The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To (2 page)

I don't get absorbed. I don't hunch over and curl my tongue up like I'm super-concentrated. The time between when you're finished with your work and class gets out would seem like the best time, because you can concentrate the most, but it's actually the worst. I draw while the teacher is talking, because then everybody's looking up at the front of the classroom, or at least they're supposed to be. I look up periodically, just like everybody else. I jot down notes occasionally, just like everybody else. Every so often my pencil drifts over and draws the jawline of a face. Then it returns to its place and writes “GILDED AGE 1870-1890.” Then it drifts over again and draws a nose. Then it goes back and writes “COINED BY MARK TWAIN IN BOOK OF SAME NAME.” Then it puts a pair of sunglasses on the nose. I'm into sunglasses recently. They're not as risky as eyes.

When there's not a good reason for me to have my pencil up, I put it away. When that empty five to ten minutes at the end of class comes around where weaker men do their drawing and end up being interrogated by popular girls and pushy dudes, I pull out a book. I try to make it a book we were assigned, too. Fewer questions that way.

“What were you drawing?” somebody asks me when I'm four pages into
The Great Gatsby
, which we just went up to the front of the room to get our copies of.

“Huh?” I look up. Eric Lederer is standing over my desk.

“When Mrs. Amory was talking about our independent essay assignment. You were drawing something.”

“Oh yeah. It's nothing.”

Eric Lederer and I have never talked, I don't think. All I know about him is he looks like a nerd, turns everything in super-on-time if not early, and knows every answer to every question always and is not shy about raising his hand to prove it. Which makes him a nerd I guess. Cecelia Martin must know more about him than I do, because she's looking at him like he just blew up a school bus and whispering to two girls next to her across the room. Looks like something along the lines of “That guy just blew up a school bus.”

“Can I see?” he asks. Having never paid that much attention to him, I haven't until just right now noticed that there's something strange about him. It takes me a second but I realize what it is: he's standing really still. Right in front of my desk, both feet planted. No one stands this awkwardly sure of themselves except characters in my drawings, staring straight ahead with their arms at their sides, because when they start to move around I start to realize that those drawing books might have a point about form and motion, even if what their tips usually get me is a bunch of basketball-burned sack-bodied heroes.

“Sure,” I say. I open my notebook. Folded up inside is the bright orange sheet with the criteria for our independent essay assignment.
The bright orange color will be a big help when I'm digging through my backpack the night before the essay is due trying to find the criteria so I know what the hell to write, the whole time swearing to myself I'm going to get some sort of organization thing going, but knowing I won't as long as teachers keep printing the important stuff on brightly colored paper that stands out even when it's shoved into my backpack with a roughness that says “I'll never need this again!”

I smooth out the paper and hand it to Eric. In the bottom right-hand corner of the page, underneath big bold letters that say “WORKS CITED IN PROPER MLA FORMAT!!!” two men in suits and dark sunglasses are restraining a cybernetic caveman with electrified lassos.

“Nice monkey,” I expect Eric to say. Even with the best intentions people always get what I'm drawing wrong, and admittedly the caveman looks kind of monkey-ish.

“Nice cyborg,” Eric says.

“Thanks,” I say.

“Is this going to be a comic book?” he asks.

“No,” I say, “I was just doodling.”

“Oh,” Eric says.

I was trying to be dismissive because Eric being genuinely interested seems about as bad as Bret Embler or Carter Buehl being mock-interested. Here somebody across the room is staring at him like he blew up a bus, and I wonder if he has a reputation that I don't know about that's rubbing off on me just by being seen talking to him that will get me lots more attention from idiots. But I may have embarrassed myself just as much by using the word “doodling.” I look around, sort of like “does anyone know this kid? I don't,” and see that Cecelia and her friends are still looking at Eric like, “That's him, Officer, he's the one who laughed when those kids who thought they were going to school went to Heaven instead.”

“You know that kid that always draws cartoon characters?” Eric says.

“Tony. Yeah.” He's going to suggest Tony and I would make good
friends since we both draw. Lindsay Skinner once told me Tony and I should be “drawing buddies.” Lindsay will never know what that remark cost her, and what it cost her was me asking her out, something I had been psyching myself up to do for weeks until the “drawing buddies” comment. So I didn't get to stand in front of Lindsay's locker and stutter out one of the eighty-five variations on “Do you wanna go do something sometime” I'd been weighing the pros and cons of, and Lindsay didn't get to shoot me down.

“Do you think he's good?”

“Tony's alright, yeah.”

“Oh,” Eric says, the same way he said it when I told him I wasn't drawing a comic book. “I think he's awful.”

“Really?” I look around, this time to see if any of Tony's friends are around. Then I realize Tony doesn't really have friends, just what I like to think of as freak-show admirers.

“Yeah,” Eric says. “He never draws anything original. You originated these characters, right?”

“I mean, they're just … y'know … doodles, but yeah.”

“I think that's great,” Eric says. “I couldn't draw anything, original or otherwise, if my life depended on it.”

“Yeah?” I say. “That sucks.”

“It does,” Eric says. He folds the sheet back up the way it was and gives it back to me.

The bell rings. Eric hustles back to his seat to get his stuff. I throw my notebook and
The Great Gatsby
in my bag and I'm out the door when one of Cecelia's friends, Jen, catches up with me.

“Hey,” Jen says. “Do you … talk to that kid?”

I shrug. “I dunno,” I say. “Not really.”

“Oh,” she says, “never mind,” and starts off down the hallway.

Eric comes out of the classroom, his backpack way too high on his back.

“See you tomorrow,” he says. “I know it's not a comic, but you should consider trying your hand at one. Seems like you have the chops, drawing-wise, along with the originality to not just sketch other people's copyrighted material plus drugs.”

“It's not a comic, but, uhm,” I say. “It's actually a movie trilogy and a series of novels.”

“Awesome,” Eric says, breaking his weird stillness to hop just a little on his toes. It's geeky but it's pretty much the way I'd want somebody to react if they were the first person I told I was planning a movie trilogy and a series of novels. Eric is the first person. He says “awesome” again and we go off to fourth period in opposite directions.

“What's it about?”

Eric is standing over me again the next day towards the end of third period. No “hi” or “what's up” or anything, like our conversation from yesterday never ended.

“The movie trilogy and series of novels.”

“It's sort of a lot to like, go into,” I say. “You know the loading dock by the auditorium?”

“Yes,” he says.

“I eat lunch over there,” I tell him.

“Okay,” he says. “Fifth-period lunch?”

“Yep,” I say.

“Good,” he says all conspiratorial like we're planning a high-stakes daylight robbery. “Good.”

When I round the corner of the auditorium, Eric is sitting cross-legged on the concrete loading dock in direct sunlight, his lunch spread out in front of him.

“Aren't you hot?” I say.

“Hmm?”

“Aren't you hot?” I say. “I usually sit in the shade.”

At lunchtime, the way the sun hits the school there's a big wedge of shadow on one side of the dock. It's cool up against the brick and easier to read over there.

“Oh, right,” he says. “Thanks.”

I don't know why he's thanking me, I didn't really do it for him. The truth is he's so pale that in the sunlight he sort of hurts to look at.

He starts packing up his lunch to move. There's four or five little Tupperware containers and something wrapped in tinfoil. He puts them all in a small paper bag and moves toward the shade.

“So?” he says.

I start unwrapping my lunchroom burrito. I have two chili-cheese burritos and a fountain Dr. Pepper. I remember coming to high school when the fact that they had soda seemed like a huge deal. The thrill has worn off but I still get it every day.

“It starts with this scientist who works for the government. He invents these cybernetic modifications for soldiers. His technology ends up causing the deaths of millions of people. Then one day he stumbles upon the technology to make time travel possible, and he knows that if the government gets their hands on it, they'll make things even worse. Then he realizes that he can actually use the technology to go back and prevent those millions of people being killed. But the government busts in just as he's about to go and there's a shootout and he ends up getting sent too far back in time, to the Stone Age, through a temporal distortion.”

I take a bite of my burrito. They're pretty messy, but I've figured out how to eat them so not too much stuff leaks out one end.

“Then in the Stone Age …” I won't repeat the rest here but there's cybernetic cavemen and a race to an energy crystal at the heart of the universe and the dead and the living keep switching places. When I finish I realize I've never said the whole thing out loud before, or any of it, really. Then I realize I forgot a bunch of things.

“That's dynamite,” Eric says. “Really.” In the time it's taken me to tell the whole thing he's worked his way through four of the five Tupperware containers (string beans, some kind of potatoes, spinach, fruit salad) and half of what was wrapped in the aluminum foil, which turns out to be a pork chop sandwich.

“Who packs your lunch?” I ask.

“I do,” he says, and I remember I have a lunch.

“Leftovers?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “I cook.”

I expect he'll talk now so I can eat without it being awkward but he doesn't, he just sort of stares straight ahead. I eat anyway, and when I'm done I chew on the rim of my Styrofoam cup.

“What if the scientist—?” he says.

“What if the scientist what?” I say.

He shakes his head. The bell rings.

Wednesday in English Mrs. Amory splits us into groups for group projects. When she announces that Eric is in the same group as Cecelia, Cecelia sighs and looks at Jen and her other friend Teresa. She goes up to talk to Mrs. Amory when we're all supposed to be getting together with our groups. After Cecelia and Mrs. Amory are done talking in very hushed tones, Mrs. Amory calls Eric and Ashlyn Taylor up and tells them they'll be switching groups. My group is Chris White, Alicia Henry, and some girl whose name I always forget but I think might be in choir. Alicia has already divided the project up into four equal sections, assigned one to each of us, and written her e-mail address on three identical-sized strips of notebook paper so we can just e-mail her our sections when we're done and she'll assemble them all in a nice little binder before the due date. She actually says “nice little binder.” We all just give in to how badly she wants to get into a good college and go back to our desks with lots of class time to spare.

I'm almost done with
The Great Gatsby
and if we don't get assigned something else soon, I'll have to start reading my own books at the end of class, which I would enjoy except for the questions about what I'm reading and why I'm reading it. Getting asked what book you're reading isn't as bad as getting asked what you're drawing. What you're drawing is coming right from your head onto the page, it's all you, but if a book you're reading looks particularly nerdy, like it has a guy straddling a dragon on the cover, or when you start to describe it to the person asking you realize
it sounds particularly nerdy, you can always defuse it by tacking “… it sucks” to the end of your description. But then the question becomes “So why are you reading it?” Like, people stop reading assigned books once they realize they suck, they stop reading on page two if page one was too dense or too gay or too historical, so the fact that you're pressing on with a sucky book that no one is even forcing you to read is now a red flag.

Mostly people ask what your book is because they're worried it's something we were assigned when they were ditching out to go huff with some friends they have who go to Catholic school downtown, and they don't think that just because they missed one day means they have any less of a right to know what books they're supposed to half-try to read and give up on for being too dense, gay, and historical.

Eric never comes over to me. He just nods when he catches my eye.

“What if the scientist COULDN'T return to the present?”

Eric is sitting in the shade of the loading dock when I go there after the cafeteria.

“He sends the cavemen back to the present to do his bidding, but why can't he just go back and lead them himself?”

“Because the time-proof signals he sends the cavemen in the present need to get intercepted by the Temporal Ranger—”

“I know. I know he needs to stay in the past for the story to work. But what I'm saying is, there ought to be a reason he has to stay.”

Eric looks at me with wide eyes, expecting something, like as long as I don't hit him, this whole thing will be very exciting.