Think. I

There’s a monster lurking through the New Jersey sewer system. She imagines that it looks like a more modern version of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. More disproportioned, brain muscles, more entrails sticking out. Gigantic packs of writhing veins. Blood pink pale skin. A mutated set of square-like teeth, and eyes that half-hang from their sockets. There’s a very photogenic monster lurking through the New Jersey sewer system. It looks good on the news, scares the bejebus out of single mothers and secretly, single fathers. The plumbers and sewer maintenance team have gone on strike. Who will wash the empires of shit and mangled body parts out of the miles of pipeline? The pipelines must resemble the veins of the monster, she thinks.
She sits at the back of the class, with frowzy hair and bitten fingernails, peeling the corners of the hand-out the teacher distributed moments before.
The teacher’s concaved in his carpet-material desk chair, wondering how early he can dismiss the class without getting in trouble. Whenever he calls on a student who has their hand raised, which is most often to ask to go to the bathroom, a batty grin spreads onto his face. According to his thoughts, he’s less happy than he seems.
Also at the back of the class, a slanted handsome boy with a man’s jaw daydreams about being on the floor of a basketball gym, its walls made of windows, lying adjacently to a set of bleachers fully occupied by the rest of his class. He’s heating up heroin, eventually loading it into the syringe and administering it into his jugular vein. He imitates someone having an orgasm, then lifelessly hangs his head. The windows start to mark as if they’re being dripped on, the marks resembling cancer pigments. They ripple and fluctuate, fading from deep purple to black to mauve and ultra blue.
To me his thoughts are boring, typical. Most of the boys in this class have thoughts involving themselves using the most notorious drugs in front of their peers, refusing aid or help. It must be some kind of coming of age ploy. Caulfield would be ashamed.

At the end of class the girl gathers her books, pushing them up against her chest, and hangs her head as she leaves the room. She continues to walk through the hallways, trying to avoid contact as much as possible but still being bumped and crushed into lockers. Near the entrance of the school she falls over, though no one laughs or notices. She doesn’t look at anyone. She has a funny way of walking down the front steps, hovering her hand over the rail but not touching it. Outside she lifts her head into the air, and twirls her head around to straighten out her mane. There’s a tree with an eraser-gray boulder beneath it. Lovers use sharpie-markers to draw their initials encased by hearts on it, and later the nerds draw miniature alien men sieging the hearts with rams and catapults.
She sways and half-prances through the grass, rocking her head in motion with her thoughts. When she reaches the tree she plops onto the boulder, letting go of her backpack and hanging her head again. The monster she dreamed of earlier crawls out of a sewer grating near the entrance of the school, and begins to attack the students, drenching them in a greenish black yogurt, piercing their heads with its wormlike tentacles that have suckers on the end of them, crushing the teachers, ripping chunks out of their faces. No one knows what to do. Everyone is lost in the uproar and chaos. Police show up and fire shots at the monster but it proves ineffective. She giggles as the monster belches.
Finally, she catches me staring at her, and becomes conscious of herself. She sinks her head and finds it hard to believe that anyone would want to stare at her, especially in the shadow of the tree. It must provide terrible contrast. From afar, I step into her thoughts. I smile and threaten the monster, beating my chest and sticking my jaw out. She sits agape, enchanted by the constant stream of uncontrollable thought I’ve caused her.
After vanquishing the monster, I tread towards her, but she begins to flee before I get too close. There are some things that happen in thoughts that I cannot control.
The bell rings, and everyone drifts back into the school.

It’s not necessary for me to be near her to see her thoughts, but it makes it easier on me, easier so that I don’t have to sit completely still in order to access them. I cut the next class. Teacher’s an antique and the regular students only think about each other. I want to know more about the monster, its name, why it’s the center of her fascination, but the earlier class was the last one I had with her. Roswell.
A part of me wonders if I listen to music too much. It makes me lazy. When I get home, and I read something or look at a picture that excites me, I’ll immediately stop what I’m doing and go into the bathroom to half-hop half-dance while listening to upbeat music. I’m sitting on one of the benches outside of the school, between my headphones. They’re expensive, but once you’ve listened to higher quality headphones it’s difficult to bear anything else. There’s a boy who, slightly square-jawed, sits on the bench across from me. I’m not very accurate at judging my own sex because what attracts me to them is usually their feminine traits (seeing how I’m heterosexual) but I’m pretty sure that this boy would be considered pretty. He’s recalling the night before, lying down on a comforter out on the balcony with a girl his best friend’s in love with. She’s socially inexperienced and beautiful, easily affected, with very low self-esteem, excessive use of make-up. She resembles most of the girls that my creator most often writes about, but with darker hair and whiter teeth.
I can see what the girl thinks, as he thinks of her. He makes her visible to me. She’s thinking of him and likes him, but is afraid of hurting his best friend. These thoughts are nothing unique and yet I find myself engrossed with them. I sometimes wonder if I do enough thinking for myself.
I wait for Roswell to leave the school. I risk being seen by her, but it’s worth it. The monster truly intrigues me. She intrigues me. Eventually she leaves the school again. I follow her again. On her way home again. We pass through the shoddiest parts of town, with tires hanging from trees and muddy wooden boards sticking out of random places in the ground. Most of the house’s backyards have been left uncut. The grass nearly swats at my knees as I stealthily pick through it. I fear that if I ever fall in love again I’ll have to endure the nights that whomever I love is out and I’m in, watching TV, imagining what she’s doing and staying up all night waiting for her to come back. It dulls even my most favorite TV shows. Everything I try to do to pass the time begins to feel inferior to whatever my lover is doing. I also despise the term lover, because referring to the person you love as a noun sounds materialistic. Even more so in plural. “My past lovers.” I hate that.
She enters a shack with a tin roof. There are cardboards patching its numerous holes. Her being impoverished only attracts me to her more. She’ll most likely be more grateful of my love for her, as vindictive as that sounds. I keep forgetting I don’t even know who this girl is outside of her thoughts. I don’t become attracted to people’s thoughts like this very often. It makes me feel weird. It’s difficult to live with knowing someone so well and never having said a word to them. Disguising that you don’t know what’s going on in their head as you talk to them. I’ve been right in front of the most unlikely people before and had them imagine me naked. Thank God I’m not a girl, though to be honest seeing myself constantly would probably turn me on. Most of my emotions are visually stirred.
Standing outside of her house, I imagine her picking flies from stale pieces of toast. I crash behind a tree overlooking the mangled road in front, sticking my legs out into the dirt. The dismalness of the neighborhood is toylike. Even the dirt is filthy. I connect with the girl inside, who’s father makes all situations awkward like a man who wears too much cologne, as she settles herself down, throwing her backpack onto the couch, fleeting upstairs. Her mother has the appearance of someone who’s survived something horrid and was probably better off dying. Roswell, the girl – I always forget to use her name – desperately wishes her father is asleep. She puts her ear against his door, still desperately wishing, devoid of thought. Her sneakers are untied, the lace slipping in between the planks of the poorly supported floor. They’re long and red, Converse, faded unnoticeable stars slapped on the sides.
Tapping into people’s thoughts often makes me paranoid. Of someone watching me, or somehow discovering my ability. During use, it delays my response time and causes me to become aloof of my surroundings. Over the years I’ve become adept at moving and channeling simultaneously, channeling through walls, channeling great distances. Nostalgia is the only type of thinking that causes me to black out if I try to access it. Doctor’s find my constant fainting inexplicable, have loaded me up on lots of drugs on the past to no effect. I suppose this back-story isn’t very necessary. A car buzzes past.
And then she’s off thinking about the monster again. She locks herself in her bathroom, opens the toilet and sits down on it, without taking off her pants. She plays with her nose, prodding and pushing it, making snorting expressions, stretching it out. She does this compulsively.

We used to do Ecstasy. We’d do it every day. Sometimes we’d do cocaine. But not as much. I really liked Ecstasy. Part of me wonders if I liked it more than them. I’m not sure. It made us dumb. I’m still dumb. Considerably. I’m not sure how to judge what my dumbest moments are. Perhaps when I’m thinking of Ecstasy, I am dumbest. At night I’ll feel depersonalized. As if I’m not there. It’s not easy. Sometimes I can’t feel my fingers. I’ll have to press hard. When I lie down on the couch certain ways my chest feels hollow. The veins beneath my knees throb too often. Am I dumb? I’m not sure. I was reading a book about an overly introspective man. It was tedious. Sometimes at night, I get paranoid. Of everything, of nothing.
I never went to rehab. I always believed I didn’t need to. I gathered tidbits of information, of how to recover from addiction. Go outside when you feel cravings. Go outside. Stuff like that. They make us all seem like we’re dumb and type with too many periods. It’s not true. We only have one problem now. We talk in plurals when its made us singular. I do a lot of things at night. There’s not much imagery involved. Like water spurts, blasting out of toilets in celebration. At the top of the water spurts, rocking back and forth, computers. A mermaid. The tiny droplets of water that spray onto my skin, I wonder.
We’d get on the bus across the bridge to where the dealers taught us how to make deals properly by slapping five and continuing to walk in the same direction we were headed towards them in.
You probably want to hear about how we’re all dead, but we’re not. Middle-class American kids making problems for themselves because they don’t have enough of their own. I sometimes wonder if the others are ever afraid of being dumb. Am I dumb? They tell us we’re not even addicted, we just think we are. Maybe we want to be. I don’t know about the others, but I don’t have a choice. I’m telling you, there’s something else out there. They exist. They’ll get you. They’ll get me. This isn’t a joke. I’m telling you. I’m really telling you. Something’s wrong with us. It wasn’t just Ecstasy that we were taking. There was something in those pills. They’re going to come for us. They’ve got us hotwired, documented for later usage. Those pills implanted tiny zip-codes into us. Tracking devices.
We’re hypochondriacs. Psychosomatics. I’m just trying to stop thinking about it. There was a half-Israeli girl I knew for awhile that hung scarves off her ceiling. She had a vinelike lighting system that crawled up her wall. The lights were pink and green and red. She had a waterbed. There was a lot of pillows on the waterbed but none of them were comfortable. The bed itself wasn’t very comfortable either. She took pride in being innocent, I think. I know it’s redundant to say “I think” since everything I confide here is what I think, but, it didn’t seem right without it.
All they want to do is read the rest of the story. That’s all anyone wants to do, they just want to get to the end. Because as long as you’re focused on the end, you’re going somewhere. You’re in motion. Unfinished. Putting light on things all the oldest philosophers were already recycling to begin with. So what’s new? I wasn’t going to give you that pitiable excuse for a realization to end this letter off before they take me. Directors always do that at the end of TV shows, that intense spew that acts like the hook of a song. Intense, man. Intense. These guys in Canada, I used to know, they’d get their dog drunk and film it humping their bed. I can hear it squealing in my mind right now. I’ve only known that half-Israeli girl for a couple days but I think I love her. I’m always falling in love like that. It’s a shame, because I’m too afraid to let anyone I fall in love with know it. I’m just walking down the street, and everyone I pass, I’m in love. I think it would be dandy if I wrote something the majority of people could relate to before I end this letter, so they’ll remember me as, well, I don’t know. Remember me as something good. That’s what it’s about. I think.