The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

by DC Pierson

  One thing it’s missing, I realize, is an in-joke. A private thing between me and all the friends I have who spend all evening checking each other’s profiles when we really ought to be doing homework. So under “Least Favorite Things,” I write “Richard’s dog.” Who’s Richard? What has his dog ever done to me? I have no fucking clue. But it seems like some dumb thing somebody would write. All the blanks filled in and tolerably smart and believable, I hit SEND.

  The ancient school computer creaks and groans and the little world in the browser bar spins and finally the next page loads. “Add a picture.” Fuck shit balls.

  If I don’t put one up, then my whole effort to make this thing look lived-in will be for nothing. Everybody has a picture on their profile. Narcissism is what this whole game is about. But there aren’t any pictures of me, really, besides yearbook photos, and won’t that look strange, unless it’s my first-grade yearbook photo, in which case it’ll be ironic, and I’m not about to be that asshole. I could put a picture that isn’t me, that’s Chuck Norris or George Washington arm-wrestling a tiger or some idiotic thing, but that’s another kind of asshole I’m not chomping at the bit to be.

  Then I remember: tucked in the bottom of my bag, waiting for me to remember to take it out and leave it at home, really, is this sketchbook, not my TimeBlaze sketchbook, but a nicer one I’ve used for what I guess I would call “real drawing.” For like landscapes and people and sketches of hands and things like that. Things I do occasionally to try to prove to myself I’m not just doodling, but things that at the end of the day I’m just not good enough at or which don’t feature enough head wounds to hold my interest. Inside that notebook is I guess what you’d call a self-portrait. I dig the notebook out, flip through, and it’s there, between an aborted attempt to draw the mountains behind my house and a female statue’s right boob. It’s not bad. It’s not good, either. I guess it just looks like I didn’t really try, which is kind of what I want, I mean, if I’m going to be an asshole with his Namespot profile picture a line drawing of him done by him, it better be one where it looks like I went “meh” and scratched it on a napkin while I was watching TV. And it looks enough like me, I guess. Anyway, time is ticking, I’ve spent maybe ten minutes on this as it is. So without thinking about it a whole lot more I put the notebook page in the flatbed scanner next to the computer. I crop me, half-trying, half-finished me, out from between the shitty mountains and the floating stone boob, save me as a JPEG, and post me in my profile. I hit FINISH. The computer creaks, the little world spins, my profile loads. I am now part of the problem.

  I expect that the nightmare is pretty much over and I am now findable by any cute drama girl who might want to invite me to a party for some reason, and I don’t want to look at my new profile the way you don’t want to look at anything horrible you’ve done, but I accidentally do anyway as I’m going to log off and I see, stamped across the top of this fucking monster, “MEMBER SINCE TODAY.” The game is up. I could make ten thousand friend requests to make it look like I’ve been a Namespot jockey since way back, but it wouldn’t matter. Member since TODAY.

  I go back to class feeling retarded for doing so much work. But then I think, that’s probably the same amount of work, the same amount of worrying about what nonexistent people and imaginary girls are going to think about what three movies in your “Favorite Movies” section say about you when put next to one another, and every other thing, I just did it compressed into ten minutes between lunch and sixth period.

  The reason I know so much about Namespot even though I think it’s repulsive is, Eric and I can’t get enough of it. Nights at his place when I’ve forgotten to bring my Xbox and we’re bored of populating the zombie senate of the postsingularity necroplanet, we go online and scoff at people’s Namespot profiles and how unique everybody thinks they are. Sometimes we look at pictures of parties we didn’t get to go to. It would be pathetic if we actually wanted to go to those parties, but we don’t, so it isn’t. It’s sort of a making-fun-of-people buffet. It’s almost too easy. People putting themselves out there convinced we’ll be charmed by their overwhelming uniqueness. Well, we aren’t charmed, Eric and I.

  I get to sixth period all sweaty from rushing. I apologize for being late. The teacher tells me it may count as an absence.

  My lab partner Ramesh gapes at me. I wonder what his three favorite movies are.

  At my house after school I’m drawing the undercarriage of a mechanized bodysuit Eric and I are convinced is going to revolutionize the way people think about mechs in sci-fi but I’m distracted and I keep telling Eric I have to go to the bathroom. It’s a little like when I was in third grade but I got skipped ahead to fourth-grade math and I got so freaked out being around older kids I’d go to the bathroom like four times a class. Nobody ever called me out on it to my face except one time a kid who sat in front of me said to the kid sitting next to him, “That kid sure goes to the bathroom a lot.” The fact that my existence had even been acknowledged one way or the other was as good as being beaten down by the entire fourth grade math class, which I for some reason assumed was always ten seconds away from happening.

  This time I’m not actually going to the bathroom, I’m going into the other room and really quickly opening up the browser and really quickly going to Namespot and logging in and seeing if I have new messages. Twice I don’t. One time I have a message, but it’s from one of those porn-website robots represented by a fake girl with a fake profile.

  The third time I get back from the bathroom, Eric says, “Are you feeling okay?” I’ve been drinking a ton of Mountain Dew to make it more plausible that I have to keep going to the bathroom, and pretty soon, I actually do have to go.

  In my house, my dad’s home office, where the computer is, is right across from my bedroom, where Eric and I are working. My dad never works here. It’s from the weeklong period when he was considering quitting his job and day-trading from home, but then all those day traders started killing themselves, and he decided to keep doing what he’s doing, which I think has something to do with computers. On my way back from legitimately going to the bathroom, I break down and stop in a fourth time. I really quickly open the browser and really quickly go to Namespot and log in. This time, an annoying banner ad starts playing this scream-o music. It is loud and dumb and definitely not the sound of me peeing or flushing or getting more Mountain Dew. Eric comes in to see what the deal is.

  “Are you on Namespot?”

  “What? Yeah. Uhm …”

  “Is that you on Namespot?”

  “Yeah. Uhm. It’s. Uhm. There’s like, things you can only see … if you have a profile. Things on … other people’s profiles. I thought it would give us, uh. More shit to make fun of.”

  “Alright. Don’t get raped. There are an incredible amount of rapists on there.”

  “I don’t think it works like that, dude. Some guy is not going to jump out of the USB port and just start raping me.”

  “That gives me an idea for a character,” Eric says, and goes back to my room.

  I hit REFRESH. A little envelope icon appears below my half-assed self-portrait. I have a message. The subject is “party.” It’s from “christine’s cliché screen name.” There is an accent on the e in cliché and everything. I think about how every Namespot profile represents a unique and wonderful individual, and how Eric and I have maybe been too quick to judge, and how everything in the world is aggressively fine.

  Drama party. I haven’t been to many parties in high school so I don’t know what to expect but I don’t expect this. I guess I expect like a high-school-movie party, with lots of kids who look like they’re thirty passing around red cups and a big kitchen island stacked with liquor and an Asian kid in a puffy neon jacket wearing inexplicable goggles on his forehead who pretends to be black the entire time. But there aren’t any of those things.

  What there is is a DJ, or really, a kid with two laptops and some speakers on a table. There are Claire and those g
irls I met earlier and Ryan, the guy I met earlier, and they’re all in the living room where some couches have been pushed aside, along with lots of other kids, some kids who I recognize from IHOP, and some who, if they go to our school, have been holed up in the drama department the entire time, and they’re all dancing. Like, really dancing. Guys with girls and girls with girls and occasionally guys with guys. That doesn’t freak me out so much as the sight of people my own age dancing. Not at a school dance, either, which I also have zero experience with. A girl I don’t know lets me in and I stand there gaping for a few minutes as a song I don’t really know but am sure I hate plays. And a roomful of mostly girls and a few guys dance just to dance. I guess they look like idiots.

  There is this one kid I notice, way nerdier than me or Eric, and he is dancing his ass off. I mean, not that I look nerdy, I think more than anything I try not to look like anything, to be not there to be noticed, but this kid looks like how I feel like I come off: fat and with a gross teenage beard and an anime T-shirt. Not that I am fat or have a gross beard or an anime T-shirt either. But this kid is just breaking it the fuck down. I am simultaneously grossed out and embarrassed for him and in complete awe. This is nothing I can process. I make for the kitchen.

  Like I said, there’s no kitchen island full of booze. Doesn’t seem to be any alcohol anywhere. There’s some snacks laid out, some pizza and sodas. I don’t see Christine anywhere, and the only other people I know are dancing in the living room to what is now a song about butts. And even if the people I sort of know noticed me they’d only know me as the kid from lunch on Thursday with the controversial friend and we wouldn’t have anything to talk about. I eat pizza, trying not to get any on my brother’s button-down shirt. I am the only person in the house not writhing and sweating to the song about butts, besides the DJ who’s playing the song about butts. Suddenly I want this to be a normal Friday night and I want to be in Eric’s bedroom or my bedroom, the two of us swearing and drawing zombies or just fucking around with no one to impress. I regret telling him I couldn’t come over because my dad was taking us to Outback. I would forgive him for not letting us explore more of his secret just to thank him for not being a weird drama person whose friend I want to make out with.

  The back door slides open. One of the shorter, fatter girls I met at lunch the other day comes in, followed by Christine. Before I left the house tonight I realized people probably think about what they wear to a party before they leave the house, so I decided not to wear my usual black T-shirt and went up to my brother’s room and took one of his button-down shirts. I am a monkey with a Namespot profile and a button-down shirt, I thought on the bus on the way here.

  Christine definitely looks like she thought about what to wear before she left the house.

  “He’s an asshole,” Christine says to the girl. “Bottom line.”

  The girl nods. “Thanks,” she says, and Christine and the girl hug. I grab for a napkin to make sure my face is clean. The girl heads for the living room. Even having just gotten done crying she is more ready to dance than I am.

  “Hey!” Christine says. “You made it!”

  “Hey,” I say, “yeah.”

  “Thanks for coming,” she says. “These parties are getting really same-y, I thought I’d spice things up.”

  “Same-y?”

  “Yeah, like, the same thing every time. They can be pretty fun, I guess. They’re not like stupid football parties, with, like, jocks and beer and misogyny.”

  I don’t know how she thought I would spice things up. I don’t know where she got that from. It seems like to spice things up you bring a hardcore band to a party full of museum donors, or a hooker to a Vatican function. Bringing a quiet nerd to a party full of loud theater dorks does not seem like spicing things up. But I don’t complain. Or say anything. I should say something.

  “How are you?”

  “Great! Really great. Sorry if you had to wait around in here. Must’ve been awkward. I had to help Becca … she just broke up with Mike. The DJ. He played Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls and he got a pretty big head.”

  “Yeah, I could see how that could happen.” I don’t see how that could happen. I don’t know who Nathan Detroit is. In the other room, the song about butts reaches its conclusion and cross-fades into a song that was popular when all of us were in middle school. The cross-fade is courtesy of Mike who got a big head when he played Nathan Detroit, which you will agree is inevitable if you know anything about who Nathan Detroit is.

  “So, Darren! What’s your story?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like, what’s your deal? What do you DO?”

  I go to school, I want to say. What do any of us do? But I don’t think that’s the answer she’s looking for. And the actual answer, that I am developing what is now a TV series culminating in a movie trilogy interspersed with books and graphic novels with any remaining holes in the epic filled in by a massively multiplayer online game, and my partner in this is my best friend who can’t sleep and never has to—that answer I’m not ready to give yet.

  “I, uhm. I read? And draw.” I don’t want “I draw” to read as “I doodle” so I think maybe I should say “I’m an artist” but I don’t want to say “I’m an artist.” I do think of myself as an artist, and I also think of myself as a science-fiction visionary and I also think I’d make a great boyfriend but I don’t want to say any of those things out loud to anybody. “I draw, and—”

  “RIGHT!” she says. “I have a confession to make. I like, looked at your profile for a while after I sent you the message about the party. And that profile picture … did you draw that?”

  “Uhm. Yeah.”

  “Oh my God. It’s. Amazing.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes! Are you kidding? It’s so good and accurate and I don’t know…. You’re a brilliant artist. If the rest of your stuff is even half that good, I’m jealous, because that means you’re a brilliant artist.”

  “Geez. Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me! And you like Leonard Cohen? I thought nobody liked Leonard Cohen except for me and my mom.”

  Leonard Cohen is one of the artists I put on there to seem eclectic. I know about him because of my brother and my brother doesn’t even really like him, but his ex-girlfriend who was a couple years older than him and broke up with him when she went away to college burned him a Leonard Cohen CD before she graduated. The only time I ever heard Leonard Cohen or saw my brother listen to Leonard Cohen was after she’d left when we were driving to the movies and he put in the CD and started crying and then made a U-turn and drove out into the desert so he could shoot the CD with a paintball gun. I try to remember what it sounded like.

  “Yeah, he’s so … quiet. You really have to listen,” I say. “And the lyrics.”

  “I know, right?” Christine says. “Oh my God, you must think I’m some kind of stalker or something.”

  “No I don’t,” I say.

  “Well, good. And didn’t it say you’d only had a profile for like a day?”

  I am found out. The beat of the song from the other room is so loud it’s almost like a physical thing, so I think about trying to hide behind it until I can escape. She will think about how weird it is that she saw me at IHOP and then again on Monday and how I didn’t get a Namespot profile until I told her I had one and how the stalkers she’s joking about are real, and she’s looking at one.

  “Did your profile get hacked or something? That happened to Claire one time.”

  “No,” I say, relieved to be given the out. “I’ve never had one. But then I figured, I guess I should get one. You know … for the art.” I have no idea what I mean by that. “To be honest with you, I think Namespot is sorta shallow.”

  “I totally agree with you! It’s like, everyone thinks they’re so unique, like, people have Namespot profiles instead of personalities anymore, and Namespot interactions instead of REAL interactions, you know what I mean? And people fight more
in real life about what happens on Namespot than they do about what happens in real life. When Claire got her profile hacked … THAT was a snafu,” Christine says. When Christine sent me the message about the party, I went and looked at her profile. I think she put more effort into it than Eric and I put into the entire TimeBlaze saga. But she did use the word snafu.

  The song that was popular when we were all in middle school fades out and another song fades up. A few people filter into the kitchen and start filling glasses with ice and water from a Brita pitcher.

  “Hey Christine. Hey person,” says one of the girls.

  “This is Darren,” Christine says.

  “Hey Darren,” the girl says. “Chris, just FYI, Becca is like, a wreck.”

  “I know. We talked.”

  “Okay, because she was dancing for like a second and then she went and locked herself in the bathroom.”

  “Are you sure she didn’t just go to the bathroom?”

  “She told me she was going to LOCK herself in the bathroom.”