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

and not actually fighting. Just like fighting is mostly just talk about fighting, I figured sex at our age was mostly just talking about sex. But it really happens. People born not long before me rub each other all over each other in their bedrooms with the music up.
    â€œLet’s go around front,” Eric says.
    It is a good five seconds before either of us moves.
    Back around front we’re a couple of kids with rotten eggs on Halloween and even though we’re not dressed as Disney characters and saying “twick or tweat” with adorable speech impediments we might as well be. We’re standing on the curb. Eric takes the eggs out of the bag, opens the carton, and looks at them. I grab one and throw it at Alan’s house. I guess the driveway is longer than it looksor I am weaker than I already feel because it doesn’t even make it. It breaks in front of a red clay pot next to the front door. I am wondering if being so awful at being a teenager that you can’t even prank right counts as originality when my brother’s car pulls into the cul-de-sac.
    Eric struggles to close the egg carton and get it back in the bag. He gives up and drops them to the concrete.
    â€œWell well well,” my brother yells out his rolled-down window in his British hooligan voice, “what’s all dis den?”
    I take off running. Since it’s a cul-de-sac, really I’m running towards the people we’re trying to get away from.
    â€œDARREN,” Eric says. I turn. Eric tilts his head back the way we came, towards Alan’s backyard. It’s kind of a cool move. I’ve never seen Eric have a cool move. Then he runs in the direction he nodded. I follow. My brother gives chase, plastic sword thwapping against his thigh. Tits has jumped out on us too, and whoever else was in the car, a couple of dark forms following my brother when I look back over my shoulder. I hope Eric’s not planning something stupid like jumping in Alan’s pool. I hope somebody tripped over the wood-stain can.
    Eric runs around Alan’s pool. There’s a back gate I didn’t notice when we were zoning out on Alan’s sex triumph. Eric blasts through the gate, I do too, and we’re in a back alley between fences where there’s trash bins and a couple of old couches and trampolines. My brother is right behind us.
    â€œThrow eggs at moi mate’s house, will you?” He cackles like a fucking demon.
    I had no idea this alley was back here. I didn’t know we had alleys. We come to what I guess is the end of the block. It looks like a dead end and I’m bracing myself to slow down and take whatever shoulder punches and nut punches and kicks in the gut from Tits are coming to us when Eric cuts into a dark corner and disappears. I run that way. Some steel rods demarcate a place where the alley opens onto a dry wash. Eric scrambles down the sharp gray rocks that look unsteady as hell and, as I find out when I try to scrambledown as fast as Eric, actually are unsteady as hell. Rocks clatter against rocks. I fuck my knee up bad a couple of times but manage to stay right behind Eric. Behind me, the thwappings of the sword against my brother’s leg get farther and farther apart, and the cackles get less and less demon-ish. Eric hangs a right and climbs out of the wash. He holds his watch up, presses a little button that lights up the face. “We might be able to make this work,” he says. As I’m climbing out of the wash a shape flies past me and clatters on the pavement. A plastic sword, still in its sheath. I look over my shoulder. My brother stands panting in the dry wash. It doesn’t look like Tits ever even made it down there. They’re heavy smokers, of everything.
    I try to tell Eric we could probably slow down but before I can he’s let his little watch light go out and has jetted down the block we’ve just climbed up to. Most of the houses are under