The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To (27 page)

Eric doesn't freak out. I think I say “shit” and I can feel the backpack on my back and I can feel the gun inside of it screaming out prison time, screaming “shot on school premises.” The garage door starts to open. I look back and see Eric at the controls.

“Let's go,” says Eric, “this is as good a place as any,” sounding all kinds of adult.

We get up and as we do I see a rock drop out of nowhere onto the concrete, making a loud crack. The Man and the cops hear it and turn to see their two soft targets walking into the drama department.

In the couple of months Christine and I went out I never made it back here. Whenever she'd talk about something that had happened that day in rehearsal or at a Theater Division meeting I'd imagine everything looking like the grainy video of clips from their plays being shown once a month on the school newscast. Kids in half assed costumes, clownish in makeup, their “flats,” as we learned they were called that one day out on the loading dock, being dwarfed by the size of the stage itself. It was a little hard to respect. But right now this seems like the ideal place for our purposes: as dark and expansive as the rest of the school is narrow and too well lit. “I don't really know how to use this gun, man.”

“You won't have to,” Eric says, and pulls on one of the curtain ropes. The curtain comes up and instead of revealing a plywood-and-tempera-paint New York, underneath the curtain is a mech.

If you are a kid of a certain age and male you will know what I mean. A giant metal exoskeleton, like Voltron, like Battletech. Like
TimeBlaze
, because someday if we make it out of this alive people will read it and totally give us credit for changing the whole interpretation
of mechs in sci-fi. The thing about mechs is, they're fucking badass. The thing that's different about ours is, they're more badass.

I am good at drawing, I think. I am fucking good. Look at how cool this thing is, how well designed, how imaginative. I holler with joy and swing up into the cockpit. The thing is about three of me tall and one of me wide. I slide right in and the cockpit conforms to my body and the HUD slides over my face and I am home, this is perfect, this is incredible. I look down at Eric.

Eric: “That works, right?”

By way of response I rocket across the auditorium, a jet-propelled leap that's just graceful as hell, and I crush some seats but I do it beautifully.

“How long have you been hiding this in here?” The mech amplifies my voice to this metallic screech that would hurt my ears if I weren't in the cockpit.

“Since this morning,” Eric said. “I came in early. If I ever have to drink another energy drink again, I think I'll kill myself.”

“It'll be worth it,” I say.

“Yup,” Eric says, and at that moment I'm fine, I'm in a mech and everything I ever wanted to be real can be and we are unstoppable and Eric's thing means we'll be around forever, we'll be fine, and we will be.

I turn around to make sure there's no one else in the auditorium because I want to fire a rocket-propelled grenade but I don't want to hit anybody and when I turn back Eric is a ball of blue flame because suddenly he always has been. And just in time too, because the law is here. In the dim light of the stage are three cops, then five, then probably all the cops in our suburb.

“Drop it, assholes!” Drop what? The gun is in a backpack lying on the stage, and they can't know that, a backpack is normal in a school, a backpack makes sense, not a kid in a mech or a kid who's a glowing avatar. “Step out of the impossible vehicle” might make sense. Or “Extinguish yourself.”

I make another leap for the stage and all of the sudden it's on: guns are out and blazing, cops who've never pulled a piece before
in their lives are unloading rounds here in the auditorium of the school some of their kids probably attend. Maybe Tony DiAvalo's dad is here, I think he might be a cop. Hey, Mr. DiAvalo, look what I can draw. Fuck your son and his hustling M&Ms.

The rounds go ricocheting off the mech, we designed it to be bomb-proof so bullets are nothing, bullets are from this world and this thing is from beyond the stars, and I keep advancing on this one cop and he keeps firing right at the blast shield I can see through, and one bullet, I don't know how, one bullet bounces straight back and he catches a round in the hand and his gun blows up, classic. His hands are bleeding and I pick him up with the mech's mechanical arm and hold him out over the orchestra pit.

“Let us go,” I screech mechanically.

The guy twists around in my mech's hand and stares directly into the blast shield. I don't think he can see me, but there is a look on his face of absolute un-cop-like shit-scaredness, and it bugs me that he is human. That he did not ask for this. That for all its videogame aspects this is not a video game.

“Stand down!” someone screams, and it's The Man. He comes out from behind a piece of stage furniture. “Stand down.”

The cops put their guns away and I put the cop down on the stage. The Man was ducking. He's nothing we have to worry about. If Eric had created him, if he were what we made him, he would've dodged bullets and come for us like it was no big deal; our Man wouldn't need fat suburban cops. There's us and there's them now, and we're something else entirely.

“No need for this,” The Man says, “no need,” and comes out from behind the end table. Then, while I'm listening to The Man say something about how we can work this whole thing out, Eric screams.

“STOP!”

But it's too late. The bloody-handed cop has his gun out in his good hand and he fires into the vent on the mech that is its us-given weakness, the little one right below the blast shield and to the left of its gyrostabilizer. The whole thing powers down at once, the blast
shield pops open, and Eric turns to see what the fuck is going on. In that second, The Man pulls something from his coat and stabs Eric in the neck with it. Eric's a kid again in that instant, no more blue flame, and the mech is no more and I'm down on the floor with the cop who just shot the vent, and I see that the thing the guy has driven into Eric's neck is a needle, the plunger totally depressed.

Eric is getting woozy. His eyes are starting to roll back in his head, and that's when he starts running. He starts running, his limbs puppet-y like he's drunk, like he's back in the IHOP parking lot. Tranquilizer in the veins of someone who can't be totally tranquilized.

God bless him but he goes and the Man runs after him, grabs him by the waist. Eric flails and fights and it's no use and I think, just go to sleep. Goddamnit, go to sleep. You did everything you could have done.

“What the fuck,” says the cop with the bloody hands. “What the fucking fuck.” The other cops must be thinking the same thing because I have enough time to roll over and unzip Eric's bag and train Eric's dad's gun on The Man, who is still holding a half-dead, drunk-looking exhausted Eric.

“Put him down.”

“You can't get out of this,” The Man says, and there's a loud echoing click of fifteen suburban cops pointing their weapons at me, just a kid with a gun, no more mech and maybe there never was.

“I know. But just put him down.”

The Man does so, his hand still on Eric's collar so he can't go anywhere.

“There.”

“Drop it, fuckwad!” one of the cops screams, and now I have something to drop so I do, and I'm still alive because I do what they say.

The cops walk me to a police car in handcuffs and The Man walks Eric to a black van with tinted windows and they don't need handcuffs, his legs are too heavy to run, heavy with what would put you and me in a coma but him it just slows him down.

When the van doors close that's the last time I see him.

My dad puts it best when he says he never thought I would be the kid to end up in jail.

But jail is what I end up in. Jail is distinct from prison, which is something I learn that I never knew before. Jail is where you are when you're awaiting trial. Prison is where you go after you've been convicted.

I can't believe myself in jail. I don't buy that I'm there. I also can't believe how much like a school it is, and I don't mean that to make some point about public education being indistinguishable from incarceration or whatever, I mean the architectural philosophies and materials that were used to build this jail are similar to the ones used to build my high school. I go to a fairly modern, antiseptic school and this is a fairly modern, antiseptic prison. The
doors are the same, down to the little rectangular windows with the wire mesh inside, except they lock from the other side.

If I am quiet and introverted in a classroom full of students who don't care about me one way or the other, then here I am … I don't know. Operating under the principle that if we don't see other people they aren't there, I never look up, in holding, in the common areas, in the cafeteria, in the cell I share with a kid named Ricky. I don't meet anyone's eyes, ever. I see my own eyes reflected up at me from the pool of water forming underneath me in the shower.

In third grade I was convinced a classroom full of relatively well adjusted fourth-graders would suddenly jump me at any moment for no reason, even though they'd expressed no violent intentions. Here, everyone expresses their violent intentions towards you all the time, then retracts them, then laughs, then high-fives somebody, then reiterates the threat. Christine's college friends could sound ironic while meaning what they said. These kids can sound threatening and friendly all at once, and be both. It's always a joke, and not a joke, and a threat, and not a threat, but still a threat. You can put your head down and not look anyone in the eye but you can't not hear what gets yelled.

My third night after lights out when I can hear Ricky stumbling around in the dark trying to find our toilet, or at least I hope that's what he's doing, I realize I have been too dazed and scared to think for more than ten seconds about Eric and about what happened. And the next day I am just settled in enough to the terrifying routine that I am able to think about it, and I think about it for the next three days.

The difference between prison and jail isn't the only thing I learn. I learn that paralegals are not lawyers, and that Ricky would have tried harder to stay out of trouble if he'd known that, because his stepmom is a paralegal and he figured even if he got caught he'd be fine because she could get him off, so he's at the very least going to slap his stepmom when he gets out of here for giving him a mistaken impression. I learn that Corrections Officer Cliff Hines is particularly disappointed to see white kids like me in here with,
in his words, “the niggers and the cholos.” I learn a good deal of Spanish swear words, and am a few days and a few catcalls away from matching all the words to their definitions when I realize I've been in here a full week without seeing a judge.

And I am working up the nerve to tell Officer Hines just that, when he unlocks my cell and looks in on me and Ricky and points to me and says, “Visitor.”

Down the long hall that is not all that different from the one that connects the science classrooms in my high school, I think of all the people it could be. My brother, here to kite me some smokes and tell me to keep my head up. My dad, to be less angry than he is just confused. My mom, to be angry at herself and me and probably to start a fight with a guard. Christine, to ask me where Eric is. The Man, to do whatever's left to do to me.

We round the corner and Officer Hines unlocks a little room and opens the door, and inside, sitting at a little table, is none of those people. It's a young, reasonably pretty, professional-looking woman. She gestures for me to sit down in a metal chair across the table from her.

“You okay?” Officer Hines asks.

“Yes,” she says.

I sit down. Officer Hines leaves us alone.

“Hi,” she says, less professionally than any lawyer I've ever seen on TV. “I'm here representing somebody who basically thought you'd know who they were without me having to identify them. Make sense?”

I think I know who she's talking about but I wonder why they switched from being represented by men in suits with black sunglasses to women who, absent the clothes and briefcase, seem like they should be selling cell-phone covers at the mall. I nod.

“Great. So … Yeesh. So … it is NOT very much fun in here. Right?”

I just stare at her.

“Right. Here's the thing. They told me not to say ‘This can all go away.' BUT—” she says, and she smiles, and waves her hand like,
“but there you have it.”

“You can be prosecuted for what you would stand accused of doing,” she says, “or … you can
not
be prosecuted, be let go, and just, like … continue onward.”

“Really?” I say.

She nods, once, not even a full nod. She just lowers her head in one sharp movement.

“Of course, contingent upon that … I mean, no-brainer … you don't say anything, to anyone, ever. It can all go away, it can all come back. Make sense?”

“Yes … You can do that?”

“I mean
I
can't do that. But you know, the people that I, you know, represent … they're very good.”

We sit there for a second.

“Do you need some time to think about it?”

“Who do you work for?” I say.

She shrugs and smiles knowingly like, I don't know, I couldn't tell you if I did know, I am a recent college graduate employed by powers great and murderous and my name is Amy and I get to go home after this.

Two hours later my dad comes to pick me up and that's when he says the thing about he never thought I'd be the kid to end up in jail. In the passenger seat of his SUV the sky through the windshield seems particularly big and blue, but not in a pretty way. I think of rap lyrics I have heard my brother recite in the past about what happens to snitches who talk to buy their freedom, and I wonder if it is better or worse than what I deserve. Then I think,
I guess I didn't really snitch
. If anything I agreed NOT to talk. But then I think,
Wait, I did snitch
. I snitched to the guy from church when I was angry. Except
snitch
is the wrong word. Snitching is too cool. I told. I tattled like a little kid.