Be More Chill

Be More Chill (2004) by Ned Vizzini is a young adult novel about a teenage boy trying to increase his social status in high school. The work employs humor and a science fiction premise to satirize the absurdity of social norms in contemporary youth culture. The main character, Jeremy Heere, is a socially awkward high school student who ingests a pill that contains a quantum supercomputer that advises him on how to modify his behavior, his appearance, and his mannerisms to seem cool to his peers. In 2015, this book was adapted into a musical of the same name with music and lyrics by Joe Iconis. It was also adapted as a graphic novel in 2021, and a film version is in development. This study guide refers to the version published in 2004 by Hyperion.

Content Warning: This guide includes a reference to death by suicide and self-harm.

Plot Summary

Jeremy Heere attends Middle Borough High School in Metuchen, New Jersey. He is fixated on quantifying his social status. Every day, Jeremy tallies up his embarrassing moments on what he calls a Humiliation Sheet, categorizing the different forms of social rejection that he experienced. Jeremy has one close friend at school, Michael Mell, whom he describes as a stoner and a fellow “loser.”

On the day that school play rehearsals begin, Jeremy plans to give a chocolate shaped like William Shakespeare to his crush, Christine Caniglia. Jeremy and Christine were cast in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Lysander and Puck, respectively. He manages to start a conversation with her during the first rehearsal, but he accidentally offends her by denying a rumor that he sent her a letter. Then, he panics when he discovers that the chocolate melted in his pocket.

While cleaning out his pocket, Jeremy encounters Rich, a male student who is considered cool; he mocks Jeremy for his mishap. When Jeremy returns home, he is inundated with media depicting masculine ideals that he is unable to achieve. He watches reality television shows about dating, obsesses over his physical appearance, and masturbates to online porn, doubting that he will ever be able to get a girl to like him. At school, he continues to talk with Christine during play rehearsals, but he realizes that she already has a boyfriend, Jake Dillinger.

At the school’s Halloween dance, Jeremy arrives and watches Christine dancing with Jake. He is approached by Rich, who is much friendlier this time. Rich reveals that he also was once a “loser” but became cool after obtaining a new technology called a SQUIP, a quantum computer contained in a pill. Rich claims it was invented in Japan but is not yet available in the US. The SQUIP interacts with the user as a voice in their head that tells them how to be cool. Rich provides Jeremy with the contact information of the person he bought his SQUIP from, and Jeremy obtains the $600 he needs to purchase one by stealing and selling some of his aunt’s rare Beanie Babies.

Once Jeremy swallows the pill containing the SQUIP, he begins to hear a voice in his head that sounds like actor Keanu Reeves. It advises him to buy new shirts that reference popular hip-hop and rap artists and corrects his out-of-date slang. When Jeremy sees two popular girls, Anne and Chloe, at the mall, the SQUIP tells him exactly what to say to charm them and get Chloe’s phone number. However, Jeremy is forced to ignore Michael, who is waiting to give him a ride home, because Michael’s social status is not high enough to impress the girls. When he returns to school, the SQUIP helps Jeremy establish a friendship with the other cool kids. Michael feels increasingly hurt and ignored, but Jeremy justifies his actions because he is finally achieving romantic success with girls.

Chloe invites Jeremy to a house party, where she offers to do ecstasy with him. Against the wishes of the SQUIP, Jeremy invites Michael to the party as well. He steals his mother’s car and drives them to the party, where he takes ecstasy and begins to kiss Chloe. However, the ingestion of drugs turns the SQUIP’s language function to Spanish, forcing him to rely on his own social skills for the night. Chloe’s jealous boyfriend, Brock, interrupts their kissing, and Jeremy is forced to hide in the bathroom. When he emerges, he finds that Christine’s boyfriend, Jake, cheated on her with another girl. The SQUIP reactivates as the drugs wear off, but Jeremy convinces the SQUIP that his goal is to date Christine, rather than to sleep with Chloe. After the SQUIP changes its mission, Jeremy offers to give Christine a ride home and discovers that Michael has met a girl named Nicole, whom he knows from chatting online. Jeremy drives them all home in his mother’s car and finally gets Christine’s number.

The next morning, Michael calls to tell Jeremy that Rich and Jake were both badly burned after the house caught fire the previous night. Students are upset by the event, but Jeremy and the SQUIP come up with a plan to use the tragedy to seduce Christine. During the first performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Jeremy interrupts the play to give a speech about the house fire’s impact on their community, and then he asks Christine to go out with him. However, the plan fails. Christine rejects him and is upset by the public spectacle, and Jeremy is kicked out of the play and replaced as Lysander for breaking character. The SQUIP apologizes for the failure, claiming that its programming is incomplete, and later versions of the technology will be better. Michael comes to comfort Jeremy, recommending that he tell Christine the truth about the SQUIP. It offers to take control of Jeremy’s brain and allow him to write down his entire mental experience so that Christine can read it and understand his intentions. The final chapter of the book reveals that the novel is the text the SQUIP wrote for Christine; whether she will forgive Jeremy is left ambiguous.