Authors: Ned Vizzini
“Oooh, tha’s cool,” the driver says.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. You look like a l’il hooligan.”
Hooligan? Hooligan doesn’t sound particularly dangerous or interesting. We ride in silence the rest of the way. I plan the night’s events: if Christine is there with Jake, I’ll
pay a girl some of this money Mom gave me to distract Jake while I talk with Christine about how I feel about her (good plan). Then I’ll take off my mask and she’ll see who I am and
she’ll be like—
“We here,” the driver says. I pay him and step out.
The Elks Club Lodge has a snaking line in front of it nine trees long, comprised of kids dressed as pro wrestlers, kids dressed as members of Slipknot, kids dressed as Fidel Castro and Bill
Clinton with Phillies in their masked mouths, kids dressed as giant condoms and Viagra pills. The line surprises me. I step to the back with my mask down.
“What’s this for?” I ask the guy in front of me.
“Tickets, yo,” he says over his shoulder, making a lip-smacking noise. He’s dressed as some sort of small tree. “You need tickets for the dance.”
Oh crap, it’s Rich. His whole face is green, so I couldn’t tell at first. I’d better be quiet so he doesn’t figure out who I am and torment me. I keep the mask on and it
gets atrocious and spitty inside, but I think the anonymity is worth it. The line shuffles toward the door and I finally get in after giving money to a guy who looks like a walrus.
The Elks Club Lodge is perfect for the Halloween Dance; it looks like a Scooby-Doo mansion inside. Fake cobwebs hang out with real ones. Streams of orange tissue paper buddy up with actual mold
on the ceiling. In the music room, a small platform has been constructed on which a DJ dressed as a wizard distributes choice R&B.
“Ngukkk!”
someone yells as they fly by me swinging a sword. Samurai costume. The samurai stashes his weapon by a pipe and starts dancing as I make for the punch.
“Welcome to the dance,” Ms. Rayburn says, ladling out a cup that has a piece of pineapple floating in it. “Nice mask, hope we get to see who you are later, huh?” Ms.
Rayburn smiles, she’s dressed as a librarian/secretary and is exceedingly hot. Then I take a look at the dance floor and get a whole new definition of exceedingly hot.
Katrina, Stephanie, and Chloe are here! That accounts for the long line and characters like Rich—where the Hot Girls go, people follow. They’re in the center of the room, gyrating, a
mesmerizing Amazon bundle. Katrina is dressed as a French maid with the little skirt and feather duster, only her outfit is blue instead of black; Stephanie is a bondage Goth, which isn’t too
far away from her normal wear, just with a bigger collar; Chloe has on small orange cat ears and a tail like an impish tiger-girl. It’s Chloe I stare at most hungrily (sometime tonight
I’ve got to find pics on the Internet of girls with tails) as I slide up to a row of guys by the wooden Elks Club walls. They’re standing, doing exactly what I’m
doing—scoping the Hot Girls, bopping their heads in a range of millimeters to the R&B.
I stand at the end of the line, next to a kid named Eric who was probably too stoned to bother with a costume; he just sports his huge eyebrow, which I know is natural. Next to Eric is Rodney,
dressed as a postal worker with a chainsaw, and toward the end of the line is Mark Jackson from math—he’s the only one who’d come as Game Boy SP.
I pick my foot up and press the sole of my shoe flat against the wall. I should be as comfortable with my wallflower status as these guys are—the way they position their shoulders and
backs and hips is almost a dance of its own. I’m not there more than two minutes when Rich, in that strange tree costume, approaches.
“Hey,” he actually says to me.
I clench up inside my mask. What does he want? He stands with his back to the wall and keeps quiet, alternating sips of punch with sips from an old-timey hip flask stashed in one of his many
pockets.
“Want some?” he asks, shrugging his flask in my direction. What the hell is this? Does he not know who I am? I turn toward him in my mask and he smirks at it. I take his flask, slip
it under my chin and suck down a big swig. Then another.
“No way,” Rich says. “You’re like the alky ghost, dude.” I don’t know what’s in the flask, but it burns and cracks my throat as it goes down.
“Bleccch, jeez,” I gargle through my mouth hole.
“Scotch,” Rich says.
“Yecch.”
Rich looks down. “So it’s Jeremy Heere under that mask, right?”
“Yeah.” Uh-oh.
“Is it true what I heard, Jeremy? You keep sheets of paper and write down all the shit that happens to you, like a list?”
“Yeah,” I gulp. The Humiliation Sheets are out.
“Well,” Rich says. “I’m sure I’m on them a lot.” He looks at me with open eyes, with some kind of understanding and humanity. Then he turns back to the dance
floor. “So which one would you get with?” He gestures to the Hot Girls.
“Uh, Chloe,” I confide.
“Bad choice, man. You gotta go with Katrina. I mean, she looks just like Barbie. I’ve wanted to fuck Barbie since I was
born
—”
In the midst of this ridiculousness (Rich is drunk, I figure), I see Christine. Actually I see her head, shrouded by a Rapunzel-style red-and-gold princess hat, bobbing to the left of the Hot
Girl entanglement. As she moves into full view, I see that she’s dressed like a Persian prostitute/angel, with a gold halter top, glitter all over her belly, and puffy pink pants like Jasmine
in
Aladdin
(only Jasmine’s might not have been pink). The thing is, she has giant, golden wings affixed to her shoulders; they wreak havoc on her dancing. It’s such a mess, but
cute somehow; I picture her dressing up in her room and thinking how it would impress Jake.
“…Now, the problem with Chloe is that she has no idea about how panties are supposed to be worn—” Rich continues, but I’m actually ignoring him, because Jake
Dillinger is on the floor with Christine. Damn. He’s not wearing any costume, just a tuxedo. He’s dancing the absolutely best way a white guy can, planting his feet and leaning back and
letting the girl rub herself all over him. And Christine rubs herself expertly. She rubs herself on him like she was trying to get barnacles off the backs of her upper thighs. The wings make Jake
flinch.
“—And she had this threesome with the girls from
Friends
, but it wasn’t even a threesome, it was a
four
some—” Rich explains.
Now Christine bends over, putting her butt right on the place where Jake’s no-doubt-impressive penis hoists on a likely nightly basis—
“Hey, you wanna talk to that girl?” Rich asks.
“Uh, what?”
“C’mon, Jeremy, you’re not even paying attention to me. You want that girl?”
“Well…” Why lie? Just say it. “Sure. Yeah. Of course I do.”
“You realize I could walk right up to her right now and get her to fuck me?” Rich smiles. “Anytime.”
“Um, actually I wouldn’t doubt that. You seem to do okay with the girls in our school.”
“‘Okay?’” Rich looks offended by my very presence, which is a look I’m used to. “Okay my ass. Watch this.”
Rich walks across the dance floor and starts talking to another girl named Samartha, a pretty hot one with punch in her hand standing by the opposite wall. After chatting for about three
minutes, he lounges on a nearby Ping-Pong table. Samartha comes over and kisses him. I watch intensely; Rich whispers in her ear and she begins to lick and suck his belly button with one
high-heeled foot bent behind her so the heel touches her butt cheek, which is blue, with stars. (She’s Wonder Woman.) After a minute of that, Rich gets up, kisses her, and walks back to
me.
“You see?” he says. “That’s real pimpin’.”
“Yeah.”
“Real pimpin’, but not
natural
pimpin’. I had help.”
“Uh…”
“I got a squip, man.”
“You’re quick?”
“Not quick. A ‘squip.’”
“Ohhh…” Flashes flash in my head. “The ‘script.’”
“No, ‘squip.’”
“I think I’ve heard of it—”
“Not script. Squip.”
“Wait. What?”
“The squip,” Rich says, and the way he says it I kind of know that something is starting, something is happening, and I’m glad because anything would be better than me in this
mask not dancing with any girls, watching Rich get his belly button licked. “And
you
need a squip, man. You need it more than, like, anyone I know. You’re almost hopeless.
That’s why I’m telling you. You have to get squipped.”
“Yeah, well, I think I heard about it from my friend,” I say carefully, not wanting to step on this and make it go away. “What is it?”
“It’s a cool pill,” he says. “From Japan.”
“Like, it makes you smarter I heard? I thought—”
“You didn’t think nothing. Look.”
Rich opens his fist and for the first time I realize what he’s dressed as—a giant weed leaf. Isn’t that great? I look down and there’s a gray oblong pill nestled like a
wart in the light creases of his palm. It looks like the acidophilus supplements Mom used to give me as a kid.
“What’s it do?” I ask. “Is it drugs?”
“Heh, no, it’s not drugs,” Rich says, closing his fist. “It’s better than drugs. It’s a supercomputer, a quantum nanotechnology CPU that fits in a
pill.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Like, they are way ahead of us with this stuff in Japan but it’s going to hit the American markets soon.” As Rich talks, rap blares, something heavily dependent on
barking. Rich almost sounds like he’s doing a sales pitch: “You take it, you know,
ingest
it, and the quantum computer, which is inside the pill, travels through your bloodstream
and up into you brain. Then it sits in your brain and assists you.”
“How?”
“It’s preprogrammed. Once it gets up there, it tells you how to be cool all the time. It interacts with your brain as if it were a voice talking to you.”
“Are you for real?”
“See, if you were squipped, you wouldn’t say that,” Rich smirks. “You wouldn’t use outdated terminology and clunky phrasing like that.”
“Ah…”
“And I gotta say, I’m personally sorry for treating you like a piece of garbage all the time.” Rich looks humble and reverent. “I only do it because my squip tells me to.
It advised me that I’d have to be a dick to you for social reasons, but recently it started saying that you were a decent guy actually who might want a squip of your own.”
“Uh…apology accepted,” I gurgle. The DJ has put on a slow song and Christine and Jake are kissing (hooking up) on the dance floor, but I don’t care. I’m rapt.
“So this is like, a real thing. You aren’t BS-ing me.”
“Once again, you wouldn’t say ‘BS-ing’ if you had one,” Rich says. “And yeah, it’s real. This one I have here was going to be bought by Ryu tonight, but
he never showed.”
“How long does it last?”
“I think it’s permanent. I’ve had mine four months. Now, do you even remember me four months ago?”
“It was summer.”
“Right, but what about last year?”
“Last year I didn’t see you much.”
“Nobody saw me, because I was busy jerking off on the Internet, I was such a loser,” Rich explains. “My squip fixed that, okay?”
“Huh.”
“Squips are awesome. Mine is actually off right now, because I’m talking to you and not some hottie, but when it’s on, it’s great.…First thing it did was instruct
me how to get consistent ass. It was very specific. Then it told me to start doing sports to cut my muscles a little and make me appeal to girls more. Then it told me who to piss off and who to be
friends with, of which you were a minor part. Then it got me with all three of the Hot Girls to solidify my social standing. It hasn’t let up.”
“Damn. You’ve been with all
three
of them?” It might be the scotch or a contact high from Eric’s eyebrow, but I don’t think Rich is lying. I think there
might have been a reason for me to be here tonight, besides Christine, who’s the real reason for everything. Somebody has made a pill for idiots like me and now all I need is—
“Where do I get one?” I ask about ten times more eagerly than I would have liked. (Will my squip fix that?)
“Why do you think I’m telling you all this?” Rich asks. “You get one through
me
. I got a supplier who exports leather down at the bowling alley in New
Brunswick—”
“The big bowling alley?”
“Yeah. Now this guy’s from Ghana, so he’s not around all the time, but I can reserve a pill for you. I would need two hundred now, four hundred when it comes in.”
“Um…” My brain struggles with 200 + 400 = ? “I don’t have six hundred bucks.”
“You’re screwed, then!” Rich says gleefully. Then he puts a hand on my shoulder. “No, seriously, not really; maybe we could work something out. Talk to me or Keith back
at school.”
“Keith the football player? With the tattoos?”
“God, you really need one, Jeremy. Yes, with the tattoos. He knows.”
“Okay. Cool,” I say.
“Most definitely. I mean we could all use a little thing in our brains getting us laid by high school girls all the time, right?”
“I could.”
“Yeah. So keep in touch. And in the meantime, you want me to talk to, ah, the Queen of Wherever over there?” Rich points at Christine. “Maybe I could get her to fuck
you
.” Christine has her arms around Jake’s neck, Rapunzel hat leaning off to the side, wings akimbo.
“No,” I say lightly.
“A’ight.” Rich shrugs and leaves. “Remember,” he says, pointing to his head as he goes back to Samartha. “Uh!” And he makes a little noise of
triumph.
Not knowing what else to do, forgetting my original plan (did I have one?), I walk out of the dance. The doorman is reading a pornographic Mexican comic book with a woman dressed as an armadillo
having sex with a coat rack. He jerks up, surprised to see me go so early. I reach the road and turn left; I’ve got enough money for a car home, but I have to walk tonight, three miles along
route 27, taking it all in. People must think I’m the world’s oldest, loneliest, most confused trick-or-treater, but cops and motorists leave me alone, and when I get back to my house
at 2:17
A.M.
, Mom is worried, but Dad is happy. He figures I got with some girl at the dance—that must’ve been what took me so long. I don’t want to
disappoint him, so I go into my room all smiling and lie down with my head buzzing around the word
squip
.