The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

teenager that you can’t even prank right counts as originality when my brother’s car pulls into the cul-de-sac.

Eric struggles to close the egg carton and get it back in the bag. He gives up and drops them to the concrete.

“Well well well,” my brother yells out his rolled-down window in his British hooligan voice, “what’s all dis den?”

I take off running. Since it’s a cul-de-sac, really I’m running towards the people we’re trying to get away from.

“DARREN,” Eric says. I turn. Eric tilts his head back the way we came, towards Alan’s backyard. It’s kind of a cool move. I’ve never seen Eric have a cool move. Then he runs in the direction he nodded. I follow. My brother gives chase, plastic sword thwapping against his thigh. Tits has jumped out on us too, and whoever else was in the car, a couple of dark forms following my brother when I look back over my shoulder. I hope Eric’s not planning something stupid like jumping in Alan’s pool. I hope somebody tripped over the wood-stain can.

Eric runs around Alan’s pool. There’s a back gate I didn’t notice when we were zoning out on Alan’s sex triumph. Eric blasts through the gate, I do too, and we’re in a back alley between fences where there’s trash bins and a couple of old couches and trampolines. My brother is right behind us.

“Throw eggs at moi mate’s house, will you?” He cackles like a fucking demon.

I had no idea this alley was back here. I didn’t know we had alleys. We come to what I guess is the end of the block. It looks like a dead end and I’m bracing myself to slow down and take whatever shoulder punches and nut punches and kicks in the gut from Tits are coming to us when Eric cuts into a dark corner and disappears. I run that way. Some steel rods demarcate a place where the alley opens onto a dry wash. Eric scrambles down the sharp gray rocks that look unsteady as hell and, as I find out when I try to scramble down as fast as Eric, actually are unsteady as hell. Rocks clatter against rocks. I fuck my knee up bad a couple of times but manage to stay right behind Eric. Behind me, the thwappings of the sword against my brother’s leg get farther and farther apart, and the cackles get less and less demon-ish. Eric hangs a right and climbs out of the wash. He holds his watch up, presses a little button that lights up the face. “We might be able to make this work,” he says. As I’m climbing out of the wash a shape flies past me and clatters on the pavement. A plastic sword, still in its sheath. I look over my shoulder. My brother stands panting in the dry wash. It doesn’t look like Tits ever even made it down there. They’re heavy smokers, of everything.

I try to tell Eric we could probably slow down but before I can he’s let his little watch light go out and has jetted down the block we’ve just climbed up to. Most of the houses are under construction. At the end of the street, another shuttle is just pulling up.

“The eleven fifteen,” Eric pants, “right on time!” Its doors open and Eric sprints up the stairs without stopping. I climb on and nod to the driver, who’s not Eulalio.

“GO GO GO!” Eric says when he gets to his seat, though he has to see no one’s chasing us anymore. The bus pulls away at its own pace.

By now, I imagine the commotion has disturbed what Alan had going on. I don’t know if it’s a regular thing for him or a one-time full-moon Halloween anomaly, all I know is Alan has been to a place I haven’t been to, and I’m really smart and I once heard Alan pronounce the word especially like this: “eck- specially.” So I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m not sorry.

We sit there catching our breath. I am so out of shape it feels like my body has given up trying to draw air from my underused lungs and is trying to run on a heart full of caffeine and a stomach that only knows Hot Pockets, and it’s having a bitch of a time. Still, it’s kind of great. We have these characters the Agtranian Berserkers, who jab each other in the chest with big syringes full of super-adrenaline before they go into battle, so they’re so euphoric they don’t give a fuck if they die. As soon as I stop feeling like I’m dying, I start feeling like that.

“Your house won’t be safe for a while,” Eric says. “We can go to mine.”

I’ve never been to Eric’s house. I don’t know what I’m expecting. I guess one of those homeschoolers’ houses we talked about that one time: weird-smelling and dark and crammed with spelling workbooks and homemade candles, his mom in a dress like a farmer’s wife, listening to religious radio. But it’s not like that at all. It’s normal. Big, even.

“How did you do that?” I say as we walk up the gravel path to Eric’s front door. “You were like a fucking ninja.”

“I know the neighborhood pretty well.”

“Did you live over there or something?”

“No.”

Eric takes out his keys and opens the front door.

“Are your parents home?” I whisper.

“Yes, but they’re asleep, and their room is upstairs, so don’t feel the need to whisper.”

“Okay.”

Eric gets me a water bottle from the fridge and gets one for himself. His kitchen is cleaner than mine but essentially the same.

“You saved our asses. How did you know where the bus stop was? How did you know the way out of that… I mean, I didn’t even know we had alleys.”

“I walk around at night a lot,” Eric says.

“Right, my brother said they saw you that night. Here’s the thing: I think we got them back, but I’m not sure we did. I’m not sure we did anything, but it feels like we got them back.”

“They had to run,” Eric said, “but they never caught us. They were mad and they never got an outlet for their anger. One time I tried to get away from them and couldn’t and this time I did. And we probably put a hitch in things for, you know, that guy and… his girlfriend.”

“Man, right through Alan’s backyard…” I’m still kind of excited. I mean, I can never go home again, but I’m never outside at night and I’m definitely never running from people at night and just narrowly escaping.

Then I think about Alan’s backyard and what we saw back there. I think about it and I’m quiet. Eric’s quiet so I figure he’s probably thinking about it too.

“Can I tell you something?” Eric says.

“Sure,” I say.

Then Eric says, “I can’t sleep.”

He says it fast and mumbly and quiet like the time I told Sara Eldensparr I liked her. I like you. I can’t sleep. Like something you’ve thought about a million ways to sort of cleverly segue into and you get the attention of the person you intend to say it to and in that moment you reach down for your favorite clever segue and it’s not there so you just figure “Let’s get this over with as fast as possible,” and sometimes it’s sloppy and they don’t understand you but I hear Eric clearly I think.

“Well, don’t drink so much caffeine or whatever.”

“No. That’s not what I mean. I mean I can’t sleep. I’ve never been able to and I don’t have to. I am physically incapable of it and don’t require it.”

“What?”

“Next you’re going to ask if I’m joking. I’m not. Then you’re going to accuse me of being crazy. I can’t speak on that as definitively as I can on the fact that I’m not joking, but I don’t think I am. It’s been this way since I was born.”

“You’re serious.”

“Yes.”

Eric sets his water bottle down on the counter and it lands with a quick series of sounds instead of just one, and that’s when I notice he’s trembling, which is also a lot like the time I told Sara Eldensparr I liked her, except all I told Sara Eldensparr was that I liked her, not that I could walk through walls or spit fire or eat bullets out of midair.

“That’s impossible.”

“I know.”

“You can’t NOT sleep. I saw a thing about this on the Discovery Channel. While you’re sleeping, your body regenerates. If you didn’t sleep, you’d die.”

“I know.”

“And your subconscious mind works a bunch of things out while you sleep. Sometimes apparently you can go