The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

the newspaper car coming around the corner. It’s a sound familiar to any kid who stays up late in the suburbs: since there are no actual paperboys anymore, some depressing cigarette-y dude in a station wagon rolls around the neighborhood at this hour and along with the sound of his car you hear the thunks of papers hitting people’s driveways, louder on Sunday mornings when the papers are stuffed with ads.

The paper guy still has his headlights on, and instead of orbiting the cul-de-sac for however long it takes to huck all the papers onto all the driveways and move on, the headlights freeze on us. The paper guy yells “STOP” and it isn’t the paper guy, we can’t see him with the glare from his headlights but it’s safe to assume it’s Mr. Who- the-Fuck-Ever, who works for the guy who works for the guy who works for the guy the church guy tipped off when I tipped him off about Eric, Mr. University. We aren’t sticking around to find out who’s on whose payroll. Eric was right, he has to run, and I shouldn’t have smoked that cigarette.

We take off. We run through the side gate. Eric bypasses the big blue recycle bin but me, dumb and unathletic, I catch it right in the stomach. I hear a car door slam behind me, and shoes running on the driveway. Eric’s up on the back fence, or back wall, big brown adobe bricks, with his foot slung over, reaching down to help me up. There’s no time to resent the implication that I can’t make it up and over myself but he’s probably right, I probably can’t, freshman year I would fake sick so I could not dress out in PE and read instead. When I’m up Eric hops down into the dry wash behind his house, a tributary of the one my brother and his friends chased us through. I remember being scared, but that was fun-scared. This is the real thing.

They say don’t look back but up on the wall with a view of the whole situation I can’t help but turn and see the dude tear-assing around the side of Eric’s house, and another thing I can’t help is thinking he looks a little bit like The Man, our unstoppable man in black, who may or may not be an actual human, who may be just a holographic entity. It’s him, down to the sunglasses (at five thirty in the morning) and the way he almost runs right into the swimming pool but instead of keeling over or raring back in a funny slapstick way, he just stops short like there was no obstacle there to be concerned about, he just decided to stop. And when we go over the fence he doesn’t appear to follow. We still run through the wash at full speed, but he doesn’t follow, which is almost kind of worse. I picture him standing in Eric’s backyard, waiting.

We come out a couple blocks away from Eric’s house. We pant in the alley, me more so than Eric, who is in surprisingly good shape. I spit.

“What kind…” pant pant pant “of college admissions officer…” pant pant pant “fucking chases you through your backyard?”

“You don’t get it,” Eric says. “I’m REALLY smart.”

We laugh, and have to start thinking about something to do today besides go to school or be at home. We are trying to figure out what time the mall opens when both our phones start vibrating. Nobody would text-message either of us at five-ish in the morning. We would, but both of us are in each other’s presence. Christine? We take out our phones.

The text messages are credited to UNAVAILABLE. They say, COME QUIETLY.

We are under the bleachers at our rival high school. Going to our own school seemed like asking for trouble: it’s a place we’re known to frequent. Going to our rival high school seemed like the perfect way to throw him off the scent. Sitting on the bleachers seemed too visible so we’re underneath them. No one is making out under here, nine thirty on a Saturday morning.

“My brother got in a fight with some Catholic-school kids here once, he said.”

“Why here? This isn’t the Catholic school and it isn’t our school, either.”

“Neutral location.”

“Oh.”

“Nobody probably ever said ‘neutral location’ and he just called it that later. He wants to be a samurai for the mafia or something. If the mafia ever starts hiring samurai I think that would be his dream job.”

“Do you think if you had paid him, to like, assault me, he would’ve done it?” Eric says.

“I did think about it,” I say. “I honestly thought about paying my brother. And his friends to… uhm.”

Eric is quiet for a second.

“But not really,” I say, not wanting to hear his reaction. “I didn’t actually intend to do it or pull the money out of an ATM or anything. It was just one of those things you think about when you’re really angry.”

“That’s it,” Eric says.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“We need to find an ATM,” Eric says.

“Show us the money,” my brother says.

“Show! Us! The! Money!” his buddy Jake screams, cackling, and never looking away from my dad’s office computer where he is watching a video of someone having sex with a pregnant lady.

Eric knew they’d ask to see the money up front, so we have it in the gym bag my grandma gave me two years ago with my initials stitched into it. I don’t go to the gym, or participate in any athletics, so the only use my gym bag has gotten is the time Eric and I filled it with my dad’s weights and threw it off our deck. We were settling a debate about gravity that had to do with whether or not Steam-punk Praetoreous could realistically toss a half-ton proton charge off the deck of an airship before it exploded. (We wanted to be believable. It was the only way we could hope to change the way people think about proton charges and airships.) Other than that it has gathered dust in my closet, until now, the time Eric and I pay my brother and his psycho friends to beat on a guy my dad’s age who may or may not be from the government but is definitely after us. Eric, and me for being with him.

“Who is this guy?” my brother asks.

“It’s a long story,” I say, “but basically, he’s—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Eric says. “All that matters is he needs to get got.”

Eric rips open the gym bag, revealing a very skeptical bank teller’s drawer full of one-dollar bills. Enough one-dollar bills to make that bank teller look hard at the couple of haggard-looking teenage boys who are asking to be handed their entire savings accounts in one-dollar bills, but not enough to make her not give us the money.

Eric’s idea is to make my brother and his friends feel like hired muscle in a movie. They are hired muscle, not movie-quality, but except for a couple of scoffs and a “Who does this kid think he is?” from my brother, the idea is working. Where else do people have duffel bags full of cash? Where else do they say “get got”? We are tickling a very specific spot on my brother’s and his friends’ teenage lizard brains right now.

“Alright,” my brother says. “But we do this our way.” Which is a stupid movie thing to say, but paying people to hurt other people is a stupid movie thing to do, so here we are.

We call The Man on the number he gave Eric. Eric tells him he wants to turn himself in. Gives him directions to a cul-de-sac that’s a ways away from my house, up against the mountains, still mostly under construction.

We don’t bring Eric. We decide that would be a little like bringing the kid to the kidnappers. And though it never gets said between us, one night not very long ago these guys did what they’re about to do, except to Eric. If he wants a pass I can’t blame him and he doesn’t have to say it. But I’m going along, the project manager, to make sure they don’t get distracted by drug scores or drunk girls or who knows, someone else to go wild on.

I have to tell them not to dress like the guys from A Clockwork Orange.

“But we get to do this our way!” my brother says as they’re loading implements of fuck-you-up into the trunk of Alan’s Altima. Two baseball bats: one wood, one aluminum. A samurai sword my brother got at the mall. A couple golf clubs. A coat hanger.

I tell them the masks will make them more conspicuous, and the suspenders will make it hard to run, if that becomes a thing that needs to happen. What I really want to say is don’t, like, enjoy this so much.

“Let them,” Eric says. “Whatever it takes.”

So half an hour later I’m in the backseat of the Altima squished between Alan and Tits, who, because none of them have the actual masks from A Clockwork Orange, are wearing the faces of a Power Ranger and Dora the Explorer, respectively. My brother is driving and Jake is riding shotgun.

“Five-oh!” Jake says as a cop car passes us in the other lane.

“Fuck ’em,” my brother says, Eric’s movie magic having worked on everybody, or maybe this is how they always talk.

“They can’t touch us,” Tits says. “We’re untouchable.”

“Touch my dick,” Alan says, which is closer to how I imagine they talk normally. Jake and my brother had a twenty-minute argument about what music to play in the car on the way there, so we’re about five minutes behind