The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

“Are you sure?”

Eric nods, and it seems like a sober and collected nod. So I let him walk to the bus under his own power.

“It seems unfair that the hash browns are counted as one item in the Delicious Dozen,” Eric says. “They’re called ‘browns.’ Plural. As in, multiple items. So they should count each brown. Are browns the unit of hash browns?”

Then he falls hard to the pavement.

6

“I thought about asking Tony DiAvalo to draw something on my cast.”

It’s a little dramatic to call it a cast. It’s more like, I don’t know, an arm brace. I’ve seen girls on the soccer team wear them. Eric’s arm is just sprained. Some joints are sort of messed up but nothing’s broken. He has some minor cuts and abrasions on his face where he hit the street. It actually looks like he gave a pretty good account of himself in a really cool fight.

“I know I said it already, but I am really sorry.”

“I thought I could walk,” Eric says. “It really felt like I could.”

“You were pretty insistent.”

“My mom hates you. I’ve been over at your house a ton and she gets called to the emergency room. So that’s the great loss here, all the esteem my mom had for you previously.”

“Did she?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Anyway. Sorry.”

“It’s okay. But can we put a moratorium on testing my limits?”

I say I guess we probably should.

This electric hum starts. Then the sound of a chain grinding against something. For the first time since Eric and I started sitting here at lunch, the loading dock door is sliding open. The light that’s bright as hell out here at lunchtime even in late November spills into what’s behind the door, which I guess is whatever’s behind the auditorium.

The door finishes opening and the hum stops. Then this other sound starts, wheels on concrete and rumbling. All these big wooden slabs start rolling out on wheels, a bunch of girls pushing them. Some of the girls look like Cecelia and her friends, bigger girls with spiked belts and black T-shirts and hair they might’ve colored with highlighters. A girl who doesn’t look like Cecelia and her friends, with black hair up in those kind of braids you might see at the Renaissance Fair, a girl who I’m 95 percent sure is the girl from IHOP, catches me looking at her chest. But mostly the girls look straight ahead, navigating these huge rolling pieces of wood that remind me of sailboats for some reason except instead of sails they have plywood sticking straight up, painted all over with a big-city skyline, some parts of which are more accurate, perspective-wise, than others.

“Goodbye, Guys and Dolls!” says a fat kid standing in the open loading dock door. He waves at the big wheeled cityscapes.

“Hey, Gary,” says one of the girls, “why don’t you, like, help, instead of like standing there?”

“Uhm, I DID help!” the kid, Gary I guess, says. “I’m just a little emotional right now, ’kay?” He has a high voice and a little bit of a Southern accent and a T-shirt that says IF YOU CAN’T RUN WITH THE BIG DOGS, GET OFF THE PORCH.

Drama kids. There are band kids and drama kids and the amorphous weird kids, free-floating nerds like Eric and me. There are other camps that could be called nerds but they’re, like, the Anime Club and the Chess Club and they experience a lot of crossover with the drama kids and the band kids. You see the band kids practicing in the morning on the field where Eric and I staged our imaginary biologically modified troop invasion and I guess if you went to football games you would see them performing at half-time. But the drama kids you never see. You might have one or two in some of your classes and never know it until they stand up at the end of class and remind everybody that they have one of their plays this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night. And they only have like two a year so you rarely get that reminder. The auditorium and adjoining classroom and whatever else is in that wing of the school is pretty much all theirs, their own little enclave where they could be doing any number of things, like sacrificing goats, but probably they just sing loudly to each other.

The big wheeled cityscapes pause right in front of Eric and me. The one girl and Gary keep bitching at each other. The girl whose chest I got caught looking at who I’m approaching 97 percent sure is the girl from IHOP comes over to us.

“Hey guys,” she says, “we’re gonna be painting out here for a while. It’s spray paint so it could get kind of messy. Just, like, fair warning.”

“Lunch is over in a minute,” Eric says. Aren’t you guys going to have to paint kind of fast?”

“We get to skip sixth period,” she says, “once every couple of weeks to help out with set-painting stuff. Our drama director made it so we can write it up as, like, volunteering.”

Sixth period I have advanced chemistry, which is an exercise in torture because despite how much of Eric’s and my stuff centers around biological modification and rips in time and the human genome perverted by radioactive ghosts, I’m terrible at actual nuts-and-bolts science. It’s the only class I have that is neither easy nor something I’m good at. Eric has health, which he hates because it’s easy. We’re different people but we both have sixth periods that suck.

“Can we help?” Eric asks.

“Uhm… sure!” the girl says, looking pretty skeptically at Eric’s arm brace, maybe wondering how much help he’ll actually be.

“I’m Eric,” Eric says, “and this is Darren.”

“Hi, Eric. Hi, Darren. I’m Christine.”

“Hi, Christine,” Eric says. I’m not sure I want to be around these people or help paint and this is my only clean pair of jeans and if I get paint on them I’ll have paint on my jeans for the rest of the week and it’ll be a tell- tale sign that I wear the same jeans every day.

Christine looks at me. I don’t know who I think I’m impressing and no one looks at my jeans anyway and fuck if I want to sit across from my lab partner today and have him look at me like I’m an idiot because I just don’t understand valence electrons. I get up off the ground.

“Hi, Christine,” I say.

“Guys, this is Eric and Darren,” Christine says to her crew of girls in black hoodies and studded belts. We meet Marisa, Ashley, Claire, and another Ashley. They are nice and it doesn’t seem fake. We meet Gary, who rolls his eyes at us.

Another guy, Ryan, comes out of the loading dock with some spray cans and some newspapers. He has big fuck-off boots and a newsboy cap and a white wifebeater. We spread the newspaper all around the rolling platforms. Pretty soon Ryan is placing his boots on the faces of bad local columnists in the pictures next to their bylines as we shake up the spray cans and cover the cityscapes in gray. The girls throw around gossip featuring the names of people we don’t know.

“It’s the cast party,” one Ashley says, “it’s for the CAST. What did she expect?”

“Kyle was being, like, the anti-Kyle on Saturday night,” another Ashley says.

“Alisha has a lesbian switch she can like turn on and off,” Marisa says.

“What is this for?” Eric asks about the platforms.

“A play,” Gary says, like we’re idiots for asking, like every tenth-grader knows that the first step in the process of making a play is to spray-paint some wood with wheels on it.

“Didn’t you guys just do a play?” Eric asks. Some of the Day-Glo-orange flyers are still blowing around in the parking lot.

“Yes,” says Marisa, and sighs so you can hear it.

All the girls get really quiet. The wind that’s blowing the flyers around kicks up even more and with their hair