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

true. And it isn’t always an easy thing to fit into your head but it almost helps that CeceliaMartin didn’t believe him. Cecelia Martin has exactly zero imagination. It’s not that Cecelia Martin is dumb, it’s just that she’s so fucking standard and convinced that she isn’t because her hair is dyed a different color and she listens to music that she finds on LiveJournals that mostly feature pictures of emo boys making out with each other. I think I understand why Eric told her. If this were a movie she’d be the person you’d go to. The freaky chick, the outcast. But Cecelia Martin is on yearbook and newspaper. Cecelia Martin gets straight A’s. Cecelia Martin is about as outcast as the head fucking cheerleader. I want to believe where she had the chance to and didn’t because it doesn’t fit in with Cecelia Martin’s worldview, which pretty much begins with Cecelia Martin and her friends Jen Ackerman and Teresa Saylor and whatever cute vintage finds they’ve made this week, and their college friends and how sophisticated and ironic they are.
    I can imagine it: Eric hears Cecelia use the words
temporal
and
agonize
in some in-class discussion. Eric suspects that Cecelia may, in fact, be smart. That night at home Eric looks up Cecelia’s Namespot profile, Namespot being the social networking site on which millions of American kids advertise their specialness, despite the fact that there is a search-engine tool right there on the sidebar that will allow you to find out just how hugely unspecial you are. Eric sees that under “Music” Cecelia has expressed a preference for The Boy Who Cried Sparrow, a pretty okay and sort of obscure group people found out about from their older siblings who are in college, which Eric, underexposed as he is to anybody, ever, doesn’t realize is a thing anyone else is into, takes it to be a sign, and without hesitation camps out waiting for Cecelia outside of English class the next day and, unbidden, stutters at her something about he has a secret only she can understand, and before she can even ask “What?” he blurts it out, all nervous and half-intelligible, so that now when she asks “What?” it isn’t because she wants to know the secret, it’s because he already said the secret and she couldn’t understand him. So he says it again, too loud this time, overcompensating, and she probably says something veryclose to what I said initially, something like “Oh, so don’t drink so much caffeine or whatever,” and starts to walk away, supremely weirded out, when Eric stops her and tries ultra-awkwardly to explain, but he has no idea where to start and this isn’t going at all like he planned it, and she stops him four half-sentences into his explanation and says, “I seriously have no idea what you’re talking about. I have to get to class.” One of the four half-sentences had something to do with how they both liked the same music, and so now she goes around telling anyone who will listen that Eric Lederer, you know, that weird kid, well, he basically stalked her and said some crazy stuff she doesn’t even know how to repeat and he ought to be red-flagged like Carl Whiteman, he probably has a hit list and everything, she’s probably on it, enjoy her while she’s here, alive, and hasn’t yet been murdered by the stalker nerd.
    And that day, I probably walked right by them out of class, not really knowing either of them or having any idea who they’d end up being to me, but I can imagine it so accurately because I was then (and I guess I am still) in my own world of misreading people, reaching out to them in an awkward, overplanned way that blows up big-time, then retreating back in to my just-me existence, while they go around telling anyone who will listen what a tard I am.
    Eric’s thing, I don’t know what to call it, sounds like something