The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To (3 page)

“Like—”

He jumps before the words are even out of my mouth.

“Like what if, unbeknownst to him the government has created a clone of him in the present and the clone him has invented an apparatus to prevent the real him from coming back? And what if … well, here, let me show you.”

He takes his math book out of his backpack, opens it, and a folded sheet of paper falls out. He unfolds it, and it just keeps unfolding until there's a diagram spread out in front of us. It's covered in words like “scientist” and “Temporal Ranger” and “government.” Question marks are everywhere. Things are circled and connected to each other with arrows. It looks like a football play drawn on the blackboard in the locker room in a sports movie, except the players are words I've had in my head for the six months since I came up with this idea. Plus some new ones I don't recognize, like “Dream Spider” and “O.M.N.I.” and “Wolfpack Genetically Modified Not To Feel Fear.”

“Jesus,” I say.

“I got sort of excited about your idea. I thought about it a lot and I sort of assembled this last night. If there's anything in here you don't like, that's fine, it's your idea, but if there's anything you do like, it's all yours. Anyway, the thing I find hard to buy about the caveman troopers is their human behavior. It seems right now they're your average everyday cyborg, only hairier. I mean, isn't the fun of cavemen that they're cavemen?”

By the time the bell rings the world of this has tripled in size. We barely touch our lunches.

“I think this is too big for three movies,” Eric says as he slips on his too-high backpack.

“Even with the novels filling in the gaps?”

“Even then.”

“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.”

“Also I don't think the title
TimeBlaze: An EVILution
necessarily applies anymore.”

“Yeah. But I don't know what else we'd call it…”

“Don't worry about it,” Eric says. “The title is the least important part.”

I spend all sixth and seventh period drawing. I've finished
Gatsby
so I just say fuck it and draw through the last five minutes of class both periods. I cover worksheets front and back, graded-and-handed-back
tests, and most of the school-picture order form we got in homeroom.

Eric spends the next two periods making a list of possible titles, which are the least important part.

It's not until I get home that I realize I'm starving.

The next morning when my dad is driving me to school I think the school parking lot would be a good place for The Committee to attack. The Committee is the government agency Dr. Praetoreous used to work for that's now pursuing him through time. They are ultra-secret, their motives are unclear, their funding is unlimited, and it's very likely they're connected to some ancient architects-behind-every-great-historical-disaster-type society. (Eric and I have decided the scientist's name should be Dr. Praetoreous.)

The Committee decides to kill Dr. Praetoreous back when he's a teenager, before he can do them any harm, so under the protection of the Temporal Ranger, an immortal avatar Dr. Praetoreous accidentally awakened with his TimeBlaze technology, they send a legion of bio-engineered AltraTroops back in time to carry out the task. Dr. Praetoreous erased his own history, but they've somehow gained the name of his high school and the year he graduated so they're going to eradicate everyone at his high school just to be sure they get him.

The troops timejump onto the marching band practice field. They're cloaked, but there's hundreds of them so the grass moves in this unnatural way as it gets trampled by a legion of invisible feet.

One of the troops sends out an electromagnetic pulse. Simultaneously every car in the parking lot dies. They're all new, people's sixteenth-birthday gifts, so they won't run without a million computers working right inside them and the electromagnetic pulse just took those out. Everyone's green parking pass hanging on their rearview mirror is like a toe-tag on their freshly killed cars.

At the same time, every cell phone in everyone's pocket winks off. Kids text messaging in the back of class are cut off in the middle of their thoughts. Their iPods and PSPs and BlackBerries all become bricks in the same second.

The troops take the doors with extreme precision, fearing Dr. Praetoreous may have forseen their attack somehow and protected his young self with a battery of dinosaur-mounted Plasma Calvary sitting right outside the school library, or counterinsurgent nano-mines that will release a million self-replicating mecha-wasps as soon as the enemy cracks the door to the teacher's lounge. But there's nobody: just teachers and kids and lockers and soda machines and plastic furniture, and the AltraTroops go through them all, fist-cannons blazing blue.

Through the chaos and screaming kids walks The Man. Skinny with close-cropped hair, a black suit, a black tie, and black sunglasses. He is the seeming head of The Committee. He's a hologram, given weight and mass when necessary by The Legitimacy Engine, a technology the teenage Praetoreous will invent one year from today, if he lives. No one has ever seen The Man in the flesh, no one knows if there's even flesh to be seen. Cannon discharge rips through him doing no damage, just passing through his unwrinkled suit and out the other side to incinerate a hand-painted homecoming poster. He strides into the attendance secretary's office and punches a few keys on the keyboard. He wants to know who's absent.

Utilizing sub-thought communication, he signals small battalions of AltraTroops who scatter through the surrounding neighborhoods. Kids faking sick watching TV in their living rooms scream as the troops take out their sliding-glass patio doors. Kids who really are sick get the waiting-room magazines blown out of their hands as troops level their doctors' offices with concussion grenades. A kid who looks a lot like Bret Embler is still asleep with a baseball cap on in bed next to his Catholic-school girlfriend when rocket boots scatter the red tile roof of his house in the hills and
crash into his bedroom. There's no blood: the fist-cannons' antimatter fire just makes it so things don't exist.

My dad laughs at something the satellite-radio DJ says about the band Supertramp, then he tells me to have a good day and I hop out of the Jeep. As I walk into school, I imagine cannon discharge passing harmlessly through me.

I tell Eric about this scene at lunch. He likes it, he says, except we could never storyboard it. We both agree that if we ever put it down on paper someone would see it and we'd be “red-flagged” and suspended like Carl Whiteman, who they found with a “hit list” of kids he thought “deserved it” freshman year.

Eventually, Eric and I agree, Dr. Praetoreous will go back and counteract the high school hit and all the kids will be safe, restored to their places in the timestream whether or not time and space have missed them all that much. But in order for that to happen, it had to actually happen at one point in the timestream, so Eric and I both agree that it did. And our high school works because Dr. Praetoreus would be our same age at this year in time. We sort of hope we were born late enough in history that by the time we are in our forties and fifties “existence engineer” and “clone wrangler” will be viable career paths.

“You should come over to my house this weekend,” I tell Eric at the end of lunch on Friday. “To work on this.”

“Absolutely,” Eric says. Because Cecelia Martin and Carter Buehl and people like that, they hang out. Eric and I work.

 

 

My brother's friends are inexplicably dressed as ninjas and jumping around the front yard when Eric shows up at eight thirty on Friday night. Or rather they have been jumping around the front yard dressed up as ninjas and Eric shows up as soon as they're gone. He said he was going to come over at seven thirty and he shows up at eight thirty all sweaty.

“I circled the block a few times,” Eric says. “There were ninjas.”

“They weren't really ninjas,” I say. “Just my brother and his idiot friends.”

“I know,” Eric says. “I just didn't want to—um—”

I guess a bunch of seniors dressed as ninjas swearing and kicking each other in the chest for an hour before peeling away in their cars could be scary to some people, but I'm used to it.

“My dad's on a date,” I tell Eric. “We pretty much have the run of the place.”

There are pizza boxes stacked four deep on the kitchen counter. “We have pizza on Fridays,” I tell Eric. “You want some?”

“No thanks,” he says. “I ate.”

“There's sodas and stuff in the fridge.” I open the fridge. Somebody else being around makes me really look at what's inside, and it really is just sodas and stuff. I try to think if there's anything in our cabinets that makes it look like we cook or my dad cooks or we eat anything besides takeout, and I don't think there is. We have a “chip cabinet” and a “cracker cabinet.” We have a lot of cabinets.

“I was thinking about it,” Eric says, “when I was walking around the block, and I think
TimeBlaze: An EVILution
can still work. Can I have one of those waters?”

I hand Eric a water bottle and get myself a Dr. Pepper.

“I just think it has to be the full title. So you know how
Star Wars
is
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope?
In our case the titles would go
TimeBlaze: An EVILution: Crisis Endpoint.”

“What's
Crisis Endpoint?”

“That would be the name of that particular part. Like
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.”

“Oh, right.”

“It's just an example, but do you like it?”

“Yeah,” I say, “I like it.”

“Why do they dress like ninjas?”

“I dunno. They're retarded?”

“Maybe it's to jump people,” he says.

“I don't think they jump anybody. They're my brother's friends from church.”

“Those kids go to church?” Eric says.

“Yeah. It's like this youth church or whatever. My family's not religious, my brother just goes because his friends do.”

“So they're religious kids?”

“They're not anything kids.”

Eric looks out at my pool. “I think maybe they jump people.”

“I dunno,” I say.

We play video games in my room. A fighting game my brother rented. Eric's terrible.

“Look at this guy! Who needs a sword that big?” Eric says about my character, a skinny guy with long blond hair in an admiral's uniform who is obliterating Eric's character with a big fuck-off sword. Eric's character is a disembodied eyeball on top of a purple whirlwind.

“It's like a surfboard! Beyond your bigger broadswords, size just becomes a disadvantage. It's bigger than he is!”

The admiral's sword glows blue and slashes the purple whirlwind, dealing the eyeball serious damage.

“And how does that hurt me? You didn't even hit anything resembling flesh!”

The eyeball goes tumbling off the cliff level's precipice when the admiral lands a surprisingly effective kick with his red slipper.

“You know who my guy looks like?” I say. “Emma Tomlinson.”

“You're totally right,” Eric says. “Do you like her?”

“Ew! No.”

“No, I didn't mean—I didn't mean romantically, I meant just do you think she's okay.”

“What's to like? She never talks.”

“Good! Yeah! Me too! I think she's an albino.”

“I think you're right.”

“And her whole family comes to pick her up from school. Her mom AND her dad AND her two little sisters and they all look exactly like her.”

“It's like they sent a homeschooled kid to regular school.”

“Have you ever known any homeschoolers?”

“There are some next door. One time we went on vacation and
they picked up our mail for us and I had to go get it when we got back and their whole house smelled like … I dunno. Oatmeal? It was creepy in there. I can't put my finger on it.”

“We don't talk to people. Do you think people think we're creepy?”

“I talk to people!”

“I've never seen you talk to anybody in English.”

“Yeah, well, not in English. Why don't you focus on the game? I'm killing you here.”

We're halfway through another match. I'm thrashing Eric again. I'm a tiny Asian schoolgirl with two razor fans. Eric's a half-man, half-Zeppelin.

A couple seconds go by where it's just the sound of my girl squealing every time she lands a knee or a fan on Eric's character, and his character harrumphing.

Then Eric says, “You know who my guy looks like?” His guy puffs up like a blimp and rockets into the Asian girl, actually a pretty good move I'm sure he got completely by accident. “Patti Helzburg.”

“Patti is fatter and has a bigger mustache.”