Read an Excerpt
Freaked AER
Chapter One
Ripple
At Stillwater Academy FOR BOYS, names were one way to calculate the score. A guy with a first name and a last name that sounded like a first name—Kenny James, for example—had a trust fund and a couple of summer homes. A first name that sounded like a last name and a last name meant first-generation cash—electronics in the home and American-made cars like Mustangs. Every once in a while, you met someone with a hyphen, a guy with a last-name first name, last name, and another last name. Davis Richardson-MacArthur—that was a guy with real problems. Those with a first name and a last name were on scholarship, for the most part, but at least their lives were normal. I was a guy with a couple of first names and a bunch of hyphens and my mother's alias. I had so many names, I didn't know who I was. Scotty Emerson-Fitzgerald-Douglas-Loveletter, for Christ's sake.
Then there's Jerome John Garcia—what the hell kind of name is that? It's not Hispanic and it's not Irish either, and Jerry Garcia sounds like the sober handle of a hard-driving captain on a police show, a character with a big heart and a case of schizophrenia written into him in order to provide new stories for the series. But he's what kept me going during the sluggish fall of 1993, my second sophomore year at Stillwater Academy for Boys. He's what raised me up from the funk I had fallen into after finding out my mother wanted to be the 1994 New Year's centerfold, what Kenny J.—one of my buddies—and a thousand other guys just like him stuffed under their beds when some dude barged into their room without knocking. My motheris a hot number, a well-known sex self-help therapist, and she liked on occasion to show that off. Jerry's sunshine daydreams and Aiko Aiko all day, the sweet lilt of Jerry's voice were like a mellow pill that eased me out when I was stressing over the complications of what it was like to be her son for the two and a half years I spent as a Stillwaterite.
I had experienced golden afternoons before I discovered the magical, beautiful music of the Grateful Dead, of course, when I was young and hopeful, when my mother was still an aspiring unknown and I was untouched by her forays into a public life. When I was seven or eight, I owned a pony named Chocolate and a toy sports car. I had even made necessary and sometimes painful adjustments as I got older that didn't kill me, like not sleeping with stuffed animals or sucking my thumb. But like a lot of guys in my income bracket, boarding school was my mother's only option as soon as the answers to my questions required more parental ingenuity than she was willing to spend on one kid.
Stillwater Academy for Boys was a last-resort school for guys like my roommate, Todd, who had gotten kicked out of better schools—Tabor, Taft, and Choate—and guys like me, who, because my mother was Linda Loveletter, advice giver and centerfold, never really stood a chance in the first place. From my first days at Stillwater, I got beat up between classes, bumped into in the hallways, hip-checked at lunch when I was carrying a tray full of sundries, described along with my mother on the backs of bathroom stall doors, made fun of in English class when I offered up an unusually creative answer about a book I hadn't read, or mocked in math class when I didn't bother being creative and just came off as stupid.
I could be a smart-ass on occasion, and the reason I could be a smart-ass was because every few seconds some hormonal asshole asked me if he could date my mother. But the humiliation didn't stop there. She often talked lovingly about me on her radio show just before giving some schmo a play-by-play on wicked number seven of the eighteen no-fail ways to make a woman sing. She appeared on most of the morning talk shows, every so often offering interesting opinions to people who loved feet, wore handcuffs, or stuck needles through their nose.
When I first got to Stillwater, in my desperation I palled around with just about anybody, which meant Star Trek junkies and computer geeks and the like, and gave my assigned roommate a wide berth because he was always inviting upperclassmen into our room, people who knew his brother through the network that connected Stillwater to Taft to Choate, linking the East Coast schools all the way up to Harvard, Dartmouth, Yale, and if a guy messed up some, Amherst. At different times of day, different sets of strangers showed up to buy or smoke Todd's dope. At first, I was harassed as a way to keep me from ratting them all out, but after a while I was ignored, then little by little treated the way a stray dog might have been, getting tossed a few scraps here and there and made to do funny tricks.
By the spring semester of my freshman year, Todd no longer saw me as such a sad, sloppy zero. He force-fed me my first hit of dope. The smoke inflated my already pathetic brain cells and awoke my chi, but what really got me going was the music that was on the deck, Jerry singing "Dear Prudence." I was flattered that a guy with tastes like Todd's wanted to hang out with me, and to prove it, I went ahead and took too much acid, drank rum, risked my SAT scores the same way people risk their physical bodies, all just to be a hero or at least a sidekick in somebody else's eyes, all to get a little closer to the music. By doing the fucked-up things that nobody else would do, I became known around school as a freak with superpowers. I spent a lot of nights kicked back in bed, my brain matter swirling, digesting the Velveeta pepper jack cheese and crickets Todd and his friends had dared me to eat and letting Jerry soothe my soul.
Freaked AER. Copyright © by J. Dutton. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
