The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

by DC Pierson

  “Oh, every night. Are you kidding me? He’s deft in the bedroom.”

  “I’m glad we can be honest. Aren’t you?”

  Christine kisses me, and it’s at a time that actually sort of makes sense, a moment that seems to lead logically to making out.

  I don’t make it to Eric’s house that afternoon.

  “I feel bad.”

  “What? Why?”

  Sweaty afternoon in my room with Christine. Theoretically we’re doing homework. There are math books and French workbooks open on the bed and mechanical pencils with little points of lead clicked out of them but we keep ending up with our tongues in each other’s mouths.

  I always forget which bases are which but I think so far I’ve been to second base? Maybe just first. Whichever base is the base where one night after seeing a black-and-white movie at an art-house movie theater, and you did not know what to think of the movie which was really long so you waited for the girl to weigh in and she did and you agreed, after that you are making out in your room with the girl in the dark and you tentatively unsexily straight-up ask if you can lift her shirt up, and she sort of laughs but not enough to ruin the mood, and when she actually does lift her shirt up there is NOTHING that can ruin the mood for you, gazing at something you have put more imagination into picturing than you have the whole of you and your best friend’s eight-movie sci-fi saga, still in a bra but adequate, I mean, amazing, but adequate for now, you don’t need fuck else, and you act like you’re in awe, too, maybe embarrassingly so, completely treating them respectfully like a museum piece, ’til you start to get greedy and another embarrassing stupid unsexy question starts to form in your throat, and maybe she senses it in your throat or maybe she gets tired of the fumbly awkward museum treatment and she lifts her bra up easy as doing anything else and the clouds part and trumpets blare and any action by any frat boy ever in a dumb comedy is justified, completely, and all of the sudden it’s like riding a bike, you just remember, except I never learned to ride a bike so I’ll have to make up for all that time and devote myself to this. That’s what base I’m at, as of two nights ago.

  “Eric.”

  “What’s the matter with Eric?”

  “I dunno. We used to … I’m kind of the only …” I try to think of a way to say it that isn’t explicitly “We’re a couple of losers with no friends other than each other,” but I can’t think of one. “I haven’t seen him in a while.”

  “Oh! You miss your friend.” She makes a face at me like you make at a dog when it does a trick. She seems to do this a lot when I have visible emotions.

  “I mean …”

  “Well, you guys should hang out more. I mean, I’m not trying to take you away from your friend.”

  “I know. Yeah. He doesn’t have, like, a lot of other friends.”

  “I feel bad now. I didn’t mean to be like, depriving him of you …”

  “You’re not! You’re not. It’s nothing you’re doing. I just have to like, make a point of seeing him.” I’m not used to doing that. Negotiating more than one person’s attention. “Y’know. Dude stuff.”

  “Okay.”

  “But it’s not anything you’re doing. Like, at all. This is … this is amazing.”

  “Us, you mean?”

  “No, your French homework. Yes of course us.”

  “Ohh.” That puppy face again. We kiss. “Hang out with your friend,” she says. “Everybody needs guy time.” She laughs. I laugh. We kiss some more. She starts taking off my clothes, and I start taking off her clothes, but she’s taking her clothes off faster than I can keep up with and I’m really more of a hindrance.

  “Whoa, naked girl,” I say. It’s sort of a joke but it’s also my sincere God’s honest feeling. The naked girl laughs at my remark and then she’s all over me. You can guess what happens next even if I can’t, in the moment, it comes as a complete and total surprise. I get to another base without even trying. And another. How many bases are there? I hope my brother’s not home. I hope my dad’s not home. Actually, I kind of hope my brother’s home. Is that weird? I should stop thinking about this right now, I think. I use the naked girl to distract myself. It’s pretty easy.

  The naked girl scoots off of me and I go to say something about how fucking floored I am by the whole of everything that’s going on right now, but I think I might talk as much when I’m not supposed to as I don’t when I am, so I stop myself, and the naked girl is reaching into her purse and pulling out what looks like, yes, is in fact a condom. I schlubbed into my bedroom today a boy, I think, and it is entirely possible I will leave it a man. If I ever leave. Don’t want to if I don’t have to, the way this is turning out.

  In the headlights of this moment I stop to think about who keeps condoms in their purse, and some part of that must read on my face because the naked girl says, “I’m not a whore, I just figured we were coming up on this.” We were? I guess we were. Of course we were. I was pushing and conniving and manipulating everything so this moment could happen, this is the sum total of my chess-game-like dating strategy, of course we were coming up on this, I brought us here. I have forced her hand with my cunning make-out-when-made-out-with-and-talk-on-the-phone-when-called technique. I am a master. The naked girl is rolling a condom on to me. The naked girl knows I have no fucking clue.

  So much skin. We’re miles of skin in my bed. Whole landscapes. Hairy pointy jagged ones and rolling smooth ones. Scattered around the plateau of the bed, math and French homework. I won’t do it. I’ll hand in my math homework tomorrow half-done and just look into Mrs. Rammlyttle’s eyes and she will just fucking know. We’re miles of skin lying around in my bed after we’re done.

  “I should exercise more,” I say.

  “You did amazing,” the naked girl says.

  Two piles of exhausted fucked-out kids kiss in my bedroom, all soft and jelly-fied, and when they re-form in a few minutes, when they become solid, they’ll be adults. Maybe one of them was already.

  “Uhm, so what I was saying earlier? Yeah, I don’t need to see friends or anyone ever again.”

  The naked girl laughs and kisses me. I kiss back and she breaks away and puts a bra back on, and underwear, turning back into Christine in the process.

  “Soon you’ll have all the time in the world to see whoever,” she says, “when rehearsal starts up for the theater piece.”

  “Yeah? When is that?”

  “Afternoons. Nights when the show comes up. It’s going to be really intense since it’s such a short schedule. So enjoy me now.”

  I nod hard. Ice water becomes necessary, and maybe Red Ropes or whatever’s in the pantry. I ask Christine who was the naked girl if she wants anything from the kitchen.

  I put underwear on. I don’t think anybody’s home and if anybody comes home it’s not totally completely unrealistic for me to be around in my underwear at five fifteen on a school day. It’s much cooler outside my room and with sweat still drying on me it’s almost cold. I feel all rubbery and high and good. I don’t know if that’s what you feel like after sex or just after exercise, which I don’t get.

  The fridge is full of leftovers. I want to eat all of it. It is all owed to me, virginity-less sixteen-year-old adult. I pour a big glass of water from the Brita and drink it down and pour another one. Carrot sticks seem like something you could eat in bed after you were just naked with somebody in it, so I grab those. I think about eating a whole slice of pizza right there in the kitchen, but if I take too long and come back with breath that smells like pizza … I’ve never lost my virginity before. I have no idea what the etiquette is.

  On my way back upstairs with the water and carrot sticks, there’s a knock at the front door. I look through the peephole. A balding dude in a pink polo shirt is out there, wearing sunglasses. Fuck it. I go back upstairs.

  Christine is almost fully clothed now.

  “Awww,” I say.

  “What?” she says.

  The doorbell rings.

  “
Who’s that?” Christine says.

  “Dunno,” I say, “some guy. He was down there when I was.” The doorbell rings again.

  “Maybe you should get it?” Christine says. Shit. Now everybody’s going to be wearing clothes.

  I get dressed, go downstairs, and open the door. A thrill of this-square-looking-adult-has-no-idea-of-the-depravity-I-just-perpetrated-up-in-my-bedroom shoots through me. It gets even stronger when he tells me he’s from church.

  “Your brother comes to our services. He told me, he told me something really very interesting about a friend of yours.”

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “That this boy …” the man says, “that this boy claims he doesn’t have to sleep?” He goes up at the end of this sentence like he can’t believe it, so I just decide to play it like I can’t believe it either.

  “What? Oh, that was just like, something he said. That I told my brother about.”

  “Well, right.”

  “I mean, like, it was a joke even to begin with, and it kind of got, I guess, blown out of proportion or misinterpreted or. I don’t know.” It is unbelievable to even hear anybody else refer to Eric’s thing. It’s only been real between us.

  “Well, we’re not JUST a church. We offer a wide range of counseling and people who really listen. So if your friend feels the need. You know. Whatever his problem is. Drugs. Here’s my card.”

  “Uhm. Thanks?” I want his pink shirt off my porch. According to his card, his name is Craig Haddaridy and he works somewhere called Lunaspa-Albans. “Thanks.”

  “Alright, then. And maybe we’ll see you around sometime?”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  I think about calling Eric, but that’s as good as admitting I told somebody. And I want him to be mad at me for not hanging out with him, not mad at me for spilling his biggest all-time secret and it ending up in the hands of church weirdos. Craig Hadarridy seems to think Eric is into drugs, at the worst. But still.

  Then I remember there’s a girl in my room, who was naked and probably could be again.

  Christine has to be home for dinner so I decide to go over to Eric’s house and tell him the news. On the bus I think about how I’m going to say it. Shouting “I DID IT WITH A GIRL!” seems too obvious.

  I ring the doorbell. Eric’s mom answers.

  “Oh. Hello. I thought you were already here.”

  “Hi! No. Is Eric here?”

  “I think he’s off somewhere,” his mom says, “behind the house.”

  “I’ll go around,” I tell Eric’s mom, who I’m pretty sure thinks I got her son addicted to drugs that make him fall down and fuck up his arm, and who, taking that into consideration, is surprisingly pleasant.

  Eric’s house is on the edge of his subdivision, The Mesa At San Vista Hills. “Behind the house” is miles of desert, butting up against the Indian reservation if you go far enough. I circle the block and go down the dusty cul-de-sac that opens up onto not much.

  On the other side of Eric’s house’s fence is a set of footprints, like the kid hopped the fence. More footprints in the dirt head off into the scrub brush and cacti. I don’t usually tramp around in the desert or go outside much at all unless it’s to walk or ride the bus between indoor air-conditioned places, but this is the new me, the man me, who has sex and tracks his friends into the wilderness with the sun setting.

  When I find Eric he doesn’t look like Eric. His shirt is off and his back is to me, he’s facing the world like an Indian brave on a vision quest in a movie, and I sort of expect to see war paint on his face when he turns around. There isn’t any, but his eyes are big and bloodshot.

  “When I’m like this I see things and I don’t know if they’re real or not. So if you’re real I’m sorry, but you really have to go. Please go.”

  “Can I help? What can I do?”

  “I’m telling you,” Eric says, his voice about two levels less nerdy than normal, “you can go.”

  “Are you sure? I can … We can …”

  “No.” Eric shakes his head. “But thank you. And Darren. This is assuming you’re Darren. Don’t tell anybody. I know this makes it harder. But you can’t tell anybody.”

  I nod. Eric turns around like he hears something, but there’s not really anything to hear besides traffic on the interstate maybe five miles away. But the silence and how totally he believes something’s there has the effect of making the silence kind of terrifying in itself, so manly sex-having me turns and bolts and the kid who no girl has ever laid a hand on stands in the desert and fights imaginary God-knows-what. It’s getting cold fast.

  I run back to the house full speed, second time today I’m drenched in sweat even though it’s winter, running even though there’s no real danger it seems like, to anyone but Eric and even that’s all in his head, and it’s not like I’m running back to call somebody or tell somebody, I told him I wouldn’t tell, I keep my word to him except when I don’t. I feel like a fucking asshole for telling my fucking asshole brother and thinking just because it’s something too crazy to believe that he couldn’t find somebody stupid enough to believe it, but I will make it up to him by not running into the house and telling his mom that he’s waist-deep in dangerous hallucination and maybe we should call someone but instead running back through the dusty cul-de-sac and straight to the bus stop and straight home, see you tomorrow. And his mom will just assume we’re back there causing trouble in the scrub brush, even after it gets dark, because I am a bad influence. I told, I told, I fucking told.

  During monsoon season these big thunderheads come in off the desert, like fleets of spaceships with hostile intentions. A lot of how I relate to the sky has to do with spaceships. When I was really little and scared of thunder, my mom told me to imagine they were Star Destroyers reentering the atmosphere from hyperspace. A lot of things ended up not being very great about her as a mom, but one of the good things was, she paid enough attention to Star Wars to get the details right.

  So it’s about four times as weird for me when I’m walking to school the day after Eric in the desert and there’s a huge red storm hanging over everything. It hasn’t been monsoon season for three or four months. There’s a dim brown layer of smog over us always, but this isn’t that. The smog is shapeless and you only really see it from far away. This is shaped like six thunderheads giving painful birth to each other. It’s like the kind of storm that blows in off the deserts of Mars, probably. Except this storm never actually storms. It hangs there all weird and un-commented-upon by just about everyone in school, never releasing whatever’s inside of it (rain, snow, skulls). By the time Eric and I are at lunch, it’s dissipated entirely and the sky is maybe too blue.

  “Did you see that this morning?” I say.

  “See what?” Eric says.

  “The clouds,” I say. “It was like something out of TimeBlaze.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he says. “I guess it was. Weird.”

  But we don’t talk much more about it, because if we speak frankly about weird stuff, we have to talk about yesterday, and if we talk about that we have to talk about why I feel so guilty, and I’m not at all ready to do that. Maybe it’ll blow away like that Martian storm, without ever spilling its probably terrible contents.

  8

  A typical day last year, before Eric: I walk home right after school. August through October and March through May my T-shirt is a sweat rag by the time I get there. When I get up to my room I take my shirt off and look into the mirror for a while, not in a vain way, just to see what the fuck is going on with my torso, scrawny and fat at the same time, has to be the worst torso for miles. Then I might turn on MTV, again not because I like what’s going on there but simply to gape in wonder at what the fuck is wrong with everybody, and occasionally there’ll be some stupidly hot girl on, writhing around on the top of a car. I go downstairs and eat everything in the kitchen and get an enormous glass of soda with no ice because it’s cold enough from the fridge. I whale on kids and grown men on
Xbox Live for a while, all of their voices modified by the presets to sound like robots or monsters. Once the headset starts to make my ears sore I go back upstairs to my room and turn on my clock radio, NPR, and listen lying underneath the fan if it’s something interesting, and if it’s really boring news, particularly from the Middle East, I might zone out and fantasize in a half-assed way about one or two girls from school. For some reason my fantasies work best if they’re half-plausible and for some reason two girls from my algebra class falling into after-school lesbianism is more realistic than them throwing me any, so while a reporter drones on about the Gaza Strip I might think about a couple members of the girls’ volleyball team making each other in the back of a Camry. After that and cleaning up after that I’ll probably fall asleep until Marketplace comes on at six and foggily watch two syndicated Simpsons episodes or just keep sleeping until I’m hungry. If it’s Thursday, my dad or my brother might knock on my door because we’re going to Outback. If it isn’t, they probably won’t, and we’ll each fend for ourselves in the kitchen or in the case of my dad and my brother, out somewhere else.

  After Eric and before Christine, a typical afternoon is going over to Eric’s house to talk about ideas and swear, and after Christine a typical afternoon is going over to Christine’s house to fool around, and my phone that used to be a silent brick I kept in my pocket to remind me how lonely I was is now ringing every ten seconds with calls from Christine if I’m with Eric, in which case I usually go wherever Christine is, and with calls from Eric if I’m with Christine, which I usually ignore.

  One time Christine calls and asks if she can come over, but it doesn’t sound like a fun sort of coming over. She had a theater meeting after school so I just went home. I thought about going over to Eric’s but I knew she was going to get out of her meeting at some point and call me, and I feel less bad just avoiding him altogether than going over to his house for an hour then leaving when Christine calls, so I take a way out of school that I know to be different than the one he takes and I catch the bus.