The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

by DC Pierson

  “And how does that hurt me? You didn’t even hit anything resembling flesh!”

  The eyeball goes tumbling off the cliff level’s precipice when the admiral lands a surprisingly effective kick with his red slipper.

  “You know who my guy looks like?” I say. “Emma Tomlinson.”

  “You’re totally right,” Eric says. “Do you like her?”

  “Ew! No.”

  “No, I didn’t mean—I didn’t mean romantically, I meant just do you think she’s okay.”

  “What’s to like? She never talks.”

  “Good! Yeah! Me too! I think she’s an albino.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  “And her whole family comes to pick her up from school. Her mom AND her dad AND her two little sisters and they all look exactly like her.”

  “It’s like they sent a homeschooled kid to regular school.”

  “Have you ever known any homeschoolers?”

  “There are some next door. One time we went on vacation and they picked up our mail for us and I had to go get it when we got back and their whole house smelled like … I dunno. Oatmeal? It was creepy in there. I can’t put my finger on it.”

  “We don’t talk to people. Do you think people think we’re creepy?”

  “I talk to people!”

  “I’ve never seen you talk to anybody in English.”

  “Yeah, well, not in English. Why don’t you focus on the game? I’m killing you here.”

  We’re halfway through another match. I’m thrashing Eric again. I’m a tiny Asian schoolgirl with two razor fans. Eric’s a half-man, half-Zeppelin.

  A couple seconds go by where it’s just the sound of my girl squealing every time she lands a knee or a fan on Eric’s character, and his character harrumphing.

  Then Eric says, “You know who my guy looks like?” His guy puffs up like a blimp and rockets into the Asian girl, actually a pretty good move I’m sure he got completely by accident. “Patti Helzburg.”

  “Patti is fatter and has a bigger mustache.”

  Eric cracks up. We rip on people from school for a while as I beat him but not as badly, then we go downstairs to get sodas.

  “How long have your parents been divorced?” Eric says.

  “Since I was like nine.”

  “Is it strange having your dad go on dates?”

  “No, I’m used to it or whatever.”

  “I would think that would be strange. Here it is Friday night, your dad is on a date. A lot of kids our age are on dates too. If your dad took his date to the movie theater, there’s a very strong chance he took his date to see the same movie kids our age took their dates to.”

  “I don’t think they’re going to the movies,” I say, shutting the cabinet too hard.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—” Eric says. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

  I shrug.

  “Do you want me to leave?”

  “What? No!”

  “Okay,” Eric says. “I’ll have a Dr. Pepper, I think.” He opens the fridge and grabs a can. “I was thinking … I was thinking about the soundtrack, too.”

  “Soundtrack?”

  “For the movie. The first one.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. I was thinking it’d be cool if it had exclusively industrial music. Like Throbbing Gristle, Bauhaus …”

  I have to admit I don’t know who those bands are.

  “Oh. They’re from the seventies and eighties. I think they would fit really well with the tone of the first movie. I was really interested in industrial music for a while.”

  “Cool. I’ve been thinking about it too. I was thinking, I dunno, more modern stuff, like, uhm, The Earnest February, or Forty Guns, or The Boy Who Cried Sparrow.”

  “UGH. I hate The Boy Who Cried Sparrow. I can’t stand them. I absolutely, I mean, I can’t stand them.”

  “Okay! Jeez. They don’t have to … we don’t have to put them on the soundtrack.”

  “I’m sorry if you like them, maybe that’s where we part company, because I think they’re completely overrated. Like, I get it, their singer went to college. Those lyrics could only be considered deep by a sixth-grader. And their arrangements? Pabulum.”

  “Fine. Wow.”

  We start back upstairs. I have no idea what pabulum means, or really what “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 like this, especially from two fifteen-year-olds. We’ve watched enough DVD commentaries to know that money is a big factor.

  Eric is going to come over at eight but my brother and his friends are dressed as pirates in the front yard, and Eric doesn’t show up until they go off down the block, and by then it’s nine thirty.

  “Your brother and his friends are seniors” is the first thing Eric says when he gets in the door.

  “Yeah, I dunno,” I say. “They dress up all the time. Why should Halloween be any different?”

  “Are they going to trick or treat?”

  “I dunno.”

  “They’re probably going to steal candy from kids.”

  “I dunno what they’re going to do,” I say. “You don’t have to avoid them. You can just come up when they’re out front. They’re pretty loud but they’re harmless.”

  Eric doesn’t say anything.

  We spread paper out on my bedroom floor. Around eleven thirty we go downstairs for sodas.

  “What’s the grossest way you can think of to die?” I ask Eric.

  “Grossest or out-and-out worst?” Eric asks.

  “Both, I guess.”

  “It’s the same answer for both. Having your brain eaten away by spiders nesting in your ear canal.”

  “Eww! That’s fucking gross!”

  “You asked. It’s bad, too, isn’t it? Now you go.”

  “Uhmm…”

  But before I can think of one (I obviously hadn’t thought about it as much as Eric) the front door crashes open. My brother comes in, hair spiked up like an anime character with a red bandanna tied around his neck and a plastic sword tucked into a plastic sheath on his hip. He comes into the kitchen and makes for the fridge. Eric suddenly becomes interested in the cracker cabinet, or pretends to.

  “We have any whipped cream?” my brother asks.

  “I dunno,” I say.

  He answers his own question by pulling an aerosol can of whipped cream from the condiment part of the fridge, which is most of the fridge.

  “Do you have a house, or …?” my brother says to the back of Eric’s head.

  “Me?” Eric says, half turning around.

  “Yeah, you’re over here, like, all the time. Where do I know you from?”

  Eric basically has his head in the cracker cabinet between the Original Wheat Thins and the Sour Cream N’ Onion Wheat Thins, that’s how hard he’s avoiding eye contact.

  “I dunno,” Eric says.

  “Operation Chaos!” my brother says.

  Operation Chaos was when my brother and his friends watched Fight Club fifty times in a row one weekend and decided it was their mission to spread anarchy in our subdivision. I don’t know what form it ended up taking, really, just that my brother and Alan both got community service for shoplifting, and my brother came home that weekend with a YIELD sign he then hung on the wall of his bedroom.

  “Yeah, that’s it!” my brother says. “Darren, check it out, your friend was walking down Mountain Terrace at like three in the morning, right, and Alan and Tits and me were driving down Mountain Terrace and we saw him, so we like start flashing our lights and swerving over and honking like we’re gonna hit him, and he FREAKS and jumps into the bushes, so we stop and get out and we thought we lost him, but Tits tripped over his sneaker on the way to the car, so Tits drags him out of the bushes …”

  “Stop,” I say. “No one cares.” I don’t know if you have ever heard someone describe beating someone else up in the presence of that someone else, not in a cruel way, just in a way that’s like it’s not supposed to bother that person.

  “Man, you should’ve seen it,” my brother says. “It was classic, right?” he says to Eric. “ROIGHT?” he screams in his and Alan’s favorite British hooligan put-on accent.

  Eric just looks at the kitchen tile.


  “No one cares,” I say again. “Fuck off!”

  “Chee-kee,” my brother says, punching me in the shoulder as hard as he can.

  “DAN-yul,” Cathy shrieks. She’s hanging in the front doorway, her breasts apparent in a pirate blouse, wearing heavy makeup. “HURRY UP!”

  “I’m COM-ing,” my brother shrieks back. He runs out with the whipped cream. Eric and I look at each other.

  “They jump people,” Eric says.

  “He’s a retard,” I say.

  “I got kicked in the stomach by someone named Tits,” Eric says.

  “They just call him Tits because he’s fat.”

  Eric doesn’t say anything. My shoulder hurts where my brother punched me.

  “You should have told me they beat you up.”

  “We weren’t friends back then.”

  “I meant, when you first came over. You knew it was them.”

  “I didn’t want to start anything.”

  I don’t think it’s within Eric’s power to start anything, but I don’t say that. It’s also not really within my power to start anything.

  “You want to keep working on ideas?” I say.

  Eric shakes his head.

  “Yeah, me neither.” I look out at the pool. I can imagine a thousand kids out there beyond the fence, fucking up and getting into trouble, kids way dumber and less deserving of a good time than Eric and me, and here we are indoors, feeling like weak beat-uppable tools. I say: “You want to get them back?”

  “Get them back? How would we go about doing that?” Eric asks. I don’t have any idea, but we are two fifteen-year-olds on Halloween and I’m sure deep within our ancestral teenage-boy lizard brains are all sorts of fun ways to cause problems after ten p.m.

  What we have on the kitchen counter five minutes later makes it pretty clear we’ve never gotten revenge on anybody. Half a dozen eggs leftover from two weeks ago when my dad made breakfast for a woman who stayed over on a Saturday night. Processed, individually wrapped yellow cheese slices because I feel like I remember seeing or reading about a prank involving cheese slices somewhere, but maybe it was an art project, not a prank. Some rope from the garage, just in case we have to rappel up or down something. Neither of us knows how to rappel, in fact I’ve always counted myself lucky that our school doesn’t have that rope-climbing thing as part of PE like you see in movies. But rappelling seems like something you do as part of getting really excellent revenge. We could also use the rope to hang somebody in effigy, if we decide to go that way. But again, that’s straying into art-project territory.