The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B by Teresa Toten Read Free Book Online Page B

cetera—but since I bought the bottle, I felt I had to empty it. Every damn ritual comes with its own instruction manual, right?”
    Snooki put a comforting hand on Wonder Woman’s arm. Snooki was a “patter”—every group had one. That’s what Robyn said. Robyn had been to a lot of groups.
    “But I won’t do it again,” Wonder Woman promised.
    To who, exactly?
    “I mean it. I learned my lesson, guys. I don’t need a full-fledged eating disorder layered on top of the claustrophobia and, and other stuff. So I’m back to chewing a hundred times for each bite. Dinner takes almost two hours, but see, that works because …”
    Forget it. Thor and Adam folded their arms across their chests. Try as he might, Adam couldn’t come up withanything remotely sympathetic to say. Skinny girls worrying about getting skinnier totally perplexed him. He
hated
being perplexed, especially in Group. There was enough perplexing
outside
Group.
    Green Lantern, thank God, had a superior story about having to keep driving back to a school crosswalk several times a day, all week, because he was convinced that he had run over someone last Tuesday. Classic—now this was something Adam could get into. Green Lantern listened to newscasts on the radio and TV, read all the local papers and scoured the Internet, searching for a report of an accident on the corner of Chestnut and Walmer. Nothing. Far from calming him, the lack of reportage just made him escalate. Adam had never had this particular experience—he couldn’t drive, after all—but he could completely understand the supremely logical compulsion to return to the scene of the imaginary accident over and over again. He so
got
that one. Adam suggested that, for starters, Green Lantern might want to journal every revisit or
thought
about revisit and assign it a number value, just like it said in the manual (well, on the back cover of the manual anyway). And that act alone might help a bit. Just because Adam didn’t do any of the assignments didn’t mean they shouldn’t be done. Green Lantern looked genuinely relieved.
    Robyn didn’t. Something was up for sure. She was avoiding eye contact and her vibe was off. She didn’t even look like herself, although Adam didn’t understand how exactly. He wasn’t good with girls’ faces. If he ruled the world, girls would say every single thing that was on their minds. He sucked at guessing, and that whole reading-between-the-linesthing was so beyond him, he couldn’t get there with a map.
    Thirty-seven minutes in and, aside from that lone smile, Robyn had not looked at him once. What was the matter? Something was. He was screwed. She
hated
him. Completely understandable, of course, but why?
    Wolverine took the floor and began laboriously listing the reasons why he thought he had congestive heart failure. “I have undefined fatigue, you know?” The guy should have sounded like the douche bag he was, but somehow he didn’t. It was unbearable.
    Adam crossed his legs, caught himself and readjusted immediately. That was no way to
man up
. He was crossing his legs the way girls do. He examined Thor, who was glowering at Wolverine, or maybe that was just Thor’s “listening” face.
    “It’s chronic, of course, and eventually fatal.” Wolverine shuddered.
    If only,
thought Adam.
    “I’ll have to get a ream of tests: extensive blood work, nuclear medicine, examine my creatine levels. Then there’s stress tests and …”
    Thor sat like a man, and at nineteen arguably he was one. First of all he really
occupied
the chair. Adam tried for a bit of heavy-duty chair occupying. He raised his right leg and oh-so-casually placed his right ankle over his left knee, finishing off with left hand grasping right ankle loosely. There. Just like Thor. Okay, not comfortable, but
way
more manly. Adam also tried nodding sympathetically at Wolverine, but his heart just wasn’t in it. More importantly,Wolverine sounded like he was winding down and it