Read Online It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini - Free Book Online

Behind us the walkway extended to City Hall, where the city had sprung for some spotlights to illuminate the dome of the building. It looked like a white pearl nestled between giants like the Woolworth building, which I learned in English class Ayn Rand had described as a “finger of God,” and that was about right—green and white at the top like the world’s most decorated mint. To our left were the other bridges of Manhattan, arrayed against each other like alternating sin and cos waves, carrying a smattering of late-night trucks whose tops trailed mist.
    But to the right was the best view: New York Harbor. Mostly black. The Statue of Liberty was lit up, but it always struck me as a little cheesy, standing out there being all cute. The real action was on the sides: Manhattan had its no-nonsense downtown, where people made money, and on the other side was Brooklyn, sleepy and dark but with a trump card—the container cranes, lit up not for show or government pride but because there was work going on, even at this hour—ships unloading stuff that was famously unchecked for terrorist threats but somehow hadn’t blown us up yet. Brooklyn was a port. New York was a port. We got things done. I had gotten things done, too.
    Between Brooklyn and Manhattan, miles across the water, we saw the final curtain of New York City—the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. It spanned the opening to the port, a steel-blue pair of upper lips greeting the blackness.
    I could do anything anywhere, in all four directions.
    “Craig?” Aaron was like.
    “What’s up.”
    “What’s up with you? You okay?”
    “I’m happy,” I said.
    “Why not?”
    “No, I said I’m happy”
    “I know. Why not be?”
    We came up to the first tower of the bridge, with a plaque proclaiming who had built it; I stopped to read. John Roebling. Aided by his wife, and then his son. He died during construction. But hey, the Brooklyn Bridge might be here for eight hundred years. I wanted to leave something like that behind. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I felt like I had taken the first steps.
    “The really cool thing about Nia …” Aaron was saying, and he started to go into anatomical details, things about her that I didn’t need to hear; I tuned him out; I knew he was talking to himself. This was what he was happy about. I was happy about different stuff. I was happy because someday I’d be walking across this bridge looking at this city, owning some piece of it, being valuable here.
    “Her butt is like—I think her butt shape is where they got the heart logo. . . .”
    We came to the middle of the bridge. On either side of us the cars hissed past; red on the left and white on the right, the lanes encased by thin metal trussing that stretched out from the walkway.
    I had a sudden urge to walk out over the trussing and lean over the water, to declare myself to the world. Once it came into my head, I couldn’t push it away.
    “I don’t know if it was real —” Aaron was saying.
    “I want to stand out over the water,” I told him.
    “What?”
    “Come with me. You want to do it?”
    He stopped.
    “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I see where you’re coming from.”
    There were pathways built onto the top of the trussing, places for the bridge workers to get out to the cables and repair them. I clambered onto one on the harbor side, the side crowned by the Verrazano, and grabbed the handrails and balanced my feet one in front of the other on a piece of metal about four inches wide. Below me cabs and SUVs hummed by. In front of me was the black of the water and the black of the sky and the cold.
    “You’re crazy,” Aaron said.
    I took steps forward. It was easy. Stuff like this always is. The stuff adults tell you not to do is the easiest.
    Below me there were three lanes of traffic; I cleared the first, got halfway over the second; then Aaron yelled:
    “What are you going to do out there?!”
    “I’m just going to think!” I called