It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini Page B

I’d been through some crap but I was learning from it. These pills were going to bring me back to my old self, able to tackle everything, functional and efficient. I’d be talking to girls in school and telling them that I was messed up, that I had had problems but that I’d dealt with them, and they’d think I was brave and sexy and ask me to call them.
    It must have been a placebo effect, but it was a great placebo effect. If placebo effects were this good, they should just make placebos the way to treat depression—maybe that’s what they did; maybe Zoloft was cornstarch. My brain said yes I am back and I thought the whole thing was over.
    This was my first experience with a Fake Shift. Dastardly stuff—you do well on a test; you make a girl laugh; you have a particularly lower-body-simmering experience after talking online and rushing to the bathroom; you think it’s all over. That just makes it worse when you wake up the next day and it’s back with a vengeance to show you who’s boss.
    “I feel great!” I told Mom when I got home.
    “What did the doctor say?”
    “I’m on Zoloft!” I showed her the bottle.
    “Huh. A lot of people at my office take this.”
    “I think it’s working!”
    “It can’t be working already, honey. Calm down.”
    I took my Zoloft every day. Some days I woke up and got out of bed and brushed my teeth like any normal human being; some days I woke up and lay in bed and looked at the ceiling and wondered what the hell the point was of getting out of bed and brushing my teeth like any normal human being. But I always managed to take it. I never tried to take more than one, either; it wasn’t that kind of drug. It didn’t make you feel anything, but then after a month, just like they said, I started to feel that there was a buoy keeping me upright when I got bad. If the Cycling started there was a panic button attached to my good thoughts; 1 could click it and think about my family, my sister, my friends, my time online; the good teachers at school—the Anchors.
    I even spent time with Sarah. She was so smart, smarter than me for sure. She’d be able to handle what I was going through without seeing any doctors. Her homework bordered on algebra even though it was only fourth grade, and I helped her with it, sometimes doodling spirals or patterns on the side of the pages while she worked. I didn’t do maps anymore.
    “Those are cool, Craig,” she would say.
    “Thanks.”
    “Why don’t you do art more?”
    “I don’t have time.”
    “Silly. You always have time.”
    “Oh yeah.”
    “Yes. Time is a person-made concept.”
    “Really? Where’d you hear that?”
    “I made it up.”
    “I don’t know if that’s true. We all live within time. It rules us.”
    “I use my time how I want, so I rule it.”
    “You should be a philosopher, Sarah.”
    “Uggg, no. What’s that? Interior design.”
    My eating came back around: first coffee yogurt, then bagels, then chicken. Sleeping, meanwhile, was two-steps-forward, one-step-back. (That’s one of the golden rules of psychology: the shrinks say that everything in our lives is two-steps-forward, one-step-back, to justify that time you, say, drank paint thinner and tried to throw yourself off a roof. That was just taking a step back.) Some nights I wouldn’t sleep, but then for the next two I slept great. I even dreamed: flying dreams, dreams of meeting Nia on a bus and talking with her, looking at her, seeing her off a few stops down the line. (Never having sex with her, unfortunately.) Dreams that I was I jumping off a bridge and landing on giant fuzzy dice, bouncing across the Hudson River from Manhattan to New Jersey, laughing and looking back at which numbers I had landed on.
    When I couldn’t sleep, though, it sucked. I’d think about the fact that my parents weren’t going to leave me much money and they might not have enough to send my sister to college and I had a history assignment to do and how come I