The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

by DC Pierson

  It also seems like a good time to spray-paint somebody’s house or car, but we don’t have any spray paint. We have a can of wood-staining stuff from the time my dad painted our deck. It’s not even technically paint, and it’s heavy as hell. Also, we have some flashlights.

  “It looks like we’re going to make an omelet,” Eric says, “rappel in through somebody’s window, and serve it to them.”

  “You read my mind,” I say. Eric laughs.

  We go out the door without much of a plan and everything in a paper grocery bag, becoming two of a ton of kids out tonight with some rotten eggs and bad intentions but probably the only ones with a can of Home Depot store brand chestnut wood stain.

  My brother and his friends could be any number of places. They could be hanging out at one of their houses or at somebody else’s house. They could be hot-boxing my brother’s car in the Sonic parking lot. They could be speeding around in the car after hot-boxing it. They could be hopping out on middle-schoolers and threatening them with plastic pirate swords to make them give up their candy. Cathy could be flashing her boobs at eight-year-olds dressed up like Yu-Gi-Oh characters. And if they aren’t doing these things right now they probably will be later. But we know they’re not at my house so we decide to go to Alan’s house, because it’s the only one of his friends’ houses I know the address of.

  It would take us a year to walk. Eric suggests we take the bus.

  “He lives on Desert Wind Drive,” I say. “It’s over by the—”

  “I know where it is,” Eric says.

  I don’t ever take the bus. It’s not the city bus, it’s this little shuttle they added to our suburb a couple years ago, I guess to ferry around little old ladies and take kids who can’t drive yet to and from the movie theater. When it came out they had this big logo design contest. Tony DiAvalo submitted this winking cartoon bus he was sure was gonna win, but when it didn’t he told everybody the city should be glad they didn’t pick his design because the whole thing had been a goof and his cartoon was filled with hidden joints and subliminal gang symbols.

  “Is your brother going to kick our ass?” Eric says as we wait for the shuttle.

  “As long as we don’t get caught, they’ll probably just chalk it up to it being Halloween. Random prank.”

  “What prank ARE we going to do?” Eric asks.

  I don’t know and I tell him we’ll figure it out on the bus, which has just pulled up with the winning logo, a boxy little cartoon bird flying in the direction the bus is going, painted on the side. We climb up. It’s free so we don’t have to put in any money or anything.

  When we’re climbing on, Eric says, “Hey, Eulalio.”

  “What’s goin’ on, man?” says the bus driver, whom I guess is Eulalio.

  “You know the bus driver?” I ask as we make our way to the back of the bus, past a couple girls our age dressed as sexy Native Americans, and an old man in jogging clothes.

  “Yeah, I take the bus a lot,” Eric says.

  We take seats at the back of the bus. I’m extra careful with the bag to make sure the can of wood stain doesn’t roll over and crush the eggs. The cheese and rope are a buffer. “I mean, besides just egging his house … what can we do?”

  “I don’t know,” Eric says. “I’ve been thinking about it…. If we tied an egg to the rope …”

  “Right…” I say.

  “Or if we tied the can with some rope …”

  “Okay…”

  “And then the cheese … The flashlight could …”

  “Hmm.”

  “To be honest,” Eric says, “I’m just combining all the things we have in my head like some Rube Goldberg contraption.”

  “Okay, well, the contraption you keep thinking of … what does it do?”

  “Make omelets.”

  “Shit.” It’s the eggs and the cheese. The effect of those two items together makes everything around them seem breakfast-y. And “start your day off right” is not the message we’re hoping this prank will send.

  “We could stain the eggs brown,” Eric says. “When he goes to clean them up he’ll think he’s been egged with some weird sort of animal’s egg as opposed to just a regular chicken’s egg.”

  “I don’t think he’s going to think that.”

  “You’re right.”

  We hate to settle for a conventional egging, even though winging eggs at the side of some dude’s house would be a first for both of us. Like, with TimeBlaze, we are hoping to reinvent the scifi/fantasy saga as the world knows it, and with this prank, we are hoping to change pranking forever. Even if no one knows about it and we did just decide to do it with the materials we had on hand, I would be really disappointed if we settled for your typical pitch-eggs-at-stucco-and-bolt, and I’m pretty sure Eric would too. At that point we might as well just be my brother and his friends; in fact, they’d probably come up with something better than that if only because they’re meaner than us and willing to go further.

  The bus makes a right into Alan’s subdivision, The Cliffs At Tapatillo Point. “I mean, if all else fails,” I say, “there’s no shame in just egging his house.”

  “Right,” Eric says. “Or his car.”

  Eric signals Eulalio and we get out on the corner of Mountain Terrace and Desert Wind Drive. It’s getting later so fewer little kids are out. Knots of older kids are up and down the street with trick-or-treat bags, not quite our age but close. They’re rowdier and pushier than the little kids and their costumes are shittier and they don’t have parents straggling along behind them. I feel like there’s a window after you get too old to trick-or-treat supervised by a parent where you can do it with your friends by yourselves and as long as you push and swear enough and don’t try too hard, you can keep getting free candy for a few years. I had a couple years like that in middle school with my friends Ethan and Chung Hoon. One year we were the Monty Python lumberjacks and the next year we were chess pieces. Chung Hoon moved away after that and Ethan went to a different high school. Actually, we did try pretty hard, but we definitely pushed one another and swore, too.

  Alan’s house is at the end of the cul-de-sac. My brother’s car isn’t here but Alan’s is parked out front, covered in stickers from bands, newer stickers starting to cover old ones of bands Alan’s decided he doesn’t like anymore.

  I get these knots in my stomach when there’s even the remote possibility of getting in trouble. I’ve gotten them since I was a kid. It’s not really a guilty feeling, it’s more a fear that I’m going to get caught and somebody’s going to tell my parents. I get them less since my mom moved away. I have one as we walk up to Alan’s house, but it doesn’t make me want to stop. It almost makes me want to keep going with whatever it is we’re going to do, which will almost certainly be stupid.

  “Let’s go around back,” I say.

  “Why?” Eric says.

  I shrug. Eric nods. We go around back.

  The pool light is on even though it’s October. All the lights in the house are off except for what I guess is Alan’s bedroom. I know it’s Alan’s bedroom because through the blinds I can see Alan lying on his bed and a girl is lying across him, going down on him. We were sneaky and quiet before but now we are frozen. The pool filter hums and Alan’s got some sort of music on, loud, not the kind of music I think I would put on but what the fuck do I know. Though he’s my brother’s friend and Eric’s tormentor I don’t think either of us has ever seen this sort of thing before. I definitely haven’t outside of the Internet and I don’t know that Eric has, ever. I don’t even know if he knows there is such a thing.

  “Oh my God,” Eric whispers.

  The girl is rubbing her boob up and down Alan’s cock.

  The thing that’s weird about it, besides all the things that are obviously weird about it, is that it’s real: I know that sounds dumb or oversimple but it’s the fact that, like I said, up until this point the only time I’ve ever seen anything remotely resembling this is in porn, and this is
most definitely not porn. Alan is sort of fat and the girl, who I actually think I might recognize, is almost too skinny and they’re more dressed than they are naked. Alan has this hoodie on that I recognize from when he forgot it at our house for like a week and it was draped over the chair by the front door, green with white lettering that reads THE WORLD’S BEST FUCKING SKATERS, and it’s real and if it’s happening right now it’s happening all over in the backs of normal-looking houses all the time while Eric and I sit indoors and draw. I mean, you hear rumors, even if you’re not friends with anyone named in the rumors, but I guess I always figured it was like fights: you know, people say they’re going to kick each other’s asses but all they really do is meet on the basketball court after school and push each other and call each other “bitch” enough so that nobody will be considered one when they both end up walking away and not actually fighting. Just like fighting is mostly just talk about fighting, I figured sex at our age was mostly just talking about sex. But it really happens. People born not long before me rub each other all over each other in their bedrooms with the music up.

  “Let’s go around front,” Eric says.

  It is a good five seconds before either of us moves.

  Back around front we’re a couple of kids with rotten eggs on Halloween and even though we’re not dressed as Disney characters and saying “twick or tweat” with adorable speech impediments we might as well be. We’re standing on the curb. Eric takes the eggs out of the bag, opens the carton, and looks at them. I grab one and throw it at Alan’s house. I guess the driveway is longer than it looks or I am weaker than I already feel because it doesn’t even make it. It breaks in front of a red clay pot next to the front door. I am wondering if being so awful at being a 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.”