This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman

Author:Helen Schulman [Schulman, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins US
Published: 2011-07-31T21:00:00+00:00

5

It was boring staying at home. Exquisitely, torturously boring. Like peeling a scab. Painful and oddly absorbing. Jake indulged in his boredom. He examined all the facets of the crystal of his boredom. When he was done with that, he inhaled and memorized its scent. He thought, I never want to forget this specific sensation, and then he wondered why, since he was so miserable. He said to himself, I am a freak! I am a mental patient! And then, after a ridiculous amount of deliberation, he thought, I want to memorize this horribleness so that I never, ever allow myself to feel this way again.

He felt tense all the time, tense and nervous. Scared and embarrassed. Angry and bored. He felt a million ands: and, and, and! Whatever . . . and so bored. So bored out of his skull, so mind-numbingly bored that he couldn’t concentrate on anything, could not divert himself out of his boredom—not with music, not with books, not with magazines. His mom wanted him to “read ahead, keep up with his studies,” but who was she kidding? Jake couldn’t think. He couldn’t concentrate. And he certainly couldn’t keep up with something if he didn’t know what it was he was keeping up with, now, could he? It’s not like his teachers were sending him his assignments. It’s not like anyone was helping him out. He wasn’t allowed on the computer, his dad said. In fact, Dad pretty much decreed this—which was fine, it was fucking fine with Jake, although it seemed like his mom lived on hers, while his dad, who’d never once seemed like a hypocrite before, was glued to his CrackBerry. Jake was afraid now to touch the damn thing anyway. The email alone. The hate mail and the “you go, dude” stuff—which was just another form of hate mail, Jake thought; it was hateful and caused him to hate himself—it was all enough to trigger a total meltdown.

The thought of the computer made Jake perspire. It made his underarms and neck and even his ass crack feel uncomfortably moist. The apartment itself felt kind of rank and sweaty—with the three of them locked in there together that way, imprisoned, ensnared, entrapped. Coco kept asking him why he didn’t have to go to school—“It’s not fair,” she said. Nothing is fair, Jake wanted to scream at her. Instead, he just glared when his mom said, “Sometimes schools think it’s better for a student to work from home for a while.” I’ll show you unfair, Jake wanted to shout.

He felt like he was living in a little snow globe, the kind his grandma had always sent him as a kid for Christmas, with some snowscape or Frosty or blah-blah-blah, and when you shook it up shiny flakes of snow would whirl about but nothing could get out.

It was a little like a snow globe at home but a hot one, a humid one, like a Bikram yoga studio snow globe. Jake and his

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