Sleepless (3 page)

“I can’t very well move on if I’m talking to you,” I say with a grin.

She huffs dramatically and throws her parasol over her shoulder. A parasol that, since it’s nighttime, is completely absurd. “Fine, fine.” She bats her eyelashes for dramatic effect and disappears into the night.

I turn back to the window. Yes, it is time to move on. But for some reason, I am frozen in place.

It’s just my nerves getting the best of me. Soon I will be alone in a new world.

Chimere’s words, “Julia’s beloved,” repeat in my head. There are so many human concepts I know nothing of, things I’ve waited a hundred years to experience. Things I intend to experience.

A breeze gently blows through the tree, rustling the leaves all around me. Julia is still, and my next charge is waiting.

CHAPTER 3
Julia

M
y dad throws the car into park but keeps it running. “I don’t think I can get any closer.”

The street is filled with the cars of mourners, all here to say a final farewell to my boyfriend, so yes, I guess this is it. The end of the line. Time for me to face the music. For some reason, my mind is allowing me to think only in clichés. My eyes trail down to where I’m digging my fingernails into the vinyl armrest. I quickly remove my hand, but by then there are three little slits there, as well as the sweaty imprint of my palm. “Uh, I know. I’m going.”

But my body refuses to move. I’m frozen.

My dad reaches over and pushes a lock of hair behind my ear, but I shake it loose so it falls back against my cheek. “Take your time,” he says.

That’s something my parents are always telling
me. They never push me. I could be spending this morning in bed, and they wouldn’t mind. In fact, they would be perfectly happy if I stayed with them until I was sixty. As I’m starting to wonder why I’m putting this pressure on myself, why I don’t just have my dad turn the car around and take me home, I remember.

It’s Griffin. My boyfriend.

I can’t let him down by not showing up, especially after making such a mockery of his death on the front page of the newspaper. That was just brilliance, Julia. Pure brilliance, I think.

I give my dad a peck on the cheek and push open the car door. The smell of grass greets me, and the heat burns my face. I totter among the headstones, heels digging into the mud as I make my way to the crowd of people gathered around Griffin’s coffin. I can already hear the sobs of my female classmates as they huddle together, clutching tissues and talking about the “senseless tragedy.” I can’t help wondering, Do tragedies
ever
make sense?

One of the girls looks up and studies me with her red-rimmed eyes, then taps her friend on the shoulder and whispers. They turn to watch me, and it’s almost as if big question marks are hanging over their heads in cartoon bubbles.

I know that the chasm separating Julia Devine from her classmates is as wide as it will ever be, thanks to that latest newspaper story. When my classmates get into the newspaper, it’s usually in the Community News section. They get positive little puff pieces about awards won or scholarships received. Both times I’ve been in the newspaper, the first when I was seven, it was front-page news. The kind of news people whisper about, and not in a good way, so that all you want to do is close your curtains and hide under your bed. The kind of news you wish you could run away from.

Before, they eyed Front-Page Julia with pity laced with fascination. Now there’s a little shock woven in there as well, as if I’ve finally proven them right and lost my marbles. If I could, I’d tell them,
I thought it was a joke! You would have thought so, too, if your boyfriend was as sick in the head as Griffin Colburn
.

The “dearly departed” was always prank-calling me, pretending to be the committee choosing runners for next year’s Olympics, or the selections board at Rutgers, offering me a full scholarship if I’d participate in their clam-baking team, or the Italian American Society, insisting I had won a Lamborghini. I only did what any of them would have done.

The reporter from the
Courier Times
had the sense not to print the stuff about Griffin’s fungus and his smell. Thank goodness for small miracles. But he did insinuate that I thought Griffin Colburn was a loose cannon. What the article said was “The victim’s girlfriend, Julia Devine, believes that the victim’s reckless nature may have contributed to the accident. ‘He was always taking chances,’ she said. ‘Clearly he is responsible.’”

The weird thing is that his mom
still
asked me to give his eulogy. She probably did it before she saw the story alerting the world to her son’s rep as an eff-up. At the time, she hugged me so tightly my gallbladder nearly caught in my throat, and moaned something about how she’d never be able to make it through the ceremony. Now I’m afraid that when she sees me, she’ll want to squeeze the rest of my organs out of my body, on purpose this time. I’m behind a bunch of freakishly tall men in suits (did Griffin know a lot of NBA players?), but between them I steal a glimpse of her—skin white, body crumpled, looking like she’s ready to jump on the coffin and join her son in the afterlife.

I can’t really blame her; Griffin was her only son. Though she, of all people, should realize that wherever Griffin is, he’s probably looking for the nacho dip and calling every last one of these mourners a pathetic sap. I can just hear his voice now:
Go home, Griffin Groupies. Take your Prozac
.

As I hide in the crowd, grimacing at the mud caked on my one good pair of heels and cursing the god who made it improper to wear flip-flops to these things, I hear a few voices mutter “eulogy.” People in the crowd start to look at one another, confused. Because of the wall of guys in front of me, I’m not sure what’s going on until I hear a full sentence: “Who is giving the eulogy? Please step forward.” It appears that Mrs. Colburn has gone mute, or else has forgotten that she asked me, or else is picturing how she might slay me, because she’s staring at the coffin as if attempting to levitate it.

“Here I am!” I say, squeezing past the Michael Jordan wannabes, waving a crinkled sheet of paper in my hand. My voice comes out wrong, too cheery for a funeral. Everything about me is wrong lately. I really should have listened to that little voice inside telling me to stay in bed. I turn the volume knob down and mumble, more weakly, “Um, here.”

I wobble through the crowd, all eyes on me. My heels kick up the mud, and I feel it splattering on my bare ankles and the hem of the only black skirt I had in my closet. When I get to the podium, I attempt to look up, but all I see is Mrs. Colburn squinting at me like
How can you betray my son’s memory?
and a bunch of girls hunched over, whispering and crying, crying and whispering. Crying for Griffin. Whispering about me.

I reach up and pat my cheeks; they’re hot but completely dry. In a way, it’s my fault that Griffin is dead; he died on the way
home from my house at two in the morning. I should have seen how exhausted he was, made him stay, pumped coffee through his veins. But I didn’t. Plus we were always together; he was my Pug (because like the dog, he made ugliness cute), number one on my speed dial. You’d think these things would bring about some emotion in me. Sophomores and juniors who Griffin barely spoke to in the hallway are wailing in grief right now, but me? I’ve got nothing.

I clear my throat. “Griffin Colburn was a good person,” I say, pulling a lock of my hair forward to cover my right cheek, to hide the scars there, since I’m sure that’s what everyone is seeing.

Shock, Julia, you’re in shock, that’s all, I tell myself. I mean, I’m not made of steel. If anything could make me cry, I’d think Griffin’s death would be it. But that’s not the type of relationship Griffin and I had. Where Griffin is concerned, tears are
not
an option. “He was a good friend to many.”

I venture a peek over the podium, away from the weeping girls and Mrs. Colburn, and see Bret Anderson, Griffin’s best friend, rolling his eyes. He pretends to string up a rope and hang himself.

Thanks, Bret. Love you, too
. Okay, so it is cliché, but would they rather a dramatic reading of “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”? I speak a little bit about how he’d gotten a full-ride academic scholarship to UCLA, how he was the “always smiling, happy-go-lucky, life-of-the-party” type of guy, and how he will surely be missed for many, many years to come. It’s corny, but what else can I do? This is what I knew of Griffin. Even though we dated for almost a year, we didn’t have deep, mind-blowing conversations. When we talked, it was mostly in the form of one-liners.

That’s when the priest clears his throat. The wind whips my hair away from my face, and suddenly I feel the scars pulsating, screaming,
Hey, look at me!
so that it drowns out my voice. I cut the next full paragraph from my speech, quickly mumble a thank-you, and step away from the podium. After that, nobody makes eye contact with me, which, I’ve come to discover over the years, is much preferable to being stared down. I fidget about in my ruined heels, searching for a safe place to stand, but Bret, the only person I trust right now, is way over on the other side of the coffin.

The priest does the whole “ashes to ashes” thing and then people begin to walk away from the casket, milling about, looking lost. Tracy McLish walks toward me. We were best friends up until last year, when I was a freshman. She moved to town when I was eight, so she missed all my drama, and we became friends. The thing was, after the story broke, I still felt the same, but everyone else expected me to be emotionally scarred for life. She didn’t expect that, so she treated me just like anyone else and made what was left of my childhood feel normal. But that was before I met Griffin. Tracy had a hard time “getting” Bret and Griffin; a lot of people do. Thin-skinned people need not apply. And Tracy, like most girls, is too easily offended. I know; I used to be that way, too. She started hanging out with us less and less, and I finally stopped calling her. It was just a mutual drifting-apart, I guess, so that’s why I expect her to walk right past me. Instead, she stops and says, “I’m so sorry, Jules.”

Her eyes are a little teary. Leave it to Tracy to get torn up over a guy she didn’t even know that well. “Thanks,” I say.

She hugs herself. “I just … wish everything wasn’t a big joke to you. Like it was to Griffin.”

“What do you mean? I’m just …” That’s when I realize she must have read the newspaper article. But I know she means more than that. I haven’t had a good cry since … well, since I started going out with Griffin.

She shrugs. “Take care of yourself.”

I start to thank her, but by then she’s disappeared into the group. Yeah, having Griffin as a boyfriend helped me develop a thick skin. I had to, to last even a day with him. Instead of greeting me with a kiss, he’d squeeze my ass and say, “What’s up, Bubble Butt?” Told me I ran “like a Muppet” at cross-country practice. Said I should “suck it up” when my cat Banshee died. He called things the way he saw them, even if it sometimes hurt people’s feelings. But that was just his way, and the price you paid for having a guy who was an utter blast to be around. The way he told stories, the way he lit up a room … he knew how to keep things light, fun. I was the only one who learned to take it
and
dish it right back at him until he thought of me as his equal. He was authentic, which is more than I can say for any of these people. Crying for a guy they hardly knew?

I look at the coffin and tell myself, That’s Griffin in there. Your boyfriend. I cough and try to think of something that might make me cry, for Tracy’s benefit. Three-legged puppies. Onions. That’s all that comes to mind.

Nope, no tears.

I’m sure Griffin would be proud of me. But I can’t help wondering if it means that I no longer have a soul. That maybe I am as messed up as people think I am.

CHAPTER 4
Eron

M
ama’s ancestors used to say, “A restless night is Satan on your shoulder.” They had no idea that sometimes a lack of rest has more to do with the worries of the person seducing a human to sleep than the person attempting to sleep. Tonight, after I completed the seduction of Julia, my two other charges suffered terribly. I was late getting to them, because my mind was in a muddle. Evangeline, a lady who took a new lover almost every evening, couldn’t seem to get comfortable, and Vicki, the sleepwalker, wouldn’t stay in bed no matter how many times I guided her back there. I’d like to say that it was their fault, that
they
were the ones with too much on their minds, but I knew better.

That’s not to say it isn’t ever the human’s fault. Sometimes I will stay at the bedside of one of my charges all night, and there will be nothing I can do. Humans worry. When I was a human, I barely ever slept after I met Gertie. Gertie could sing “Ave Maria”—or was it some other song?—like an angel. Chimere has always said that seducing me to sleep was her greatest challenge. I’d toss and turn and think of exactly
what I would say when I finally did have the guts to approach Gertie. It ranged from direct (“You are so beautiful”) to subtle (“You dropped your glove”), with a thousand other iterations in between. One time, I found her alone in the coat room after church, and all I could muster was a subhuman grunt. Chimere used to tease me, saying I was the only charge she’d ever had who would get tongue-tied around women even in his dreams.

I’ve always taken great pride in my work with the seduction, because Chimere will tell you I possess a particular skill with it … however, my talents will likely get me nowhere as a human. Maybe I’m a much more adept Sandman than man. Still, I’m committed to not letting fear—or my inability to string two words together—stand in the way, not again.

Sleepbringers do not have homes, for we do not sleep, or eat, or enjoy time with our families, or do any of the other things that humans do in their houses. I spend a good portion of the daylight hours sitting in the trees outside the homes of my charges, alone, which leaves much time for thinking. That is all I can do, because straying too far from my charges is forbidden. After all, you never know when one of them might desire a catnap. Not that I mind; it is quite relaxing and I enjoy the solitude. At least alone I won’t stumble over my words like a fool. My other two charges live by themselves, within a few blocks of Julia, and they never vacation or travel, so I am never able to explore fully how the world has changed since I left it. And because the Sleepbringers charged with lulling Julia’s parents to sleep are solitary types themselves, I’m always by myself, save for a daily visit from Chimere. I know that things in the world have changed. The
women I watch over wear tighter, almost obscene attire; their surroundings are far more opulent; they speak on telephones without cords and say things in odd ways…. And I thought they were a mystery before! I know that becoming part of this world will take some adjustment, but I’m hopeful that I’ve learned a thing or two from these hundred years.