Free Be More Chill by Ned Vizzini

girlfriend?”
    “No.”
    “Now, why
is
that, Jeremiah?”
    “I don’t know. Can I please clean your gutters now?”
    “Let’s talk more about you not having a girlfriend.”
    “Let’s not.”
    “My my. Testy testy.” My aunt gets up and paces around her table, then pulls a long metal pole out from behind her refrigerator.
    “Let’s see how you like this, huh, testy boy!” She starts poking me with the pole! She’s six feet away jabbing it at me! It looks like there’s tetanus on that pole!
I get up very quickly.
    “Aunt Linda!”
    “Oh, I’m just having a little fun.” She pokes again, then stands with the pole at her side, like a pygmy.
    “Ahm, I really think I should go up and take a look at your gutters now.”
    “All right, Jeremiah, you take yourself upstairs.” Aunt Linda jabs more as I move out of the kitchen and up to the second floor of her house, which smells like the rim of a big
bottle of milk. On the second floor—she still has that spear—I mount a thin stepladder that’s attached to the ceiling by, like, one screw from the 1950s and clamber through a trap
door into the attic.
    “You okay up there?” Aunt Linda asks from below, her face a fat pudding pie.
    “Yep.”
    “You know what you have to do?”
    “Go outside and clean the leaves out of your gutter?”
    “Yes! Get to it like a good boy. And behave yourself!” Aunt Linda shakes her pole at me—I think it used to be part of an outdoor clothes-hanging apparatus. I close the trapdoor
on her fearsome image. God.
    I find a pull-down switch and light up the attic. It’s not like I have to look hard: sitting on a pyramid of newspapers by a pile of
Time
magazines are a couple of hundred Beanie
Babies. I pull the list out of my pocket and start cataloging.
    Nectar the Hummingbird! A
full
set of Asian Pacific Bears! This is the frickin’ motherlode! I can’t believe it. I grab enough Babies to net a clean $500 on
eBay—that’s enough—I can furnish the last $100 myself—and carry them, cradling them in my arms, over to the attic window. Now comes the tough part: getting the Beanies out
and nestling them into the lone tree in Aunt Linda’s yard, where I can climb up and rescue them later. Ideally, I’d rather not have them fall to the ground and lie there for any period
of time…that’s sure to downgrade their value.
    I press my back against the window and use my coccyx to work it open. Maple is the first to go; I give him a light toss about 15 feet and he lands right in a crook of the tree, as if he were
having sex with it. I’m awesome. I throw out Nectar the Hummingbird, the Patriot LF bear, Prickles the Hedgehog, and Prinz von Gold, but I’m not as lucky with them; they fall right to
the grass below. I hope Aunt Linda doesn’t notice any bear suicides from her kitchen window; I bet not; she’s probably torturing Hiroshima with her pole/Jeremy goad.
    Once I get the desired Beanies vacated, I clamber through the window and hoist myself onto the roof. It’s beautiful up here; any time you can get high in New Jersey it’s beautiful
because the country is so flat, you can see everything—or at least, Piscataway. It looks natural, like Mother Earth intended for Jersey to be colonized by suburbanites. She grew roads and
power lines to welcome us. The tops of her trees and our houses mesh like lichen.
    I turn to the gutters; they’re less pleasant, filled with leaves so old and black they look like they came from the bottom of a lake in a horror movie. There’s no way I’m
touching them with my hands, so I pull off a shoe and use it to dredge them up and push them down to the lawn below; making sure no leaf refuse hits my Beanie Babies.
Plat plat plat.
It’s forty minutes of numbing work and then I’m done, with the sun setting on me and me sitting on the aluminum siding, taking a drag from an imaginary cigarette. I’m
accomplished.
    I get back through the window, avoid Aunt Linda as best I can, say my