The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To by DC Pierson Page A

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Authors: DC Pierson
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which it has to be, then it makes everything I know about him false, because I cannot imagine a reason for him to tell me this, this absolutely made-up story. It’s like when you’re taking a standardized test with one of those bubble sheets and you’re humming along, filling in the circles the whole way like they show at the top of the sheet, and you go to fill in the answer for question 58 and you realize the next empty circle is 59, you’ve been one number off for God knows how long, maybe since the teacher flipped over her one-hour egg timer. It might only be one number but now everything is wrong. I do not know him and I do not feel comfortable doing anything with him but sitting and waiting until he falls asleep, and this can all be over, our friendship probably included.
    Because you can’t just believe somebody, can you? I mean it: kids exaggerate how many people the party bus they’re renting this weekend can accommodate and the length of their family vacations in Greece. The general default pose of anyone towards anyone else on any subject is a sort of “yeah, sure, okay,” a generalassumption that everyone is pretty much full of shit. Or if they’ve been honest, that this honesty is hiding some sort of deeper, far worse full-of-shitness. So if Eric seemed straight-up and genuine about everything so far then he was really only prepping me for this, the big crazy, or the big prank, or something. Some legitimately intensely delusional shit or some weird disgusting lie I can’t even begin to figure out a reason for. Everybody lies a little about everything for no reason and here I’m supposed to treat this huge, world-altering fantasy thing better, with more trust than I would treat Carter Buehl telling me the Hummer limo he rented for prom is literally a block long?
    Thing is, I don’t care about Carter’s block-long rape-mobile, but Eric’s thing, I would love for it to be true. And I think that’s part of the reason I’m pissed (because I am, among many other things, pissed right there against the wall): How dare he tell me something I want so badly to be true that so clearly isn’t, and can never be?
    Eric’s house is quiet. He has no brothers to lead in cackling herds of friends at two in the morning on a school night, or, if they’re alone, turn the TV in their room on full-volume and then get on their computer and put headphones on so they forget how on and loud the TV still is. Just the sound of two parents sleeping soundly in the same bed somewhere else upstairs, which isn’t a sound at all, and the occasional creak of the house settling or whoosh of the air-conditioning coming on.
    â€œI want you to know that it’s okay if you don’t believe me right away.”
    â€œPlease shut up.”
    Books are everywhere. You could make a pretty good case for this room actually being part of a larger room and having been partitioned off by walls of books. There’s a record player on the floor with three milk crates full of records next to it. A box full of disassembled action figures. Some electrical equipment I can’t identify as part of one thing or another. The computer and the TV and the PlayStation. Stacks of magazines I haven’t heard of. More books.Where there is wall that you can see, including what I have my back up against,
TimeBlaze
art is tacked up. Most of it is stuff we’ve worked on together, but every so often there’s a movie poster mocked up in Eric’s really-can’t-draw style. He doesn’t go stick figures, the cowardly route of most people who’ve accepted the fact that they suck at drawing; it’s just this mushy little-kid assemblage of characters with arms and legs that don’t bend, just curve, big black circles for mouths, and eyes that can only convey the emotion “these shapes represent eyes.” And more books.
    For all that, it’s not messy. My room

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