Todd could plunk down in front of it anytime, play for a few hours, and be giddy when he stopped. He told me, “Nintendo's even better than TV, 'cause you can win.”

Todd was right. Nobody wins at television. If you waste your life watching it, you'll end up on a nursing home couch, glued to a talk show, wondering, “What's it all worth?” But if you waste your life playing video games, you can stand up at the end and yell, “Yes! 500,000 points in Tetris!”
^*
Video games give you purpose.

And I was a smart, purposeful kid. When adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, “A cartographer or a civil engineer.” Those professions were specific enough to sound smart but vague enough to conceal my real career goal: playing video games.