The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

The creepy church guy hangs up.

I’d like to say that that night I dream of Eric being carried off by monks and nuns and ultrareligious freakazoids and burned at the stake at the top of a hill, but I don’t. My dreams have no poetic justice, they’re just mind farts. I dream about checking my e-mail. There’s a thing where my brother and I are in a submersible in the ocean and he keeps trying to send text messages. I dream I’m fucking Christine. So no dreams about it but before and after I go to sleep I think about what I may have just opened Eric up to, and it never feels as good as I want it to. It feels pretty terrible, actually.

A typical day after me and Christine and Eric explode: I walk home right after school. I should start driving, but it’s too late to switch into driver’s ed and I’ve been bothering my dad to sign me up for the same driving school my brother took but he keeps forgetting. So for now I walk home and it’s February so I’m not all sweaty when I get there. I go in the kitchen and eat everything. I feel a lot like human shit. I’ve started doing the occasional sit-up but it doesn’t move anything around on what is still the worst torso in North America. I check my e-mail in my dad’s office, but it’s a lot like checking my phone: asking for disappointment, a good activity for somebody who likes the numeral zero, and blank screens, and no change. I go in my room and turn on NPR. I masturbate to scenarios totally unrelated to my life: weird fantasy specifics like cat women and Venusian slave girls. Afterward I fall asleep and wake up when it’s dark. I have a couple hours of groggy useless energy after that and it feels like I could stay up all night. I’ve become really involved in this massively multiplayer game online. My character is a daemon lord whose right arm is a scythe. The rest of my squadron is ten-year-olds whose voices are modified to sound like bugs or robots. I always fall asleep eventually, and the days keep going like this.

In English we’re supposed to be turning in our modern-day adaptations of The Grapes of Wrath. Creative assignments usually send most honors students into a seizure, because there aren’t predefined rubrics for being creative, you’re encouraged to do exactly what you’re not supposed to do in any other assignment, which is MAKE IT UP, you’re not even asked to provide a bibliography, and before long you have to put a belt in soon-to-be-valedictorian Alicia Henry’s mouth to keep her from choking on her own tongue. But the Grapes of Wrath adaptation has a legendary, all-purpose solution: just make it about illegal immigrants. Some kid who was a junior when my brother was a freshman did it, and Mrs. Amory thought it was so great she used it as an example of the assignment for the next couple years, until people got the hint and just started copying it. I have one-upped everybody and made my adaptation, which is supposed to be a prose short story, seven to ten pages double-spaced, about Iraqi refugees. Plus, it’s in screenplay format. Eric and I were briefly debating buying really expensive screenwriting software to write the TimeBlaze movie scripts, but we eventually decided against it and Eric wrote thirty or so pages of the first movie in a Microsoft Word document he formatted very specifically. I just take out the names DR. PRAETOREOUS and TEMPORAL RANGER and THE MAN and replace them with SADIQ and HADIR and TOM JOAD, whose name I decided not to alter for obvious reasons. And I change the dialogue and action, of course.

Mrs. Amory is coming around the room and I hand in my paper and then Chris White hands in his and then some girl whose name I can’t remember but I think is in choir hands in hers and when Mrs. Amory gets to Eric, Eric doesn’t have anything to hand in.

He sort of shrugs and tries to find someplace to point his sinking-in eyes besides Mrs. Amory’s face. And Mrs. Amory stays there longer than she would if it were anyone else who didn’t have an assignment to turn in, looking at Eric like he’s right now undoing everything she knows to be true: first bell is at 7:45 and Pearl in The Scarlet Letter symbolizes evil and Eric Lederer will turn his work in on time if not early.

“Eric?” she says.

“Sorry,” Eric says.

Though it was always a sticking point between me and Christine, that afternoon I’m glad I can’t drive because everyone’s cars are fucked. I walk through a parking lot full of rip-shit, mystified kids who can’t figure out why their Jettas won’t start. Ryan, the kid from Theater Division who is pretty much always wearing suspenders, is about to pull out of the parking lot in his old white truck. I look at him. He shrugs at me. I shrug back. A couple of kids in older cars are behind him, some of them packed with friends whose cars are bricked and need rides home.

The principal comes on the loudspeaker the next morning and condemns what he calls the “car prank” and vows to ferret out the “parties responsible.” I wonder if Christine’s car still works. I think of how it smelled inside her car, like carpet shampoo and the weird nonsmell of the air conditioner. Then I punch my leg underneath my desk and try really hard to think of anything else.

Eric isn’t in class that day, or the day after that. Then on Friday I am leading a squadron of bug-and-robot- voiced ten-year-olds into battle against another squadron of ten-year-olds that doesn’t have such a sage older leader when my phone starts vibrating in my pocket. I tell BMXIZ4FAGS to watch my six and take my phone out of my pocket. Eric is calling me.

I should hold a grudge. It really seems like the right thing to do in this case.

“Can I come over?” Eric asks.

I should really be over people “coming over” at this point, knowing that when they call first they are coming to your house to break your heart in the first person. But there is really nothing the dude can say to me at this point that would surprise me in its awfulness. And also I’m hoping that like when I used to go over to his house with an Xbox and all the controllers shoved in a backpack, Eric will come over with a console that just has a reset button and we’ll hit it and everything will be like it was in October.

We’re in front of my house in pretty much the same spot where I told my brother about Eric that night.

“On Wednesday morning I got pulled out of class. I got called down to the principal’s office, and there was this guy in there with the principal, then the principal excused himself and I was alone with this guy. And he said he knew about my thing. And he said he was from a university. He said he wanted to study my thing. And I asked him if I could have some time to think about it. He said I could, but that time was of the essence, that now that he knew about it there’s no telling who else knows. I left and ditched the rest of the day. He came to my house that night and said he heard I ditched the rest of my classes, and I shouldn’t do that, that if I started behaving erratically that would draw attention to me, and I didn’t want that, did I? He said I should come with him right then, that there were people after me. I shut the door and locked it and when my mom got home I told her. I mean obviously not everything, but I told her this guy had been by and she said she thought it was a good idea, this college program. And it turns out that this guy had already talked to my dad and her, and they thought it was a good opportunity. He told them I was eligible for this early-freshman thing for high school students, effective immediately. And then I knew I was fucked because there’s nothing your parents won’t agree to if they think it’s about you getting into college.”

“Shit. Come inside I guess.”

On the way into the house Eric stops. He reaches into a bush next to my front door and pulls out a piece of paper that’s all wrinkled from being stuck in a bush and drenched by sprinklers then dried by the sun. It’s some TimeBlaze art, still blowing around from when Eric covered my yard in it. A Thragnacian Containment Pylon. The Containment Pylons float in space at regular intervals around the wormhole that is the Thragnacian’s charge. They opened the wormhole as a weapon in their war against the peaceful Albions, and the Galactic Conclave decreed as punishment that they should have to use their superior technology to harness the wormhole, and take care of it for the duration of their civilization. Eric folds it up and puts it in his pocket.

We go into the kitchen, maybe from force of habit. Eric starts closing all the blinds.

“I’m really sorry about everything.”

“Yeah, what the fuck, dude? Seriously. I’ve been meaning to ask you what your deal is sometime when I didn’t think you were going to say, like, ‘We should have it out,’ or something.”

“I’m sorry about that. It was really stupid. I was saying and doing things I knew to be stupid. I’m really, really sorry. In light of everything that’s happened you don’t really have any reason to, you know, let me, but I was wondering if I could stay with you until this guy, this guy who I’m pretty sure isn’t from a college, until he goes away.”

“I don’t know if that’s a great idea.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, he probably knows where I live too.”

“Why?”

Then I tell him. I tell him about the church guy and about the call and that I don’t know how and I don’t know