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

Utilizing sub-thought communication, he signals small battalions of AltraTroops who scatter through the surrounding neighborhoods. Kids faking sick watching TV in their living rooms scream as the troops take out their sliding-glass patio doors. Kids who really are sick get the waiting-room magazines blown out of their hands as troops level their doctors’ offices with concussion grenades. A kid who looks a lot like Bret Embler is still asleep with a baseball cap on in bed next to his Catholic-school girlfriend when rocket boots scatter the red tile roof of his house in the hills and crash into his bedroom. There’s no blood: the fist-cannons’ antimatter fire just makes it so things don’t exist.

My dad laughs at something the satellite-radio DJ says about the band Supertramp, then he tells me to have a good day and I hop out of the Jeep. As I walk into school, I imagine cannon discharge passing harmlessly through me.

I tell Eric about this scene at lunch. He likes it, he says, except we could never storyboard it. We both agree that if we ever put it down on paper someone would see it and we’d be “red-flagged” and suspended like Carl Whiteman, who they found with a “hit list” of kids he thought “deserved it” freshman year.

Eventually, Eric and I agree, Dr. Praetoreous will go back and counteract the high school hit and all the kids will be safe, restored to their places in the timestream whether or not time and space have missed them all that much. But in order for that to happen, it had to actually happen at one point in the timestream, so Eric and I both agree that it did. And our high school works because Dr. Praetoreus would be our same age at this year in time. We sort of hope we were born late enough in history that by the time we are in our forties and fifties “existence engineer” and “clone wrangler” will be viable career paths.

“You should come over to my house this weekend,” I tell Eric at the end of lunch on Friday. “To work on this.”

“Absolutely,” Eric says. Because Cecelia Martin and Carter Buehl and people like that, they hang out. Eric and I work.

My brother’s friends are inexplicably dressed as ninjas and jumping around the front yard when Eric shows up at eight thirty on Friday night. Or rather they have been jumping around the front yard dressed up as ninjas and Eric shows up as soon as they’re gone. He said he was going to come over at seven thirty and he shows up at eight thirty all sweaty.

“I circled the block a few times,” Eric says. “There were ninjas.”

“They weren’t really ninjas,” I say. “Just my brother and his idiot friends.”

“I know,” Eric says. “I just didn’t want to—um—”

I guess a bunch of seniors dressed as ninjas swearing and kicking each other in the chest for an hour before peeling away in their cars could be scary to some people, but I’m used to it.

“My dad’s on a date,” I tell Eric. “We pretty much have the run of the place.”

There are pizza boxes stacked four deep on the kitchen counter. “We have pizza on Fridays,” I tell Eric. “You want some?”

“No thanks,” he says. “I ate.”

“There’s sodas and stuff in the fridge.” I open the fridge. Somebody else being around makes me really look at what’s inside, and it really is just sodas and stuff. I try to think if there’s anything in our cabinets that makes it look like we cook or my dad cooks or we eat anything besides takeout, and I don’t think there is. We have a “chip cabinet” and a “cracker cabinet.” We have a lot of cabinets.

“I was thinking about it,” Eric says, “when I was walking around the block, and I think TimeBlaze: An EVILution can still work. Can I have one of those waters?”

I hand Eric a water bottle and get myself a Dr. Pepper.

“I just think it has to be the full title. So you know how Star Wars is Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope? In our case the titles would go TimeBlaze: An EVILution: Crisis Endpoint.”

“What’s Crisis Endpoint?”

“That would be the name of that particular part. Like Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.”

“Oh, right.”

“It’s just an example, but do you like it?”

“Yeah,” I say, “I like it.”

“Why do they dress like ninjas?”

“I dunno. They’re retarded?”

“Maybe it’s to jump people,” he says.

“I don’t think they jump anybody. They’re my brother’s friends from church.”

“Those kids go to church?” Eric says.

“Yeah. It’s like this youth church or whatever. My family’s not religious, my brother just goes because his friends do.”

“So they’re religious kids?”

“They’re not anything kids.”

Eric looks out at my pool. “I think maybe they jump people.”

“I dunno,” I say.

We play video games in my room. A fighting game my brother rented. Eric’s terrible.

“Look at this guy! Who needs a sword that big?” Eric says about my character, a skinny guy with long blond hair in an admiral’s uniform who is obliterating Eric’s character with a big fuck-off sword. Eric’s character is a disembodied eyeball on top of a purple whirlwind.

“It’s like a surfboard! Beyond your bigger broadswords, size just becomes a disadvantage. It’s bigger than he is!”

The admiral’s sword glows blue and slashes the purple whirlwind, dealing the eyeball serious damage.

“And how does that hurt me? You didn’t even hit anything resembling flesh!”

The eyeball goes tumbling off the cliff level’s precipice when the admiral lands a surprisingly effective kick with his red slipper.

“You know who my guy looks like?” I say. “Emma Tomlinson.”

“You’re totally right,” Eric says. “Do you like her?”

“Ew! No.”

“No, I didn’t mean—I didn’t mean romantically, I meant just do you think she’s okay.”

“What’s to like? She never talks.”

“Good! Yeah! Me too! I think she’s an albino.”

“I think you’re right.”

“And her whole family comes to pick her up from school. Her mom AND her dad AND her two little sisters and they all look exactly like her.”

“It’s like they sent a homeschooled kid to regular school.”

“Have you ever known any homeschoolers?”

“There are some next door. One time we went on vacation and they picked up our mail for us and I had to go get it when we got back and their whole house smelled like… I dunno. Oatmeal? It was creepy in there. I can’t put my finger on it.”

“We don’t talk to people. Do you think people think we’re creepy?”

“I talk to people!”

“I’ve never seen you talk to anybody in English.”

“Yeah, well, not in English. Why don’t you focus on the game? I’m killing you here.”

We’re halfway through another match. I’m thrashing Eric again. I’m a tiny Asian schoolgirl with two razor fans. Eric’s a half-man, half-Zeppelin.

A couple seconds go by where it’s just the sound of my girl squealing every time she lands a knee or a fan on Eric’s character, and his character harrumphing.

Then Eric says, “You know who my guy looks like?” His guy puffs up like a blimp and rockets into the Asian girl, actually a pretty good move I’m sure he got completely by accident. “Patti Helzburg.”

“Patti is fatter and has a bigger mustache.”

Eric cracks up. We rip on people from school for a while as I beat him but not as badly, then we go downstairs to get sodas.

“How long have your parents been divorced?” Eric says.