Reality Boy Read Online Free Page A

day. The one I was living in my head when Beth snapped me out of it. My place-of-no-triggers. I invented it when I was little, thanks to Nanny. I call it Gersday. It rhymes with pairsday or daresday. It’s the extra day I get inside of a week that no one else knows about. I live it in little parts of those other, regular days like Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, et cetera. While normal people who have seven days in their week may think I’m spacing out or “off in la-la land,” as my asshole third-grade teacher used to say, I’m really living one more day than all of you. A good day.
    All Gersdays are good days.
    Let me repeat. All Gersdays are good days.
    The postal abbreviation is GD. For Gersday. Or good day. Or anything you want to make it, as long as it’s so good that all the bad goes away. The zip code is.
    And if I take a day in GD during every other FS 00000 or UF ????? week, then I get to have a longer life than everyone else. That’s fifty-two extra days a year, which adds up.
    Let me explain further.
    A normal sixteen-year-old (nearly seventeen-year-old) would have lived about 6,191 days. I, Gerald “the Crapper” Faust, have lived 6,815. That’s 624 days more than other near-seventeen-year-olds. Technically, if we go by days, I’m almost nineteen.

7
EPISODE 1, SCENE 12, TAKE 2
    “GERALD, YOU CAN’T keep going off into your own world like that,” Nanny said. “You need to stay here and listen to what I’m saying, do you
undah-stand
?”
    I nodded because the director told me to nod. But I was still in Gersday, eating strawberry ice cream and walking down a happy street in a city neighborhood where none of the kids did things that made me want to beat them up.
    Nanny must have noticed, because she grabbed me by the arms and put her face right in my face and said, “Gerald! You’re needed here. You either listen or you spend time in the naughty chair.”
    I answered, “I’ll take the naughty chair, please.” Then Igot up and walked to it, sat down, and went back to Gersday and my ice-cream cone. One kid there wanted me to be on his kickball team. Another kid wanted me to go bike riding with him, and he didn’t care that I still used training wheels. I finished my ice cream and thought it would be nice to have another one. And then Lisi was there and she handed me a vanilla cone with rainbow sprinkles. She had chocolate with chocolate sprinkles. We walked down a bunch of roads until we got to our house.
    Mom was there and she hugged us when we got in and told us to finish our ice cream in the kitchen. When Lisi and I sat down at the table, Mom asked us how our day was and we told her how wonderful our day had been. When we were done, she said she had a surprise for us and took us to the hallway and showed us our new school pictures, framed and hung on the wall. Lisi looked like a little movie star. I looked like the cutest five-year-old who ever lived. There was one other picture—of Mom and Dad in that semi-embracing pose, her head leaned in on his chin a little. They looked so in love and happy. I stood back and looked at those three pictures and I cried happy tears. That’s what Gersdays were all about. Happy tears. Ice cream. Mom not ignoring Lisi and me because she was too busy fussing over Tasha. That couldn’t happen on a Gersday because on Gersday, Tasha didn’t exist. Which means she didn’t put plastic bags over Lisi’s head or call me
gaytard
. She couldn’t do those things because she wasn’t there at all. As Nanny would say:
Simple as one, two, three
.
    “Did you hear that?” Nanny asked.
    “What?” I asked.
    “The timer. It buzzed three minutes ago. You were off with the fairies for all that time. Smiling.”
    I checked to make sure I wasn’t still smiling. “Sorry,” I said.
    “Gerald, you and I are trying to work on some very serious
behay-vyah
issues and I can’t do it without your help.”
    “Yes.” Close-up of me nodding. I could see the camera’s lens