The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

by DC Pierson

“Oh GOD,” Christine says. She puts down her drink and looks at me. “I’m so sorry. Drama kids equal drama. We’re more obnoxious than we realize. Hang out?”

  I nod. I don’t know what else I’m going to do. I’m definitely not going to dance. The song is a techno remix of a song sung by an American Idol champion from like two years ago.

  “Okay,” Christine says. “Be right back.”

  Christine goes, leaving me, the artist with whom she shares an opinion about the vapidity of Namespot, alone. I’m not bothered. I spend a few minutes putting handfuls of pretzels together with handfuls of M&Ms and eating them. It’s something Eric and I do. I go to pour myself some Dr. Pepper. I have an unpleasant flashback and pour Mountain Dew instead. I eat more pizza. Eventually, I get bored in the kitchen, and it’s awkward being the only person staying in there while everybody else comes and goes for water or food or to whisper secrets in each others’ ears before going back to the dance floor. So I go out to the living room.

  Mike is bobbing up and down in front of one of his laptops. His head does not seem especially big but he’s wearing a baseball hat so it’s hard to tell. He does seem like kind of a cock, just from the way he’s bobbing up and down. People start hooting and stop dancing to look at something. Two girls in the middle of the room are making out. People are taking pictures. One of the girls is not really attractive at all and the other one is not not attractive. I wonder which is the one with the lesbian switch she can turn on and off. Camera phones click. Eventually that stops and I take a seat on the couch, feeling awkward as hell but not awkward enough to dance. Some of the girls are amazing-looking.

  Claire comes out of the crowd and sits down next to me. “Hey, what was your name?”

  “Darren!” I have to shout.

  “Oh. Your friend was a real asshole to me the other day.”

  “Yeah, he’s kind of an awkward … he’s kind of awkward!” I shout.

  “Is he here?” she asks.

  “No!”

  “Good,” Claire says, “and no matter what Christine tells you, do NOT audition for Hendershaw’s ‘theater piece.’ It is going to suck.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  A girl appears next to Claire and whispers in her ear. Actually, she’s yelling, but I can’t hear what she’s saying. Claire giggles. “Yes! Absolutely! Yes! Bye, Darryl!” She and the girl make their way around the dancers to Mike’s DJ table and lean over and yell in his ears. Mike nods. Claire and the girl high-five. Mike fades out the American Idol song and a song fades in that doesn’t sound like it belongs here, all horns, but not the obnoxious bouncy Muppet-ska kind. The entire room goes nuts and everybody clears the dance floor. Suddenly where I’m sitting is really valuable space as everybody stands around while a few people take places on chairs in the middle of the room. Girls walk through the center and flirt exaggeratedly with guys. They’re doing choreography. The crowd freaks out at every little motion.

  As the tempo picks up, girls go into this dance with a lot of kicks, swishing their arms around to indicate what I guess are skirts they don’t actually have. The cameras are out again, so that later when people are uploading their pictures to Namespot, images of two girls making out will go right next to pictures of people who are almost college-age kicking and swishing imaginary skirts.

  Gary the fat kid is sitting next to me, clapping and cheering and telling individual dancers to “GO, Tyra! GO, Ashley!,” et cetera. I look over at him.

  “What’s this …”

  “The HAVANA DANCE!” he screams before I can even get the words out. “From Guys and Dolls, only the greatest production in the history of Theater Division!” Everyone outside of Drama Club calls what these kids do Drama Club. Everyone inside of Drama Club calls it Theater Division.

  The horns are really blaring and now the dance is a fake fight. Guys I can tell are gay swing on guys who could fool me. The guys who could fool me swing back. There’s lots of kicking and ducking under kicking. Some guys are kicking people who aren’t there or ducking kicks from people who aren’t there: I guess the entire cast of the greatest production in the history of Theater Division could not make it out to Nicole’s house.

  When I came in and saw a roomful of kids dancing I thought a little bit for a second that it looked like fun. Now I want to beat myself up for being anywhere near something like this. Christine aside I really want to be back in my room playing old video games with Eric quoting Weird Al lyrics because it’s honestly less nerdy than this. I look for the kid in the anime shirt so I can ask him for confirmation on that. I let Gary have the couch and go back into the kitchen and then I work up the nerve to go out on the porch and tell Christine I’m leaving.

  I slide the back door open and step out onto the back porch. Christine and Becca are sitting on a pool chair. Christine is rubbing Becca’s back. I startle them.

  “Hey!” Christine says.

  “Hi. Uhm. I think I’m gonna take off.”

  “Oh no!” Christine says. “I’m sorry I haven’t…”

  “Oh God,” Becca says, “I’m like taking up your time, I’m so sorry, I’m such a time-suck, God …”

  “No,” Christine says, “you’re not—” but before she can finish Becca gets up and runs inside, not crying exactly but not far from it.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, since we’re apologizing.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Christine says.

  “Do you want to go talk to her, or …”

  “It’s okay,” she says. “I think Becca’s going to cry tonight no matter what happens. Just one of those nights. Anyway, I feel like a complete asshole for just, like, abandoning you to the wolves.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Claire probably told you all sorts of wonderful things about me.”

  “She didn’t,” I say, assuming she means “wonderful” sarcastically. “I mean, she told me I shouldn’t audition for Mr…. Hendershaw’s? Piece.”

  “Oh. Do you want to?”

  “I’m not sure I even know what it is. And also … not really.”

  “Well, it’s going to be amazing. But you’re already amazing at your own thing. You probably don’t feel the need to excel in multiple things.”

  “I guess I never thought about it.”

  “Anyway, sorry for leaving you. I’m a terrible host. Come sit down! Unless you really do have to leave.”

  I don’t have to do anything unless it’s not watch kids my own age play-fight to swing music. I have to not watch that. I go sit down next to Christine on the pool chair, wondering if everybody who sits there gets their back rubbed.

  “I’m a terrible host,” Christine says. “Well, I guess I’m not really the HOST. I’m a guest. But, I’m like, the host in charge of making sure you have a good time, since I dragged you out.”

  “You’re the host of our mini-party,” I say.

  “Right. Exactly. I promise we won’t play any trance music at the mini-party.”

  “Oh, man! But if you don’t play trance music, nothing at the party will suck!”

  Christine laughs. She throws her head back and there is so much of her neck, all white in the moonlight. The moonlight is also glinting off the pool, which is probably freezing.

  “Do you guys always eat where I saw you the other day?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  It is the last question I have to answer because it turns out if I keep asking her questions I don’t have to talk. She doesn’t mind talking and I don’t mind listening, and it feels like we’re out there a long time and not that much time at all at the same time, and we occasionally break from one of her answers to identify a song playing inside by its bass line pumping through the stucco of the house, and then rag on that song. She unapologetically mentions books. It turns out she has two classes with Tony DiAvalo and thinks he’s a thoroughgoing d-bag. Her words, “thoroughgoing d-bag,” not mine, but I agree. I realize with no small amount of shock that this is a conversation with a non-Eric person tha
t I in no way want to get out of, that I am just enjoying rather than trying to minimize its awkwardness and length. I am interested on a level I imagine Eric is interested on in the things he gets interested in and learns everything about, learning and remembering with zero effort because I actually give a damn.

  Pretty soon she has laid her head in my lap. This comes as a surprise to me. I start to get that standing-in-front-of-your-locker-telling-you-I-like-you thing, complete with unmanly trembling I pray she can’t detect. She says something about when it was cool to tie flannel shirts around your waist and I lean down and kiss her.

  I don’t think I ever actively imagined what my first kiss would be like. But here’s why I’m at least as big a nerd as the bad-teenage-beard anime guy: I’m pretty sure that whenever I thought about it in passing, it looked like a video game cutscene. In my head it was never at a real time in a real place. What I’m trying to say is I think I always figured it would happen on the deck of a flaming airship after I vanquished a multilimbed squid-god. This is not that. But this is great. It’s real, and my neck really hurts.

  “Is your neck awkward like that?” Christine says.

  It is, so we reposition. Pretty soon we’re making out and we don’t stop to guess the songs based on their bass lines and after a while Becca comes out with some other crisis and Christine has to go inside and I say goodnight and take the bus home before I can screw anything up, Christine’s phone number saved in the cell phone my dad pays the bills on.

  I get off the bus and walk back to my house, jackrabbits scattering across people’s lawns. My brother is sitting in front of my house underneath the porch light in a lawn chair. He is wearing oversized sunglasses and no shirt, drinking beer from a can with an open case at his feet.

  “Hey,” I say on my way into the house.

  “Beach party,” he says, “Alan and them left, though,” as though I’d asked him “What’d you do tonight?” He says: “What’d you do tonight?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You go over to that kid’s house?” He means Eric.

  “No. Party.”

  “You went to a party? Oi, ja hear that?” he says in his obnoxious Cockney thing, addressing no one in particular. “Ee went to a fook-in’ partee!”

  “Yup.”

  “You want a beer?”

  “Uhm … sure.” I made out with a girl. I am drinking a beer with my brother on the front porch of my house. The old world I knew is dead.

  He takes one out of the box and hands it to me. I open it and sit on the concrete. It’s cold. I keep forgetting to be happy about what happened earlier, but then I remember.

  “Is Dad coming back tonight?”

  “I dunno. He left money. You can order something if you’re hungry.”

  “I ate at the thing.”

  “Whose thing was it? I didn’t hear about anything.”

  “Some drama kid party.”

  “Oh, a fag party.”

  “Fuck you. I made out with a girl.”

  “Ferreals?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nice! JA FUCK HER?” my brother says, and launches forward in his seat. His beer foams over and it’s awkward and I think he senses it’s not a good idea to be so completely himself in all situations. “Seriously, though. Nice. I’m through here. Top me off.”

  We drink the rest of the beers. There are eight left. It’s the third time I’ve ever been drunk; the first time was a couple years ago when my brother had a Pimps and Hos party when my dad was gone and the second time was at my mom’s wedding.

  “I don’t see that kid here much anymore. That kid.”

  “Eric?”

  “Whatever. Big fuckin’ eyes. Nerd. Yeah.”

  “Yeah, mostly I go over to his house.”

  “Good. You guys fuck with … Alan again, like that time? He’ll kill you. I don’t care as much.”

  “Okay.”

  “That’s a weird fuckin’ kid. He wanted roofies? Fuck is his deal?”

  “He’s like, I dunno, an honors student and stuff.”

  “That does not even begin to explain the roofies.”

  “You had them.”

  “You WANTED ’em.”

  “It was for an experiment.”

  “Fucked kind of experiment.”

  “No girls involved.”

  “Story of your life.”

  “I kissed a girl tonight!”

  “Good. Me and yer pa were startin’ ta worry.”

  Crickets chirp. I kill my beer and open another one.

  “What fuckin’ experiment?”

  “Okay, get this: Eric can’t sleep.”

  “Insomnia? Like Fight Club?”

  “No, like, he can’t sleep AT ALL.” I think about trying to explain it further. Then it occurs to me I probably shouldn’t have said anything.

  “The fuck?”

  “Or … that’s what he tells me. I don’t know. It’s weird.”

  “You’re fucking-A right it’s weird.”

  “He’s like, joking I think.”

  “You’re fucking-A right it’s weird.” My brother is quiet for a long time, then he says, “Huh.”

  “What?”

  “That’s a weird kid.”

  “Yeah, he says … he says a lot of, y’know, stuff. He’s got a big imagination.”

  “Huh.”

  I get up to go inside. Though I shouldn’t have said anything, obviously, the armor on Eric’s secret is that it’s too strange to be believed. “Is that my shirt?” my brother says.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well gimme it, it’s freezing out here.”

  7

  Christine is very quick to tell me we’re not boyfriend and girlfriend.

  “I don’t like to get caught up in labels,” she says.

  I am very quick to tell Eric that Christine and I are not boyfriend and girlfriend.

  “Where would she get the impression that you were?” Eric says. “We just met her at lunch the other day.”

  “Well, I went to this party on Friday night and she was there and we sort of made out.”

  “What? Friday night? I thought you went to Outback on Friday night.”

  I feel bad enough about telling my brother about Eric’s thing that I tell him about Friday night but not bad enough to tell him I ditched him on purpose and definitely not bad enough to tell him I told my brother about his thing.

  “I did but then she called me and I went over. It was this stupid drama party but she was there and that was pretty cool.”

  “What time did it end?”

  “I dunno, I got home around one….” I start to say “You would’ve been asleep” because for anyone else that would work as an excuse not to have called them, but I can’t.

  “Oh,” says Eric.

  What? I’m allowed to have friends outside of him, right? Especially when those friends want to invite me to parties and make out with me.

  Christine is very quick to tell me we’re NOT just friends.

  “I mean, I definitely like you. I just want to take our time.”

  I am very quick to tell Eric that Christine just wants us to take our time.

  “Hm,” he says. “Does that mean she’s allowed to date other people in addition to you?”

  I don’t know the answer when Eric asks. Christine just calls me up and gives me a declaration of who we are to each other the day after we go out for the first time, which is the Sunday after the party. We go to the movies on a school night. She drives because I don’t have a license or a car. She drops me off at home and we make out in her car for a while before I go inside.

  Here’s the thing about making out: it’s awesome. The other thing about making out is there’s no talking and you don’t have to think of anything cute or clever to say, and that’s great. But there is absolutely no good way to get into it. Or at least no logical way. It just sort of starts. The first time we made out, at the party, I’m pretty sure we were talking about flannel. That is not s
exy. Nothing about that says “make out with me.” And when we make out at the movies it’s all the sudden during a trailer for a new computer-animated kids’ movie about talking animals, one of the twenty it seems like are coming out this year, this one about gophers. One of the gophers has Chris Tucker’s voice and another gopher has Dane Cook’s voice and the movie is called “GoPher It!” Chris Tucker’s gopher has just gotten in a gopher hole with his legs sticking straight up in the air, and he goes, “Let me out, I’m stuck!” which isn’t even really a joke, and we just start. Later, when we make out in the car, Christine has just noted that at a certain spot on my driveway, the radio station we have on crackles and breaks and becomes a mariachi station for half a second. You are saying something inane and then you are not saying anything, everything you need to put voice to dumb thoughts you have pressed up against somebody else’s set of everything they need to talk. Both of you are given permission to not have to think of what to say next. Maybe that’s why we do it. Probably also we do it because like I said, it’s awesome.

  But now Eric has me worried that Christine is seeing movies on school nights with other dudes, so I text-message her and she meets me by the flagpole after school and I follow her to her car and we sit in her car and talk about nothing in particular for a while. So far I have only seen Christine at night. Afternoons are still Eric and me, and I’m planning to go to his house right after I hear it out of Christine’s mouth that she’s not planning on attending the opening of “GoPher It!” with Carter Buehl.

  “So, uhm, I was thinking, we talked about, you had mentioned, like, we’re dating, so does that mean you’re like … dating other dudes?”

  Christine laughs. “What? No. You’re adorable. No. The whole, like, boyfriend-girlfriend scene kind of makes me claustrophobic, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to be like, slutting around with other guys.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “Why, did you have your eye on somebody?”

  “No.”

  “It’s that girl, isn’t it?” Christine gestures to some freshman band girl who’s heading out to or across the parking lot just like everyone else after school.

  “No! But you are slutting it up with that dude, right?” I point to the fat kid with the gross beard and the anime shirt, which may in fact be the same anime shirt as the night of the party, who is standing in somebody’s truck bed, hooting.