Free The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen

already losing my cool. And this wasn’t even the worst of it, because it was possible that, even now, in one of the glamorous cars, somebody was reading my mother’s letter . I felt like an Air Force officer who’d let a nuclear warhead go missing.
    I ran back to my chosen car and reported, with ornate self-disgust, that I’d lost my dinner. But the mustached seminarian almost welcomed my loss. He said that each person in the car could give me a small piece of dinner, and nobody would be hungry, and everybody would be fed. In the gathering dark, as we drove south out of the city, girls kept handing me food. I could feel their fingers as I took it.
    On my only Boy Scout weekend, two years earlier, the leaders of the Bison Patrol had left us Tenderfeet to pitch our tents in steady rain. The leaders hung out with their friends in better-organized patrols who had brought along steaks and sodas and paraffin fire starters and great quantities of dry, seasoned firewood. When we young Bisons stopped by to warm ourselves, our leaders ordered us back to our sodden campsite. Late in the evening, the Scoutmaster consoled us with Silly Sally jokes that the older Scouts didn’t want to listen to anymore. (“One time when Silly Sally was in the woods, an old man said to her, ‘Silly Sally, I want you to take off all your clothes!’ and Silly Sally said, ‘Why, that’s silly, because I’m sure they won’t fit you!’”) I came home from the weekend wet, hungry, tired, dirty, and furious. My father, hating all things military, was happy to excuse me from the Scouts, but he insisted that I participate in some activity, and my mother suggested Fellowship.
    At Fellowship camps there were girls in halter tops and cutoffs. Each June, the seventh-and-eighth-grade group went down to Shannondale for five days and did maintenance for the church there, using scythes and paint rollers. The camp was near the Current River, a spring-fed, gravel-bottomed stream on which we took a float trip every year. My first summer, after the social discouragements of seventh grade, I wanted to toughen up my image and make myself more stupid, and I was trying to do this by continually exclaiming, “Son of a bitch !” Floating on the Current, I marveled at every green vista: “Son of a bitch !” This irritated my canoe mate, who, with each repetition, responded no less mechanically, “Yes, you certainly are one.”
    Our canoe was a thigh-fryer, an aluminum reflector oven. The day after the float trip, I was redder than the red-haired seventh-grader Bean but not quite as red as the most populareighth-grade boy, Peppel, onto whose atrociously sunburned back Bean spilled an entire bowl of chicken-noodle soup that had just come off the boil. It was Bean’s fate to make mistakes like this. He had a squawky voice and slide-rule sensibilities and an all-around rough time in Fellowship, where the prevailing ethic of honesty and personal growth licensed kids like Peppel to shout, “Jesus Christ! You’re not just clumsy physically, you’re clumsy with other people’s feelings! You’ve got to learn how to watch out for other people!”
    Bean, who was also in Boy Scouts, quit Fellowship soon after this, leaving me and my own clumsiness to become inviting targets for other people’s honesty. In Shannondale the next summer, I was playing cards with the seventh-grader MacDonald, a feline-mannered girl whose granny glasses and Carole King frizz both attracted me and made me nervous, and in a moment of Beanish inspiration I decided it would be a funny joke to steal a look at MacDonald’s cards while she was in the bathroom. But MacDonald failed to see the humor. Her skin was so clear that every emotion she experienced, no matter how mild, registered as some variety of blush. She began to call me “Cheater” even as I insisted, with a guilty smirk, that I hadn’t