The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To (15 page)

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.”

 

 

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 sexy. 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.

“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.”