The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

by DC Pierson

  I’m watching a show about bear attacks when Christine calls. “Can I come over,” she says, like words that are preceded by the words “I’m sorry, but…” and after I hang up this dread comes over me like well, here it comes. Sex after school with a girl that can stand you seemed impossible, and it was. The package was mistakenly addressed to you and the real owner is coming to get it. I settle in for a lot more bear attacks. Christine knocks on the front door.

  When I open it, she comes in and basically collapses into my arms. She’s been crying and will be again.

  “The show is canceled!” she says. Her hair smells good.

  “Yeah?”

  “The administration, those fucking idiots, they say Mr. Hendershaw can’t put up any new work. It’s too ‘risky.’ It’s not even THAT controversial! If they would read the piece …”

  “Yeah, they’re idiots.”

  “They ARE idiots. No one understands what he’s trying to do, not the administration, not the parents, not the other kids in TD, fucking assholes …”

  “Yeah, they’re assholes.” I’ve never been around Christine crying before. Her tears are hot on the collar of my shirt. I’ve been around Christine being around “other kids in TD” when they’re crying before, so I just try to do what she seems to do, which is just agree with what the person says and then try to get them to look on the bright side.

  “Well look at it this way, at least we’ll get to hang out more.”

  “What? Fuck you!” Christine pulls away from me and whacks me on the arm.

  “What? You said we were gonna be seeing a lot less of each other when you were doing the show and now you aren’t gonna do the show so we won’t be seeing a lot less of each other. That’s all.”

  “It’s not just oh, bummer, one less show. I’ve been looking forward to this since forever!”

  “I know. Yeah.”

  “It’s not fair,” she says. “I’ve been wanting to do this kind of thing for two years now, this was my chance to do something besides, just like, the typical corny school play, and now …” She starts crying again. For a second I think of what my brother would say if he came home and found me embracing a sobbing girl in the front hallway. Probably something about how I rape lots of girls and she shouldn’t take it personally. I don’t want to be in the front hallway anymore where that sort of thing can happen.

  “Do you want to go upstairs?”

  “Fucking GOD, Darren! Can you not think about sex for like two seconds and just fucking listen to me?”

  “I wasn’t thinking about sex! I was thinking about your musical!”

  “It’s not a musical! It’s a fucking experimental theater piece! You know what? I need to go. I need to talk to somebody who listens.”

  And pretty soon I get my wish and I’m not talking to a crying girl in the front hallway anymore, except instead of being in my room the crying girl is back in her car headed God knows where. I call her forty or fifty times and leave lots of apologetic voice messages and she’s online later but doesn’t respond to any of my instant messages. She didn’t come over intending to leave me alone with my bear-attack shows but I guess I made sure she did anyway.

  “Christine’s okay.”

  I’m hoping to have lunch and not think about Christine. I’ve been thinking about Christine all day, hoping to catch her in the hallway and plead my case. I have the beginnings of an apology note in my English notebook. If things get really dire, I have the beginnings of an apology comic in one of my sketchbooks. I have fifty apology voicemails simmering in Christine’s cell phone, or if not physically in her cell phone, then in whatever phone-company computer or server or satellite stores the world’s voicemail. Wherever it is, there are fifty snippets of me saying variations on “Christine, I’m sorry, call me back.” I wonder in negative repetitive patterns about whether or not she’s listened to them or just gone through them one after another hitting “7.” I’ve been hoping for what I can always count on, which is a lunch full of Eric and me debating the virtues of time machines versus wormholes, no matter how I’ve treated him. And now he’s telling me Christine is okay.

  “Huh?”

  “Christine. I mean, she’s nice.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Why do you say that?”

  “She started talking to me via Instant Messenger. She said you’d had some sort of fight and she wanted to get an outside perspective on what you’re thinking.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “That you’re an asshole.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “No. I didn’t. I told her that you’re really smart but you hide it, and as a side effect of that maybe you end up hiding your emotions as well, and so if you seemed less than demonstrative that’s what that’s about and you can’t help it.”

  “Oh. Wow. How’d she take it?”

  “Okay I guess. She said she’d think about it.”

  “Okay.”

  “She also said I was ‘insightful.’”

  “What does demonstrative mean?”

  “You know what demonstrative means. This is what I’m talking about.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “We ended up talking for the rest of the night. She stays up late. She’s pretty nice.”

  “Yeah. I like her. I hope she doesn’t still want to kill me.”

  Eric looks tired, I think. Then again, he did say he stayed up all night. Then again, he always stays up all night and has forever.

  Christine sends me a text message in seventh period. She says we should go see a movie and bring Eric. I’m back in and not a terrible person anymore. Just like that, I get to have boobs and cyborgs and I don’t have to choose.

  We go to see this indie movie, The Paucity of Feeling. It’s the sort of movie Christine likes, I guess because she’s smart, and the sort of movie I say I like because I like to watch Christine being smart and I like it when she likes things, but I am coming to suspect that, despite my best efforts, I don’t actually like these kinds of movies. It’s playing at this art-house theater that used to be a real-people theater when I was a kid and my mom would take my brother and I there because it was the only movie theater in town when she was growing up, and I think because it was close to the mall and we could make a day of it. Now there are a bunch more movie theaters, big multiplex situations that remind you of learning your times tables (they all end in numbers divisible by 8: Desert Ridge 8, MesaPlex 16, Vista Crest 24), and three or four more malls, but this place is still the place you go if you want your girlfriend to think you’re smart.

  Christine picks me up first and then we pick up Eric. We are making fun of the hip-hop station’s station-identification breaks before Eric gets in the car.

  “YOUR HOME-HOME-HOME FOR TODAY’S HIP-HOP HITS,” I say.

  “He sounds like he’s eighty years old. That guy does the announcements for every station.”

  “YOUR HOME-HOME-HOME FOR YESTERDAY’S RAGTIME HITS,” I say.

  We fuck around like that waiting for Eric; it takes him a little while to stumble out of the house after I call him.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he says. “Dinner tonight was a total IQ.”

  Christine laughs and says, “I know what you mean. I was working on this French paper tonight … complete IQ all the way.” Eric laughs.

  “What does IQ mean?” I ask. “I mean, I know what it means … like, normally, but…”

  “IQ. It’s this thing we came up with the other night on IM,” Christine says. “In honors history, Mr. Webber called Vietnam an ‘intractable quagmire.’ So we started calling things IQs if they are, in fact, intractable quagmires.”

  “Britney Spears’s career. IQ,” Eric says.

  “My parents’ marriage … IQ,” Christine says.

  “Ever getting our school on year-round schedule. IQ,” Eric says.

  “Driver’s tests, total IQ,” Christine says. “Not that you would know.” She smiles at me.

  I ignore the slight and try to play along. “Uhm
, my brother, there’s an IQ if I ever saw one.”

  “You’re saying your brother is a conflict mired in complications which any form of struggle only aggravates?” Eric says.

  “I don’t think you understand how this game works,” Christine says.

  We pay for our tickets and go into the lobby. There’s a café area around the concession stand. Marlee and Antonia, these two girls wearing big puffy hats that resemble muffins who don’t go to our school but who Christine knows from their blogs, are sitting there eating pastries that look like their hats, notebooks open. Antonia flags down Christine. Normally I just stand around and look dumb while Christine and Antonia and Marlee talk fast. Tonight at least I’ll have somebody to stand around and look dumb with.

  “Ohmigod,” says Antonia. “We just saw the Godard retrospective.”

  “Seminal,” Marlee says. “SEMINAL.”

  “I’ve been meaning to see his stuff,” Christine says, “but I haven’t yet.”

  “You have to,” says Antonia, “you absolutely have to.”

  “You really should, he’s pretty great,” Eric says.

  “You know Godard?” says Marlee.

  “A little,” Eric says. “I went through a phase.”

  “What’s your favorite?”

  “Well, it’s a toss-up between Breathless and …”

  I lose the thread for a little while and focus on feeling betrayed by Eric, who is supposed to be a dude with me. Then I see my window.

  “… just like Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress was ripped off by Lucas with Star Wars,” Eric says.

  “Speaking of Star Wars, did you guys know that in the first draft of the script, Luke Skywalker was called Annakin Starkiller?”

  Everybody, even my girlfriend, even my best friend, looks at me like blood just started gushing from my mouth. In fact, I think they would prefer blood was coming out of my mouth, instead of these stupid words that are trying so hard. In fact, I would prefer blood was coming out of my mouth, because then I’d have an out from this stupid evening.

  “What film are you guys seeing?” Marlee asks.

  “The Paucity of Feeling,” Christine says.

  “I saw it when I interned at the film festival,” Antonia says. “You’re going to love it.”

  They’re called “movies,” not “films,” you fucking muffin-hats, I think as we make our way to Theater 2.

  The movie, the “film,” is a lot of shots of bridges and rosaries swinging from rearview mirrors and a guy with a beard is very mean to a French girl. It doesn’t start where it starts or end where it ends for any particular reason and I keep wanting zombies to jump in from the margins of the frame and eat everybody but they don’t. Everyone stares at the ocean for two hours, which forces us to as well, even if we don’t want to, even if we would rather watch a thing in which a thing happens.

  Usually when these movies are over I wait for Christine to weigh in and if she hated it I hate it with her and if she liked it I say, “Ah, interesting.” But tonight I’ll have Eric on my side, and we will be able to argue with the authority of two dudes who have conceived of a seventy-hour multimedia sci-fi epic that this movie was a piece of shit.

  “Bradgate was right, for once,” Eric says when he comes out of the bathroom.

  “Yes, for once,” Christine agrees.

  “Who’s Bradgate?”

  “The film critic for the Republic,” Eric says.

  “Usually he hates movies like this and loves, like, dinosaur island movies,” Christine says.

  “But every so often, he picks an art movie to champion, mostly because everybody else is. He gave this one a good review.”

  “Which actually had me worried,” Christine says. “But he was right.”

  “So you guys liked it?”

  Christine and Eric look at each other.

  “You didn’t?” Christine asks.

  “Uhm …” I say, “it was interesting.”

  On the walk to Christine’s car I listen as they dissect motifs and symbolism and mise-en-scène and Eric, whom I thought was loyal to clones and alien broods and movies that are actually, you know, about something, reminds me that while I jerk off and sleep, he stays up being interested in things. Christine drives and Eric sits in the front seat and the kid sits in the back.

  A typical afternoon in the Eric/Christine/Darren trio goes like this: I’m either at Eric’s house or Christine’s house or one of them is at my house. At last it seems I don’t have to choose, like my time is perfectly balanced. I’ll be drawing the sails on an ultralight skiff designed to ride on the surface of the sun, and Eric will be contemplating ways we can cut down the length of our titles (we’ve gotten them down to just two colons) when Eric’s cell phone beeps. Before Christine I never heard Eric’s phone ring because I don’t think it ever rang when I wasn’t with Eric because I’m the only one who ever called. Eric flips his phone open and says to me, “What’s a seven-letter synonym for perspicacity? Christine is beating me at this word game,” and before I can answer, he’s texting her back, not that I could answer. Or I’ll be at Christine’s house doing something to her I think I’m actually getting really good at, considering my previous lack of experience, and Christine’s phone will ring, and she’ll listen to the voicemail immediately after we finish, and she’ll say to me, “Eric says you said the cutest thing at lunch,” and before I can ask if Eric really described whatever thing I said as “cute” she’s calling him back to find out what the cute thing was.

  Or the three of us are together.

  Or it’s just me alone.

  9

  She thought it was a seizure.

  The way she tells it, Christine had offered to burn Eric a CD and did and brought it over to give it to him, and when she did he was locked up in his room and she talked her way in and he was freaking out, one of his “bad days,” and he told her what he always tells me, which is “go and don’t tell anyone,” and she went down to her car and sat there for a while and thought about calling the police and thought about telling his parents, but didn’t do either of those things. She didn’t leave. She went back upstairs and went back into his room and waited him out. He was tripping. He thought she was a werewolf. He punched her in the gut. But she stuck it out and finally when he was coming out of it, sweaty and glassy-eyed and shaking, the both of them, her from being scared and him from whatever built-up tension the rest of us work out in our dreams, she held him, like La Pietà, that statue we learned about in humanities class, until he was completely recovered and realized what he’d done and apologized and thanked her for staying even though he had told her not to and thanked her for not telling anyone. Then they kissed.

  Christine tells me first. I get one of those “can-I-come-over-we-need-to-talk” calls and this time I tell myself I’m going to be supportive and not say anything retarded or insensitive, whatever it is she has to tell me. She gets there and says we should go up to my room but not in a because-I’m-about-to-get-a-condom-out-of-my-purse way.

  “He was having some sort of seizure,” she says. And she waited him out, she says.

  “Yeah, he gets those,” I say. “He doesn’t like to talk about it.”

  Then I expect her to get mad at me for never telling her this big thing about my friend that I knew, and I gear up to say he wouldn’t want me to tell anyone, I was being a good friend, I’m always a good friend, but she doesn’t get mad at me, which is when I know something is really wrong, and she tells me they kissed.

  “Who kissed who?”

  “I don’t know, it doesn’t matter.”

  “‘It doesn’t matter’? That isn’t something you say when it was just a mistake and it’s never going to happen again.”

  “Well…”

  “Well what?”

  “Well I can’t promise it won’t.”

  “You can’t promise you won’t, because …”

  “I kind of like him. Eric.”

  “I kind of like him too, he’s my fuckin
g best friend!”

  Fuck not being able to sleep, now I have powers. I have eye-beams that fire pure rage. I have a black internal-combustion heart that never stops exploding. I have a red jealous streak that runs diagonally left-to-right across my chest and like Superman’s crest it strikes fear into the hearts of certain people but in this case it’s those who do not hold up their end of relationships. I am a meteor headed to Earth that was once a part of a planet made entirely of fuck-off.

  I need to see Eric and have him tell me this whole thing was a hallucinatory mix-up, that he thought my girlfriend was an extraterrestrial queen he had to make out with in his fantasyland and he didn’t know what he was really doing, just like when he slugged her. I’m out the door and halfway down the driveway, Christine running behind me.

  “Aren’t you going to lock your front door?” she asks.

  “I don’t,” I say.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Eric’s,” I say.

  “Do you want a ride?”

  I wheel on her and if I really had those eye-beams I think I would use them. I end up letting out a half-sob, which is embarrassing, because fuck her, she doesn’t get to see me cry. Besides, I’m not crying. For all she knows I’m going over to Eric’s to bash his head in, even though I’m not, I’m going over to have him tell me what I need to hear so I don’t have to bash his head in.

  “I’m sorry,” Christine says, but I’m halfway to the bus stop by then.

  “I’m sorry,” Eric says.

  “Well, she thinks … she thinks you guys are going to be boyfriend and girlfriend or something.” I laugh. Dudes. We can talk about this stuff. Eric doesn’t speak, though.

  “Uhm,” he says.

  “Fuck,” I say.

  “I…”

  “FUCK!” I say.

  “I really regret that it had to happen like this,” he says.