Make Something Up by Chuck Palahniuk Read Free Book Online

commentators on ESPN, and they’re all saying it.
    The televisions show people outside in parking lots and in tow-away zones, all holding hands. Bonds forming. Everyone’s uploading video of everyone, people standing miles away but still connected back to me.
    And crackling with static, voices come over the walkie-talkies of the Homeland Security guards, saying, “If you hurt yourself, you hurt me—do you copy?”
    By that point there’s not a big enough defibrillator in the universe to scramble all our brains. And, yeah, eventually we’ll all have to let go, but for another moment everyone’s holding tight, trying to make this connection last forever. And if this impossible thing can happen then who knows what else is possible? And a girl at Burger King shouts, “I’m scared, too.” And a boy at Jack in the Box shouts, “I am scared
all the time.
” And everyone else is nodding, Me Too.
    To top things off, a huge voice announces, “Attention!” From overhead it says, “May I have your attention, please?” It’s a lady. It’s the lady voice who pages people and tells them to pick up the white paging telephone. With everyone listening, the entire airport is reduced to silence.
    “Whoever you are, you need to know…,” says the lady voice of the white paging telephone. Everyone listens because everything thinks she’s only talking to them. From a thousand speakers she begins to sing. With that voice, she’s singing the way a bird sings. Not like a parrot or an Edgar Allan Poe bird that speaks English. The sound is trills and scales the way a canary sings, notes too impossible for a mouth to conjugate into nouns and verbs. We can enjoy it without understanding it. And we can love it without knowing what it means. Connected by telephone and television, it’s synchronizing everyone, worldwide. That voice so perfect, it’s just singing down on us.
    Best of all…her voice fills everywhere, leaving no room for being scared. Her song makes all our ears into one ear.
    This isn’t exactly the end. On every TV is me, sweating so hard an electrode slowly slides down one side of my face.
    This certainly isn’t the happy ending I had in mind, but compared to where this story began—with Griffin Wilson in the nurse’s office putting his wallet between his teeth like a gun—well, maybe this is not such a bad place to start.

LOSER
    The show still looks exactly like when you were sick with a really high fever and you stayed home to watch TV all day. It’s not
Let’s Make a Deal.
It’s not
Wheel of Fortune.
It’s not Monty Hall, or the show with Pat Sajak. It’s that other show where the big, loud voice calls your name in the audience, says to “Come on down, you’re the next contestant,” and if you guess the cost of Rice-A-Roni then you fly round-trip to live for a week in Paris.
    It’s
that
show. The prize is never anything useful, like okay clothes or music or beer. The prize is always some vacuum cleaner or a washing machine, something you might maybe get excited to win if you were, like, somebody’s wife.
    It’s Rush Week, and the tradition is everybody pledging Zeta Delt all take this big chartered school bus and need to go to some TV studio and watch them tape this game show. Rules say, all the Zeta Delts wear the same red T-shirt with printed on it the Greek Zeta Delta Omega deals, silk-screened in black. First, you need to take a little stamp of Hello Kitty, maybe half a stamp and wait for the flash. It’s like this little paper stamp printed with Hello Kitty you suck on and swallow, except it’s really blotter acid.
    All you do is, the Zeta Delts sit together to make this red patch in the middle of the studio audience and scream and yell to get on TV. These are not the Gamma Grab’a Thighs. They’re not the Lambda Rape’a Dates. The Zeta Delts, they’re who everybody wants to be.
    How the acid will affect you—if you’re going to freak out and kill yourself or eat somebody alive—they