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  After the principal listens to Terry’s story, he looks up my record, which already includes the other smoking incidents, and he tells me I’m suspended for four days, starting Monday.

  “They all know about my smoking,” I try to explain. “They understand that I have to smoke.”

  “Who lets you?” the principal wants to know.

  I don’t want to give him the names of my teachers. “Nobody actually said I could smoke. It’s just that they let me.”

  The principal isn’t buying my story. I guess he has to go by the rules. He’s the one who makes up a lot of them.

  Terry seems pleased, which I find unbelievable, and so hurtful. Maybe he just can’t handle me anymore — my tics are too much for him — and my smoking is a way to be rid of me. Or maybe I’m just a symptom of the life he’s sick of.

  When we leave the office, I ask him, “What the heck, man? How could you do that to me?”

  He just looks at me blankly, his eyes as cold as can be, and keeps walking.

  This reaction pushes me too far. Suddenly I’m in a blind fury. I replay the scene over and over and can’t stop: him following me, jumping out of the shadows and reporting me, his creepy grin. I want to smash walls. I want to go after him and beat him up, which is funny because I don’t know the first thing about fighting and would probably lose. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this much anger toward anyone, and there have been a lot of people who’ve done cruel things to me.

  A plan for some kind of revenge races through my mind, and I do the first stupid thing I can think of. I run to the library computer and e-mail Terry. The angry words just spill out of me — the stronger, the better.

  The phone call to my house comes late on Monday, the first day of my suspension for smoking. The principal wants to see me right away.

  The suspension turns out to be nothing compared to what happens next.

  Chapter 43

  AT SCHOOL I find out that Terry has read my e-mail and has shown it to the principal. I don’t even remember what I wrote, but the message says something about “getting even” and that he’d “better watch out.”

  “I didn’t mean it,” I say as soon as I’ve read it. “I was just mad. He was supposed to protect me at school, not make things worse.”

  The principal begins speaking differently than he ever has, choosing his words carefully.

  “When threats to school personnel are received, they are evaluated by degree. The words you used fall into the third category, a physical threat, and are the most serious. In cases like this, we are required to turn the information over to the county prosecutor for evaluation and possible prosecution.”

  I sit there, in shock. This must be a bad dream. I’ve never even heard of a “county prosecutor,” but it sounds like I’m being treated as a criminal.

  The principal hands my mother a copy of my e-mail. After she reads it, she looks up at me, shaking her head slowly, disappointed but also worried. Now I know I’ve really crossed the line. I didn’t mean to, but it happened.

  “You know I’d never do anything like that. I was just letting off steam. I could never hurt anybody.”

  “I’m afraid that doesn’t matter,” the principal says. “The legal process has already started. There’s nothing I can do to stop it now. The prosecutor has your e-mail.”

  Chapter 44

  TWO DAYS LATER I’m at home, still on suspension for smoking, and going crazy waiting to see what the county prosecutor wants to do. My whole body is ticcing horribly. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, and the anxiety is reaching new highs. To settle me down, we try a few different drugs. Neurontin is one of them, used for seizures, but it only makes my tics more crazy. Same thing with Effexor, an antidepressant and mood elevator. It produces wild ticcing, even for me.

  “You couldn’t have picked a worse time, Cory,” my mother says. “There are kids committing violent acts in schools all over America, and you’ve just threatened your aide. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t mean it. Everyone’s thinking about violence these days.”

  As usual, I’ve done the worst possible thing at the worst possible time.

  “What’s going to happen?” I mutter meekly. “Honestly, I would never hurt Terry. You know me, Mom.”

  She just shakes her head. No pep talk this time.

  On the fourth day of my suspension for smoking, my father takes off work to go speak with the director of special education. My poor dad is on the case again. He fills us in when he gets home.

  “Mr. Sweeney knows that you’re not the kind of person to do something bad, Cory, but what you did was wrong and impulsive. Maybe your aide should have known you weren’t really threatening him, but once he complained, you technically could have gotten into real trouble. You’re lucky to have the right people on your side.”

  “And what’s going to happen to Terry?” I ask. “I don’t want him to be my aide anymore.”

  “I don’t think there’s any chance of that happening. But he’s still going to be around. The school always needs aides. You know what kind of job it is.”

  “But it’s gonna be okay?” I wish out loud.

  “Mr. Sweeney doesn’t know yet. He’s agreed to ask the county prosecutor to have the serious part of the charges dropped. That’s all he could tell me for now.”

  The next few days are real bad, as my mind fills with dozens of horrible possibilities. Finally the phone rings, and it’s Mr. Sweeney from school. I won’t be charged with a violent threat. Nothing will go on my record, but I’m being given an additional ten-day suspension. And I have to apologize to Terry. To me, this is the ultimate injustice, but I have no choice.

  The first day back at school, I find Terry eating alone in the cafeteria. It isn’t easy to even look at him, but I manage to choke the words out.

  “Sorry I wrote that e-mail, Terry. It just got me angry ’cause I thought we were friends. I didn’t mean what I said. Sorry. I’m really sorry.”

  When I finish, Terry gets up and leaves without saying a word or even looking at me, as if I’m invisible. Now I feel like a wuss for having groveled, and I have the urge to tell him off again, but I hold myself back — a minor victory.

  It’s been a few months since the e-mail incident, and Terry and I pass in the halls once in a while. We try not to look at each other. I’m no longer required to have an aide. I’ll be more disorganized than I was with Terry, but maybe I’ll learn more by having to do things for myself.

  By now I guess I should be putting the incident behind me and trying to see Terry’s side of the story, but I can’t. Even though I acted like an idiot, I still think the wrong person apologized.

  The Slippery Slope, Once Again

  Chapter 45

  IN SOPHOMORE YEAR, it’s becoming clear that obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, is a bigger part of my condition than we thought. Right now I’m mostly experiencing the kind of OCD they call intrusive thoughts — ideas that can take over your thinking. The worst thought I have now is that there’s no point to anything in life. This obsessive idea has suddenly paralyzed my desire to do anything, even to work on my Internet projects.

  I feel like I’m drifting outside the world that everyone else is living in, that I’m in a whole different place. I don’t understand how other people can feel so attached to their lives and appear to know something I don’t. I wonder if they really do or if everybody’s just faking it.

  “I have a bad thought every day,” I tell my parents, “that nothing will ever be any good for me. I look at other people and wonder how they can relax and do normal things, but my thoughts tell me that nothing matters. What am I supposed to do next, and why don’t I know? What do I do every day? Am I in hell?”

  Over the course of several months, I go from medicine to medicine again, and I also bounce back and forth between three doctors. I don’t know if what I’m thinking is caused by the drugs or if another part of my brain is starting to play new games.

  My par
ents learn about Dr. Bonds at a Tourette’s syndrome seminar they attend in New York City, where the doctor works. Some people say he would be great for me, so I make the trip to the city twice a week for about five weeks.

  Dr. Bonds focuses on my mood as a cause of my other conditions because, he says, a lot of my new thoughts are signs of depression and anxiety. Old and new medicine combinations follow quickly: propranolol and Ativan to relax me, Neurontin (in a different dose than before), Risperdal, and an occasional Xanax when I need it.

  It actually seems so normal for me to be popping all these pills every day that I’ve stopped thinking about it.

  The medicines keep changing, but not much about me does. Then, with the reintroduction of Effexor, another antidepressant, I’m suddenly unable to go to school at all. There’s a huge increase in my verbal and physical ticcing. I’ve found another level of hell.

  Now the nights are getting as bad as the days because my body isn’t letting me rest. One time I’m squirming so much that I have to go to the local hospital for an injection to help me sleep. We’re jumping back and forth between Dr. Pressler and Dr. Meyerson, the psychologist who got me out of the psychiatric ward, then back to Dr. Bonds and Dr. Pressler again. From Aricept to Remeron to baclofen. Nothing helps, and now my whole family is depressed. There’s no way for me to believe that this isn’t my fault, too. Somehow.

  At the end of this period of drugs and doctors, I have nothing to show for all the new advice and chemicals that I’ve been loading into my body. My tics are all over the place, and my OCD is increasing daily. I’m up against a wall and at a new low point in my life.

  And I’m running out of medicines to take.

  The only thing that’s working is alcohol.

  Friends in Need

  Chapter 46

  ON A FREEZING SATURDAY NIGHT, I hear someone knock at the basement door. Judging from the pounding, I realize it has to be my friend Mingo, all three hundred pounds of him. Our friendship started in high school when I was on the freshman football team. He was on the varsity and came with some other players to watch me.

  Having been on the football team changed a lot of things for me socially. People now think that I’m somebody special. Maybe that’s why I have a few regular friends, the group, to hang out with. Almost halfway through high school, I still don’t go to classes as much as normal kids do, but nothing stops me from having a party with the group. A few of my friends have been calling since school ended on Friday, and some of the talk was about who’s supposed to bring the liquor. Of course, I can’t be sure anyone is going to show up. Most of the kids I hang out with usually take the best offer at any given moment, and they’ve ditched me at the last minute more times than I can remember. Sometimes I think that they’re my friends mainly because they want what I have . . . a basement in which to party.

  These days Mingo has become the leader of our group. Everyone’s afraid of his size, plus he’s able to buy liquor for us at a place in another town.

  When I open the door, the sight that greets me is pretty ridiculous. Mingo is standing there with another friend of mine, Drew, who’s at the opposite end of the size spectrum. Drew is a great guy, but at sixteen, he’s very short and weighs fewer than ninety pounds. He could be Mingo’s backpack. Of all my so-called friends, I feel the closest to Drew.

  Mingo charges in first, carrying a case of beer with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s on top of it. He’s twenty but looks older, mainly because of his weight, which is increasing all the time now. I worry about his health.

  At times Mingo has taken care of me like a brother, teaching me how to do things I should have already learned, like how to dress cool and change the air filter in my car. In return, I buy him things such as a paintball gun or food, and I give him money to purchase liquor. He doesn’t get along very well with his family, so a lot of nights my parents let him sleep in my basement. Mingo wasn’t exactly an honor student when he graduated from my high school, but he’s very street-smart. He’d be the one to bet on in a Road Warrior world.

  Drew asks if he can play a set on my drums while we’re waiting for the others to arrive, and Mingo cracks beers for the three of us. The beers loosen us up, and before long Mingo is hugging me like in the old days. He has a really warm streak, but as close as we are at the moment, Mingo has almost killed me in a few fights over the past year. We get tight for a while, then have a serious argument. That’s our pattern, and I have the scars to prove it. Even though my continuing use of Risperdal has piled weight on me, Mingo still outdoes me by a good seventy pounds and has a temper you don’t want to set off.

  By now I can hear Drew playing some rhythms with feeling on the drums. He is the coolest of us by far, a hippie dude straight out of the sixties. Playing drums unites us. They’re a refuge, a way to express our feelings and let out our anger at being different.

  Suddenly Sara is standing there. She’s come in alone, and I can’t help but notice how different she looks from just a year ago. She used to be a thin, pretty blond girl with a sweet smile. Now it hurts me to see that she’s become very overweight and reckless. The word is, she’s taking whatever she can to get high, even cough syrup. Her values have also changed. At my last party, someone sneaked upstairs from the basement, and I noticed later that a bunch of my Xanax pills were missing from the kitchen cabinet. I can’t prove it was she, but it’s a solid guess. I should be angry, but I’m not really. I feel sorry for Sara. Drugs can control even a good person’s life.

  To be honest, my friends have many decent qualities. We have lots of laughs, and when we’re just one-on-one, I can count on them. But there are times when they can lie and take things that don’t belong to them. They mainly come from poor families or have problems getting along. Since they don’t get what they need at home, they live by their wits and hang around people who need them, and I’m one of those people. Also, by now a lot of the nicer kids don’t want to be around them, so they are able to attract only one another.

  Even though I know all of this, I don’t care. I’m with them because it’s them or no social life at all. Isolation hurts, and it increases my Tourette’s and my OCD, so my parents and I have allowed them to stay in my life, despite the fact that a few of them have ripped me off here and there. Most parents would simply forbid their kids to have such friends. It’s been a tough call.

  Chapter 47

  SARA LIGHTS A CIGARETTE, and I sit down to play my drums and sing to her. A little while later, Robert and Jamie join the party. It’s not unusual for us to have four or five guys and only one or two girls at our gatherings.

  Jamie is even moodier tonight than the time he stormed out of my house. He’s constantly depressed about something that’s always right under the surface. Robert is the kid who is most out for himself. He doesn’t seem to have much of a conscience, particularly when it comes to sex. To find easy sex, he picks out girls who can’t get dates because they’re overweight or not too pretty.

  Being beautiful, Sara was an exception at first, but when she started going out with Robert, he began to treat her like his other low-self-esteem girls. Now he uses her any time he wants, then gets rid of her. She’s so insecure she keeps letting him do what he wants with her.

  Sometimes they make out in front of the rest of us, and it kills me to watch this happening. It’s like seeing someone spray poison on a beautiful flower. I’ve always had a close feeling for Sara, and at times I’ve wanted to be her boyfriend. So it hurts that she has chosen him over me.

  I’m surprised to see Eddie come in, because he’s never been in our group or to my house before. He’s in some of my classes, and I like him, even though we don’t really talk. He used to be a good student and a great athlete. But something has happened to Eddie, and I hear that he’s become a heavy drinker.

  Sara acts glad to see Robert, but he barely says hello to her, and she sinks back into the couch and curls up and looks small. Robert doesn’t care. He’s in a lousy mood and looks ill. His eyes are
sunk deep into his face and he’s getting so thin I wonder if he’s sick, exposed to something because of all the girls he’s screwed.

  Mingo opens the Jack Daniel’s and asks everyone for money to pay him back, even though it was mostly my money in the first place. Some of the others don’t have any money, so I lend it to them. In a little while, everyone feels good. I drink about three big swallows of Jack, then two or three more when the bottle comes around again. I never remember that it takes a while to feel the liquor, so I always drink too much too fast.

  This is the biggest party I’ve had by far. I don’t even recognize the two people who come in last. There’s a chubby black girl, Angel, who turns out to be one of Robert’s new girlfriends. He’s invited her without asking me and obviously without caring what it will do to Sara. Angel’s friend is a lot prettier. I wonder how they got here. Neither one of them is old enough to drive, so someone must have dropped them off without checking out my party — something my parents would never do.

  My basement couch runs wall-to-wall and is filled with people. Eddie takes a seat on the floor, sucking up the bourbon. Sara sits above him and between the couples who are kissing and touching each other all over. It must kill her to see Robert doing this so close to her. At first she acts like she doesn’t notice, then she can’t take it anymore and grabs the bottle from Eddie and slugs down a huge mouthful.

  Even though I’m getting dizzy, I can see how miserable Sara is. When she finally gets up to leave, I put a hand on her shoulder and tell her how shitty Robert is acting and that she doesn’t deserve it. I want to hold her and show her there’s goodness in the world. She stops and turns to me with a warm, almost inviting look I’ve never expected to see. I suddenly want to kiss her, and it looks like she wants me to hook up with her. I lean in toward her mouth, but at the last second Angel, the chubby girl I didn’t invite, busts in between us looking for the liquor, and the moment has passed. Sara dips away from me and finds the bottle, and the two of them go off laughing.