Read Online Eeeee Eee Eeee by Tao Lin - Free Book Online Page A

Penn there.
    The bear would be watching TV.
    Thinking about the Pulitzer Prize.
    And go blank a little.
    And think, “I wish I could punch Sean Penn in Sean Penn’s face.”
    And Sean Penn would be there.
    Sean Penn would fight the bear when it got there.
    The bear would try to stop Sean Penn but Sean Penn had knives and the bear would crush Sean Penn by accident.
    The bear would think, “Oh god, oh my god.”
    Then put a blanket on Sean Penn’s corpse’s head.

 
    It was a year, that year, Ellen knew, as she’d noticed from her 10th grade classmates and from observing her family—her new year’s resolution (it was stupid to have one but she was bored in class and made a list, then picked one) had been to be more alert, to think more truthfully about things, and it had affected her, she guessed, with better grades, an increase in self-esteem that was actually just a realization ofhow dumb everyone was, and nerdy, slightly annoying insights like this one—for doing something not even that exciting or wild and then saying, “Why not?” Or else saying, “Why not?” then doing something sort of forced and meaningless. Mostly people just went around saying, “Why not?” and, later on, when it came time to act, saying, “It’s too hard,” without ever actually doing anything.
    Things still happened that year, of course, like any other year—they were pretty much all the same, Ellen guessed; what was a year, anyway; floating around the sun in the straight line, really, of a circle; it felt sarcastic to keep count—just mostly by accident, or else by momentum, by implication and solution of past things (like a math equation, trying to solve itself, as what was the world, the unstoppable mass of it, but one of those long division problems in seventh grade that went on, annoying and blameless, forever?).
    Ellen herself had knocked down a No U-Turn sign. She was sixteen and didn’t have a permit and didn’t want one—driving was badfor the environment, she had no money for a car, and she didn’t want to stand in line five hours to fail whatever stupid test—but had craved alfalfa sprouts with balsamic vinaigrette one night when everyone else was asleep, and so had washed her face and ran out to the street, to her brother Steve’s Honda Civic, the keys of which were left on the dash (more depressively, Ellen thought in a tic of imposition, than stupidly). After knocking down the No U-Turn sign she panicked and drove for a time on the wrong side of the road, where, after a vision of crash test dummies, she felt a vacuum-sealed sort of calmness—the sound-reducing serenity of breaking a traffic law, of going metaphysically back in time, to a truer place, where every direction was equally legal; probably this was not unlike meditation, Ellen thought gently—then cut across a median, knocking the right rearview mirror against a tree so that it banged shut against the window, and drove back to her neighborhood. At her house, thinking,
Destroy the evidence
, she parked, put the keys back on the dash, andthen was wrenching the damaged rearview mirror off the car, though not without a lot of difficulty—and not without realizing, after a moment, that there wasn’t actually anything wrong with it, it just needed to be adjusted back into position; but continuing, still, with two hands, now, in a sort of rampage—and then was running across the street and lobbing the half-melon of the thing over a fence, into someone’s backyard. Back in her house, she walked around carefully, civil and perceiving as a saint. She saw her brother, Steve, asleep on the sofa. In the kitchen her two little sisters were eating a bowl of something, which they hid as Ellen walked by, into her room, where she crawled onto her bed and lay on her side, and, for a long time, then, until she yawned and closed her eyes and fell asleep, stared, a bit objectively, without mood or judgment—though self-consciously so, feeling while doing it a bit