D. Pierson - The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

“Dude! It’s me!” Nobody comes out of the dirt hole. I jump down and there’s nobody in there. The tarp is gone, and the Yerum Battlebeast.

“Darren?” I look up and standing at the mouth of the hole is Eric’s mom. “What are you doing here?”

“Uhm. Looking for Eric.” Talking to moms is never not hard, especially when you’re not pretending to be someone else, and I’m out of practice. “You wouldn’t happen to know where he is, would you?”

“He went to school,” she says, mystified because it’s a Wednesday and of course he’s in school. Except he’s not supposed to be in school, he’s supposed to be back here with me getting ready for the showdown. “How was your college experience?”

“What? Oh. It was good. It was really interesting. I think I’m probably gonna go there. You know? Or, uhm. Or NAU.”

“Well, Eric would sure miss you. If you’re going by school, bring him his backpack.” She holds out Eric’s red bag. “He forgot it. He can be such a space cadet sometimes.”

I take Eric’s bag. “Have a nice day,” she says, and she walks back toward the house. It makes me really sad to see her go for some reason, and I have this overwhelming desire to be normal. To give it all back in exchange for being allowed to be normal, even more normal than I was before this whole thing started. It makes sense for me then why Eric needed to go home. Maybe I’ll have him generate me a mom. But right now the sun is moving across the sky and the plan is already going haywire and my friend needs me.

The rock is still over in one corner of the hole, and underneath it is Eric’s dad’s gun. I unzip the bag, put the gun inside, put the backpack on my back and rolling-stop my way to our high school.

My brother has a parking space and even though parking is a concern for me the two spaces next to his are empty as well, so I don’t clip anybody. He and Jake and Alan all got parking spots together. I guess they aren’t coming to school today either.

It’s the very end of second period and I catch Eric coming out his class, no backpack and empty-eyed.

“What’s going on, man? What happened to behind the house? Our final stand?”

“I went back there and, I don’t know, it’s too empty back there. If he comes for me and he takes me there’s no one to notice. But here, we’ve got a whole audience.”

“Right, and he’ll probably just hold off until you leave. I thought the whole point was to lure him in so we could fight him off once and for all. And the reason he can’t come and take you here is the same reason you can’t end him here.”

“Huh,” he says, “I guess you’re right.”

“Do you want your bag? You look pretty conspicuous without it.”

“Uhm…”

“It’s got your dad’s… uhm… thing in it. I figured…”

“Oh, in that case, hold on to it. In a minute I’m not gonna be somebody you want handling a firearm.”

“Dude! Don’t say firearm in the middle of…” The reality sort of dawns on me, being in school with somebody else’s backpack with somebody else’s gun. I’m glad we don’t go to an inner-city school with metal detectors. I think about how I’ve gotten to the point that Carl Whiteman with his list of kids who “deserved it” could only have angry revenge-fueled daydreams about getting to. Standing in the hallway during passing period, secretly tooled up.

We’re both going to class as usual, and I guess just on instinct we end up out by the auditorium ramp at lunchtime, although neither of us has a lunch or really any desire to eat.

“Maybe it won’t go down today,” I say, “maybe he won’t come.”

“My mom told you I went to school?”

“Yeah. She was really nice to me.”

“Last night she said it reflected well on you, that you would go to this honors college program. She told you. If he shows up she’ll definitely tell him. She thinks he’s from college.”

“Yeah,” I say. “How come it’s taking so long?”

“Marshaling his forces,” Eric says. The sun beats down on us. I guess it’s almost spring.

“I’m really fucking sorry, man,” I say. “This whole fucking thing is my fault. I told somebody in the first place and then when I had the chance I turned you in over some fucking girl.”

“It’s not your fault,” Eric says. “I told somebody first. And anyway, I think it is my fault because I think I accidentally created him.”

“Who?”

“The guy. The Man. We thought him up and I think I brought him into being. That day in my room. If the glasses can be real, he can too.”

“Does he look like this guy?”

“A little. Not really. I dunno. It’s pretty egotistical to think I made him, I guess, huh?”

“We did make him. In a way. Or I did. I called him. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. But if we made him, that means we can undo him,” Eric says, washing an Adderall down with ginger ale.

It doesn’t start like the Altratroops invading the school in Time-Blaze . All that happens is a cop car pulls up by the flagpole. No siren or anything. Two cops get out, normal fat cops who bust kids for skating. I think one of them might have been my DARE officer even. But then another police car pulls up, and another one, and another one. Slow as can be, a little army of cops shows up in front of the school. Their radios buzzing, all looking at each other like “It’s a living.” And I know they’re not all inhuman monsters because the one who’s driving the car The Man gets out of gives The Man a look like “Who is this asshole?” But it looks like he’s in charge, and they all take orders from him because someone has told them to.

Eric doesn’t freak out. I think I say “shit” and I can feel the backpack on my back and I can feel the gun inside of it screaming out prison time, screaming “shot on school premises.” The garage door starts to open. I look back and see Eric at the controls.

“Let’s go,” says Eric, “this is as good a place as any,” sounding all kinds of adult.

We get up and as we do I see a rock drop out of nowhere onto the concrete, making a loud crack. The Man and the cops hear it and turn to see their two soft targets walking into the drama department.

In the couple of months Christine and I went out I never made it back here. Whenever she’d talk about something that had happened that day in rehearsal or at a Theater Division meeting I’d imagine everything looking like the grainy video of clips from their plays being shown once a month on the school newscast. Kids in half assed costumes, clownish in makeup, their “flats,” as we learned they were called that one day out on the loading dock, being dwarfed by the size of the stage itself. It was a little hard to respect. But right now this seems like the ideal place for our purposes: as dark and expansive as the rest of the school is narrow and too well lit. “I don’t really know how to use this gun, man.”

“You won’t have to,” Eric says, and pulls on one of the curtain ropes. The curtain comes up and instead of revealing a plywood-and-tempera-paint New York, underneath the curtain is a mech.

If you are a kid of a certain age and male you will know what I mean. A giant metal exoskeleton, like Voltron, like Battletech. Like TimeBlaze , because someday if we make it out of this alive people will read it and totally give us credit for changing the whole interpretation of mechs in sci-fi. The thing about mechs is, they’re fucking badass. The thing that’s different about ours is, they’re more badass.

I am good at drawing, I think. I am fucking good. Look at how cool this thing is, how well designed, how imaginative. I holler with joy and swing up into the cockpit. The thing is about three of me tall and one of me wide. I slide right in and the cockpit conforms to my body and the HUD slides over my face and I am home, this is perfect, this is incredible. I look down at Eric.