The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

“Nothing,” I say.

I need to get to a computer.

I duck into the library. My sixth-period lab partner is just going to have to wait five or ten minutes to look at me like I’m stupid.

I grab a computer in a study carrel over by the dusty “Young Adult Fiction” section. I type “namespot.com” into the browser: It loads, thank God. Sometimes sites that are for purposes of entertainment are blocked by the school’s firewall, but the librarians probably aren’t the quickest trend-seekers and Namespot is something like the eighth social-networking site kids our age have adopted and then abandoned in the time I’ve been in high school.

As soon as the page loads I feel like a complete sellout: The front page is covered in banner ads for truly awful skate-punk bands and, look, I can enter a contest to be an extra in a sequel to a movie about a hard-luck inner-city dance gang. I hit JOIN.

I enter my real name. One of the million things that make Namespot obnoxious is the tendency people have to make their profile names cute or weird or off, like instead of Deandra, a girl might be DEANDRACAN’TWAIT4THAWEEKEND! Or a dude, instead of Chris, might be BMX_IZ_4_FAGS. I won’t do that and plus how is Christine supposed to find me if I do? I guess people do it to prevent “stalking,” which is a big preoccupation everybody seems to have, but nobody’s going to stalk me. People just wish they were stalked. Given the option, they’d stalk themselves.

At first I start coasting through profile blanks, entering not much if anything at all for likes, dislikes, influences. (Influences on what? My Namespot profile?) But then I realize I want her to think I didn’t just whip this profile up so she could invite me to a drama party, it has to look lived in, used. But what the fuck do you say?

For bands, I put the three bands I talked to her about, but then I think, no, that looks odd. I only like three bands? So I intersperse them with some other things, a band or two I’ve heard my brother mention, and some things my dad likes, like The Band, and some things I remember Eric rattling off when he was talking about his industrial phase. Then I look back at what I have and I think, This is weird, does this look like I’m too eclectic? Does this look like I’m joking? Then I think maybe Christine’s got Namespot on her phone, maybe she’s in class looking for me right now, and the thought simultaneously excites me and freaks me the fuck out: I have to finish this. For books I put a couple sci-fi authors, old ones, old enough to sound either cool or obscure, and throw Salinger in there for good measure. Movies: Fight Club, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Sin City. Not my favorite movies, my brothers’, but mine sound too nerdy (the sacred texts like Star Wars, the original trilogy, and Lord of the Rings, and beyond that to be honest with you my favorite movies are theoretical ones that haven’t been made yet and I think only people like me and Eric would make. You see how I can’t write that). I leave relationship status blank: not desperate, not anything, an enigma. Yeah.

One thing it’s missing, I realize, is an in-joke. A private thing between me and all the friends I have who spend all evening checking each other’s profiles when we really ought to be doing homework. So under “Least Favorite Things,” I write “Richard’s dog.” Who’s Richard? What has his dog ever done to me? I have no fucking clue. But it seems like some dumb thing somebody would write. All the blanks filled in and tolerably smart and believable, I hit SEND.

The ancient school computer creaks and groans and the little world in the browser bar spins and finally the next page loads. “Add a picture.” Fuck shit balls.

If I don’t put one up, then my whole effort to make this thing look lived-in will be for nothing. Everybody has a picture on their profile. Narcissism is what this whole game is about. But there aren’t any pictures of me, really, besides yearbook photos, and won’t that look strange, unless it’s my first-grade yearbook photo, in which case it’ll be ironic, and I’m not about to be that asshole. I could put a picture that isn’t me, that’s Chuck Norris or George Washington arm-wrestling a tiger or some idiotic thing, but that’s another kind of asshole I’m not chomping at the bit to be.

Then I remember: tucked in the bottom of my bag, waiting for me to remember to take it out and leave it at home, really, is this sketchbook, not my TimeBlaze sketchbook, but a nicer one I’ve used for what I guess I would call “real drawing.” For like landscapes and people and sketches of hands and things like that. Things I do occasionally to try to prove to myself I’m not just doodling, but things that at the end of the day I’m just not good enough at or which don’t feature enough head wounds to hold my interest. Inside that notebook is I guess what you’d call a self-portrait. I dig the notebook out, flip through, and it’s there, between an aborted attempt to draw the mountains behind my house and a female statue’s right boob. It’s not bad. It’s not good, either. I guess it just looks like I didn’t really try, which is kind of what I want, I mean, if I’m going to be an asshole with his Namespot profile picture a line drawing of him done by him, it better be one where it looks like I went “meh” and scratched it on a napkin while I was watching TV. And it looks enough like me, I guess. Anyway, time is ticking, I’ve spent maybe ten minutes on this as it is. So without thinking about it a whole lot more I put the notebook page in the flatbed scanner next to the computer. I crop me, half-trying, half-finished me, out from between the shitty mountains and the floating stone boob, save me as a JPEG, and post me in my profile. I hit FINISH. The computer creaks, the little world spins, my profile loads. I am now part of the problem.

I expect that the nightmare is pretty much over and I am now findable by any cute drama girl who might want to invite me to a party for some reason, and I don’t want to look at my new profile the way you don’t want to look at anything horrible you’ve done, but I accidentally do anyway as I’m going to log off and I see, stamped across the top of this fucking monster, “MEMBER SINCE TODAY.” The game is up. I could make ten thousand friend requests to make it look like I’ve been a Namespot jockey since way back, but it wouldn’t matter. Member since TODAY.

I go back to class feeling retarded for doing so much work. But then I think, that’s probably the same amount of work, the same amount of worrying about what nonexistent people and imaginary girls are going to think about what three movies in your “Favorite Movies” section say about you when put next to one another, and every other thing, I just did it compressed into ten minutes between lunch and sixth period.

The reason I know so much about Namespot even though I think it’s repulsive is, Eric and I can’t get enough of it. Nights at his place when I’ve forgotten to bring my Xbox and we’re bored of populating the zombie senate of the postsingularity necroplanet, we go online and scoff at people’s Namespot profiles and how unique everybody thinks they are. Sometimes we look at pictures of parties we didn’t get to go to. It would be pathetic if we actually wanted to go to those parties, but we don’t, so it isn’t. It’s sort of a making-fun-of-people buffet. It’s almost too easy. People putting themselves out there convinced we’ll be charmed by their overwhelming uniqueness. Well, we aren’t charmed, Eric and I.

I get to sixth period all sweaty from rushing. I apologize for being late. The teacher tells me it may count as an absence.

My lab partner Ramesh gapes at me. I wonder what his three favorite movies are.

At my house after school I’m drawing the undercarriage of a mechanized bodysuit Eric and I are convinced is going to revolutionize the way people think about mechs in sci-fi but I’m distracted and I keep telling Eric I have to go to the bathroom. It’s a little like when I was in third grade but I got skipped ahead to fourth-grade math and I got so freaked out being around older kids I’d go to the bathroom like four times a class. Nobody ever called me out on it to my face except one time a kid who sat in front of me said to the kid sitting next to him, “That kid sure goes to the bathroom a lot.” The fact that my existence had even been acknowledged one way or the other was as good as being beaten down by the entire fourth grade math class, which I for some reason assumed was always ten seconds away from happening.

This time I’m not actually going to the bathroom, I’m going into the other room and really quickly opening up the browser and really quickly going to Namespot and logging in and seeing if I have new messages. Twice I don’t. One time I have a message, but it’s from one of those porn-website robots represented by a fake girl with a fake profile.

The third time I get back from the bathroom, Eric says, “Are you feeling okay?” I’ve been drinking a ton of Mountain Dew to make it more plausible that I have to keep going to the bathroom, and pretty soon, I actually do have to go.

In my house, my dad’s home office, where the computer is, is right across from my bedroom, where Eric and I are working. My dad never works here. It’s from the weeklong period when he was considering quitting his job and day-trading from home, but then all those day traders started killing themselves, and he decided to keep doing what