Free It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini

the entire entering class had gotten 800. It turned out the test had been “broken” in my year; they were tweaking it to make it less formulaic—i.e., less likely to let in people like me. There were kids from Uruguay and Korea who had just learned English but were doing extra credit for the current events stuff in Intro to Wall Street, reading Barron’s and Crain’s Business Daily. There were freshmen taking calculus, while I was stuck in the math that came after algebra, which the teacher announced on the first day was “ding-dong” math and there was no reason for us not to get a 100 in everything. I got an 85 on my first test and a small frowny face.
    Plus there were extracurriculars. Other kids did everything: they were on student government; they played sports; they volunteered; they worked for the school newspaper; they had a film club; they had a literature club; they had a chess club; they entered nationwide competitions for building robots out of tongue depressors; they helped teachers out after school; they took classes at local colleges; they assisted on “orientation days.” I didn’t do anything but school and Tae Bo, where I hit a plateau. They humored me in class, letting me fake-fight and do my not-that-form-fitting pushups, but the teacher knew it was something that I didn’t really enjoy. I quit. That was the only Tentacle I ever cut.
    Why were the other kids doing better than me? Because they were better, that’s why. That’s what I knew every time I sat down online or got on the subway to Aaron’s house. Other people weren’t smoking and jerking off, and those that were were gifted—able to live and compete at the same time. I wasn’t gifted. Mom was wrong. I was just smart and I worked hard. I had fooled myself into thinking that was something important to the rest of the world. Other people were complicit in this ruse. Nobody had told me I was common.
    That’s not to say I did terrible in high school—I got 93’s. That looked good to my parents. Problem is, in the real world, 93 is the crap grade; colleges know what it means—you do just well enough to stay in the 90’s. You’re average. There are a lot of you. You aren’t going over the top; if you’re not doing any extracurriculars you’re done. You can change things in later years, but with 93’s your freshman year, you’re going to have a lot of dead weight.
    In December, three months into Executive Pre-Professional, I had stress vomiting for the first time. It happened with my parents at a restaurant; I was eating tuna steak with spinach. They had brought me out to celebrate the holidays and talk with me. They had no idea. I sat there looking at the food and thinking about the Tentacles waiting for me at home, and for the first time the man in my stomach appeared and said I wasn’t getting any of it; I had better back down, buddy, because otherwise this was going to get ugly.
    “How’s biology class?” Mom asked.
    Biology class was hell. I had to memorize these hormones and what they did and I hadn’t been able to make flash cards because I was too busy clipping newspaper articles.
    “Fine.”
    “How’s Intro to Wall Street?” Dad asked.
    A guy from Bear Stearns had visited our class, thin and bald with a gold watch. He told us that if we were interested in getting into finance, we had better work hard and smart because a lot of machines were able to make investment decisions now, and in the future, computer programs would run everything. He asked the class how many of us were taking computer science, and everybody but me and this one girl who didn’t speak English raised their hands.
    “Great, excellent,” the guy had said. “You other people are out of a job! Heh heh. Learn comp sci.”
    Please die right now, I mumbled in my head, where more and more activity was taking place. The Cycling had begun to develop, although it hadn’t hit hard, and I didn’t know quite what it was yet.
    “Wall Street is