The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

“arrangements” are, at least in relation to music. I barely expected Eric to know what I was talking about much less have such a violent reaction. It’s one part scary and one part hilarious to see him so enthusiastic and negative.

“Maybe we’re putting the cart before the horse,” Eric says when we’re back upstairs, “thinking about the soundtrack before we even have the script necessarily, or the whole thing planned out.”

I really think about it, then I say, “No. I don’t think so. I think it’s important to know what kind of mood we’re trying to have, y’know?”

“Good,” Eric says, “I don’t think so either. You know who your guy looks like?” he says. “Tony DiAvalo.” He smiles.

We go to bed at three. Eric unrolls his sleeping bag and goes through a whole nighttime ritual. I feel like he’s never spent the night at somebody’s house before. He has pajamas. Not, like, feety pajamas or anything, but clothes that are specifically for sleeping. An oversize T-shirt with some microchip-company logos, and a pair of gym shorts.

“Do you want a pillow?” I ask.

“Oh, right,” he says. “I forgot my pillow. Knew I forgot something.”

“No problem,” I say, and throw him one from my bed.

We talk about the opening chase sequence through feudal Japan for a little while longer. When discussing the extra-fat Japanese warlord Praetoreous escapes from via riddles, we draw numerous comparisons to Patti Helzburg then we both go silent and I fall asleep pretty quickly.

“FAGGOT PATROL! FAGGOT PATROL!”

I wake up to screaming out in front of the house. It sounds like my brother’s friend Alan’s sister Cathy.

“Shut the fuck up Cathy you bitch!” my brother yells in what he calls his “wifebeater” voice, which is basically the world’s worst bad Southern accent. “Shut the fuck up!”

There’s a loud smacking sound. Cathy screams then laughs like a witch.

I sit up. The TV is on. Eric’s awake, sitting up in his sleeping bag, playing Threat Monster: Blue, the game we were playing before. Or at least I think he is. It’s two characters I haven’t seen before, and a totally different level. A panda in a mechanized bodysuit fights a kabuki guy whose right arm is a crossbow in a vertical neon city at night.

“Are you the panda or the kabuki guy?” I say.

“Oh, hey,” Eric says. “The ninjas are back.” Eric leans forward to turn the TV off.

“Don’t worry about it,” I say, and he leans back and keeps playing. “Did they wake you up?”

“No. I was up. I woke up earlier. They just got back. I’m the panda. Don’t worry, I saved your game and started a new one.” The TV is muted. The controller buttons click.

“RAPE! RAPE! RAPE!” my brother shouts out on the lawn.

“Cathy, stop raping him! Stop RAY-PING him,” Alan screams in a terrible British accent. “He’s moi MATE!”

“Your brother and his friends sure know how to have fun on a Friday night,” Eric says.

“It’s Saturday morning now,” I say. It is. The sun’s starting to come up behind my blinds.

We stay up until like nine playing with all the new characters Eric’s unlocked and then he walks home. I sleep the whole rest of the day and try to ignore Cathy and my brother in my brother’s room laughing and yelling and whatever else all day.

I don’t know anybody who thinks Cecelia Martin is cute. Her and Jen Ackerman and Teresa Saylor make up this little clique of I don’t know exactly what you would call them. Goth girls? They wear baggy black jeans and spiked belts and black T-shirts with Invader Zim on them and black eyeliner and their hair is always dyed in chunks and colors that make it look like they did it with highlighter, which they may have.

Cecelia walks next to me out of English on Monday.

“Do you hang out with Eric Lederer?” she says. Her voice is too high for her body.

“Yeah…” I say.

“Oh, like, just so you know,” she says, “he’s weird. Like, really weird.”

“Okay.”

“He was like obsessed with me for a while. He saw on my Namespot page that we liked the same music or something, so he thought we were like soul mates or something.”

“Huh,” I say. “That is weird.”

“He told me…” she says.

“Told you what?”

“Anyway,” she says, “he’s weird. I think he might be like one of those school shooters or something.”

“Why do you think that?”

“He was like obsessed with The Boy Who Cried Sparrow,” she says. “Like obsessed.”

“You think he’s a school shooter ’cause he really likes a band?”

“You don’t understand,” she says. “He’s weird.”

“He told me he hates them.”

“I told you. Weird,” Cecelia says. “I gotta go to Spanish. I just thought you should know.”

“Uhm, okay.”

I head down the stairs and Cecelia turns around and heads for Spanish, where her Spanish name is probably Noche or Muerta or Mariposa, because those girls are either obsessed with death or cute things. Like, obsessed.

So he got excited when he found out you guys like the same things. That’s exciting, and sometimes when that happens if the person who likes the same things as you doesn’t turn out to be a complete fucking simpleton who thinks she’s enlightened just because her belt has spikes on it, you and that person will become friends and the two of you will chart out whole literal galaxies on the backs of worksheets, with infinite time to flesh out what you’ve charted. If it turns out the person isn’t that cool, it just might sour you on that thing you both like. So I get why Eric now hates The Boy Who Cried Sparrow and I continue to get why no one who doesn’t look and behave and think exactly like Cecelia Martin likes Cecelia Martin.

3

By October we have three notebooks full of concept art for Time-Blaze. By this time Dr. Praetoreous, instead of being the main character, is just another player in a universe of characters, including the Praetoreous family (each of whom is actually another version of Dr. Praetoreous in a different timestream, so there’s cowboy Praetoreous and postapocalyptic Praetoreous and two-dimensional Praetoreous in a universe rendered in 2D), the Time Squad (the Temporal Ranger’s extended posse of villains, rogues, and scoundrels from the outskirts of time), and an entire pantheon of gods drawn from the Greek, Aztec, Indian, and Chinese mythologies who have been summoned by The Man using Dr. Praetoreous’s invention known as The Mortalizer. (Aside from cracking the whole time-travel deal wide open, Dr. Praetoreous’s strong suit is inventions that make unreal things real, from The Legitimacy Engine all the way up to The Mortalizer.) It helps that Eric knows shit-tons about all these different mythologies, even though all we ever learned about gods in school was a three- week Greek mythology unit in English freshman year, and the time D’andrea Rhys-Phelps, a Jehovah’s Witness kid, got so offended by the fact that there was a fortune-telling booth at the school carnival that we had to have a two- hour assembly on religious sensitivity.

I am proud of the way, in this one drawing, the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl seems to be almost 3D, his feathered tail way off in the distance in the bottom right corner of the page and his semi-reptilian head roaring toward you in the top left as The Man stands passively at the top of an ancient South American ruin, directing the newly Mortalized god to go out and fuck shit up.

On Halloween we decide that dressing up and trick-or-treating is for kids so instead we’re gonna stay inside and work on merchandising ideas. No detail is too small, we’ve decided, from the soundtrack to possible directors for the movies to the cover art for the books to the fast-food tie-ins, which we realize is sort of commercial and sell-out-y but we definitely know we’re going to have to consider if anybody is going to take on an expensive project