The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To (19 page)

So it's not surprising to me that people can just blow up and change or I guess reveal who they always were, it's just disappointing that the people who stay the same are people like my brother or Cecelia Martin and the people who change or I guess peel back their façade are the people who you thought were the good ones.

I go downstairs and out into the garage to get a case of soda to put in the fridge. There's a mark on the front of my dad's SUV where he hit the animal on the road. There's no blood or gore, just a big yellow stain like we hit America's biggest bug. I don't like to think about what angle we would've had to hit something at for it to leave a mark like that. And also, we hit a mammal, a pretty big one, not an insect. I think. I wasn't paying much attention. I was in my head building a world where everything is back to normal that felt so real for a second I thought I could step into it.

In fourth period our first day back I have to run a class survey up to the office. I want it to take as long as possible. I'm in no hurry to get back to Mr. Webber's history class because I guess he got in trouble for showing us too many movies last semester so now he's pledged to lecture all day every day and he would clearly rather be running
Glory
or a Ken Burns documentary and you can feel him
boring himself. So I walk around the side of the school and Christine and Eric are sitting in the loading bay. Christine is sharing Eric's enormous lunch, which he's not supposed to be here eating until next period, fifth period, when we both have lunch. I'm not going to stop or say hi, I'm just going to clutch my manila envelope and ignore them, but Christine says, “Hey, Darren,” and stupidly, I turn my head. Just enough to acknowledge that they actually exist.

“You don't ditch class,” I say to Eric.

“I am right now,” Eric says.

“He's being very rebellious,” Christine says. She smiles. She thinks this is all a joke.

I walk away, and Eric actually says, “That's right, walk away.”

“Eric!” Christine says.

I actually, actively want to punch him in the face. I think about turning and running back and putting a sneaker in his stomach, and it's confusion that keeps me from doing it.

Sex with Christine has turned him into an asshole, I think, and that actually kind of makes me smile. Or maybe it's just hanging out with all the assholes in all the pictures I keep getting. All the muffin-hats.

That day after school Eric is waiting for me by my locker. Maybe Christine made him come apologize for being a real cock at lunch. Maybe he's come to do that on his own.

“Hey,” Eric says.

“Hey,” I say.

He looks skinny. Skinny even for how skinny he is. Behind his glasses his eyes are retreating into his brain. There's a scraggly sort-of mustache on his upper lip. I think maybe this is Christine's older friends making him into one of their own. But he has the same clothes and the same backpack and the same glasses, there's just less of him for everything to hang off of.

“So …” he says. “How do you wanna do this?”

“Do what?”

“This,” he says. “We have to have it out.”

“You mean like fight?”

“Yeah,” he says, sounding totally unsure of himself, then again, “Yeah,” like he knows he sounded like a pussy the first time.

“You're serious.”

“It needs to happen.”

“Fucking stop it. Stop e-mailing me pictures of you and Christine. What the fuck is that about? I don't want to know you guys. Go fool around and take pictures of each other and die.”

What's left of Eric squares up to me. “Come on, then,” he squeaks.

“Fuck you, you fucking mutant.” And for the second time today I walk away and for the second time Eric says “Walk away” like he's seen it in an action movie.

My life is strange and I don't know anyone in it, except my brother, who's still my brother, so it doesn't surprise me when he comes in the house that night singing an Irish drinking song with Alan and it doesn't surprise me when he comes up to my dad's office where I'm playing a space strategy game online and shoves a wad of paper in my face, he's just that kind of asshole, but what does surprise me is what's on the paper. It's the dossier of a member of the
TimeBlaze
zombie posse.

“Tha fuck iz this?” he says in his British fuckhead accent. “Someone exploded yer faggit library all over tha droiveway, ya bastahd.”

I push him to one side and run downstairs and out the front door and when I get there, sure enough, six months of made-up universe is all over the driveway, flapping in a half-assed January wind. Steampunk Praetoreous is stuck in the rubber plants. His cyberpunk counterpart is underneath the wheel of the blue recycling bin. Paper is everywhere and I'm completely fucking done.

I'm going to go back upstairs and tell my brother I will pay him and Jake whatever Christmas money I got in various cards from various relatives to have them go to Eric's house and push his eyes
all the way back in his brain. Then I think of a better idea. Inside my junk drawer, next to porn I've printed off the Internet, I find the business card of that guy from my brother's church. I take out the phone I haven't had reason to use in a few weeks, and I dial the number on the business card.

On the third ring the guy picks up, and I remind him of who I am, and then I start talking about a boy who can't sleep.

“I didn't believe it either but I swear to God … err … I swear it's true.”

“I believe you. I was ready to believe when I heard thirdhand from your brother. I was ready to believe even before then. These are interesting times. For things like your friend to occur doesn't come as a complete surprise.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I can't be much more specific than I've been. Thank you for your honesty. If you need anything from me, anything, you let me know. And I hope I can feel free to do likewise.”

“Uhm … okay.”

“Thank you, Darren.”

The creepy church guy hangs up.

I'd like to say that that night I dream of Eric being carried off by monks and nuns and ultrareligious freakazoids and burned at the stake at the top of a hill, but I don't. My dreams have no poetic justice, they're just mind farts. I dream about checking my e-mail. There's a thing where my brother and I are in a submersible in the ocean and he keeps trying to send text messages. I dream I'm fucking Christine. So no dreams about it but before and after I go to sleep I think about what I may have just opened Eric up to, and it never feels as good as I want it to. It feels pretty terrible, actually.

A typical day after me and Christine and Eric explode: I walk home right after school. I should start driving, but it's too late to switch
into driver's ed and I've been bothering my dad to sign me up for the same driving school my brother took but he keeps forgetting. So for now I walk home and it's February so I'm not all sweaty when I get there. I go in the kitchen and eat everything. I feel a lot like human shit. I've started doing the occasional sit-up but it doesn't move anything around on what is still the worst torso in North America. I check my e-mail in my dad's office, but it's a lot like checking my phone: asking for disappointment, a good activity for somebody who likes the numeral zero, and blank screens, and no change. I go in my room and turn on NPR. I masturbate to scenarios totally unrelated to my life: weird fantasy specifics like cat women and Venusian slave girls. Afterward I fall asleep and wake up when it's dark. I have a couple hours of groggy useless energy after that and it feels like I could stay up all night. I've become really involved in this massively multiplayer game online. My character is a daemon lord whose right arm is a scythe. The rest of my squadron is ten-year-olds whose voices are modified to sound like bugs or robots. I always fall asleep eventually, and the days keep going like this.

In English we're supposed to be turning in our modern-day adaptations of
The Grapes of Wrath
. Creative assignments usually send most honors students into a seizure, because there aren't predefined rubrics for being creative, you're encouraged to do exactly what you're not supposed to do in any other assignment, which is MAKE IT UP, you're not even asked to provide a bibliography, and before long you have to put a belt in soon-to-be-valedictorian Alicia Henry's mouth to keep her from choking on her own tongue. But the
Grapes of Wrath
adaptation has a legendary, all-purpose solution: just make it about illegal immigrants. Some kid who was a junior when my brother was a freshman did it, and Mrs. Amory thought it was so great she used it as an example of the assignment for the next couple years, until people got the hint and just started copying it. I have one-upped everybody and made my adaptation,
which is supposed to be a prose short story, seven to ten pages double-spaced, about Iraqi refugees. Plus, it's in screenplay format. Eric and I were briefly debating buying really expensive screenwriting software to write the
TimeBlaze
movie scripts, but we eventually decided against it and Eric wrote thirty or so pages of the first movie in a Microsoft Word document he formatted very specifically. I just take out the names
DR. PRAETOREOUS
and
TEMPORAL RANGER
and
THE MAN
and replace them with
SADIQ
and
HADIR
and
TOM JOAD
, whose name I decided not to alter for obvious reasons. And I change the dialogue and action, of course.

Mrs. Amory is coming around the room and I hand in my paper and then Chris White hands in his and then some girl whose name I can't remember but I think is in choir hands in hers and when Mrs. Amory gets to Eric, Eric doesn't have anything to hand in.

He sort of shrugs and tries to find someplace to point his sinking-in eyes besides Mrs. Amory's face. And Mrs. Amory stays there longer than she would if it were anyone else who didn't have an assignment to turn in, looking at Eric like he's right now undoing everything she knows to be true: first bell is at 7:45 and Pearl in
The Scarlet Letter
symbolizes evil and Eric Lederer will turn his work in on time if not early.

“Eric?” she says.

“Sorry,” Eric says.

Though it was always a sticking point between me and Christine, that afternoon I'm glad I can't drive because everyone's cars are fucked. I walk through a parking lot full of rip-shit, mystified kids who can't figure out why their Jettas won't start. Ryan, the kid from Theater Division who is pretty much always wearing suspenders, is about to pull out of the parking lot in his old white truck. I look at him. He shrugs at me. I shrug back. A couple of kids in older cars are behind him, some of them packed with friends whose cars are bricked and need rides home.

The principal comes on the loudspeaker the next morning and
condemns what he calls the “car prank” and vows to ferret out the “parties responsible.” I wonder if Christine's car still works. I think of how it smelled inside her car, like carpet shampoo and the weird nonsmell of the air conditioner. Then I punch my leg underneath my desk and try really hard to think of anything else.

Eric isn't in class that day, or the day after that. Then on Friday I am leading a squadron of bug-and-robot-voiced ten-year-olds into battle against another squadron of ten-year-olds that doesn't have such a sage older leader when my phone starts vibrating in my pocket. I tell BMXIZ4FAGS to watch my six and take my phone out of my pocket. Eric is calling me.

I should hold a grudge. It really seems like the right thing to do in this case.

“Can I come over?” Eric asks.

I should really be over people “coming over” at this point, knowing that when they call first they are coming to your house to break your heart in the first person. But there is really nothing the dude can say to me at this point that would surprise me in its awfulness. And also I'm hoping that like when I used to go over to his house with an Xbox and all the controllers shoved in a backpack, Eric will come over with a console that just has a reset button and we'll hit it and everything will be like it was in October.

We're in front of my house in pretty much the same spot where I told my brother about Eric that night.

“On Wednesday morning I got pulled out of class. I got called down to the principal's office, and there was this guy in there with the principal, then the principal excused himself and I was alone with this guy. And he said he knew about my thing. And he said he was from a university. He said he wanted to study my thing. And I asked him if I could have some time to think about it. He said I could, but that time was of the essence, that now that he knew
about it there's no telling who else knows. I left and ditched the rest of the day. He came to my house that night and said he heard I ditched the rest of my classes, and I shouldn't do that, that if I started behaving erratically that would draw attention to me, and I didn't want that, did I? He said I should come with him right then, that there were people after me. I shut the door and locked it and when my mom got home I told her. I mean obviously not everything, but I told her this guy had been by and she said she thought it was a good idea, this college program. And it turns out that this guy had already talked to my dad and her, and they thought it was a good opportunity. He told them I was eligible for this early-freshman thing for high school students, effective immediately. And then I knew I was fucked because there's nothing your parents won't agree to if they think it's about you getting into college.”

“Shit. Come inside I guess.”

On the way into the house Eric stops. He reaches into a bush next to my front door and pulls out a piece of paper that's all wrinkled from being stuck in a bush and drenched by sprinklers then dried by the sun. It's some
TimeBlaze
art, still blowing around from when Eric covered my yard in it. A Thragnacian Containment Pylon. The Containment Pylons float in space at regular intervals around the wormhole that is the Thragnacian's charge. They opened the wormhole as a weapon in their war against the peaceful Albions, and the Galactic Conclave decreed as punishment that they should have to use their superior technology to harness the wormhole, and take care of it for the duration of their civilization. Eric folds it up and puts it in his pocket.