The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

It’s not even THAT controversial! If they would read the piece…”

“Yeah, they’re idiots.”

“They ARE idiots. No one understands what he’s trying to do, not the administration, not the parents, not the other kids in TD, fucking assholes…”

“Yeah, they’re assholes.” I’ve never been around Christine crying before. Her tears are hot on the collar of my shirt. I’ve been around Christine being around “other kids in TD” when they’re crying before, so I just try to do what she seems to do, which is just agree with what the person says and then try to get them to look on the bright side.

“Well look at it this way, at least we’ll get to hang out more.”

“What? Fuck you!” Christine pulls away from me and whacks me on the arm.

“What? You said we were gonna be seeing a lot less of each other when you were doing the show and now you aren’t gonna do the show so we won’t be seeing a lot less of each other. That’s all.”

“It’s not just oh, bummer, one less show. I’ve been looking forward to this since forever!”

“I know. Yeah.”

“It’s not fair,” she says. “I’ve been wanting to do this kind of thing for two years now, this was my chance to do something besides, just like, the typical corny school play, and now…” She starts crying again. For a second I think of what my brother would say if he came home and found me embracing a sobbing girl in the front hallway. Probably something about how I rape lots of girls and she shouldn’t take it personally. I don’t want to be in the front hallway anymore where that sort of thing can happen.

“Do you want to go upstairs?”

“Fucking GOD, Darren! Can you not think about sex for like two seconds and just fucking listen to me?”

“I wasn’t thinking about sex! I was thinking about your musical!”

“It’s not a musical! It’s a fucking experimental theater piece! You know what? I need to go. I need to talk to somebody who listens.”

And pretty soon I get my wish and I’m not talking to a crying girl in the front hallway anymore, except instead of being in my room the crying girl is back in her car headed God knows where. I call her forty or fifty times and leave lots of apologetic voice messages and she’s online later but doesn’t respond to any of my instant messages. She didn’t come over intending to leave me alone with my bear-attack shows but I guess I made sure she did anyway.

“Christine’s okay.”

I’m hoping to have lunch and not think about Christine. I’ve been thinking about Christine all day, hoping to catch her in the hallway and plead my case. I have the beginnings of an apology note in my English notebook. If things get really dire, I have the beginnings of an apology comic in one of my sketchbooks. I have fifty apology voicemails simmering in Christine’s cell phone, or if not physically in her cell phone, then in whatever phone- company computer or server or satellite stores the world’s voicemail. Wherever it is, there are fifty snippets of me saying variations on “Christine, I’m sorry, call me back.” I wonder in negative repetitive patterns about whether or not she’s listened to them or just gone through them one after another hitting “7.” I’ve been hoping for what I can always count on, which is a lunch full of Eric and me debating the virtues of time machines versus wormholes, no matter how I’ve treated him. And now he’s telling me Christine is okay.

“Huh?”

“Christine. I mean, she’s nice.”

“Oh. Yeah. Why do you say that?”

“She started talking to me via Instant Messenger. She said you’d had some sort of fight and she wanted to get an outside perspective on what you’re thinking.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That you’re an asshole.”

“Fuck you!”

“No. I didn’t. I told her that you’re really smart but you hide it, and as a side effect of that maybe you end up hiding your emotions as well, and so if you seemed less than demonstrative that’s what that’s about and you can’t help it.”

“Oh. Wow. How’d she take it?”

“Okay I guess. She said she’d think about it.”

“Okay.”

“She also said I was ‘insightful.’”

“What does demonstrative mean?”

“You know what demonstrative means. This is what I’m talking about.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“We ended up talking for the rest of the night. She stays up late. She’s pretty nice.”

“Yeah. I like her. I hope she doesn’t still want to kill me.”

Eric looks tired, I think. Then again, he did say he stayed up all night. Then again, he always stays up all night and has forever.

Christine sends me a text message in seventh period. She says we should go see a movie and bring Eric. I’m back in and not a terrible person anymore. Just like that, I get to have boobs and cyborgs and I don’t have to choose.

We go to see this indie movie, The Paucity of Feeling. It’s the sort of movie Christine likes, I guess because she’s smart, and the sort of movie I say I like because I like to watch Christine being smart and I like it when she likes things, but I am coming to suspect that, despite my best efforts, I don’t actually like these kinds of movies. It’s playing at this art-house theater that used to be a real-people theater when I was a kid and my mom would take my brother and I there because it was the only movie theater in town when she was growing up, and I think because it was close to the mall and we could make a day of it. Now there are a bunch more movie theaters, big multiplex situations that remind you of learning your times tables (they all end in numbers divisible by 8: Desert Ridge 8, MesaPlex 16, Vista Crest 24), and three or four more malls, but this place is still the place you go if you want your girlfriend to think you’re smart.

Christine picks me up first and then we pick up Eric. We are making fun of the hip-hop station’s station- identification breaks before Eric gets in the car.

“YOUR HOME-HOME-HOME FOR TODAY’S HIP-HOP HITS,” I say.

“He sounds like he’s eighty years old. That guy does the announcements for every station.”

“YOUR HOME-HOME-HOME FOR YESTERDAY’S RAGTIME HITS,” I say.

We fuck around like that waiting for Eric; it takes him a little while to stumble out of the house after I call him.

“Sorry I’m late,” he says. “Dinner tonight was a total IQ.”

Christine laughs and says, “I know what you mean. I was working on this French paper tonight… complete IQ all the way.” Eric laughs.

“What does IQ mean?” I ask. “I mean, I know what it means… like, normally, but…”

“IQ. It’s this thing we came up with the other night on IM,” Christine says. “In honors history, Mr. Webber called Vietnam an ‘intractable quagmire.’ So we started calling things IQs if they are, in fact, intractable quagmires.”

“Britney Spears’s career. IQ,” Eric says.

“My parents’ marriage… IQ,” Christine says.

“Ever getting our school on year-round schedule. IQ,” Eric says.

“Driver’s tests, total IQ,” Christine says. “Not that you would know.” She smiles at me.

I ignore the slight and try to play along. “Uhm, my brother, there’s an IQ if I ever saw one.”

“You’re saying your brother is a conflict mired in complications which any form of struggle only aggravates?” Eric says.

“I don’t think you understand how this game works,” Christine says.

We pay for our tickets and go into the lobby. There’s a cafe area around the concession stand. Marlee and Antonia, these two girls wearing big puffy hats that resemble muffins who don’t go to our school but who Christine knows from their blogs, are sitting there eating pastries that look like their hats, notebooks open. Antonia flags