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

friend tellingyou he can’t sleep and then finally deciding you believe him has the same effect as not needing to sleep and not being able to, at least for a little while.
    Eventually, the sun has risen. I can hear Eric’s parents rustling around downstairs.
    At some point I tell him I should go home. I am never away from home for this long consecutively, and before Eric, I was barely away from home at all, but because of my brother being my brother, I know how long my dad can stand one of his offspring not being around and not checking in at all. It’s not when anyone normal’s parents start to worry, it’s more a time about twelve hours after normal people’s parents start to worry that my dad realizes he isn’t worried and that’s what starts to worry him.
    â€œWhen was the last time you saw your brother?” he’ll ask me.
    â€œTuesday night.”
    And I think in his head he starts up an imaginary conversation with a custody judge or my mom or the cop who comes by to tell him they found my brother floating in the canal after not quite being able to jump it with his car, and realizes that for the sake of looking not-so-bad in that imaginary future conversation he should probably start to worry, or go through the phone-dialing motions worried people go through, though he knows we’re okay.
    Phones are like these talismans for me and my brother and my dad. Like, as long as we have our phones on us, my brother and I, there is no way we could be hurt or kidnapped or impaled on anything. The one or two times I’ve been out of the house and needed to call and let him know I’d be out the house longer have gone like this:
    â€œHey, Dad?”
    â€œHello?”
    â€œHey, I’ll be late tonight.”
    â€œOkay. Got your phone on you?”
    â€œYep.”
    â€œAlright. Be safe.”
    â€œBye.”
    â€œBye.”
    We have the same kind of phone and we’re all on the same phone plan. I know full well that when I call him from my phone my name shows up, indicating that I’m calling from my phone, and that in order to be doing that, I must have my phone on me. It’s so dumb I think with any other kind of dad it would be a dad joke. But my dad doesn’t joke so much as he goes to the gym all the time.
    I get up off the floor of Eric’s room. “It was nice having someone to stay up with,” he says.
    When I get home at ten or so on Saturday morning my brother’s car isn’t there. It’s probably wrapped around a pole or he got arrested for lighting trash cans on fire and rolling them into traffic last night or he’s at the morning youth mass with Cathy and Alan and Tits, who’s Jewish but goes because of peer pressure. I go to my room and lock the door and fall asleep on top of my sheets with my clothes on and when I wake up it’s dark outside and I have one of those weird is-it-morning-what-day-is-it half-awake slept-the-day-away feelings, and I remember what Eric told me. I try to think whether it was a dream or not, and then I remember that it wasn’t, and I think that Eric’s been awake this whole day while I’ve been asleep, and Eric’s been awake since I’ve known him, and Eric’s been awake since he was born.
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5
    Eric always insists that our characters have a weakness. The Thragnacian hell-beast has a soft and glowing underbelly which Martian Praetoreous can hit with his arm-mounted crossbow. Being cybernetic, the AltraTroops are susceptible to biohacking, an arcane art practiced by the laptop monks who dwell in The Spoke, an aborted half-constructed space platform. The Man is the only character without a weakness. He is holographic and infinitely self-replicating. No one knows where he is or what he is or if he’s even human and you can’t kill him because it’s very possible there’s nothing there to kill.
    I live in a world where what Eric told me is