Free The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen Page A

seen her cards. She called me “Cheater” for the remainder of the trip. Leaving Shannondale, we all wrote farewell notes to each other, and MacDonald’s note to me began Dear Cheater and concluded I hope someday you’ll learn there’s more to life than cheating .
    Four months later, I certainly hadn’t learned this lesson. The well-being I felt in returning to Shannondale as a ninth-grader, in wearing jeans and racing through the woods at night, was acquired mainly by fraud. I had to pretend to be a kid who naturally said “shit” a lot, a kid who hadn’t written a book-length report on plant physiology, a kid who didn’t enjoy calculating absolute stellar magnitudes on his new six-function Texas Instruments calculator, or else I might find myself exposed the way I’d been exposed not long ago in English class, where an athlete had accused me of preferringthe dictionary to any other book, and my old friend Manley, whom I’d turned to for refutation of this devastating slander, had smiled at me and quietly confirmed, “He’s right, Jon.” Storming into the Shannondale boys’ barn, identifying luggage from the Social Death car and claiming a bunk as far as I could get from it, I relied on the fact that my Fellowship friends went to different junior high schools and didn’t know that I was Social Death myself.
    Outside, I could hear tight cliques in desert boots crunching along on the Ozark flint gravel. Up by the Shannondale community center, in a cluster of Fellowship girls with wavy album-art hair and personalities that were sweet the way bruises on a peach are sweet, two unfamiliar tough guys in army jackets were calling and responding in high, femmy voices. One guy had lank hair and sufficient hormones for a downy Fu Manchu. He called out, “Dearest Jonathan!” The other guy, who was so fair he seemed not to have eyebrows or eyelashes, responded, “Oh, dearest Jonathan!”
    â€œHeh heh heh. Dearest Jonathan.”
    â€œDearest Jonathan!”
    I turned on my heel and ran back into the woods, veered off into tree litter, and cowered in the dark. The retreat was now officially a disaster. It was some consolation, however, that people in Fellowship called me Jon, never Jonathan. As far as the tough guys knew, Dearest Jonathan might be anybody. Dearest Jonathan might still be up in Webster Groves, looking for his paper bag. If I could somehow avoid the two thieves all weekend, they might never figure out whose dinner they’d eaten.
    The thieves made my task a little easier, as the group assembled in the community center, by sticking together and sitting down outside the Fellowship circle. I entered the room late, with my head low, and crowded into the antipodal portion of the circle, where I had friends.
    â€œIf you want to be part of this group,” the youth minister, Bob Mutton, told the thieves, “join the circle.”
    Mutton was unafraid of tough guys. He wore an armyjacket and talked like a pissed-off tough guy himself. You made yourself look childish, not cool, if you defied him. Mutton oversaw the entire Fellowship operation, with its 250 kids and several dozen advisors, and he looked rather scarily like Jesus—not the Renaissance Jesus, with the long Hellenic nose, but the more tormented Jesus of the northern Gothic. Mutton’s eyes were blue and set close together below mournfully knitted eyebrows. He had coarse tangles of chestnut hair that hung over his collar and fell across his forehead in a canted mass; his goatee was a thick reddish bush into which he liked to insert Hauptmann’s cigars. When he wasn’t smoking or chewing on a Hauptmann’s, he held a rolled-up magazine or a fireplace tool or a stick or a pointer and slapped his opposite palm with it. Talking to him, you could never be sure if he was going to laugh and nod and agree with you, or whether he was going to nail you with his favorite