The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

by DC Pierson

  He sort of shrugs and tries to find someplace to point his sinking-in eyes besides Mrs. Amory’s face. And Mrs. Amory stays there longer than she would if it were anyone else who didn’t have an assignment to turn in, looking at Eric like he’s right now undoing everything she knows to be true: first bell is at 7:45 and Pearl in The Scarlet Letter symbolizes evil and Eric Lederer will turn his work in on time if not early.

  “Eric?” she says.

  “Sorry,” Eric says.

  Though it was always a sticking point between me and Christine, that afternoon I’m glad I can’t drive because everyone’s cars are fucked. I walk through a parking lot full of rip-shit, mystified kids who can’t figure out why their Jettas won’t start. Ryan, the kid from Theater Division who is pretty much always wearing suspenders, is about to pull out of the parking lot in his old white truck. I look at him. He shrugs at me. I shrug back. A couple of kids in older cars are behind him, some of them packed with friends whose cars are bricked and need rides home.

  The principal comes on the loudspeaker the next morning and condemns what he calls the “car prank” and vows to ferret out the “parties responsible.” I wonder if Christine’s car still works. I think of how it smelled inside her car, like carpet shampoo and the weird nonsmell of the air conditioner. Then I punch my leg underneath my desk and try really hard to think of anything else.

  Eric isn’t in class that day, or the day after that. Then on Friday I am leading a squadron of bug-and-robot-voiced ten-year-olds into battle against another squadron of ten-year-olds that doesn’t have such a sage older leader when my phone starts vibrating in my pocket. I tell BMXIZ4FAGS to watch my six and take my phone out of my pocket. Eric is calling me.

  I should hold a grudge. It really seems like the right thing to do in this case.

  “Can I come over?” Eric asks.

  I should really be over people “coming over” at this point, knowing that when they call first they are coming to your house to break your heart in the first person. But there is really nothing the dude can say to me at this point that would surprise me in its awfulness. And also I’m hoping that like when I used to go over to his house with an Xbox and all the controllers shoved in a backpack, Eric will come over with a console that just has a reset button and we’ll hit it and everything will be like it was in October.

  We’re in front of my house in pretty much the same spot where I told my brother about Eric that night.

  “On Wednesday morning I got pulled out of class. I got called down to the principal’s office, and there was this guy in there with the principal, then the principal excused himself and I was alone with this guy. And he said he knew about my thing. And he said he was from a university. He said he wanted to study my thing. And I asked him if I could have some time to think about it. He said I could, but that time was of the essence, that now that he knew about it there’s no telling who else knows. I left and ditched the rest of the day. He came to my house that night and said he heard I ditched the rest of my classes, and I shouldn’t do that, that if I started behaving erratically that would draw attention to me, and I didn’t want that, did I? He said I should come with him right then, that there were people after me. I shut the door and locked it and when my mom got home I told her. I mean obviously not everything, but I told her this guy had been by and she said she thought it was a good idea, this college program. And it turns out that this guy had already talked to my dad and her, and they thought it was a good opportunity. He told them I was eligible for this early-freshman thing for high school students, effective immediately. And then I knew I was fucked because there’s nothing your parents won’t agree to if they think it’s about you getting into college.”

  “Shit. Come inside I guess.”

  On the way into the house Eric stops. He reaches into a bush next to my front door and pulls out a piece of paper that’s all wrinkled from being stuck in a bush and drenched by sprinklers then dried by the sun. It’s some TimeBlaze art, still blowing around from when Eric covered my yard in it. A Thragnacian Containment Pylon. The Containment Pylons float in space at regular intervals around the wormhole that is the Thragnacian’s charge. They opened the wormhole as a weapon in their war against the peaceful Albions, and the Galactic Conclave decreed as punishment that they should have to use their superior technology to harness the wormhole, and take care of it for the duration of their civilization. Eric folds it up and puts it in his pocket.

  We go into the kitchen, maybe from force of habit. Eric starts closing all the blinds.

  “I’m really sorry about everything.”

  “Yeah, what the fuck, dude? Seriously. I’ve been meaning to ask you what your deal is sometime when I didn’t think you were going to say, like, ‘We should have it out,’ or something.”

  “I’m sorry about that. It was really stupid. I was saying and doing things I knew to be stupid. I’m really, really sorry. In light of everything that’s happened you don’t really have any reason to, you know, let me, but I was wondering if I could stay with you until this guy, this guy who I’m pretty sure isn’t from a college, until he goes away.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a great idea.”

  “Oh.”

  “I mean, he probably knows where I live too.”

  “Why?”

  Then I tell him. I tell him about the church guy and about the call and that I don’t know how and I don’t know when but the church guy probably resulted in this dude we have on our hands now, visiting Eric at home and handing his parents college brochures. And I tell him I called the church guy because Eric was being such a dick and that was my revenge.

  “Oh,” Eric says. “It almost worked.”

  “What almost worked?”

  “Everything has been shitty. Everything. My thing. The bad days are substantially worse. I can still anticipate them, when they’re going to be, my stomach starts to hurt and I get these headaches and that day I’ll have to go out into the desert but now they happen more and more frequently and I feel shitty, I mean really physically shitty, pretty much all the time. So when I was doing all that stuff … the e-mails and whatever and just generally being a dick, I was hoping—Jesus, it sounds stupid—I was hoping you’d get fed up with me and knock me out. Like you said that one time.”

  “I’d knock you out? I’m the least athletic person we know, dude.”

  “I know, that’s why I really had to be an unbelievable dick. I was thinking maybe you’d get your brother to do it.”

  This is such a dead-on echo of what I was contemplating a couple weeks ago, not in any real way, I don’t think, but just in the holodeck of revenge we keep around to make ourselves feel better, that for a second I don’t say anything. Then I think of something.

  “You didn’t have to start dating my girlfriend just to get me to get my brother to rough you up.”

  Then Eric is quiet. Then he says: “I didn’t do it for that. I did it for all the reasons I said I did it. I wish I hadn’t. But it helped me feel shittier, definitely. It helped me want to get knocked out, black out, take a few hours off, definitely. I felt really profoundly guilty and I still do.”

  I ask why he didn’t come to Christine with all of this.

  “I wanted to come to you with this, because this seems like it might be an adventure. And you bring adventures to the kids you make up comic books with. Christine, and those kids, those kids are more for blog entries and memoirs.”

  “Ah,” I say, not really understanding what he means and also having to stop myself from automatically correcting him: Time-Blaze is, or was, not a comic. TimeBlaze is, or was, a ten-part movie maxi-series with the mythos filled in by comic books and graphic novels, culminating in a series-rebooting singularity at the end of the tenth movie, following which, using some technology not yet invented, all existing copies of all the previous movies will have their stories altered. I want to correct him out of habit, I guess.

  “And also, I figured if I was going to come to you, w
hich I knew I had to, I couldn’t come if I was still, y’know, dating Christine, so I’m not anymore.”

  “You broke up with her?”

  “I told her what the deal was.”

  The fact that Eric, poindexter Eric, could not only land Christine, who was dating someone (never mind it was me), but then when the time called for it up and drop her, her and all the nakedness she entailed, makes me hate him and admire him and be happy to be on his side all at once. Then I wonder semiselfishly how it all went down, how she reacted. And I think to ask and I realize I’m really not ready to talk to Eric about her. There’s a clone of our dead friendship starting to grow in a tank full of pinkish fluid and I think talking too much about what happened, no matter the reasons for its happening, will flush the tank and leave the thing sputtering and dead.

  So we’ve hit the reset button, but it doesn’t clear the board. There are forces after us, stuff I called down upon our heads. But I have a best friend with superpowers, and days to fill, and rage to direct. And Eric has superpowers, and days and nights to fill, and a best friend with rage to direct. We have both seen enough and read enough to know that the guy who says there are people after Eric is probably the person in charge of the people after Eric.

  Now we have our adventure.

  10

  Eric marvels at the plastic jar of hot wings in our fridge. It’s big, like an economy-size pretzel-stick plastic jar. In fact, maybe that’s what it was at one point. I think so, then we had a barbecue and my dad filled the leftover jar with leftover wings and now it’s sitting in our fridge about half-empty. Me and my brother and my brother’s friends have all made assaults on it, but we haven’t come close to finishing it.

  “Only a house full of guys has that,” Eric says. And except for when my brother’s girlfriend comes through or my dad’s girlfriend comes through or until recently, my girlfriend came through, that’s definitely what we are. (At least, I think my dad would call that woman his girlfriend. And I think that girl would probably say she’s my brother’s girlfriend, although my brother would probably identify her as “mah bitch” or “that cunt,” depending on which accent he feels like shouting in.)

  We’re not sure where we’re going to, but the right thing to do right then seems to be to put a bunch of snacks in a backpack and walk out into the dark. We’re not sure where to, but before we go I throw on a hoodie. Eric doesn’t have a coat so I let him borrow one of mine. My brother has left a quarter-pack of cigarettes on the patio table in the backyard, he’s not even trying to hide his smoking from my dad anymore, so I snag it, and his lighter.

  We ditch main roads and stick to side streets, which all have Native American names like Arapaho Peak and Native Crest, and come together to form subdivisions with names like Desert Pines and Mountain’s Edge At Tapatillo West. I dig into sandwiches we brought, the meal I’d ordinarily be eating right about this time in front of the three thirty Conan rerun. I offer one to Eric.

  “No thanks,” he says, “I’m not hungry.”

  When I finish the sandwich, I throw the plastic bag away in a big dumpster on the edge of a construction site where a big new house is going up.

  “Creepy,” Eric says, “like, if I were a junkie who stumbled here from downtown, that’s exactly where I’d sleep.”

  It is creepy, and being creeped out by it is actually kind of a nice change from being scared of this thing that’s after us and we don’t know what it is but we’re very sure it’s on our tail.

  “Maybe he’s a guy from the Vatican,” Eric says, “and I’m supposed to be the Christ child or something, meant to bring about the apocalypse.”

  “Maybe he’s from the government,” I say, “dispatched to bring you to Area 51, where they’ll run tests on you.”

  “Maybe,” Eric says.

  “But if we can imagine what it is, that probably statistically eliminates the possibility of that actually being what’s going on. Like, if we can imagine it, it can’t be real,” I say.

  “Maybe,” Eric says.

  I take out a cigarette.

  “You smoke now?” Eric says.

  “Not really,” I say, “it just seemed like the right thing to do. You want one?”

  “No thanks,” Eric says. “At some point, I’m probably going to have to run.” And his certainty gives me the creeps more thoroughly than the imaginary junkie in the gutted model home.

  But eventually it wears off a little bit and we get to talking about what’s happening on shows we both watch, whether the creators are staying true to what makes the shows so great or whether they’ve gone completely off the reservation, and we both got the Maxim issue with the girl who can phase through walls from our favorite show, Superlatives, even though we’d never, ever buy Maxim under normal circumstances, but some of the articles were surprisingly funny. And before long we’re sort of around Eric’s neighborhood and instead of turning back we drift towards his house, naturally enough and the whole thing not seeming particularly real. It’s, like, five thirty in the morning and just a little bit of daylight is chasing the desert hares off people’s lawns and as we’re walking up Eric’s front drive I hear the newspaper car coming around the corner. It’s a sound familiar to any kid who stays up late in the suburbs: since there are no actual paperboys anymore, some depressing cigarette-y dude in a station wagon rolls around the neighborhood at this hour and along with the sound of his car you hear the thunks of papers hitting people’s driveways, louder on Sunday mornings when the papers are stuffed with ads.

  The paper guy still has his headlights on, and instead of orbiting the cul-de-sac for however long it takes to huck all the papers onto all the driveways and move on, the headlights freeze on us. The paper guy yells “STOP” and it isn’t the paper guy, we can’t see him with the glare from his headlights but it’s safe to assume it’s Mr. Who-the-Fuck-Ever, who works for the guy who works for the guy who works for the guy the church guy tipped off when I tipped him off about Eric, Mr. University. We aren’t sticking around to find out who’s on whose payroll. Eric was right, he has to run, and I shouldn’t have smoked that cigarette.

  We take off. We run through the side gate. Eric bypasses the big blue recycle bin but me, dumb and unathletic, I catch it right in the stomach. I hear a car door slam behind me, and shoes running on the driveway. Eric’s up on the back fence, or back wall, big brown adobe bricks, with his foot slung over, reaching down to help me up. There’s no time to resent the implication that I can’t make it up and over myself but he’s probably right, I probably can’t, freshman year I would fake sick so I could not dress out in PE and read instead. When I’m up Eric hops down into the dry wash behind his house, a tributary of the one my brother and his friends chased us through. I remember being scared, but that was fun-scared. This is the real thing.

  They say don’t look back but up on the wall with a view of the whole situation I can’t help but turn and see the dude tear-assing around the side of Eric’s house, and another thing I can’t help is thinking he looks a little bit like The Man, our unstoppable man in black, who may or may not be an actual human, who may be just a holographic entity. It’s him, down to the sunglasses (at five thirty in the morning) and the way he almost runs right into the swimming pool but instead of keeling over or raring back in a funny slapstick way, he just stops short like there was no obstacle there to be concerned about, he just decided to stop. And when we go over the fence he doesn’t appear to follow. We still run through the wash at full speed, but he doesn’t follow, which is almost kind of worse. I picture him standing in Eric’s backyard, waiting.

  We come out a couple blocks away from Eric’s house. We pant in the alley, me more so than Eric, who is in surprisingly good shape. I spit.

  “What kind…” pant pant pant “of college admissions officer…” pant pant pant “fucking chases you through your backyard?”

  “You don’t get it,” Eric says. “I’m REALLY smart.”

  We laugh, and have to start thinking
about something to do today besides go to school or be at home. We are trying to figure out what time the mall opens when both our phones start vibrating. Nobody would text-message either of us at five-ish in the morning. We would, but both of us are in each other’s presence. Christine? We take out our phones.

  The text messages are credited to UNAVAILABLE. They say, COME QUIETLY.

  We are under the bleachers at our rival high school. Going to our own school seemed like asking for trouble: it’s a place we’re known to frequent. Going to our rival high school seemed like the perfect way to throw him off the scent. Sitting on the bleachers seemed too visible so we’re underneath them. No one is making out under here, nine thirty on a Saturday morning.

  “My brother got in a fight with some Catholic-school kids here once, he said.”

  “Why here? This isn’t the Catholic school and it isn’t our school, either.”

  “Neutral location.”

  “Oh.”

  “Nobody probably ever said ‘neutral location’ and he just called it that later. He wants to be a samurai for the mafia or something. If the mafia ever starts hiring samurai I think that would be his dream job.”

  “Do you think if you had paid him, to like, assault me, he would’ve done it?” Eric says.

  “I did think about it,” I say. “I honestly thought about paying my brother. And his friends to … uhm.”

  Eric is quiet for a second.

  “But not really,” I say, not wanting to hear his reaction. “I didn’t actually intend to do it or pull the money out of an ATM or anything. It was just one of those things you think about when you’re really angry.”

  “That’s it,” Eric says.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “We need to find an ATM,” Eric says.

  “Show us the money,” my brother says.

  “Show! Us! The! Money!” his buddy Jake screams, cackling, and never looking away from my dad’s office computer where he is watching a video of someone having sex with a pregnant lady.