Free The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To by DC Pierson

milk in cereal and in a glass beside every meal growing up. It’s like seeing your teacher outside of school. It’s them, but they’re all wrong and out of context.
    â€œWarm milk, yes. And Children’s Tylenol PM. So I would just lie there … you know … stoned.”
    I laugh. Eric laughs.
    â€œI told them. I kept telling them. My mom told me that if it was really bothering me, we could go to a sleep specialist. So I stopped telling them.”
    â€œYou’ve never been to a doctor for it?”
    â€œNo. Not a chance. If they found out…”
    â€œWho’s THEY?”
    Eric looks at me like, you oughta know.
    â€œIf they found out, what? Man, you were a paranoid ten-year-old.”
    â€œI’d seen
E.T.”
    â€œYeah, I gotcha.” Somewhere we picked up the unspoken idea that if there’s something unique about you, men in suits and dark glasses will show up to take you away. Something about it felt scary and right, like yes, that is exactly what goes down when you’re special.
    â€œSo what do you think it is?”
    â€œYou mean what do I think caused it?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œI don’t know. A mutation or radiation exposure or a new stage in human evolution.”
    â€œYeah, that’s what I would say, except…”
    â€œNone of those things are real.”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œRight, well … here I am.”
    â€œDo you ever get tired?”
    â€œI guess. I mean, there are times I feel tired, but from what I understand, people who have to sleep feel tired sometimes and it has nothing to do with whether or not they’ve gotten enough sleep.”
    That’s true. Every day I tell myself I’m not going to fall asleep in geometry, and no matter how much sleep I’ve gotten the night before I still end up nodding off with my head propped up on my hand.
    â€œIf I experience fatigue, I just feel it for a while and before long I feel better.”
    â€œWhat do you do with all that time? I mean, when everybody else is asleep?”
    â€œI get interested in things. I might get really interested in jazz music and just want to learn everything about jazz, so I do. I get my homework done fast. I get projects done a week in advance so I have time for other things. It’s like … this is … I’ve thought this but I’ve never said it out loud before, but it’s like, there’s me and there’s everyone else in the world, and everyone else is in a constant state of joining me and leaving me. When they leave, it’s sort of lonely, I suppose, but I have time to think and do things uninterrupted. I go for walks.”
    I guess that’s how my brother and his friends found him that night. I guess that’s how he knew the ins and outs of that street all the way across town when my brother and his friends found us on Halloween, getting flimsy and unoriginal revenge.
    â€œI’m sorry I didn’t just…” I say. “I’m sorry, I just had to see for myself that you don’t … you know.”
    â€œIt’s okay. I understand. Even that, even waiting around to find out, was a kind of believing, I think. More than anybody else has ever done, anyway. While you were, I guess, thinking about how Cecelia and I were getting one over on you, I was thinking that. That the fact that you didn’t just immediately say, ‘Screw off, Eric,’ that was as close to complete and immediate trust as something as wild as this deserves.”
    I think of Eric in that one moment between fast-forwards, crying it looked like. Even if he says it’s okay I still feel like pretty much of an asshole, following a stone miracle around for thirty-six hours going, “Prove it!”
    We sit there talking about it for hours. Even with the unintentional nap, I expected to feel tired at some point. I thought I might need coffee or soda or something. But I guess your best